Dr Harold Moody. Photo courtesy of Dr Killingray and the Moody Family.
Angela Corrias learns about Black London in WW2.
We’ve all studied the Second World War from many angles, but the mainstream textbooks are more likely to cover political and social mega-events, forgetting smaller, but by no means less important, facts that risk being left on the scrapheap of history.
Listening to the passionate words of historian Stephen Bourne, I gradually discovered a reality unknown to most of us, the stories and the contributions that the black London-based community made during World War II. Tales of common people from all walks of life can make us feel what living under the constant fear of enemy shelling was like.
The Cuming Museum, in cooperation with Pioneer African Caribbean Over 50s Group and Blackfriars Settlement, devoted the exhibition Keep Smiling Through to these forgotten and untold stories, focusing on the roles played by the black Londoners on the home front during the Second World War.
Along with black volunteers such as civilian defence workers, fire watchers, air raid wardens, stretcher-bearers and mobile canteen personnel, we also find important figures like Dr. Harold Moody, Jamaican-born, who moved to London in 1904 to study medicine at King’s College, encountering immediately the London reality of the colour bar. Despite his first difficulties in grappling with the Edwardian English world, in 1913 he managed to start his own successful practice in Peckham and was later elected chairman of the Colonial Missionary Society. Having experienced the humiliation of the colour bar, Dr Moody devoted his life in demanding equal rights for black people living in London.
Aunt Esther outside what has been called Lucky 13, their house in Fulham that survived the blitz. Photo courtesy of Stephen Bourne
Among the representatives of the black civilian population of a country at war, we also have the enterprising Mrs. Vroom, originary from a West Indian family and married to an “African from West Coast Africa,” who in October 1941 wrote a letter to Prime Minister Winston Churchill and asked him to support the rights of black people to have a “decent place to live in”, tellingly pointing out to the highest offices of the state that “after all we are British subjects.”
Stephen Bourne’s aunt, Esther Bruce, was a black working-class Londoner who experienced first-hand both World Wars. Aunt Esther’s father, came to live in Fulham, west London, from the South American colony of British Guiana, and the young Esther worked as a cleaner and fire watcher in Brompton Hospital, helping her community also through distributing food parcels sent by her family in Guyana when in Britain food was rationed.
These stories of real life give us a picture of the development of the society in which we now live, an image that we can’t have only studying the main events of the war.
Keep Smiling Through: Black Londoners on the Home Front 1939-1945 has been running at the Cuming Museum since April 1 2008 and will close on November 1 2008. The museum is fully accessible and admission is free.
Opening hours are Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 5pm
For more information visit their website www.southwark.gov.uk/cumingmuseum.
e-mail cuming.museum@southwark.gov.uk
Tel. 020 7525 2332
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