The Officer Who Refused to Lie About Being Black - British Racism in WWI
Today it’s taken for granted that people of all ethnic groups should be treated equally in the armed forces and elsewhere. But as Leslie Gordon Goffe writes, during World War One black officers in the British armed forces faced a system with prejudice at its core.
When war was declared in 1914, a Jamaican, David Louis Clemetson, was among the first to volunteer.
A 20-year-old law student at Cambridge University when war broke out, Clemetson was eager to show that he and others from British colonies like Jamaica — where the conflict in Europe had been dismissed by some as a “white man’s war” — were willing to fight and die for King and Country. […]
Two years before, in 1915, he became one of the first black British officers of WW1. This was despite the provisions in the 1914 Manual of Military Law which barred, what it called, “negroes and or persons of colour” from holding rank above sergeant. […]
History has long recorded another black soldier, British-born Walter Tull, as the first to become an officer. But by the time Tull became a 2nd lieutenant in the Middlesex Regiment on 30 May 1917, Clemetson had been an officer for going on two years. There is a distinction — Clemetson was in the Yeomanry, part of what was then the Territorial Force, rather than the regular Army. […]
Another candidate for the first black officer is Jamaican-born George Bemand. But he had to lie about his black ancestry in order to become an officer. Bemand, whose story was unearthed by historian Simon Jervis, became a 2nd lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery on 23 May 1915, four months before Clemetson became an officer and two years before Walter Tull. […]