First World War: Empire and Commonwealth Troops

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Monday 4th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for securing this debate and for his typically erudite introduction to it. He has enabled noble Lords to focus on an aspect of the conflict a century ago that has since received much too little scrutiny.

In 1914, 350 million people were citizens of the British Empire, only 46 million of them from the UK. It is often held that without the intervention in 1917 by the USA, Britain and its allies would not have won the war. I would contend that without the contribution of troops and support in many forms from the colonies and dominions of the Empire, the war would have been lost before 1917 arrived. When I studied the war at school there was not a mention of the involvement of non-white troops, far less the importance of their endeavours, so it is gratifying that in the centenary commemorations their service is being recognised, particularly in the Government’s imaginative programme of events for schools.

Australia, Canada, Newfoundland, New Zealand and South Africa together contributed 1.3 million men. The sacrifices and bravery of those troops, particularly on the Western Front, is rightly highlighted when some of the war’s most punishing battles are recounted and their dead remembered. My noble friend Lord Desai detailed India’s huge contribution with the largest number of men from the Empire—almost 1.5 million. Yet of their sacrifices and bravery, we have traditionally heard little. Why is it that only relatively recently have we learned, as the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, said, that it was Indian troops who stopped the German advance at Ypres in the autumn of 1914 while the British Army was still recruiting and training its own forces? Hundreds of Indians died then, as was also the case the following year at Neuve Chappelle. More than a thousand of them perished at Gallipoli on the altar of Churchill’s intransigence, while in Mesopotamia Indian soldiers formed a majority of allied manpower throughout the war.

Those colonial subjects and their feats remain marginal in popular histories of the war for the same reason that their very presence as combatants, at least in Europe, was controversial—the racism on which imperialism was built and sustained, and whose consequences, in some forms, endure to this day. This connects with the contribution of African and Caribbean soldiers to the allied cause, as the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, mentioned. A year ago, the first memorial in the UK specifically to these men was unveiled at Windrush Square in Brixton. It remembers their service in both world wars but racism at the time of the First World War was of such depth and strength that even senior army officers were uncomfortable about their deployment. The Times History of the War described it thus in 1914:

“The instinct which made us such sticklers for propriety in all our dealings made us more reluctant than other nations would feel to employ coloured troops against a white enemy”.


As mentioned, Indian troops were in action in France in the earliest days of the war, but although the British West Indies Regiment was enacted by Army order in 1916, black soldiers from the Empire were not deployed in European theatres. That was seen as unacceptable, after a scandal erupted in May 1915 when the Daily Mail—plus ca change, some may say—printed a photograph of a British nurse standing behind a wounded Indian soldier. Army officials tried to withdraw white nurses from hospitals treating Indians and disbarred them from leaving the hospital premises without a white male companion. That did not prevent the continued deployment of Indian troops in France and Italy, but black soldiers saw action only in the Middle East and in Africa. In total, 55,000 Africans and around 15,000 from the Caribbean fought, with many receiving awards for bravery, as the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, said.

Although attitudes have certainly progressed, as the 70th anniversary of the arrival of MV “Empire Windrush” approaches—and given recent revelations of the appalling treatment of some of the Windrush generation—it is self-evident that the need for greater progress remains. The long-overdue exposure of the involvement of non-white members of the British Empire in the First World War has contributed to the process of re-examining what kind of people we are, and how our multicultural heritage has developed over the century that has followed.