Tag Archives: Black history

Black soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars

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Let’s start with numbers. We can get them out of the way so quickly that I can’t resist.

How many Black soldiers fought for Britain in the Napoleonic Wars? 

Dunno. Record keeping was– Should we be kind and call it inconsistent? 

More than I thought isn’t a number that’ll make a statistician happy, but if I’m a fair sample of the English-speaking population (I seldom am but I might be for this) it will tell us something about the history we’re taught. It never crossed my mind that any Black soldiers fought for Britain, for France, or for the Republic of Never Happened.

The history I was taught was (a) boring, (b) often inaccurate, and (3) except for a quick digression into the slave trade, white. And just when I think I’ve cleared its last sticky residue out of my head, I find a few more bits. So, Napoleonic Wars? Of course my mind showed me white soldiers. And my mind was wrong. Although we can’t have solid numbers, we’re talking about a significant block of people. In the British armed forces, they would’ve come from the West Indies, from Africa, from the US, from Canada, from the East Indies, from Britain itself, and from Ireland. 

I don’t suppose I need to remind you that Britain was an imperial power by then.

Irrelevant photo: November sunset

 

Historian Carole Divall says, “It’s often forgotten how many black soldiers were employed by both the British Army and Navy during the period. There were many in the Northamptonshire Regiment, a fair number in the 73rd and probably also the 69th regiments who had both been in the West Indies. No doubt some of the other regiments of the British Army also had black drummers, as did the 1/30th India.”

You can find a website about Black soldiers who served in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire regiments. I’m sure you can find others, but I stopped there.

 

The West India Regiments

The majority of Britain’s Black soldiers seem to have been in the West India Regiments, so let’s focus on them. 

The regiments were formed in the 1790s to fight the French in the Caribbean. The British started out thinking British recruits could handle the fighting, but enough of them died of tropical diseases that the government was left with a problem, which it decided to solve by recruiting Black soldiers, who it was sure were better suited to the climate. 

When I say “recruit,” though, what I really mean is buy. The Caribbean islands were slave economies. And what would seem more natural to a slave-owning power than to buy itself some slaves, both off the plantations and from newly arrived slave ships, and turn them into soldiers? In 12 years, they bought some 13,400 men to serve as soldiers.

The soldiers’ legal status wasn’t clear–were they slaves? weren’t they slaves?–but once they were discharged they became free and some were awarded pensions. Which implies that some weren’t awarded pensions. That, unfortunately, is all I know about that.

The regiments might’ve been formed to fight in the Caribbean, but they ended up fighting wherever they were needed, which included the Battle of Waterloo. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

In 1807, Britain did two things that matter to the story: it abolished the slave trade, although not yet slavery, and it passed the Mutiny Act, which made it clear that the soldiers of the West India Regiments were free and should be treated like any other soldiers. Military discipline wasn’t anything you’d think of as fun, but it wasn’t slavery.

After 1807, the regiments incorporated men the navy had liberated from slave ships (the trade was now illegal, remember) as well as Black soldiers captured from French and Dutch colonies.

Unlike colonial subjects from India and from other parts of the empire, soldiers in the West India Regiments were recognised as part of the British Army. Increasingly, formerly enslaved soldiers got the same enlistment bounty, pay, and allowances as white soldiers, and soldiers of equal rank were equal, which seems, at the same time, stupidly obvious and also amazing.

Compared to the other choices on offer for Black men (working as servants; cobbling together whatever casual work they could) the army would have been an improvement. The work and the pay were steady, and it was a place where Black men in an overwhelmingly white society could find a small community, although that business of people shooting at you and being expected to shoot at them might’ve been off-putting. 

Black soldiers had a high re-enlistment rate.

 

Consider one soldier, Private Thomas James

Thomas James, from the West India Regiments, has been in the news recently because the National Army Museum identified him as–very probably, although not 600% certainly–the subject of an 1821 portrait by a painter whose more usual subjects were, say, the Duke of Wellington or Lord Byron, not lowly privates. The way painters made their money wasn’t by looking around for interesting faces but by charging their subjects. If you wanted to see yourself looking handsome in oils, you paid for the privilege, which is why we find the ordinary riffraff underrepresented and the aristocratic riffraff overrepresented.

In spite of which history has handed us the handsome portrait of a Black private in a bandsman’s white uniform, and it’s said, “You figure it out.” 

The National Army Museum speculates that James’s officers would’ve commissioned the portrait to honor his courage. That’s not impossible and I don’t have a better story to offer, but before we give it our tentative acceptance let’s sprinkle a little salt on top.

Not much is known about James’s background, but that’s typical of enlisted men of the era. He may well have been enslaved. He was illiterate. He breaks into history as one of 9 Black soldiers who received the Waterloo Medal–the first British medal awarded regardless of rank; 38,500 were issued. 

James was wounded by Prussian deserters who were trying to loot the belongings of British officers during the battle of Waterloo. (That’s 1815; you’re welcome. I won’t remember it ten minutes from now either.) It’s an odd little sidelight to the battle: we–or I, at least–imagine everyone out there on the battlefield hacking the hell out of each other after their flintlocks misfired (health and sanity warning: military history isn’t one of my strengths), but here were 20 soldiers assigned to guard the officers’ money, jewelry, silver dishes, and whatever else they considered necessary to the rough and tumble of a military life. And clearly it did need guarding. This wasn’t a safe neighborhood.

We–or at least I–don’t know what happened to the other 19 defenders, but James was seriously wounded. And got a medal. And a portrait, for whatever either of those might’ve meant to him. The portrait shows him holding a cymbal, and along with his white uniform it indicates that he was part of the regimental band.

 

Music and warfare

Musicians were an essential part of warfare. They kept morale up; they communicated with–

C’mon, people. Use your own imaginations here. Whoever. Their own guys on the other side of the battlefield, or hidden in the trees. The system wasn’t good enough to carry letters home but it worked.

But bands weren’t only about the music. Band members flipped their cymbals into the air, swung them under their legs. Military music was full of athletics and show-offery. And Black soldiers were–

Okay, the story goes kind of queasy here. European armies had adopted the idea of military music from the Ottomans, and for a while it was the thing to have Turkish musicians in their bands. Gradually, they replaced them with men of African backgrounds. They weren’t Turkish but they were, you know, exotic. They brought a prestige addition to any military band. And I have no doubt some officer was sitting in a tent somewhere telling another officer, “They have natural rhythm, don’t they?”

I know. You get a little progress on one side of the equation and on the other you lay the foundation for a racist stereotype the next generations will build on. If you’re serious about your history, don’t expect purity. The water’s so murky it’s hard to tell it from the land.

 

So is this a feel-good story?

Depends what you’re wired to feel good about. Historians–or some of them, anyway–argue that the Napoleonic Wars opened up ways for marginalized groups to move half a rung up the social ladder. 

No, I know that’s not physically possible. My best guess is it would’ve been precarious, so half a rung? Yeah, I’ll stand by that, in all its absurdity.

What marginalized groups are we talking about? Jews from Central Europe, who fought in the Austrian and Prussian armies. Catholics from Ireland who fought in the British army. And the people we’ve been talking about: enslaved men of African heritage. 

How far up the ladder did they get? Far enough that a lot of Black soldiers re-enlisted. It doesn’t sound like a great deal from where I sit, but that’s not where they were sitting. It was worth it to them. 

If you want your history smoothly stitched out of feel-good stories, stick to kids’ books. 

Immigration and the Windrush story

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When you read the history of Black immigration to Britain, you’ll find the story of the Windrush looming large.

The story of what?

A ship called the Empire Windrush. It docked in Essex (that’s in England; you’re welcome) in 1948, bringing immigrants from the West Indies–and also from other places, including Poland, but only the West Indian immigrants became part of the story. Think of the story as a paper bag full of groceries. The bottom got wet and everyone else fell. They haven’t been seen since. Sorry.

The Windrush gave its name to a generation, not because it was the first ship to bring immigrants from the West Indies but because it was the first to arrive after the passage of the British Nationality Act, which gave people from the colonies the right to live and work in Britain. 

History’s funny like that. A few events get to be fixed points in the story while other things, things that happened before, after, and around those fixed points, go missing. They’re hanging out with those Polish immigrants at the Invisibility Cafe and they’ll be there until a new generation of historians comes along to resurrect them.

Irrelevant photo: Geraniums hanging out with a California poppy.

 

Postwar Britain

Britain came out of World War II exhausted, heavily bombed, and damn near broke. Wartime food rationing continued well into peacetime. To reconstruct, the country needed a lot of things, including workers. Some 260,000 British soldiers had died in the war. (That doesn’t count troops from the colonies, just the ones from Britain itself.) And when after the war some half a million migrants left Britain for the colonies to build new lives, Winston Churchill, by then a mere former prime minister, begged them to stay, saying “We cannot spare you.” 

To which they replied, in unison, “Your problem, buddy,” and off they toddled.

The government turned to its colonies, where they hoped to recruit workers who already spoke English from places where labor was cheap. 

Yes, it was all entirely high minded.

The West Indies were a prime target, since they were struggling economically, and West Indians responded, taking took jobs as manual workers, drivers, cleaners, and nurses, although when I took the Life in the UK test (you have to pass to get indefinite leave to remain), what I had to memorize was that they became bus drivers. Every last one of them.

Listen, when you have to pass a standardized test, you give ‘em what they want, no matter how strained its relationship to fact may be.

People from other colonies also took up the offer, but they too have dropped out of the story. If you want to know more about them, there’s this cafe I can recommend.

 

The welcome mat

So Britain put out the welcome mat, right? 

Sure it did. And the sun shone on this rainy island for 365 days straight. 

What happened was the usual hysteria about immigrants, because the thing about immigrants is that they’re from other countries. Where they do things differently. You know how it works: the country they come to may be divided against itself in six different ways, but drop in enough foreigners to hit critical mass and the country discovers it dislikes them  more than it dislikes its fellow countryfolk.

Sorry, I don’t mean to sound as cynical as I sound. It just sort of happens sometimes. 

Once you’ve cued up the usual hysteria, you can multiply it by the fact that the immigrants were Black and Britain was still overwhelmingly white. 

Result? As much as the country needed workers, jobs were mysteriously hard to find. One man from the Windrush generation said, “Apparently I was always just a few hours too late,” although they were so polite about it that he added, “The Englishman can be the nicest man out when he is telling you no.”    

Housing was equally hard to find. Rooms for rent were generally advertised on notices in the windows of local stores, and a lot of notices said, “No blacks.” Or in some cases, “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs.” 

Yes, kiddies, Irish and Black people were bundled into such a tight package that it was hard to tell them apart. In the rest of this paragraph I’ll be working from memory, so give me some leeway, but Ireland was the place where Britain honed its skills in justifying imperial conquest. It learned to write a story that showed the conquered people as a separate race, so incompetent, so inferior, that conquering them was damn near doing them a favor. In that contest, wrapping them all up together made a kind of sense. 

The things you learn, right?

Maybe the atmosphere of those early years is best summed up by a quick visit to MP Enoch Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech in Parliament. By then, hundreds of thousands of commonwealth immigrants had moved to Britain.

In a decade or so, he said, “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

And it wasn’t just the immigrants he was talking about but their descendants, They’d erode the national character. He talked about a constituent who wouldn’t rent rooms to Black people. 

“She is becoming afraid to go out,” he said. “Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies.

“They cannot speak English, but one word they know. ‘Racialist,’ they chant.”

He was trying to defeat the Race Relations Bill, and the speech was so over the top that it ended his political career. The bill passed, making race-based discrimination illegal. But the speech did succeed in cranking up antagonism against Black people, so multiply the anti-immigrant hysteria by twelve if you would and write your answer at the bottom of your test paper and leave it in the trash can on your way out. Thank you. Everybody gets an A.

Thousands of people turned out onto the streets protesting Powell. And thousands turned out in support. 

The speech has found echoes in a recent speech by the current prime minister, Keir Starmer, who warned that immigration would make us “an island of strangers.” The speech was somewhat less hysterical but was still full of talk about uncontrolled immigration and incalculable damage to British society.

Starmer’s favorability rating is now – 46. (He’s Labour.) His most vocal opponent–the right-wing voice he’s trying to out-right-wing–is Nigel Farage (Reform), whose favorability rating is -26. Kemi Badenoch (Conservatives) is at – 39. That leaves Ed Davey (Liberal Democrats) at – 8 the clear winner.  

I’d love to explain how those ratings are calculated, but it involves numbers and we’ll all be better off if I don’t try. What we really need to know is that (a) a minus rating isn’t good, and (b) if you want everyone to love you, British politics isn’t the right place for you just now.

 

The Windrush Scandal

But back to our story. The immigrants landed, they worked, they built lives and families. Those who had children back home brought them over once they were settled. The country rebuilt, and–

Do you remember how people in Britain clapped for essential workers during lockdown? Essential workers were the people risking their lives, generally for low pay, to keep the rest of us fed and to keep the lights on, the hospitals running, and the trash collected. Once a week, we acknowledged how much we depended on them, then lockdown ended and the world forgot about them. Did they get a raise? The hell they did. The only visibility they have now is that at our local supermarket the people who round up the shopping carts–or trolleys if we’re talking British–still wear vests (or in British, gillets) with some slogan about essential workers. Probably because the store doesn’t want to spend money on replacing them. 

That was a longish digression, but if you subtract the clapping and the acknowledgement, that’s what happened to the Windrush generation, but again you’ll need to multiply it by twelve. 

Or possibly more than twelve, because in 2012, in the midst of a new wave of hysteria about immigrants, the government introduced a “hostile environment for illegal immigrants.” Landlords had to check a potential tenant’s right to be in the country; employers had to do the same; so did the National Health Service. Bank account? Ditto. Local government couldn’t offer support to people unless they could prove their right to be in the country. 

And guess what: a significant portion of the Windrush generation couldn’t prove its right to be in the country. Not because they’d done anything wrong but because the government hadn’t kept a record of who’d been granted the right to remain. They’d never issued the paperwork people needed to document their status and in 2010 they’d destroyed the landing cards that would’ve documented their arrival. 

Many of the people needing those documents had arrived as children, traveling on their parents’ passports, giving them one less document to rely on. 

Overnight a swathe of people who arrived legally became, officially speaking, illegal immigrants. People lost their housing, their jobs, their driving licenses, their bank accounts, their access to healthcare. Some were deported to countries they no longer remembered. Some were detained within Britain as illegal immigrants. 

As the scandal became public and individual stories emerged, assorted politicians made all the appropriate noises and in 2019 reparations were promised. In 2021, a committee of MPs found that the system of compensating people was so torturous that applying for compensation had become another source of trauma. The Home Office was and still is in charge of the process, which leaves it investigating its own fuck-ups, and many of the people who should get compensation are, not unreasonably, afraid to make themselves known. Some 15,000 people are thought to be eligible for compensation. As of February 2024, 2,307 claims had been accepted. 

The people who have applied have faced long delays, and this is a group of elderly people, and the thing about elderly people is that we keep getting older. If the government stalls this group long enough–apologies for reminding you–they’ll start to die off. We all do that sooner or later.

Many cases that are denied are overturned on appeal, but that depends on being able to launch an appeal.

Is free legal advice available? Don’t kid yourself.

I think it’s fair to say that when compensation has been given, it doesn’t match the wreckage that was made of the recipient’s life. One man who was deported ended up living on the streets in Jamaica for ten years. He’s only just been promised a return, although his case hit the newspapers months ago. Whether he’s actually been brought home yet I don’t know.

What sort of compensation makes up for that?

Mary Prince & the ambiguity of slavery in England

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In 1831, a couple of years before the British Empire abolished slavery, a former slave named Mary Prince published The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave. It’s credited with giving a good strong push to the abolitionist chariot and it’s one of Britain’s pivotal slave narratives, the first written by a woman, remembered with Ottobah Cugoano’s from 1787 and Olaudah Equiano’s from 1789, although Cugoano and Olaudah are, I think, better known.

Why am I weaseling around saying “I think” there? Because I’m not originally British. I’ve lived here for–hang on, I’ll need access to my toes to count this high–18 years, give or take a toe, but when you come to a country as an adult there’s some ground you just don’t make up. You bring other gifts. Immigrants are handy to have around, although you wouldn’t know that if your only contact with us comes from following the news. But some of the stuff that happens in your brain when you’re young doesn’t happen when you’re not. And I’m very much not. So I have the impression that Prince is less well known, but y’know, most of British history is new to me, so I’m not the best judge. 

To be fair, a lot of British history would be new to most of the British if they were to stumble over it, just as most of American history would be new to most Americans, and a lot of people are working overtime to make sure it stays that way.

Irrelevant photo: daffodils growing in a hedge. I’d love to run a picture of Mary Prince but there are none.

 

But back to Mary Prince

Prince was born into slavery in the Caribbean, sold away from her family when she was twelve, and shuffled between islands and slaveholders until well into her adulthood. She escaped once briefly, as a child, and as an adult married a free Black man Daniel James, who offered to buy her freedom but was refused. 

In 1828, about a year and a half after her marriage, the last in that collection of slaveholders, John Adams Wood, took Prince to England as a servant, and–

You remember that first paragraph where I said she was a former slave? That’s both true and not true. Her status in England was ambiguous. 

 

The bit about whether slavery was legal

To make sense of this, we have to go back to a 1772 court ruling involving  James Somerset, a slave who escaped in England just as he was about to be shipped overseas and sold. The court freed him and that ruling was generally taken as putting an end to slavery within England’s borders, although not in its empire. 

In fact, it didn’t end slavery. A year after the Somerset ruling, a newspaper reported that an escaped slave had been recaptured and committed suicide. Other newspapers ran ads for the sale of slaves. In 1788, two anti-slavery campaigners bought a slave in England to prove that slavery continued within the country’s borders. 

In fact, the judge in the Somerset case, was aware enough of slavery’s ambiguous status that his 1782 will freed his grand-niece, Dido Elizabeth Belle, who’d been born into slavery but who he’d raised and educated and who lived in England with his family. What he had in fact ruled illegal in the Somerset case was taking a slave out of the country without his or her consent. That left England in a thoroughly weird position: none of its laws gave slavery any standing, but none of them made it illegal either. 

 

And back to Mary Prince again

Not long after Prince arrived in London, she walked out on the slaveholders who’d brought her, and I’d love to tell you how long “not long” was but nothing I’ve found makes it clear. The sources I’ve found do say her health was getting worse–she had arthritis–and a couple of the sources make it sound like she struggled to do the work that the Wood family demanded. One source says they threatened to throw her out on the street.

Whatever happened, she walked out and turned to the Moravian Mission, a Protestant church that she’d joined in Antigua, and at some point she found her way to the Anti-Slavery Society and met Thomas Pringle, the secretary of the London branch. She also found work and, the ambiguities of the law be damned, lived as a free woman.

What Prince wanted was to return to Antigua as a free woman, though, and she and Pringle tried, first through a lawyer and later through a minister, to negotiate with Wood for her freedom. Wood refused to free her on any terms. 

In 1829 she petitioned Parliament, asking them to free the enslaved people of the Caribbean, making her the first woman to petition Britain’s Parliament. And in what seems to be a separate petition, the Anti-Slavery Society petitioned for her manumission. 

Sorry for the murkiness. I’m working from multiple articles here and frankly some of them are better on rhetoric than on detail. Anyway, if there were two petitions, both failed. If there was one– 

Yeah. You get it.

At some point she became unemployed and the Pringles hired her as a domestic servant, and it was while she lived with them that she suggested testifying, in book form, to the brutality and violence of slavery. 

“I have felt what a slave feels,” she wrote, “and I know what a slave knows; and I would have all the good people in England to know it too, that they may break our chains, and set us free.”  

Prince could read and write, but she dictated the book to an English abolitionist, Susanna Strickland, who compiled it, and an abolitionist who’d lived in Antigua “helped on the Antigua section,” whatever that means. An additional slave narrative, by Louis Asa-Asa, was added to the book. He testified to his experience of being captured in Africa and brought ashore in St. Ives, Cornwall, when storms took the ship off course. 

Scholars argue about the extent to which Strickland and Pringle shaped the manuscript. By extension, I’d guess they’re arguing about how much the voice is Prince’s. No one these days seems to question the reality of her evidence, which is graphic and raw. 

 

The book and the lawsuits

At the time, though, the book was questioned, and it wasn’t long after the book was published that the lawsuits started. First Pringle, as the publisher, sued someone who claimed in print that the story was a fraud. Pringle won and was awarded £5 (more or less £485 in 2025 money, and from here on I’ll leave you to do the calculations) plus costs–a total of £160. 

Then Wood–the last in that line of slaveholders, remember–sued Pringle for defamation and Pringle countersued. The court decided that story was exaggerated and Wood was awarded £25 but not costs. All of which added to the book’s popularity. It went through three editions in its first year. 

 

And after that . . . 

. . . Prince drops out of the public record and we don’t get the end of the story. In 1833, slavery was abolished in the British empire, except for, ahem, the parts controlled by the British East India Company, and that first ahem is followed by a second ahem, because for a period of years slavery was replaced with an apprenticeship system that was slavery under a different name.

Still, it’s possible that Prince returned to Antigua and her husband. It’s also possible that she didn’t. 

Bermuda counts her as a national hero and observes a holiday in her honor.

Exporting segregation: Black G.I.s in Britain during World War II

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The best-known stories about American G.I.s in Britain during World War II involve white soldiers, who the British liked to say were over overpaid, overfed, oversexed, and over here. Not long ago, I met someone who quoted that to explain why he didn’t know what part of the US his American grandfather came from. 

But there’s another story about U.S. soldiers in Britain: over the course of 3 years, some 240,000 Black U.S. soldiers passed through Britain and their situation was complicated, not because Britons didn’t welcome them but because they did. 

Screamingly irrelevant photo: The river Something or Other, flowing through Canterbury’s city center

 

The segregated army

Let’s back up. Hang around here long enough and you’ll get used to that. The US Army was segregated until 1948, three years after the end of World War II, so during the period we’re talking about Black and white soldiers served in separate units. They had separate barracks or camps along with separate hospitals or wards, blood banks (yes, seriously), medical staff, and recreational facilities. 

The US military didn’t consider Black soldiers fit for combat, so they were limited to support roles. They drove, cooked, cleaned, built roads and buildings and air bases, unloaded supplies, dug ditches, and worked as mechanics, generally under white officers. The few Black soldiers who did become officers could only command Black troops, and Black soldiers faced all the harassment you’d expect–and depending on how low you set your expectations, probably more.

In case anyone needs it, here’s the ten-second summary of US segregation: America’s southern states were segregated by law. Blacks and whites had separate drinking fountains, separate schools, and separate pretty much everything else. And whatever was for white people got more money–a lot more money–than what was for Black people. Those laws were enforced not just by the police and the courts but by terror. To cross the line that separated Black and white was to risk your life–at least if you were Black. This is what the federal government was carrying over into the armed forces. 

But segregation wasn’t just about separating the two groups, it was about enforcing inequality. By way of example, unlike white soldiers, Black soldiers weren’t allowed to marry women they formed relationships with overseas, which added to the number of children abandoned by their G.I. fathers.

Now we get to the contradictory–which is to say the interesting–part: for all that Britain brought segregation to its colonies, it had no color line at home. That doesn’t mean it was free of racism. When the US first proposed bringing over Black troops, Anthony Eden, the secretary of state, objected on the grounds that Black people weren’t suited to the climate. 

Britain had some 8,000 identifiably Black citizens at the time, and they seemed to survive the climate well enough, but never mind that. Sometimes you grab the first argument that flits past, and after that there’s nothing to do but keep a straight face and repeat it. 

 

A quick interruption

What does identifiably Black mean? Over the course of several centuries, a lot of Britons with Black ancestors were absorbed into an overwhelmingly white population and no longer counted as Black. Many of them wouldn’t have known of any reason not to count themselves as white. So we’re talking about whoever was visible. 

By way of contrast, in the US at the time, the one-drop rule held that if you had any Black ancestry at all (“one drop of blood”)–and of course if anyone knew about it–you were considered Black. 

 

The two systems collide

With that out of the way, let’s go back to the British government: it was a reluctant host. James Grigg, the secretary of state for war, wrote in a memorandum labeled “to be kept under lock and key, ”that “the average white American soldier does not understand the normal British attitude to the colour problem, and his respect for this country may suffer if he sees British troops, British Women’s Services and the population generally drawing no distinction between white and coloured. . . . 

“This difference of attitude might clearly give rise to friction. Moreover, the coloured troops themselves probably expect to be treated in this country as in the United States, and a markedly different treatment might well cause political difficulties in America at the end of the war.”

Why was that kept under lock and key? Probably because Britain was in no position to object to an American plan. It depended on the US to fund the war effort. So while Grigg chewed on his fingernails, the US brought its soldiers over, and it brought US-style segregation with them.

Where Britain did manage to draw the line was at enforcing segregation: that would be up to the US. On occasion, that left Britain trying to keep segregation from being imposed on Black soldiers from British colonies.

Isn’t it interesting how something starts out looking like it’ll be clear but turns out to be murky as hell?

Black American soldiers were generally welcomed by the local population, most of whom had never met a Black person before. As George Orwell put it, “The general consensus of opinion appears to be that the only American soldiers with decent manners are the Negroes.”

Orwell may have been making a political point there, but people with no name recognition at all are quoted (anonymously) saying roughly the same thing. A West Country farmer said, “I love the Americans, but I don’t like those white ones that they have brought with them.” And when white G.I.s gave the landlady of a pub grief for serving Black soldiers, she’s reported to have told them,”Their money is as good as yours and we prefer their company.”

Some businesses, however, did refuse Black customers for fear of losing white soldiers’ business. So the picture wasn’t unmixed. 

Before I go on, let’s be clear: Britain wasn’t free of racism. A cricketer from the West Indies who lived in Britain in the 1920s said that “personal slights” were “an unpleasant part of life in Britain for anyone of my colour.” At the end of World War I, a race riot kicked off over fears that demobilized troops from the empire would take white Britons’ jobs. And at the end of World War II, when Black people from the West Indies moved to Britain in large numbers and looked for places to live, they found signs saying, “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs.”

But during the war, the British generally welcomed Black soldiers, and the raw racial hostility that white troops brought with them seems only to have made that welcome more pronounced. 

An element of nationalism probably fed into that as well. Britons didn’t want to be pushed around by the US–the rising imperial power.

 

So what happened?

Not every white G.I. in Britain was a racist, but those who were were outraged by what they found, which turned everything they’d taken for granted on its head. Not only were Blacks occupying spaces they expected to be exclusively white, they were dancing with white women and going out with white women. For a segregationist, this was the ultimate horror–the thing segregation was supposed to defend against: a Black man with a white woman.  

No, seriously. Within living memory–mine, since you ask–the question that was supposed to demolish any white support for the civil rights of Black Americans was, “Yeah, but would you want your sister to go out with one?”

Gasp, wheeze, end of argument. How could anyone accept that?

If the situation in Britain was a pressure cooker, it blew that little valve on the top more than once, with violence sometimes being set off by white soldiers, sometimes by military police, and at least once by Black soldiers marching into the nearby town that was off limits to them but not to white soldiers. 

In Bamber Bridge, Lancashire, white troops tried to establish a color line in the village and locals responded by putting “Black Troops Only” signs outside the village’s three pubs. 

Maybe you have to be as old as I am, as well as from the US, to be tickled by the quiet genius of local people saying, Fine, you want a color line? We’ll draw it here and you’re on the wrong side. 

In June 1943, still in Bamber Bridge, an argument started between MPs and a Black serviceman outside a pub. Local people and British servicewomen took the side of the soldier. Somebody brandished a bottle. An MP (that stands for military police, by the way, not member of parliament) brandished his gun. The MPs drove away, gathered reinforcements, and later that night ambushed the Black soldiers. A melee broke out, fought mostly with billy clubs, bottles, and cobblestones, but one Black soldier was shot, after which 200 Black soldiers gathered and confronted their white officers. The unit’s only Black officer had calmed the situation until a dozen MPs showed up with jeeps and a machine gun, at which point the Black soldiers seized most of the available arms and fought the MPs for several hours. 

The incident ended with one man dead, several injured, and a hefty number of Black soldiers (32, I believe) convicted of everything from ignoring orders to mutiny. Still, Historic UK counts it as a “turning point in handling racial tension within the military.” Specifically, “A subsequent overhaul led to the removal of racist officers from the trucking units and the introduction of black officers into the MP units.” 

There were also violent confrontations in Launceston, Cornwall; Tiger Bay, Wales; and Leicester. You can ask Lord Google for details if you want them. In the meantime, we’ll jump to what happened at Combe Down, Somerset, where Leroy Henry, a Black soldier, was accused of rape, found guilty by a court martial, and sentenced to death 

That might’ve been the end of it, but a local baker was shocked by the lack of evidence against the man and started a petition, which 33,000 people from the area signed. A national newspaper picked up the story. This was just before D-Day and southern England was packed with troops. It wasn’t a good time for a scandal, and General Eisenhower overturned the conviction. Leroy Henry returned to his unit–and survived the war.

 

So was James Grigg right?

You’ve forgotten James Grigg already, haven’t you? The secretary of state for war who said (among other things) that seeing a country without a color bar might cause political trouble when Black soldiers returned home. Well, around a third of the leaders of the US Civil Right Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s were World War II veterans. That doesn’t say they all spent time in Britain and it doesn’t say they needed to stand on British soil to imagine a life free of segregation. But the experience of Black soldiers in Britain surely added a few drops of water to the rivers that–help! my metaphor’s in danger of going wrong here–rose so powerfully in the postwar US, washing away segregation’s legal structure. 

That flood didn’t solve all our problems, as you will have noticed if you live there or follow US politics at all, but it did move history forward by an inch or three.

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I’ve relied heavily here on a BBC TV documentary, Churchill: Britain’s Secret Apartheid. If you can find it, it’s well worth your time.