Over a few short months from September 1915 to January 1916, around two thousand Black soldiers from various British colonies in the Caribbean area passed through the small Sussex town of Seaford. They were members of the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the newly formed British West Indies Regiment, a Regiment whose very existence had been fiercely opposed by the War Office where the prevailing view was that Black men had no place in the British Army. They were being trained in readiness to play their part in the battles that were raging a few short miles away across the English Channel, but only a handful saw active service in France.
Nineteen of them died in Seaford and are buried in Commonwealth War Graves in a cemetery there. It has frequently been asserted that, housed in poorly constructed huts and unaccustomed to the English weather, the men who died in Seaford succumbed to pneumonia. In fact, pneumonia was the principle cause of death of only seven of them. The death certificates of these nineteen men tell a more complicated story, one that this new book reveals for the first time.
In addition to tracing their journey to Seaford and describing their time there, this book tells the stories of men who left Seaford on 20th January 1916 to set sail, not for France as they had hoped and expected, but for Alexandria. The War Office opposed the idea of Black men, who they believed to be inherently inferior, being allowed to take shots at White men, even if they were German. In the warped racial hierarchy of the time it was considered more acceptable to deploy the men of the BWIR in Egypt where they would be faced by Arab and Turkish forces, men who were almost equally inferior, and definitely not White.
Initially denied a combat role, men of the BWIR played a big part in the successful campaign in the Middle East, a campaign that saw Allied forces advance out of Egypt, into Israel and on to the capture of Jerusalem. Some men were also deployed in separate campaigns in East Africa (present day Kenya and Tanzania) and Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq).
They served with distinction and drew praise from their commanding officers. But they also encountered racism, in particular when the War ended and they were sent to Italy to await demobilisation and return to their homes in the colonies.
Men in the BWIR were awarded a range of medals: five Distinguished Service Orders, nineteen Military Crosses, eleven Military Crosses with Bar, and forty-nine mentions in dispatches. The Imperial War Museum identify the man on the left as Lance Corporal Leekham but this is probably incorrect, the man’s true identity is not known. Several of the men who received medals or were mentioned in dispatches are known to have trained at Seaford.
In total, around 15,600 men served in the BWIR from its formation in 1915 to its disbandment in 1919. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission website identifies 1,499 men from the Regiment who died (the Imperial War Museum offers a slightly lower number). Most, as the book shows, died as a result of illness or disease contracted on active service – malaria was a particular killer. Few of those who returned to their homes in the Caribbean were unscathed by the experience, as existing pension records show.
The service of these men has been largely ignored by the history books and it is time that omission was rectified. This book seeks to play a part in that.