|
from The
Guardian Thursday 25 February 1999
Memorial for black servicemen
By John
Ezard
A memorial gateway is to be
built in London to honour the millions of black Commonwealth servicemen
who fought for Britain in two world wars.
The stone-pillared double gates will stand behind Buckingham Palace,
close to the Duke of Wellington's statue. An appeal was launched yesterday
to raise £700,000, backed by politicians, Commonwealth ambassadors and
descendants of wartime generals. The rest of the cost will be met by a
lottery grant from the Millennium Commission. The project sets out to make
amends for what is seen as a slight to the men from Africa, the West
Indies and the Asian subcontinent.
They saw action on fronts ranging from the Gallipoli beaches to the
skies of the Battle of Britain. Tens of thousands were killed and wounded.
Yet many feel that, after being undervalued in war, they met racial
prejudice in Britain in peacetime and were partly left on the sidelines of
commemorations in 1994 for the 50th anniversary of the war against
Hitler.
Laurie Phillpotts, 76, curator of the West Indian Ex-servicemen's
Association, and one of the memorial's supporters, joined the RAF from the
West Indies and served as a ground crew signals specialist. 'Even during
the war itself, I personally was insulted in this country.'
The chairman of the trust, Britain's first Asian peer, Lady
Flather,
whose father served as a medical orderly in the first war, said she was
once asked if Remembrance Sunday meant anything to her as an Indian.
'If I had not been deputy major of Windsor at the time, I would have
hit the man who asked that.'
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