Ten thousand Black Caribbean men and women served in the UK during the Second World War, and the government photographed and filmed them as propaganda—but almost nobody has studied those images since. This PhD is the first to examine the visual records held by Imperial War Museums of these volunteers, who served in the RAF, industry, forestry, and the Merchant Navy while facing racial discrimination from employers, trade unions, and the military itself. The Colonial Office commissioned the photographs and films to project an image of a unified Empire, hoping the volunteers would return home as “convinced ambassadors of Empire.” Yet the actual experiences of the people in those images—their work, their discrimination, their lives—remain largely unknown. If this research succeeds, it will recover those marginalised voices and show how official propaganda shaped—and continues to shape—British memory of the war. By working with Caribbean diaspora groups and community organisations, the project will also bring these collections into contemporary conversations about identity and decolonisation. This is fundamental historical and cultural research: it will not change a manufacturing process or a supply chain, but it could change how Britain understands its own wartime past and whose stories get told.
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This PhD will be the first to focus on the records in photographs and film held by Imperial War Museums (IWM) of Black volunteers from the Caribbean in the UK during the Second World War, when 10,000 Black men and women people served in the UK - in the armed forces, industry, forestry or the Merchant Navy. The majority of these volunteers responded to British recruitment drives in the Caribbean, while some, particularly early in the war, made their own way to Britain to join the fight. Although the Colour Bar had been officially lifted in 1939, many of them would experience discrimination during the recruitment process or in the course of their service. The experiences of these people varied across the different areas where they contributed to the war effort. Many Caribbean volunteers served in the Royal Air Force, whereas the Army proved far less receptive to Black men and women serving in its ranks. Those involved in industry and agriculture experienced racial discrimination from employers, trade unions and government officials. Although the Colonial Office was keen to encourage recruitment of Caribbean men and women, it was mostly an exercise in public relations and an attempt to quell any dissent to ensure that those who served in Britain would return home ‘convinced Ambassadors of Empire’. The PhD project will focus on the visual record – photographs and film – held in IWM’s collection commissioned largely (though not exclusively) by government departments, including the Colonial Office, the Ministry of Labour and Ministry of Supply, or by branches of the armed forces. It formed part of a wider propaganda campaign that showed Britain’s empire pulling together in a joint struggle, overlooking differences of race and ethnicity. Our understanding of this material is, however, very limited. This PhD will open up new perspectives and information on this largely unexplored collection by looking at how and why these images and footage were commissioned, the subjects chosen, and the intended audiences and messages. It will also investigate how these records have been used more recently in developing understanding and making memory, and engage in innovative field work which draws in minority communities, captures marginalised voices, and examines long-term memory processes in the context of postwar decolonisation. Specifically, in order to address this gap in the historical record, this CDP PhD aims to: 1) Unearth the lived experiences of the people in the visual records by engaging with the history of Black Caribbean service/armed forces personnel and war workers in the UK, and visual and material culture; 2) Explore how these records have been used since the war, thereby developing an understanding of post-war narratives and memory construction in Britain through memory studies and history of emotions; and 3) Retrospectively centre previously marginalised voices, in doing so bringing IWM collection into wider discussions of contemporary identity and memory, by using participatory research methods working with diaspora groups from the Caribbean and local community organisations.
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