There aren’t many positives to take from the current coronavirus pandemic but, possibly, clutching at straws, our time indoors gives us more time to catch up on our reading. With that in mind I have just finished ‘Telling the Truth: the British Honduran Forestry Unit in Scotland (1941-44)’ by Amos Ford. Our friend, the Yorkshire historian, Audrey Dewjee, recommended this book to me some time ago. It’s a slim volume but no less interesting for that.
The book covers one of the little known byways of black British history, just the sort of thing that intrigues us at Historycal Roots.
Amos worked as a civil servant (in the same Department as me as it happens; our careers overlapped by 10 years but we never met) until he retired in 1980. He clearly then spent many productive hours at the National Archives at Kew researching the official records covering the story of the British Honduran Forestry Unit in which he himself had served. Evidently he was shocked by the racism of the British authorities that he found documented in the files. The reports, he says, ‘made disturbing reading.’
In 1941 Britain was crying out for timber, the chair of the Forestry Commission estimated that at least 5.7 million tons would be needed in that year alone. This may seem strange today but the British economy was heavily reliant on coal and coal mines needed substantial quantities of timber to prop up the walls and roofs of the tunnels as the coal was dug out. Before the war much timber (4 million tons in 1936) had been imported from continental Europe, 2 million tons had come from Finland alone. With German forces now in control of most of the pre-War sources of timber Britain needed to look elsewhere. She didn’t need to look far, the hillsides of Scotland, England and Wales were covered with the stuff. There was no actual shortage of the raw material, what was lacking was the men to cut it.
This was where the colonies could help and foresters from Canada, Australia and New Zealand were recruited. British Honduras (now Belize) was identified as another source of recruits. The men from British Honduras had just the skills that were needed, indeed they were used to felling hardwood trees like mahogany and so the softwood trees of Britain would have been ‘no more than broom-sticks’ in comparison.
There was no shortage of willing volunteers and 500 recruits quickly came forward, in Amos’ words they signed up ‘with alacrity, charged with all the love and patriotism of England.’ Getting the volunteers to Britain posed logistical problems at a time when German submarines were wreaking havoc on shipping in the Atlantic. Making the arrangements took precious time and in the end the volunteers had to split between several different ships. The SS Strathaird and SS Orbita[1] left Trinidad where the men had mustered, in August and got 381 volunteers safely to Glasgow and Liverpool respectively without major incident. Amos was on the third ship to leave Trinidad, the SS Winnipeg, which left Port-of-Spain on 11th September. The Winnipeg was not so lucky, being battered by a force 10 storm, a hurricane and was torpedoed by a German U Boat. The ship limped to Iceland where Amos and his colleagues transferred to the SS Bergensfjoird for the last leg of the journey to Scotland.
Given that planning for the establishment of the unit had started in May it was a surprise to the first men to arrive that their camp was ‘in a sorry state of unreadiness and disarray.’ and they had to sleep in ‘tents in the cold night air of Scotland in late Autumn.’ The dining hall and toilets were unfinished ‘and the men had to plough through ankle deep mud to reach their temporary mess facilities.’ Reading the official reports at Kew it became evident to Amos that forestry units from other parts of the Empire had been catered for significantly better. At the camps occupied by the Newfoundland unit, for instance, ‘the canteens were clean and well kept’ and ‘education huts were attached to each canteen’ where ‘the Newfoundlanders made considerable use of the opportunities for study.’ Amos notes the ‘significant contrast’ with the situation at the camps provided for the men of British Honduras.
The men from British Honduras experienced an entirely unfamiliar climate: ‘it was a cold task because one was working in the open, high up on a Scottish hillside where the timber was located in most cases. Travelling in uncovered trucks in the icy winter mornings was, itself, a daunting experience! With the vehicle moving fast over the road, ensuring that it did not become a German raider’s target, the very cold winds were more than our tropical bodies could stand at times.’ The accommodation didn’t help, the huts ‘had huge holes in parts of the floor-boards and walls and openings in the ceilings,’ which ‘let in the biting winter night air.’ The single wood-burning stove in the centre of the hut (each hut accommodated about twenty men) simply wasn’t up to the task of keeping the men warm. The Duke of Buccleuch, whose estate many of the men were working on, wrote to Harold McMillan (then a junior Minister at the Colonial Office) describing the men as ‘lazy at work and requiring a good deal of waking up to get anything out of them.’ McMillan’s reply observed that in his view the men were ‘not lazy but intolerably cold.’
The Duke of Buccleuch had another cause for complaint: ‘the local women and girls had interpreted too widely the request to be kind with the foresters,’ in his words some local females had been ‘over zealous’ in their welcome of the black foresters. The Duke’s real concern was to prevent miscegenation, something that anyone who was read ‘Mixing It’ by Wendy Webster will know was a major source of concern to the British authorities at the time, a concern that bordered on obsession. Amos comments that it was a clear policy objective of the officials dealing with the black forestry units to keep the races separate.
It was also important that the black men should ‘know their place’ and that place was subordinate to white men. Amos quotes a memorandum from an official at the Ministry of Supply: ‘My own view is that the foreman or whatever name is given to the man in charge of each camp, should be a white man … I should suggest that we might try to recruit the chief man in charge of each camp from ex-Indian officers or ex-tea planters or rubber planters – men who have been accustomed to handling coloured labour. It may however be possible to recruit such white men in British Honduras and, of course, this would be preferable as presumably such white men would be able to speak the language.’ Amos says he was confused and astonished by the level of ignorance and racism displayed here.
Various other indignities were heaped up the black foresters before the unit was disbanded in 1944 and (most of) the men shipped back to British Honduras. Not all returned, some chose to stay in Britain and make new lives for themselves here. Amos Ford himself married Hilda Wilson in Newcastle in the early months of 1945 and they went on to have a large family together.
Perhaps what is most surprising about Amos Ford’s account is that he seems to have been surprised by the racism he encountered on open display in the files at Kew. You really don’t have to look very hard to find shocking examples of how the British authorities regarded black people in the colonies. While researching at Kew for the book ‘The Walker Brothers And Their Legacy: Three Black Soldiers In World War One’ I came across the story of Merwyn Deniston Crichton {file reference CO 295/460/58].
In 1910 Merwyn was a civil servant working as a book keeper in Trinidad. On 28th October he applied for an advertised post as a storekeeper in Sierra Leone. He was young and keen to get on in life and for him this would be a promotion. The Acting Governor of the island, S W Knaggs, endorsed the application, reporting that Mr Crichton ‘is intelligent and hard working and has some experience as a storekeeper … he has shown a satisfactory grasp of these duties and would in his opinion [the reported opinion of the Director of Public Works] competently fill the post for which he applies. I have the honour to be, My Lord, Your Lordship’s most obedient, humble servant.’
But Mervyn’s application troubled those considering it. It wasn’t Crichton’s capability that was in question, it was his colour. There is a query on the file: ‘do you know whether Mr Crichton is of more or less unmixed European origin?’ The reply ‘I cannot say, but the number of pure white families in St Vincent (where he was born) is distinctly limited,’ only served to fuel concerns. The correspondence on the file goes on to suggest that Acting Governor Knaggs should be reminded that the authorities in Trinidad ‘had been told always to let us know whether applicants for transfer were coloured or European.’ The added comment ‘I have little doubt he is coloured’ draws the discussion of Crichton’s colour to a close.
The sorry saga concludes with the suggestion that the application should be acknowledged and Mr Crichton told that ‘other arrangements have been made for filling the post of storekeeper’ with a final reminder ‘I have the honour to request that in cases of application for promotion such as that of Mr Crichton I may be confidentially informed whether the candidate is or is not of pure European descent,’ with the added comment that ‘we must discourage the idea that every tin pot clerk who cares to apply has the chance of getting one [a promotion].’ The flowery language makes no attempt to disguise the message that black men needed to know their place.
Merwyn’s story scarcely merits a footnote in the history of Britain’s relationship with her colonial subjects but it does illustrate in microcosm the way that insidious institutional racism can cast a blight over people’s lives.
You might hope that examples like Merwyn’s and the Forestry Unit are just ‘history’ and that the British authorities have moved on. Sadly such hope is misplaced as Wendy William’s recent report into the root causes of the Windrush scandal demonstrates all too clearly. The report’s author concluded that ‘The factors that I identified demonstrate an institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race and the history of the Windrush generation’ and that ‘some senior civil servants and former ministers showed ignorance, lack of understanding and acceptance of the full extent of the injustice.’ Williams is shy of accusing the Home Office of being ‘institutionally racist’ but reading the report I cannot share her coyness. The report contains many case studies some of which will be familiar to anyone who followed the scandal, they have lost none of their ability to shock and appall.
Wendy Williams full report can be found here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/874022/6.5577_HO_Windrush_Lessons_Learned_Review_WEB_v2.pdf
These stories (sadly there are many others that could equally well have been quoted) illustrate a seamless thread running through Britain’s relationship with the people of its colonies and former colonies and that thread goes by the name ‘institutional racism’.
Wendy Williams’ report contains 30 recommendations. Williams acknowledges that the Home Office has apologised but in her words ‘The sincerity of this apology will be determined by how far the Home Office
demonstrates a commitment to learn from its mistakes by making fundamental changes to its culture and way of working.’ Historians of a future generation will be able to judge just how ‘heartfelt’ the various Ministerial apologies for the scandal really were by seeing what, if anything, changes and whether the ‘seamless thread’ truly can be broken.
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[1] The SS Orbita was the ship the brought James Berry from Jamaica to Liverpool in September 1948. Berry, one of the early pioneers of the Windrush generation, went on to make a name for himself as a poet and was awarded the OBE in 1990