‘Lies will roll tomorrow’, wrote Jackie Kay in her memorial poem for Joy Gardner. ‘The man with the abscess will say she had a weak heart. High blood. Illegal. Only doing his job’. Joy Gardner was a Jamaican citizen who had travelled to England to visit her mother in 1987, starting a new family in London’s Crouch End. She died in July 1993, asphyxiated in her home, in front of her son, by a gag that police officers from Scotland Yard’s Deportation Squad used as they attempted to remove her from the country. In the wake of her death, the violent and largely concealed practices by which UK police and immigration officers deported people came under intense scrutiny, thanks in large part to the campaigning efforts of Bernie Grant, one of the first Black Members of Parliament (alongside Diane Abbott and Paul Boateng), and Gardner’s former constituency MP. This public lecture revisits the campaigns that sought to gain justice for Joy Gardner— campaigns that expanded from protests, petitions and public meetings to poetry and performance. In seeking justice for Gardner, Grant and his allies found themselves facing a co-ordinated smear campaign which sought to blame Gardner for her own demise and to absolve the police and the Home Office of responsibility. Resisting such a narrative, the campaign not only worked to dignify Joy Gardner’s memory, but to change how the British state was seen, and how Britain’s past was remembered. In this lecture, we too will remember Joy Gardner in order to remember Britain differently.
Biography
Dr Rob Waters is a senior lecturer in modern British history, based in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Thinking Black: Britain, 1964–1985 (University of California Press, 2018), which was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society’s 2020 Whitfield Prize. His most recent work is Colonized by Humanity: Caribbean London and the Politics of Integration at the End of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2023)
This event is part of Black History Month.
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