Interview with Ruby Joseph
- Title
- Interview with Ruby Joseph
- Description
- Ruby Joseph arrived in the UK from Grenada as a young child with a British passport in 1962. She had to renew her passport in 1982 because she wanted to go on holiday. The Home Office informed her that she was no longer a British citizen as her country of birth had gained its independence.
- Associated dates
- 1982
- 1962
- interviewee
- Ruby Joseph
- Location
- Grenada
- Collection
- Restricting the Right to ‘Britishness’
- Provenance
- This oral history excerpt has been drawn from the scoping project ‘Nationality, Identity and Belonging: An Oral History of the ‘Windrush Generation’ and their Relationship to the British State, 1948-2018'.
- Rights
- This material, including photograph, cannot be reproduced without permission.
Transcript:
-
"I arrived in this country with a black British passport. We felt we belonged here. Nobody once a year said oh prove who you are in school, or prove who you are when you went to get a job, so there was no reason to question my nationality. I set about applying for a passport aged 22. There was a problem, that oh you’re not British any more. And this was quite shocking. You can’t have a British passport because you’re not British any more, you’re now Grenadian, because Grenada has become independent. And Grenada became independent in 1974, and at that time, when a colony, an ex-colony, became independent, the British government then said, you’re not British any more, which is one thing, but to not tell anybody, is ridiculous. I happened to be a legal secretary at that time and my boss at the time, I mentioned this to him, and he was furious at the British government’s treatment of people, but he got on to it. So I filled in whatever form I had to fill in and paid the money, and then became registered as a British citizen. But if I was a person who had never applied for a passport, I’d never know that I’m no longer British. They’d done this knowing what the consequences could be. And when I say ‘they’, I mean the British government."
"I arrived in this country with a black British passport. We felt we belonged here. Nobody once a year said oh prove who you are in school, or prove who you are when you went to get a job, so there was no reason to question my nationality. I set about applying for a passport aged 22. There was a problem, that oh you’re not British any more. And this was quite shocking. You can’t have a British passport because you’re not British any more, you’re now Grenadian, because Grenada has become independent. And Grenada became independent in 1974, and at that time, when a colony, an ex-colony, became independent, the British government then said, you’re not British any more, which is one thing, but to not tell anybody, is ridiculous. I happened to be a legal secretary at that time and my boss at the time, I mentioned this to him, and he was furious at the British government’s treatment of people, but he got on to it. So I filled in whatever form I had to fill in and paid the money, and then became registered as a British citizen. But if I was a person who had never applied for a passport, I’d never know that I’m no longer British. They’d done this knowing what the consequences could be. And when I say ‘they’, I mean the British government."