Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

You're listening to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Susan Hume.

Today we're going back to September

1943 and a landmark racial equality case in the UK. The

celebrated and popular West Indian cricketer Leary Constantine took the Imperial Hotel in London to court

for refusing to let him and his family stay there because of their race.

I've been listening back to archive interviews with Leary Constantine.

I had a receipt in my pocket and when we arrived they accepted the English section of our party and rejected the coloured section.

And although we had booked the rooms for all, told me they were full up up and so on and I produced my receipt and they made excuses.

But eventually we had to leave the hotel.

And in order to set the example that the law wouldn't discriminate, I took action against the hotel. By the end of his life Leary Constantine was a familiar figure in British public life

as well as an outstanding cricketer he was knighted Sir Leary Constantine was eventually made a lord.

He was a governor of the BBC, rector of the prestigious St Andrews University and a politician

and diplomat in his native Trinidad where he was born in

1901 but here he is in the 1940s talking about a background that was a far cry from the

British establishment.

My grandparents were slaves.

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