Black Poppies

Britain's Black Community and the Great War

Stephen Bourne

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780752497877
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Erster Weltkrieg

'A powerful, revelatory counterbalance to the whitewashing of British history' - Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other

In this updated edition of his acclaimed study of the black presence in Britain during the First World War, Stephen Bourne illuminates fascinating stories of black servicemen of African heritage. These accounts of the fights for their 'Mother Country' are charted from the outbreak of war in 1914 to the conflict's aftermath in 1919, when black communities up and down Great Britain were faced with anti-black 'race riots' despite their dedicated services to their country at home and abroad.

With unprecedented access to the wartime personal correspondence of the Jamaican siblings Vera, Norman and Douglas Manley, Bourne helps bring to light the day-to-day trials, tribulations and tragedies of life on the battlefield. The stories of servicemen like Arthur Roberts - Scotland's Black Tommy - and Trinidadian soldier and campaigner George A. Roberts sit alongside the experiences of people of African descent at home during the First World War.

These include a black police officer, munitions factory workers and even stars of the stage like Cassie Walmer. Informative and accessible, with first-hand accounts and original photographs, Black Poppies is the essential guide to the military and civilian wartime experiences of black men and women, from the trenches to the music halls.

1

ALL THE KING’S MEN

From 1914, British-born black men from all over the country, not just the seaports of Cardiff and Liverpool, volunteered at recruitment centres, and they were joined by West Indians and other colonials. The latter travelled to the ‘Mother Country’ from the Caribbean and other parts of the British Empire, at their own expense, to take part in the fight against the Germans. Those who were unable to pay for their passage arrived here as stowaways. Their support was needed, and they gave it. It is true that some black soldiers in the British Army faced discrimination, but it is also true that others shared comradeship with white soldiers, especially on the front line. Photographs surface from time to time which illustrate this, including the black soldier in the centre of ‘Sergeant J.O. Hughes’ Squad, Welsh Guards, March 1916’. The black soldier is not pushed to the side, or placed at the back, or made invisible. He can be seen in the centre of the photo and his comrades are proud to have him there. Another photo, showing a group of tired and dishevelled Tommies at the front, includes a black soldier. The quartet have clearly been in battle together and they are friends, comrades, with a shared experience. As far as I am aware, neither of these black soldiers have been identified.

It is not a straightforward story. Nothing is clear cut, especially with the absence of first-hand testimony by black recruits. Historians simply didn’t consider them important, so they were overlooked. Unlike America, Britain did not segregate black soldiers. They integrated into British regiments. Promotion was difficult. The military wanted to avoid having black soldiers ruling over whites, but there were exceptions, such as Walter Tull, who did gain promotion and commanded white soldiers.

Page 471 of the Manual of Military Law (1914) stated that ‘any negro or person of colour, although an alien, may voluntarily enlist’ and when serving would be ‘deemed to be entitled to all the privileges of a natural-born British subject’. A note indicates that this passage relates to enlisted persons ‘and prohibits their promotion to commissioned rank’. According to the historian Jeffrey Green:

This shows that African descent enlisted people should not be promoted to be officers. It is not crystal clear, which explains why Walter Tull and others were commissioned. I know of no evidence that black men were not enlisted; when conscription came in 1916, all British-born males were surely in the pool. My understanding is that the distinction was drawn between officers and rankers, the former having authority over the latter. The conscription laws applied to all male citizens and the 1914 Manual of Military Law said the volunteers could enlist. The manual did not bar anyone. I suspect recruiting officers may have had different opinions but there seems to have been no law that excluded black men from being enlisted. We are being told a story backwards; without knowing how many blacks were subject to conscription in 1916–18, an assumption is made that, because officers could not be black, rankers could not be black. There are enough photographs of blacks in standard regiments to show that they were not siphoned off into ‘ethnic’ regiments such as the British West Indies Regiment. Imagine a recruiting station somewhere in Britain before conscription. A bunch of lads turn up and volunteer, and are processed. How many sergeants or officers would say that one (or more) of the group of pals could not be accepted? After conscription was legislated, anyone presenting their papers would be processed. Excluding blacks would upset the other reluctant recruits who were only there because they had to be there. Turn down one and the others would be aggrieved.¹

Soon after the war started, soldiers from Nigeria, The Gambia, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Nyasaland (now Malawi), Kenya and the Gold Coast (now Ghana) were recruited. Many saw active service in their home continent, taking part in the campaigns to capture the German-controlled territories of Togo, Cameroon, German South West Africa (now Namibia) and German East Africa (now Tanzania). Of a population of some 30 million in the African colonies of the British Empire, 55,000 men served as combatant soldiers, and many hundreds of thousands more as carriers and auxiliary troops. An estimated 10,000 were killed or died while serving. A total of 166 decorations were awarded to Africans. Many of them helped to defend the borders of their countries which adjoined German territories and later played an important role in the campaigns to remove the Germans from Africa. Throughout the war, 60,000 black South African and 120,000 other Africans served in uniformed Labour Units.²

It is a little-known fact that the first shot fired in the First World War did not take place in Europe or the Pacific, but was fired by an African, Alhaji Grunshi, of the Gold Coast Regiment, on 12 August 1914. Africa was the site of the first military action by British land forces and Grunshi fired the shot in the German colony of Togoland, which was isolated from the rest of the German Empire. It had the British Gold Coast to the west, French Dahomey to the east and French West Africa to the north. The area being strategically vital to the defence of Germany’s overseas empire, troops of the Gold Coast Regiment entered Togoland from the British Gold Coast and advanced on the capital, Lome. An advance patrol of the regiment encountered the German-led police force in August 1914 near Lome and the police force opened fire. Alhaji Grunshi returned fire and became the first soldier in the British service to fire a shot in the war. In 1940 The Times reported details of what happened:

It was on the Gold Coast that the first shot was fired by a British soldier in the last War. It came from a rifle carried by a dusky warrior whose name was Sergeant Alhaji Grunshi, and whose face bore the tribal scars of a people familiar only to the traveller who has penetrated into the hot savannah land north of the Colony of Ashanti … Sergeant Grunshi was a member of the Gold Coast Regiment, West African Frontier Force, and was one of the contingent of troops which marched into the then German dependency of Togoland shortly after the war was declared. There was little show of resistance to this invasion, but at Lome, some miles from the capital, a few Germans, ensconced in a factory, opened fire on a British patrol. This fire was promptly returned by Sergeant Grunshi and the first bullet to leave his rifle (although neither Alhaji nor any of his companions realized it at the time) signalized the opening of four years of bitter hostilities in the course of which the Empire was to lose more than 1,000,000 dead. During that war hundreds of Gold Coast men followed Sergeant Grunshi on active service in West and East Africa.³

The first white soldier of the British Army to fire a shot was Corporal Edward Thomas of the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards. This took place on the Western Front in France on 22 August 1914. Grunshi survived the war, having fought in three African campaigns, and he was mentioned in dispatches on 5 March 1918. On 13 March 1919, as a sergeant, he was awarded the Military Medal for his part in the East African Campaign. The first confirmed Commonwealth casualty under fire was Grunshi’s comrade, Private Bai, who was killed in action on 15 August 1914, probably at Agbeluvoe, 50 miles north of Lome. Unlike Grunshi, nothing is known of Private Bai (only one name is given). Private Bai’s name is engraved on the memorial at Kumasi in Ghana.

In Britain in 1914, the response to the campaign to join up was overwhelming, and at recruiting offices up and down the country small numbers of black and mixed-race men were successful at joining the Army, partly because the recruitment centres were not made aware that they were supposed to be discouraging black recruits. The historian David Killingray says that ‘whether or not a man was accepted into the ranks appears to have depended largely upon the attitude of individual recruiting officers and also the degree of colour of the recruit’.⁴ In December 1914 Gilbert Grindle, a principal clerk at the Colonial Office, wrote: ‘I hear privately that some recruiting officers will pass coloureds. Others, however, will not, and we must discourage coloured volunteers.’⁵

Information about the lives of black servicemen in the First World War is difficult to find. There are hardly any interviews, and identifying soldiers and sailors from army and navy records is a hit-and-miss task because ethnicity was only rarely recorded. It was not a requirement as it was in America. Consequently their stories are fragmented, and this has made the recording of their wartime experiences an almost impossible task. This is not the case with the Second World War because large numbers of black servicemen and women who survived the 1939–45 conflict lived long enough to be interviewed about their experiences. In the case of others, like Cy Grant and E. Martin Noble, they wrote and published their memoirs.⁶

An obituary in the Nottingham Evening Post on 1 May 1935 acknowledges the death of an African called Chief Luale, ‘a well-known figure in the amusement world’. In Skegness he was the proprietor of a seaside attraction known as the ‘African Village’. The obituary also mentions that, during the First World War, he enlisted in the Duke of Cambridge’s Middlesex Regiment and for some time he was utilised at a recruiting campaign in Trafalgar Square. He then served in France, Salonika and Egypt before settling in Britain.

Various sources mention names and provide brief ‘snapshots’ of black army recruits. In Under the Imperial Carpet (1986), David Killingray listed several black recruits who were accepted by the British Army. These include John Williams, who joi...