As Black History Month comes to an end,

in this episode we look at the story of Britain's forgotten Black Army of the Great War.

Described in contemporary documents as men of colour,

often they were British born or came from the wider empire.

From 1914 these black soldiers joined the ranks of regiments of the British Army, or served in the British West Indies Regiment.

Who were these men? What do we know of their stories? And what can we find of them on the battlefields today?

My journey of looking into the story of black soldiers in the British Army and the Great War

began more than 30 years ago when a friend in Sussex asked me to identify a photograph of a black soldier in British Army uniform.

It's easy to presume that the story of the black British community began in the windrush period after the Second World War, but delving into black history, I quickly discovered that black families have lived and worked and taken part in British history over many centuries, and that included the Great War.

About the same time in one of those mythical junk shops on the Sussex

Coast that I often speak about on this podcast, I discovered another photograph of a black

British soldier, and then another, and it seemed that somehow they were calling to me from the past.

My friend then gave me some details from an article by Professor David Killingray, who had recently researched the story of some black soldiers in the Great War.

Amongst this were two names of two black soldiers buried in the same cemetery in Flanders,

and on a crisp autumn day I found myself in Popering a new military cemetery,

looking at the graves of a soldier, a young soldier of the British West Indies Regiment, and a gunner in the Royal Field Artillery, a corps, a unit of the British Army, and asking myself, whatever happened to these men, and why isn't their involvement in the Great War more widely known. And then in the 1990s I took this research

one step further as part of my master's degree. Ever since, I've been trying to research their story,

highlight their role in this war, and it's been good to see many other historians doing the same.

Most recently, David Olusoga, Stephen Bourne with Black Poppies

and Richard Smith in his studies of the West Indies Regiment. And what I hope to do in this podcast

is cast a light on the story of Britain's forgotten Black Army in the Great War, tell some of their

stories, look at some of the many issues connected with their service, and point you to some

...