24 - What it means to be the first: my journey from Windrush to PhD

Summary

In 1950, my grandad boarded the SS Castel Verde at Port Royal, Jamaica. Two months later he arrived in England. Fast forward 70 years and here I am, the first person in our lineage to be awarded a PhD. Throughout the years I have experienced a lot of firsts. During the final year of my undergraduate degree, I applied for a range of PhD projects, which I mainly found on findaPhD. com. I utilised the resources that I had – the university careers service, my personal tutor, and my family. I chose my PhD project based on my passion for the project; however, if I could go back and do things again I would be more cognisant of the institution and supervisory team to which I was applying. I struggled through my PhD mentally, emotionally and academically. After suddenly losing my grandfather to cancer in my second year, I felt lost and broken. Imposter syndrome followed me around like a dark cloud. However, thankfully, I pushed my way through with help from my support system consisting of close family and friends. Almost one year since defending my thesis, I can look back and appreciate the journey.

When my paternal grandfather, Joseph Morris, left the sunny isles of Jamaica aboard the SS Castel Verde at Port Royal in May 1950, he was a teenager and one of the first from his area to embark on such a journey. In July he arrived in Southampton, UK, to a hostile and unfamiliar cold. For the first time in his life, he beheld the ‘mother country’. This is the story of just one of my grandparents. He, my maternal grandfather, Manzie Buchanan, and grandmothers, Gloria Morris and Pansy Samuels, faced many unknowns and difficulties coming to England from Jamaica in the 1950s and 1960s, but their bravery and perseverance made a way for me. My parents, Bernard and Maureen Morris, were born in the UK in the 1960s. They met and married in the 1980s and had three children, of which I am the youngest.

From the ages of 3– 18 I was schooled in White- majority environments. I have always felt different as a result. I was too ‘White’ for the Black kids but obviously still very much a brownskinned girl from a British Jamaican household.