The memorials’ missing men
The failure to properly commemorate black and Asian troops who served the British empire in the First World War made headlines in April, with the UK government issuing an official apology. MICHÈLE BARRETT explains how her research was key to breaking the story
In April, the UK’s secretary of state for defence, Ben Wallace, announced in parliament the findings of a Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) report. It found that the organisation had failed to commemorate large numbers of Indian, Egyptian and other African troops after the First World War, either to the same standard as those who had fought on the western front, or even at all – with the number possibly being as high as 400,000. Wallace offered an official apology on behalf of the government of the time, the current government, and the CWGC, and made a commitment to put things right. The story attracted extensive coverage, much of which quoted the report’s reference to the “pervasive racism” of the time.
The apology followed a 2019 Channel 4 documentary, Unremembered, presented by Labour MP David Lammy and based on my research. It revealed that a policy that was applied on the western front after the war, whereby cemeteries equally commemorated people of all social classes and military ranks, had not been employed outside Europe. As a result, many Indian and African soldiers, porters and carriers had either been commemorated only in general terms, with no individual names, or were not commemorated at all.
The documentary’s findings prompted the CWGC to establish a special committee to investigate the situation. It revealed that tens of thousands of Indians were not commemorated by name on memorials such as that in Basra (in modern-day Iraq) – despite the Imperial War Graves Commission, or IWGC [as the commission was known until 1960] having their names, and including them in printed registers. More than half of the Indians killed in the war were not commemorated to the European standard, while perhaps as many as 350,000 Africans (some of whom had been forcibly recruited) were not properly honoured.
On the day of the government apology, David Olusoga – the historian and broadcaster whose production company made the Channel 4 documentary – was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. Describing the story, Olusoga said: “It is an absolute scandal. It is one of the biggest scandals I’ve ever come across as an historian, but the biggest scandal is that this was known years ago.” Indeed, despite knowing about the story for more than a decade, prior to 2019 the CWGC did not respond explicitly to this research, although for some while they had been silently correcting memorials. While the commission had sought to blame the lack of commemoration on the attitudes of colonial governments, their own archives show that many of its staff regarded Africans as lacking the “civilisation” to appreciate commemoration.
The film that triggered the CWGC’s response was based on my own studies. I began that research in 2004 when, puzzled by the deletion of the word “Indian” in the registers of the Neuve Chapelle Memorial in France [which commemorates British Indian soldiers with no known grave who died in the First World War], I wrote to the CWGC to ask why this was. Their answer was that it had been carried out due to pressure from Pakistan to redesignate the memorial an Indo-Pakistani one. I decided to call up the archive files for Neuve Chapelle and Basra.
The contrast between the two was striking. The Neuve Chapelle memorial on the western front meticulously lists the names and details of the approximately 5,000 soldiers and followers from India who had perished in Europe at the time of the Indian army deployment there in 1914–15. The memorial at Basra, meanwhile, commemorates nearly 33,000 people who died in the campaign in Mesopotamia – but features only the names of white personnel and Indian officers. Approximately 30,000 Indian rank and file – sepoys, supporters and followers – are mentioned only in terms of the number who served in each military unit. Their names were known, but kept in printed registers.
A lack of equality
The Basra files made it clear that the policy of equality of treatment in death, so strikingly and progressively enacted on the western front, simply did not apply elsewhere. Archive files for Africa, for instance, revealed a stark contrast between the way in which white people and “natives” were treated. Staff at the organisation routinely referred to “white graves”, which included those of German and other enemy forces as well as white British people, and went to a great deal of trouble to make these graves permanent. This was often done via a policy of “concentration”, in which the remains of white casualties were exhumed and reburied in larger permanent cemeteries. In many cases the bodies of white Europeans were removed from cemeteries, while a larger number of African people were left behind, their bodies left to “revert to nature” and their graves deemed “unmaintainable”.
should In east receive Africa, named the rule commemoration. was that no African The policy person for “natives” was that they should be considered missing (in official parlance, “sent missing”) – particularly poignant, given that, unlike their counterparts in Europe, memorials to the “missing” of the campaign bore no names at all.
I first published my research on the subject in a 2007 journal article, which I sent to the then director-general of the CWGC that November, asking for his comments.
He told me that a policy had been agreed in the 1990s of adding names to memorials in cases in which they had been recorded in their registers. I continued my research, publishing papers and giving lectures on the topic around the world. In 2014, I decided to go to east Africa to see what the archive files described. I headed to the town of Voi, in southern Kenya, with a copy of a 1922 letter from the commission’s archives written to London by the local director of works. In it, he suggested that Africans buried as Christians were “worthy of commemoration compared with the numerous other natives who had died in the vicinity”. When I raised the issue with the cemetery’s caretaker, he asked if I would like to
The Basra files made it clear that the policy of equality of treatment in death, so strikingly enacted on the western front, simply did not apply elsewhere
see where the other Africans had been buried. Taking me around the side of the cemetery, bounded by solid walls, he showed me a patch of land. The contrast between the immaculate cemetery and the neglected scrub outside was dramatic.
Further trips to Kenya and Tanzania left me equally shocked. There I found beautiful cemeteries, impeccably maintained, but which excluded Africans who had died.
Denying the problem
The IWGC policy was based on a 1917 report by Major George Evans, the officer commanding the Graves Registration Unit in east Africa. He opined that headstones for lowly personnel such as porters would be a waste of public money – a view shared by Lord Arthur Browne, who largely ran the commission in the 1920s. At an even higher level, the colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, set out the IWGC policy that memorials to “natives” would not normally be individual, but that statues would instead be put up in local towns.
Many reasons were advanced for these policies, including that Africans “do not attach any sentiment to marking the graves of their dead” – which anthropology suggests is an exception rather than the rule for peoples in Africa. A more telling argument, often repeated, was that the commission did not have any names. Yet the CWGC report shows that such records for some of these men did exist at the time – and that staff lacked interest in obtaining the information. For instance, although it’s estimated that up to 350,000 carriers died uncommemorated, the Carrier Corps in east Africa was run by a very diligent officer named Lieutenant Colonel Watkins. He had an elaborate system of registering the carriers and recording their pay, and I found a roll of names among his private papers – yet, as far as I know, no attempt was
The commission’s report points out that its failure to properly commemorate African and Indian personnel in the First World War has led to public ignorance of their contribution
made to obtain their details. It’s among several instances in which it’s clear that the commission was not interested in pursuing this information.
My findings have now been corroborated by research undertaken for the CWGC committee by its chief historian and his assistant researcher. Yet it has taken a long time for the commission to register their significance. This is partly because its official history, first published in 1967 and reprinted many times since, denies the problem. This document states that the commission “shouldered its burden” across Africa and Asia, that every individual grave was cared for, and that there was “no withdrawal from responsibility”.
This is both a myth and an important part of the myth-making that the CWGC worked on over the years. It is extremely proud of its progressive policies on social class and military rank, but has been unwilling to confront the extent of the racism that I believe mars its historical reputation. The CWGC report notes that the commission’s history has been “sanitised” (for example, I would suggest, in its official history), and makes the key point that its failure to properly commemorate Africans and Indian personnel in the First World War has led to public ignorance of the contributions they made.
The research done by the CWGC, and my own team, has shown several avenues where it might be possible to find the records of those who died, particularly in east Africa. I hope that, with a new and constructive attitude at the commission, we can work together to find some of these men who were so appallingly just “sent missing”.
Michèle Barrett is professor emeritus at Queen Mary University of London. Her research on this topic is available online at michelebarrett.com
WATCH
Unremembered: Britain’s Forgotten War Heroes is available on Channel 4’s catchup service All 4: channel4.com/ programmes/unremembered-britains-forgotten-war-heroes