A Medal for Walter: Representations of Black Britons and World War I

"Your King and country are relying on you, don't let them down"

(Walter Tull:Footballer, Soldier, Hero 2)

Every war produces images—shorthand symbols—to help nations focus their efforts during war, and remember and memorialize after war's conclusion. For Britain, World War I produced two familiar images of soldiers: the young Oxbridge officer-poet, epitomized by tragic Cambridge student Rupert Brooke, who died in a war hospital in 1915 and who Yeats once called "the handsomest young man in England," and the British Tommy, a common soldier often of working-class origins, who was popularized by the poetry of writers as diverse as Rudyard Kipling and Jessie Pope. In either of these cases, the image of the soldier—of Britain itself, between 1914 and 1918—is white and generally English.¹ Fifteen thousand West Indians volunteered to serve "the mother country" during World War I (Rogers), seeing the war, as Glenford Howe points out in Race, War and Nationalism (2002), "as the first real opportunity since slavery to demonstrate their loyalty to and equality with whites" (16). This demonstration of equality and loyalty was true for the black soldiers born in Britain as well, and although Stephen Bourne points out that "Information about the lives of black servicemen in the First World War is difficult to find" (Black Poppies 42), the evidence he provides suggests that many black men living in Britain signed up for various branches of military service or for the merchant seamen. The most famous of these, British-born Walter Tull, son of a black Barbadian father and a white English mother, became the first black infantry officer ever appointed during any war, despite laws of the time that forbade black people from achieving such an honor. He did not win any medals, despite being recommended for them—something many biographies of Tull ignore. Until recently, black World War I soldiers have been almost nonexistent in British children's literature, and even now, only Walter Tull is highlighted by name. Books like Hilary Claire's The Story of Walter Tull (2007), Dan Lyndon and Roger Wade Walker's Walter Tull: Footballer, Soldier, Hero (2011), and Michaela Morgan's Respect: The Walter Tull Story (2005) and Walter Tull's Scrapbook (2014) present Tull as a special case rather than ordinary or expected. Michael Morpurgo's A Medal for Leroy (2012) bases a fictional story on the life of Tull as well, but the changes Morpurgo chooses to make in his soldier's life story further isolate and alienate the Black soldier from British acceptance. In books written by white authors and produced by mainstream publishers, race is used as both the reason for the narrative and, at the same time, denied as a matter of importance; white British are rarely depicted as racist, and systemic racism plays no role in these books in denying black soldiers their rights. When racism is present, the books depict it as easy to overcome and limited to a few bad people. Often, the book's paratextual elements such as book covers and publisher's blurbs reinforce this duality about race and racism in Britain. The black World War I soldier in British children's literature remains something other than British, in the rare case that he appears at all.

Despite the numbers in which they served and the specific honor gained by Tull, the Black British (those born in the UK) and West Indian (citizens of the British Empire, but born in the islands of the Caribbean) soldiers of World War I went unrecognized during the conflict and until relatively recently. But the idea of an almost-exclusively white Britain accords with traditional accounts of both British history and British children's literature. Peter Fryer points out that "school textbooks often quoted the classic nineteenth-century historians" (79) on issues of white superiority and black inferiority, and "The racist bias of the literature produced for children by British authors continued into the twentieth century" (80), leaving out achievements and accomplishments of all Black people, British- or colonial-born. Paul...