Caribbean Beat — November/December 2018 (#154)

on this day
The war
after
the war
Thousands of men from the British West Indies enlisted in the
armed forces during the First World War, playing a crucial but often
thankless role in the Allied victory. And when the fighting was over,
another struggle for respect and recognition began — feeding a
new wave of self-determination in the Caribbean. James Ferguson
remembers the events of a century ago that set it all in motion
Illustration by Rohan Mitchell
A
couple of issues ago I told the story of the
First World War hero Walter Tull, the grandson
of a Barbados plantation slave who went on
to become a ground-breaking professional
footballer before enlisting in the British Army
and gaining promotion to the rank of lieutenant
— the first non-white soldier ever to do so. Tull’s experience,
though it ended tragically in the mud of northern France in March
1918, showed at least that an exceptional individual could shrug
off the institutional racism of the British military establishment in
the early twentieth century and set an example of self-sacrifice.
Tull was not alone among people from the Caribbean or of
Caribbean descent in wanting to play a part in the war effort,
and to assist the imperial “motherland.” When conflict broke
out in Europe in July 1914, thousands of men across the region
volunteered to join the army. Some may have been inspired by
patriotic idealism, others were perhaps keener to escape the
hardships of an economically and socially stagnant colonial
backwater — but the enthusiasm was real enough, and considerable
numbers made their way to Britain under their own steam.
The response of the War Office was at first negative, as the prevailing
racism of the day questioned the volunteers’ loyalty and
commitment. But pragmatism took over as casualties mounted
on the Western Front, and in 1915 it was decided to form an
exclusively Caribbean regiment, the British West Indies Regiment
(BWIR). The First Battalion was comprised of volunteers who had
already been accepted into other regiments, members of the much
older West India Regiment — a body founded during the Napoleonic
Wars to defend British colonial territories — and, finally, new
recruits from Jamaica, Barbados, and British Honduras (Belize).
When formal training began in Sussex in September 1915, the
BWIR numbered 15,600 men, two-thirds from Jamaica, and with
sizable contingents from Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas, and
the smaller islands of the eastern Caribbean.
Many of these men would have been bitterly disappointed, as it
became evident that they were seen less as a fighting force than as
a supply of cheap, albeit vital, labour. In the Somme, for instance,
they were put to work digging trenches, stockpiling munitions,
and building roads in the thick mud. It was gruelling but also
dangerous work, since they were within shelling and sniping
94 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM