The Guardian: unequal-commemoration-of-black-and-asian-troops

Discussion in 'War Grave Photographs' started by bucklt, Apr 22, 2021.

  1. bucklt

    bucklt Bucklt

  2. smdarby

    smdarby Well-Known Member

    I went to the CWGC site and saw this has been posted:

    " The founders of the IWGC were determined that on the battlefields of the Western Front, all men should be commemorated equally. But there were more distant places where that did not happen.

    In 1923 the Colonial authorities in East Africa, the British Government and the Imperial War Graves Commission decided not to commemorate by name each one of the thousands – possibly hundreds of thousands - of men and women in the Carrier Corps who died provisioning the armies of the British Empire in Africa during the First World War. No-one knows exactly how many porters died, mostly of exhaustion, hunger and disease. They have no known graves, and their names have been lost. We deeply regret the decisions of the time which allowed this to happen.

    Statues of black carriers, scouts and askaris were erected in Nairobi, Mombasa and Dar es Salaam in 1927 to pay tribute to their service. We know now that this is inadequate, and that each man’s name and place of rest should have been identified. It was not. With a Special Committee comprising experts and community interest groups, we are now working with specialist researchers to find all such gaps in our commemorations, and to recommend what can be done to restore their names to be remembered forever alongside all the other war dead of the British Empire."
     
  3. bamboo43

    bamboo43 Very Senior Member

  4. CL1

    CL1 116th LAA and 92nd (Loyals) LAA,Royal Artillery

  5. Mr Jinks

    Mr Jinks Bit of a Cad

    Sorry more insincere `apologies`. Mistakes were made acknowledge them . Racist ? Perhaps in some cases? Logistics in some cases? Incomplete records in some cases ? Locally raised units/volunteers in some cases? Cremation memorials in line with faith in some cases? Too many reasons to be lumped into the `R` category.
    In relation to headstones do we now replace the screen walls erected when cemeteries close or fall into disrepair ? Do we now reopen the unmanageable cemeteries and remove the names from the commemoration panels they are now inscribed on? Or do we acknowledge that mistakes were/are being made in a system which `tries` its best ?

    John Donne:- " Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes"

    Kyle
     
    Last edited: Apr 23, 2021
  6. Charley Fortnum

    Charley Fortnum Dreaming of Red Eagles

    1923 has let 2021 down badly with its stubborn failure to live up to contemporary standards.
    If we don't start thinking like it's 2119 pronto, we're going to end up a total disgrace to the future.
     
    Dave55, High Wood, Rich Payne and 3 others like this.
  7. CL1

    CL1 116th LAA and 92nd (Loyals) LAA,Royal Artillery

    As Kyle states
    Or do we acknowledge that mistakes were/are being made in a system which `tries` its best ?

    Which is the way to go.


    A question I asked in 2017

    Is it the intention of CWGC to eventually replace UK burial commemoration headstones( both CWGC and Private) with special memorial screen wall structures within cemeteries /graveyards.

    Current examples I have visited Hammersmith Old cemetery and East Ham (St. Mary Magdalene) Churchyard whereby this is the case.

    answer
    To explain and clarify, screen walls are used where we - for whatever reason - are unable to individually mark a casualty's grave with a CWGC headstone. This could be because local cemetery regulations prohibit us from doing so or, as is sometimes the case, war casualties are buried en masse, making it impossible for us to erect an individual grave.



    Clearly the commemoration of all casualties is important.
    If you look at social media today the bandwagon has been jumped on and a political agenda is being hung based on a time long ago when the world was a different place.

    It is easy for us on the forum to see this ,but most people who have no interest whatsoever in this particular field will read into it what they may.

    The most important thing is to commemorate those who are missing by name, however due to the passage of time this could be impossible.


    A simple plan of what is possible re commemorations should be agreed on and kept as simple as possible to avoid re offending 10 years down the line.

    Don't look where we have been, look where we are going
     
    BrianHall1963 likes this.
  8. jonheyworth

    jonheyworth Senior Member

    I can visualise that within my lifetime , most individual war graves in small local cemeteries will be either lost or not maintained
     
  9. Rich Payne

    Rich Payne Rivet Counter Patron 1940 Obsessive

    Considering the scale and that nothing like it had ever been attempted before, I think that the IWGC did a pretty good job and those of Empire nations who died on the battlefields of Europe were eligible for the same treatment as the highest-ranking officer....pretty egalitarian for the time. Did any other Empire Power take such steps for such troops ?

    Did any British troops killed in the South African wars just a few years earlier receive a proper memorial ? Only the officers, I suspect.
     
  10. CL1

    CL1 116th LAA and 92nd (Loyals) LAA,Royal Artillery

    This is worth a read and it was a massive task to complete commemorations and burials and this still goes today

    The administrative task is a very formidable one. There are upwards of 500,000 graves that we know of for certain, and there are 100,000 others—themselves the cause of special difficulty—that the Commission are not yet completely certain about. The task of erecting within a reasonable time this immense number of monuments in all the different places where the cemeteries are to be set up is one which involves a great administrative problem, and it cannot be dealt with except on the basis of general principles.

    IMPERIAL WAR GRAVES COMMISSION. (Hansard, 17 December 1919)
     
    Last edited: Apr 22, 2021
    papiermache likes this.
  11. Charley Fortnum

    Charley Fortnum Dreaming of Red Eagles

    A powerful counter argument by Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, University of Oxford:

    How racist was the British Empire?
    A debate over war graves threatens to mislead the public about the past

    Full Article:

    The British Empire wasn't racist
     
  12. CL1

    CL1 116th LAA and 92nd (Loyals) LAA,Royal Artillery

    Chucked down your throat every day now
    The media ought to watch it
    You tell a lie often enough people believe it and barriers will be created
     
  13. idler

    idler GeneralList

    As always, 'ordinary' people who happen to be black will get tarred with the same brush as the blactivists and end up taking the rap.

    Putting aside the issue that maybe I should mix my metaphors more, the Guardian-BBC axis and its useful idiots know exactly what they're doing. The question is whether their bubble is as big as they think it is.
     
    CL1 likes this.
  14. m kenny

    m kenny Senior Member

    It is a lobster thing if you don't realise the water around you getting hotter. These a normal everyday newspaper headlines in the 1950s-60s:

    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]


    My own local newspaper in 1969 felt the need to point out that two children who died in a fire were 'coloured' .
     
  15. CL1

    CL1 116th LAA and 92nd (Loyals) LAA,Royal Artillery

    The most common method for killing lobsters humanely is setting live lobsters in the freezer for ~15 minutes to help them drift in a numb sleep, then plunging them head-first into boiling water for a quick, kind death.
    How to Cook the Perfect Lobster - LobsterAnywhere.com
     

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