Donald Hinds

Donald Hinds
Born	1934 (age 82–83) Kingston, Jamaica

Donald Hinds (born in 1934) is 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".

Hinds was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1934 and grew up in a village in the parish of St. Thomas with his grandparents, his mother and stepfather having migrated to Britain.

In 1955, aged 21, he 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.

While working on the buses Hinds met Theo Campbell, a local Jamaican businessman who owned London's first Black record shop at 250 Brixton Road. The record shop shared the building with the West Indian Gazette. Campbell introduced Hinds to Claudia Jones, the newspaper's editor, and Hinds began working for the paper in the summer of 1958. As the paper's "City Reporter", he was a regular contributor until Jones's death in 1964.

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 Indians 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, and 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. "One of the great works of journalism to have come out of the Jamaican-British encounter", 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."

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