Required:

• Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (see also "Further Resources," at the bottom of this page)

Highly Recommended:

• Wole Soyinka, "Telephone Conversation" 
• Colin MacInnes, from City of Spades
• "Jamaicans Arriving" and "Our Jamaican Problem," part of a collection of British Pathé newsreels connected to immigration in the 1950s (see also this short photo slideshow)
• "Why 492 West Indians Came to Britain" (Manchester Guardian 23 June 1948)
• A BBC documentary (available for streaming and download) on "Caribbean Voices," Una Marson's long-running radio program that was seminal in the development of contemporary West Indian literature in postwar England: Part 1 (23 min.)| Part 2 (23 min.)

Ms Agatha Claudette Hart, bus conductor, at Stockwell Garage, March 1962.
London Transport Museum Picture Library (Ref. No. 24380)

Other texts on Windrush and West Indian Immigration to Britain:

• S.S. Empire Windrush (Wikipedia)
• British Pathé newsreel footage of the Windrush arrival
• Louise Bennett, "Colonisation in Reverse" (be sure to explore the links in the introductory headnote to this poem)
• Gabriel Gbadamosi, "The Boat Passage" (from No Blacks, No Irish)
• George Lamming, "The Train" (from his 1954 novel The Emigrants)
• "The Color Bar" (Time Magazine, December 27, 1954)
• A sampling of photos related to "immigration" at Hulton Archives/Getty Images (not all images pertain to the immediate postwar years or to immigration from the colonies)
  • "British Colour Bar" (Picture Post 1949)
  • "Breeding a Colour Bar" (Picture Post 1952)
  • "Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Negro?" (Picture Post 1954)
  • "British Colour Conflict" (Picture Post 1955)
  • "30,000 Colour Problems" (Picture Post 1956)
    
• Several pages from BBC-TV's now-defunct "Windrush Season" website have migrated elsewhere:
• Three poems by John Agard: "Windrush Welcome," "Citizenship," and "Howdoyoudo" (sidebars on "Windrush - ticket to a new Britain" [BBC], below)
• Two more: "Remember the Ship," and "Windrush Child" (Poetry Society)
• "Arrivals" (eight transcribed oral histories of Windrush passengers)
• "Windrush - The Passengers" (introductory essay by Mike Phillips on blacks in Britain since 1948)
• Introductory Essay on Black British Literature by Onyekachi Wambu, editor of Empire Windrush: Fifty Years of Writing About Black Britain
• "Windrush: ticket to a new Britain" (BBC)
• "Windrush: the passenger's perspective" (BBC)
• An interview with Windrush passenger Sam King (BBC)
• Andrea Levy speaks to the London Guardian about Small Island, her prize-winning novel about the Windrush generation (podcast)

• Lord Kitchener (Aldwyn Roberts): 
  • Kitchener being interviewed by a Pathé Newsreel reporter upon disembarking from the S.S. "Empire Windrush," June 21, 1948)
• The studio recording of "London Is the Place For Me," several years later
• Kitch reminiscing (ca. 1990) about his early days in England
• "Lord Kitchener steps off the Empire Windrush": part of the London Guardian's series "50 key events in the history of world and folk music"
• The Mighty Terror (Fitzgerald Henry), "Women Police in England"
• Lord Beginner (Egbert Moore), "Mix Up Matrimony" (lyric sheet here)
• Lord Kitchener, "My Landlady" and "Sweet Jamaica"
• Lord Invader (Rupert Grant), "Teddy Boy Calypso" (Wikipedia will tell you what a "Teddy Boy" is, though I'll have more to say about them in a bit. As for "mixed marriage" [Lord Beginner, above]: we've already seen depictions, in two works we've read recently, of some of the fear and fascination that attended the idea of "racial mixing." To put all of this in context, here's part of the entry on "Miscegenation" from The Oxford Companion to Black British History. Column 3 may be of particular interest.)

• James Berry, "Afternoon Train"
• E. R. Braithwaite, excerpts from To Sir, With Love
• Calypso, a 1948 stage musical featuring actor, singer, and folklorist Edric Connor
• Stuart Hall, "Calypso Kings" (The Guardian 28 June 2002):  Hall reviews the history of calypso in Britain in the 1950s
• Ray Funk, "Notting Hill Carnival: Mas and the Mother Country" (Caribbean Beat November-December 2009)
  • Photos from the early years of Notting Hill Carnival (London Guardian)
• Claudia Jones (alternate site), "Mother of Carnival" and founder of the West Indian Gazette (YouTube documentary on Jones)

Further Resources

• On and related to Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners:
• Sam Selvon (Wikipedia | World Literature in English)
• Novelist David Dabydeen speaks about The Lonely Londoners on "Open Book" (BBC Radio 4)
• Rebecca Dyer, "Immigration, Postwar London, and the Politics of Everyday Life in Sam Selvon's Fiction" (Cultural Critique 52 [2002]) (HSU users only)
• Ashley Dawson, "'In the Big City the Sex Life Gone Wild': Migration, Gender, and Identity in Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners" (Chapter 1 of Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain) (eBrary [HSU users only] | Google Books [free preview])
• Two short, reflective essays from The Guardian: Helon Habila's "Out of the Shadows" and James Ferguson's "Sam Selvon: Words of Welcome"
• Thomas Hylland Eriksen, "Liming in Trinidad: The art of doing nothing" (Folk 32 [1990]) (html | pdf with endnotes)
• Interactive map of the "Bayswater" neighborhood of London
• And if you really need some ready-made ideas about The Lonely Londoners, I would say the best source is not eNotes or SparkNotes or Cliff's Notes, but this course at Open University