4.3 • 4.5K Ratings
🗓️ 28 October 2020
⏱️ 36 minutes
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0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History magazine, |
0:15.0 | Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm Ellie Korthorn. In today's episode you'll be hearing from the author and social historian Stephen Bourne. |
0:32.0 | Stephen's latest book, Under Fire, Black Britain in wartime, |
0:36.8 | explores the experiences of black people in Britain between 1939 and 45. |
0:42.4 | Our production editor, Spencer Misen, called him to find out more. |
0:47.0 | Stephen, your new book Under Fire, Black Britain in wartime documents the experiences of black citizens on the home front and in the |
0:55.6 | services during the Second World War. Now just to give our listeners a little context, how many |
1:01.1 | people are we talking about here? And where did they hail from? |
1:07.4 | I would answer this. I've said this in the introduction to the book, we'll never know what the numbers are. |
1:17.1 | Statistics in relation to black people in Britain, black people in the armed services in the |
1:22.3 | Second World War. in the recruitment papers of the Army, the Navy and the Air Force. |
1:38.9 | So there are no accurate figures. |
1:41.5 | So what I've done is quote various historians who give |
1:44.4 | very conflicting figures I don't know where they got their figures from what I |
1:48.7 | have done which has never been done before and I'm very proud of this. |
1:53.2 | I trawled through the 1939 register for England and Wales which was a kind of |
1:59.2 | census if you like taken in September 1939 for the government and so on and so forth. |
2:05.6 | The authorities to try and establish who was who, where they were living, |
2:09.9 | how old they were for the war work. |
2:14.2 | And I found, I wanted to find, my target was to find 100 black Londoners, |
2:19.9 | and I did. |
2:21.2 | Black people that I knew of or knew about and a few that I didn't. |
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