James Berry (1924–2017), by unknown photographer

The Argus

Berry, James Radglan [also known as James Raglan Berry] (1924–2017), poet, was born on 28 September 1924 in Portland, Jamaica, one of six children of a fisherman and smallholder, Robert Berry, and his wife, Maud, a seamstress. The family was poor and to make ends meet his parents required James’s help, even when he was still only a child. As a result, his school education was basic. This did not deter him from writing down some of the stories he heard his elders tell. As he grew in confidence, so he invented his own tales, always conceived for reading aloud and so retaining patois and speech rhythms best suited to oral communication. This apparent ease of expression and almost conversational directness of manner informed most of his work, whether poetry or prose, for the rest of his life.

Finding few opportunities for work in Jamaica, Berry went to the United States in 1942, assured that work on farms there would be a welcome contribution to the war effort. After six years he returned to his island, aware, in his own words, that ‘America was not a free place for black people’ (Thomas, ‘The poet James Berry’). Uncertain of what to do next, he just missed the chance to be among the passengers who travelled to England in June 1948 aboard HMT Empire Windrush, answering government pleas to the colonies for help in post-war reconstruction. He did not miss out a second time and was one of 108 Jamaican immigrants who sailed on the next ship to London, SS Orbita, in October of the same year.

Berry gravitated to Brixton in south London, which was becoming the epicentre of Caribbean life in Britain. He joined the Post Office, using skills as a telegraphist that he had acquired in the USA. In Wandsworth on 1 June 1957 he married Mary Levien (1924–2002), a social worker, and daughter of Charles Henry Levien, college steward, and his wife, Edith. At the same time he continued writing. His first published poems appeared sporadically in various small magazines, but he did not have a full collection of his own work until Fractured Circles came out in 1979. In 1976, however, he edited Bluefoot Traveller, an anthology of poems by black British writers which became hugely influential in boosting their self-esteem and raising awareness of their quality.

By now Berry had acquired a sufficient reputation to be invited to give public readings and to work in schools, culminating in the year he spent in 1978 as a writer-in-residence at Vauxhall Manor Girls’ School, an inner-city state school in an underprivileged area. He had become a friend of cultural activists such as the poet and publisher John La Rose, originally from Trinidad, and his fellow Jamaican, the novelist Andrew Salkey. They persuaded him to be part of the Caribbean Artists Movement, an organization dedicated to promoting Caribbean culture in Britain and to forging links between artists and the community. Berry briefly became its chairman in 1971.

In 1981 Berry won the National Poetry Competition, run by the Poetry Society. His winning poem, ‘Fantasia of an African Boy’, went on to be included in many anthologies. In it Berry transposed the dreams of a poor Jamaican boy to Africa, evidence of his growing identification with the African roots of black people everywhere. In 1982 his second collection was published, Lucy’s Letters and Loving, a sequence of epistolary poems written in the persona of a Jamaican woman settled in Britain but anxious to keep in touch with her place of origin. These pithy, colloquial, and droll observations of English social life helped to make Berry an increasingly public performer and broadcaster, as well as a regular representative of multi-ethnic Britain on tours abroad. He became a favourite of both the Arts Council of Great Britain and the British Council.

Other poetry collections followed, among them Chain of Days (1985), Hot Cold Earth (1995), and Windrush Songs (2007). His second anthology of poems by West Indians living in Britain, News for Babylon (1984), was even more influential than his first. His selected poems, A Story I Am In, appeared in 2011. In addition he wrote many story collections, often with children in mind. A Thief in the Village, and Other Stories won the Smarties prize for writing for young people in 1987 and the Coretta Scott King prize in 1989. His prose was as vivid and intimate as his poetry.

James Berry played a central role in expressing the voice of the so-called ‘Windrush generation’, black people from the colonized Caribbean who had been invited by the British government after the Second World War to assist with reconstructing a country that was on the one hand fatigued by six years of fighting and on the other committed to massive social and institutional change. They left behind poverty and struggle in the hope of a better life in the ‘mother’ country, often encountering instead racism and disillusion.

For the last six years of his life Berry suffered from dementia and lived in a care home, but this was not the end of his creative life. With the guidance of Susanna Howard, of the organization Living Words, he continued to express his thoughts in a manner that could be transcribed by her into structured poetry, pointing a positive way forward for any artist with this disease. Participants in a benefit evening, held in London on 27 September 2013 to raise funds for his care, included many prominent poets, who gathered to recognize Berry’s unique contribution to British literature. Their tributes would have been inconceivable sixty-five years before, when Berry first came to England. They acknowledged how his writings had helped make central those who had felt marginal, how the ‘other’ was now part of everyone, and how the colonized were no longer passive recipients of largesse or punishment, but creators and shapers of a shared world.

In 1990 Berry’s acceptance of an OBE appointment caused controversy because it referenced the British empire. Some other black artists had declined the same honour and accused Berry of compromising with a system his writing clearly rejected. He believed so strongly in people working together that he not only accepted this award, but several others including an honorary degree from the Open University in 2002. He and his wife, Mary, separated but never divorced. By various relationships he had three children, one of his sons and his only daughter predeceasing him. From 1984 his partner was Myra Barrs, a well-known authority on language and literacy. He died at Parkfield House nursing home in Hillingdon on 20 June 2017.