Interview with Jerome Chee-A-Tow

Photograph of Jerome Chee-A-Tow (copyright: Dr Juanita Cox)

"I had no desire to come to England. My mother had bought a ticket for my elder brother, who was with the Drainage and Irrigation in Berbice. He didn’t really want to leave [British] Guiana and my mother said, well you’ll have to go, because she didn’t want to lose that $120 that she’d paid Richter and Richter. So I’d never had any desire to come to England or to leave home, it’s all accidental, and by the time I had to travel I didn’t even have a passport. Fortunately my father brought the passport for me whilst I was in Trinidad. Being he was in the police department he used to write passports and that sort of thing, he brought it for me. 1955, on the 8th of June, I got on the SS Sundale from the police wharf at Big Market. As soon as I came here I went to Brixton School of Building and I start doing building construction, and then we represented the school, Brixton School of Building, at the Ideal Home Exhibition in June ’56, and we won the first prize."

Title
Interview with Jerome Chee-A-Tow
Description
Jerome Chee-A-Tow was a teenager working in British Guiana when his mother decided he would travel to Britain, in 1955, in place of his brother. Like other ambitious parents she believed sending a child to Britain would enhance their success. Chee-A-Tow had a long and rewarding career in the UK as an architect.
Associated dates
1955
interviewee
Jerome Chee-A-Tow
Location
Guyana
Collection
Travelling to Britain
Source
Find out more on the Windrush Scandal project website
Provenance
This oral history excerpt has been drawn from the three-year AHRC-funded project ‘The Windrush Scandal in a Transnational and Commonwealth Context’.
Rights
This material, including photograph, cannot be reproduced without permission.