Donald Hinds

Donald Hinds (13 January 1934 – 13 March 2023) was a Jamaican-born writer, journalist, historian and teacher. He is best known for his work on the West Indian Gazette and his fiction and non-fiction books portraying the West Indian community in Britain, particularly his 1966 work Journey to an Illusion, which has been called a groundbreaking book that "captured the plight of Commonwealth immigrants and foresaw the multicultural London of today".

In 1955, aged 21, Hinds decided to travel to London, England, to join his mother. He had qualified as a probationary teacher in Jamaica but like many other West Indian migrants to the UK was unable to find employment that matched his qualifications. He eventually got a job with London Transport as a bus conductor, working out of Brixton bus garage in Streatham Hill.

Between 1959 and 1963, Hinds was also broadcasting on BBC Caribbean, often reading short stories based on his experiences working on the buses. After The Observer published a piece by him on West Indian schoolchildren in Britain, he was approached by a literary agent, which led to the commissioning of a book by Heinemann. Receiving an advance of £100 — the equivalent at the time of eight weeks' wages as a bus conductor — Hinds was emboldened to leave his job with London Transport to concentrate on his writings. Journey to an Illusion: The West Indian in Britain — a series of interviews, together with autobiographical writing and social comment — was first published in 1966. the book was reissued in 2001 by Bogle-L'Ouverture Press and, in the words of Anne Walmsley: "Journey to an Illusion remains a classic of the West Indian immigrant experience."

Hinds was one of the writers associated with the influential Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) that flourished from 1966 to 1972, a cultural initiative primarily set up by Edward Kamau Brathwaite, John La Rose and Andrew Salkey, with the subsequent involvement of other notable artists and intellectuals including C. L. R. James, Stuart Hall, Wilson Harris, Kenneth Ramchand, Ronald Moody, Aubrey Williams, Gordon Rohlehr, Christopher Laird, Louis James, Orlando Patterson, Ivan Van Sertima, Althea McNish, James Berry, Errol Lloyd and Anne Walmsley. Hinds joined CAM's committee and in 1969 took over editorship of the organization's Newsletter. In February 1971, he chaired and introduced CAM's public session on "Contemporary African Poetry", at which Femi Fatoba from Nigeria and Cosmo Pieterse from Namibia participated with their Caribbean peers.

Hinds also worked for Magnet, a newspaper launched in the 1960s with Jan Carew as its first editor. While continuing to write, Hinds went on to become a teacher and subsequently a lecturer in education at South Bank University, Describing the book as "an absorbing hybrid of fiction and reportage" in a Financial Times review, Ian Thomson says: "Mother Country, a work of documentary authenticity and rare narrative verve, takes us to the heart of the West Indian immigrant experience in postwar London."

National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C1149/25) with Donald Hinds in 2012 for its Oral History of Oral History collection held by the British Library. He features in Colin Grant's oral history Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation (2019).

Hinds died on 13 March 2023, at the age of 89, survived by his wife Dawn (née Bruce), whom he married in 1961.

List of works Non-fiction books and essays Journey to an Illusion: The West Indian in Britain (Heinemann, 1966), Bogle-L'Ouverture Press, 2001, "The 'Island' of Brixton", Oral History: The Journal of the Oral History Society, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring 1980), pp. 49–51 Black Peoples of America, 1500-1900, Collins Educational, 1992, Native Peoples in America, Collins, 1995,

Novels and short stories "Busman's Blues" in Andrew Salkey (ed), Stories from the Caribbean: an anthology, Elek Books, 1965 Mother Country: In the Wake of a Dream, Hansib Publications, 2014,