People of Sri Lankan origin arrived in the 1950s and 1960s, but it was the civil disturbances in Sri Lanka in the 1970s that led to larger numbers of Sri Lankans migrating to Britain. The early migrants were both doctors and teachers. Intensified conflict in 1983, resulted in greater numbers of working class Tamils escaping the civil disorder and coming to Britain as refugees and asylum seekers. Read the stories of Sri Lankan's, Mutu Coomaraswamy and Ananda Coomaraswamy as well as experiences of modern day Tamils coming to England.

There were many new opportunities open to early migrants during the course of the Second World War, but one option was entirely closed to them: it was impossible for them to return to India, even if they wanted to. Indeed, it was not until 1947 that it became at all easy to book a passage home. Many early migrants did just that as soon as the opportunity arose, partly because they had not seen their families for so long, but also because conditions deteriorated for people of colour in post-war Britain.

Opportunities for industrial employment had opened up in wartime, because so many of the men who had previously performed them had been called up for military service. Once demobilised, they promptly wanted their jobs back. Women, they argued, should return home to look after the children; and 'immigrants' should likewise go back to where they belonged. The forces of marginalisation bearing down on people of colour became a great deal more intense at this time.

A few hardy souls withstood the pressure, only to find that it eased once again in the early 1950s. Britain's economy suddenly began to boom and, as a result, acute labour shortages soon emerged in almost all of Britain's major industrial cities. As Britain became more prosperous, indigenous workers took the opportunity to move upwards through the hierarchy into jobs which were lighter, cleaner and better paid. This meant that employers found it increasingly difficult to fill jobs which were hot, hard, heavy, low paid and involved extensive shift work, such as:

Since local people sought to avoid such jobs at all costs, especially as prosperity increased, they could only be filled by migrant workers.

There was, of course, still a great deal of prejudice against people of colour: discrimination was not illegal in those days, and no-one thought of making it so. Nevertheless, the well established reservoirs of migrant labour in the Irish Republic and Eastern Europe were by then running dry, and the jobs still had to be done. It was in this context that people of colour began to get a look-in once again.

Although popular myths subsequently grew up, suggesting that migration from South Asia got off the ground as a result of employers making active efforts to recruit from India and Pakistan, there is no evidence that this actually happened. It was not so much that employers recruited South Asian workers, but rather that South Asian migrants organised the process of recruitment themselves.

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