Video Nation

Opportunities for work, less sunny weather, hostile reactions from white Britons - just some of the things immigrants experienced on arrival in Britain.

Latchman Bagwandeen's parents originally came from Bergli, near Delhi in India. He was born in Kingson, Jamaica in 1926 and his family worked on plantations.

He left school at 14 and tried his hand at fishing, but when the chance came to head to England ("the mother country") he took it with both hands at the age of 22.

There were 492 passengers on the Empire Windrush and, after Tilbury, they were all taken to Clapham from where they were to begin a new life.

Empire Windrush, 1948

Latchman's working life was spent in the ironworks in Wellington, Shropshire; at Joseph Sankey & Son in Hadley, Shropshire and as a welder/pipefitter for GN Haden of Kings Cross, London.

In 1954, he married a white English woman and they had four children before separating in 1972. This put an end to Latchman's working life as he brought up the children on his own.

In 1974 he moved to his current home in rural Suffolk and in his film he tells us some of the stories of his life.