A fire station is part of the story
George Arthur Roberts joined the Auxiliary Fire Service in 1938. Born in Trinidad, he had served in the First World War before settling in London, where he made his home in Camberwell. During the next war he worked at New Cross fire station and became a leading fireman. His contribution included establishing discussion and education groups for fellow firefighters, work recognised alongside his operational service when he received the British Empire Medal in 1944. The award was presented by George VI the following year. His working life connects emergency response with something less often pictured in wartime commemoration: adults learning and exchanging ideas while serving together. Roberts was part of a local institution, not a visitor briefly passing through a national story. 1
Women also undertook essential work outside the best-known uniformed roles. In historian Stephen Bourne's account for the London Fire Brigade, his relative Esther Bruce moved from dressmaking into hospital work in 1941. A Black Londoner with a Guyanese father, she cleaned wards at Fulham and Brompton hospitals and joined colleagues in fire-watching duties, using a stirrup pump. Bourne also records Laureen Goodare's fire-service work through the recollections of her daughter, the performer Cleo Sylvestre. These accounts widen the meaning of service. Hospital cleaning, watching for incendiaries and recording information belonged to the practical work of keeping people alive. Family testimony helps recover workers who may be missing from ceremonial photographs, without requiring every contribution to have produced a medal or a prominent public reputation. 2
Care in a city under attack
On 25 November 1944, a V2 rocket struck New Cross, devastating the Woolworths store and surrounding buildings. The attack killed 168 people. Harold Moody, the Jamaican-born doctor whose surgery and home were in nearby Peckham, joined the medical response. He was already known for his general practice and for founding the League of Coloured Peoples. At New Cross, his medical knowledge became part of a collective emergency effort among a neighbourhood's ruined shops and homes. Remembering the response brings together the doctor's professional and local identities. It also keeps the victims and the many other rescuers in the account: this was a community disaster, not a scene that can be adequately represented by the courage of one individual. 3
Other Black health workers were still completing their professional training. Princess Adenrele Ademola, daughter of the Alake of Abeokuta in southern Nigeria, was listed among the nursing staff on St Saviour's Ward at Guy's Hospital in 1939. She passed her nursing examinations and was registered in 1941. During the war she trained in midwifery at Queen Charlotte's Maternity Hospital and worked at New End Hospital in Hampstead. Her royal background attracted attention, but the sequence of hospital posts and examinations also records a demanding professional life. Her experience belongs to the history of African women in British healthcare before the NHS began, rather than to an account which assumes that all Black nursing participation started with postwar recruitment from the Caribbean. 4
Skills that kept aircraft working
Lilian Bader's wartime career began with exclusion. She lost work in a NAAFI canteen because she was Black, but entered the Women's Auxiliary Air Force on 28 March 1941. She trained as an instrument repairer, passed with a first-class result and worked at RAF Shawbury, becoming an acting corporal. The job placed her technical knowledge inside the maintenance system on which flying depended. Personal loss accompanied her training: her brother Jim died while serving in the Merchant Navy. Bader married the tank driver Ramsay Bader in 1943 and left the WAAF during pregnancy in February 1944. Her record connects skilled military work with bereavement, marriage and changing family responsibilities, rather than presenting service as a separate interval outside ordinary life. 5
Emanuel Peter John Adeniyi Thomas illustrates another form of work behind operational flying. Born in Lagos, he left government service in Nigeria to train with the RAF. By January 1945 he was serving at No. 4 Radio School at RAF Madley, taking trainee wireless operators into the air so they could practise. On 12 January, he and Frank Stokes encountered bad weather during an exercise over the Brecon Beacons. Their aircraft crashed into a mountainside. Stokes survived and went for help, but Thomas died; he was buried in Bath's Haycombe Cemetery. His story places African participation within Britain's training infrastructure. A flight supporting another serviceman's learning could be fatal even when it was not an operation against the enemy. 6
Workshops, camps and difficult accommodation
Factory production depended on people whose journeys and working conditions deserve the same attention as military enlistment. Learie Constantine, already internationally known as a cricketer, became a Ministry of Labour and National Service welfare officer in Liverpool in 1943. His responsibilities included West Indian and West African technicians and engineers working in British industry, including the Midlands. Helping people secure accommodation and navigate discrimination was part of making their employment possible. The National Archives preserves evidence of both the recruited workers and Constantine's efforts. The need for a welfare officer exposes a contradiction in wartime mobilisation: an employer or ministry could need a person's skills while landlords and other gatekeepers still obstructed the everyday arrangements that allowed that person to work. 7
In Scotland, the British Honduran Forestry Unit brought men from the territory now called Belize into timber production. They lived in camps across several areas, including the Borders, East Lothian, Sutherland and the western Highlands. The accommodation and equipment could be inadequate, and clothing presented difficulties in an unfamiliar climate. Their lives were not confined to work and camp buildings, however. Music, dances, sport and visits to local pubs created relationships with surrounding communities. When the unit was disbanded in 1943, some men returned to British Honduras and others remained in Britain. Following these different outcomes makes the story more than a temporary wartime labour transfer. It also connects forest work with settlement and with remembered encounters in places far from London's better-known Black neighbourhoods. 8
Speaking across the Atlantic
Broadcasting helped bridge distances between people in Britain and their relatives in the Caribbean. The BBC's Calling the West Indies began in 1939, carrying personal messages as well as material addressed to listeners across the region. Under Una Marson, the wartime broadcasts also developed a space for Caribbean writing. Caribbean Voices emerged as a distinct literary feature in 1943. Poetry and family messages were different kinds of communication, but both challenged the idea that people who travelled to Britain simply left their earlier relationships behind. The microphone connected places, accents and audiences. Marson's work also made editorial choice important: selecting and presenting writing helped establish which experiences Caribbean listeners could hear discussed as literature, alongside the practical news of people separated by war. 9
The Ministry of Information film West Indies Calling, made in 1943, brought several kinds of service together for a British audience. Una Marson presented the programme, while figures including Constantine and RAF officer Ulric Cross described work in industry and the armed forces. Forestry also featured, and music framed the gathering. The surviving film is valuable evidence of voices, manner and presentation, but it was made to encourage support for the war. Its emphasis on shared endeavour should not be mistaken for proof that discrimination had vanished. Read alongside employment and accommodation records, it shows both the range of Caribbean participation and how the state wished that participation to be understood. Propaganda can preserve genuine contributions while arranging them into a deliberately reassuring public picture. 10
Allies, colour bars and a Lancashire confrontation
American troops brought the racial segregation of the United States armed forces into British towns and villages. At Bamber Bridge in Lancashire, tensions between Black servicemen and white military police escalated into gunfire on 24 June 1943. Private William Crossland was killed. Historian Alan Rice's account places the confrontation within the operation of a segregated army and the Black soldiers' relationships with local people, some of whom resisted the demand that they enforce American racial divisions. This was not a battle against German forces, although it occurred during the Allied war. It exposed the limits of a military partnership that required Black Americans' service while treating them unequally. The soldiers were Americans in Britain; recognising that distinction matters as much as recognising the British community in which the events unfolded. 11
Local solidarity did not mean Britain had become free of racism. The Mixed Museum's account of Black GIs and British women describes officials who were reluctant to endorse American segregation publicly but worried about interracial relationships and the children who might result. Restrictions and discouragement could operate through dances, cinemas, policing and informal pressure. For couples, these were not abstract arguments about national character. They affected opportunities to meet, maintain relationships and establish families. Their history therefore cannot be reduced to a contrast between a racist American army and an entirely welcoming British public. Different people, institutions and localities behaved differently, while racial assumptions could cross the Atlantic as readily as troops. The intimate consequences continued well beyond the presence of any particular military camp. 12
Children whose lives continued after the war
Relationships between Black American servicemen and white British women produced children whose British histories are often omitted from accounts ending with victory in 1945. Historian Lucy Bland's research, shared through Anglia Ruskin University and The Mixed Museum, recovered these experiences through photographs, documents and personal accounts. The African American press described the children as 'brown babies', a historical label rather than a term that should be imposed on people today. Research estimates around 2,000 such children, with almost half placed in children's homes. Numbers indicate the scale, but not the meaning of any individual childhood. The surviving testimony includes differences in care, family relationships and later efforts to establish who their parents were. It gives the children a place as narrators of their own lives, not just as evidence in arguments about race. 13
Holnicote House in Somerset is one place where these histories can be followed. Donated to the National Trust in 1944, it was requisitioned as a residential nursery, initially for evacuated children and then for wartime babies, including children of Black GIs. In a later recorded discussion, former residents Ann Evans, Carol Edwards and Deborah Prior spoke together about their experiences. Their continuing friendships are part of the history too. The institution's administrative purpose tells only one side of the story; the people who lived there can describe what an official file could never fully convey. Bringing records and recollections together also prevents a single institutional label from being mistaken for a complete account of a person's childhood or subsequent family life. 14
Finding people behind the wartime record
The history can also be approached through an address. The government's Bomb Census began in 1940 and gathered information about bombing in major cities before extending its coverage. Maps, incident reports and civil-defence records can help identify what happened near a family's home or workplace. They generally do not supply a ready-made history of Black residents, and a damage mark cannot reveal the identity of everyone who lived in a building. Their value increases when they are read beside photographs, hospital records, employment histories and family accounts. This is a way of locating people within a neighbourhood's experience, rather than assuming that military service papers are the only surviving evidence of a Black person's wartime life. 15
The 1939 Register offers another route. Created for wartime administration, it records civilian households and occupations; Princess Ademola's entry is among the documents used by The National Archives and the Young Historians Project to investigate African nursing. Passenger lists can add earlier journeys, while professional records show training and qualifications. Together, these sources demonstrate a presence that preceded both the NHS and the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948. Postwar Britain inherited workers, patients, children, friendships and grievances from the war years. Beginning their story only with a famous ship obscures people already helping to sustain hospitals, maintain aircraft, produce timber and protect neighbourhoods. The war changed Black Britain, but it did not create it from nothing. 16
Sources and further reading
1. London Fire Brigade: George Arthur Roberts BEM.
3. Goldsmiths History Project: The V2 Woolworths rocket bomb disaster, 25 November 1944.
4. Young Historians Project: Princess Adenrele Ademola.
5. Royal Air Force Museum: Leading Aircraftwoman Lilian Bader.
6. Commonwealth War Graves Commission: Flight Lieutenant Emanuel Peter John Adeniyi Thomas.
7. The National Archives: Sir Learie Constantine.
8. Forestry and Land Scotland: British Honduran Forestry Unit.
9. Victoria and Albert Museum: West Indies Calling, poetry from the radio feature Caribbean Voices.
10. Imperial War Museums: West Indies Calling, film and catalogue commentary.
11. Alan Rice: Black troops were welcome in Britain, but Jim Crow was not, via History Guild.
12. The Mixed Museum: Black GIs, English women and brown babies.
13. Anglia Ruskin University: Online Brown Babies exhibition wins major prize.
14. The Mixed Museum: Remembering Holnicote House, a conversation with former residents.
15. The National Archives: Bomb Census survey records, 1940-1945.
16. The National Archives and Young Historians Project: African nurses, original documents.
Join the conversation
Comments 0
Share a memory, ask a question or add to this story.
There are no published comments on this article.
Comments are closed for this article.