Bill Morris was part of the post-Windrush generation of the 50s, arriving in the UK in 1954, a couple of years after the first wave of immigrants. His visit was to have lasted just months - joining his recently widowed mother in Birmingham where she was visiting her family.

Bill Morris was brought up in small village in rural Jamaica.  His mother was a domestic science teacher; his stepfather was a part-time policeman.  On their five acres of land they kept a few chickens and rabbits and grew some crops.  What they couldn't eat they sold at market, using the money to buy kerosene, fuel, clothes and a few extras for the family.  Life revolved around the family, the church, school and cricket - a green unripe orange for a ball, and a branch of the coconut tree for a bat:  "I was going to bat for the West Indies."

Arriving in Handsworth, Birmingham aged 16 in his first suit, his British passport in his pocket (at that time Jamaica was a British protectorate), he experienced a new world - cold, wet and grey.   No trees, no grass, a few rows of houses, and "boxes on roofs which smoked". He saw the notices:   "No blacks here".   In 1964 when he applied for a job with the T&G he was told "The union is not ready for a black official".  He lived through the rise of the National Front, the race riots of the 1980s, Norman Tebbit's "cricket test" and the growth of the British National Party.

Yet in England he was the first black person to make it to the top of a trade union whose members, more than 30 years earlier, had marched in support of Enoch Powell.  And his roots are still in Jamaica which he visits regularly and where, until 2010, he was Chancellor of the University of Technology.

In 1957 he married a young Jamaican woman, Minetta, who came from a neighbouring parish in Jamaica.  Minetta was a nurse.   They had two sons - Clyde and Garry, and he has two grandchildren - Una and Rohan.   Minetta died in 1990 of breast cancer.  He says that all the great influences in his life have been women - his grandmother who was the mainspring of the family, his mother, his wife Minetta and now his partner, Eileen. And now he detects strengths of self-reliance in his grand-daughter Una and his great grand-daughters Ella, Laire and Rosa.
Congratulations from grand-
children Una and Rohan.

Now retired, he likes to spend time at home with friends, watching cricket, eating good food, listening to jazz, and tending his garden.

 

First ever photograph for passport
in 1954.