 Welcome everyone. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Dr. Mark Kondos. I'm one of the co-directors of the Sir Michael Howard Center and the convener of this seminar series and I'm very happy to introduce this evening our speaker, Professor David Lambert from the University of Warwick. Professor Lambert is a professor of Caribbean history at the University of Warwick and his research explores histories of slavery and empire in the 18th and 19th centuries with a particular focus on the Caribbean. He's the author of White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition, Mastering the Niger, James McQueen's African Geography in the Struggle over the Atlantic Slavery and is more recently co-editor of Empire and Mobility in the Long 19th Century. He's currently the principal investigator on a new HRC funded project that looks at the history of West India regiments from the late 19th to early 20th centuries and as I understand is in sort of the final stages of preparing a book on this and I believe that's what he's going to be talking to with us about this evening so without further ado please David take it away. Okay thanks Mark and thank you for those of you who joined us. Okay so what I'm going to do I'm just going to I'm going to present a specific element to the book which is essentially on the kind of the changing image changing status of the West India regiments across the long 19th century. I am going to touch on some of the other things that people would like to talk more about some of the earlier histories and the West India regiments more broadly than obviously I'm very happy to do so. Okay so in 1898 the year after Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee the graphic illustrated newspaper published a three four page supplement entitled Our Colonial Troops which included this color print of a crowd of 89 military figures accompanied by a numbered legend to aid with their identification. The print quotes from the final standard of a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson one with Britain heart and soul one life one flag one throne and Tennyson had written this poem when he was the poet laureate at the request of the Prince of Wales and he read it at the opening of the Indian and colonial the colonial Indian exhibition which had taken place in London in 1886 and the poem cast the relationship between Britain and its empire in familial terms and the graphic takes this to underscore its image of a multi-ethnic cross-cultural martial fraternity. The print also evokes both contemporary practices of the display of racialized types which of course were very much associated with exhibitions like that in 1886 and also a culture of imperial military spectacle that was particularly intense around Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and the Diamond Jubilee had taken place the year before in 1897 when real representatives of many of these military units had paraded through the streets of London. The graphics full colour print was accompanied by an article by Percy John Percy Groves who was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Royal Guernsey artillery and in addition to his military service Groves is well known as the author of military histories and also military themed adventure stories particularly aimed at boys. His article which was entitled Defenders of the Empire sketched out the composition of Britain's global military forces at the end of the 19th century so Groves talks about the Indian army and then he goes on to make a distinction between on the one hand British imperial troops that were recruited in Britain itself in the metropole and on the other hand what he called purely colonial forces and the latter consisted primarily of locally raised permanent units militia volunteers and armed police that provided the defense forces across the self-governing colonies of Canada Australia South Africa and New Zealand and these had seen the gradual withdrawal of imperial forces since 1870 most other colonies and dependencies across the empire were still guaranteed garrisoned by forces sent out from Britain so in addition however to these three categories of Indian the Indian army purely colonial forces and British imperial troops there also existed another category that groves somewhat awkwardly termed imperial colonial core and these were imperial units that were not recruited in Britain but could not be deemed purely colonial forces either and this is a real kind of mixed bag of units so along with the West India regiment which I'm going to be focusing on the there was also the Hong Kong regiment which was the only other existing unit of what groves called local imperial infantry and this was a relatively recent unit that had been formed only in 1891 and raised essentially as a battalion of native infantry in India in the Indian army and then this unit was seconded to the British army for service in Hong Kong another of these imperial colonial cores was the Royal Malta artillery which like the West India regiment and various other artillery and engineer units was also a regular part of the British army it had its origins in infantry units that had been raised in the early 19th century but had then been converted into an artillery unit in 1861 there were also all the units that were categorized as imperial colonial core but they were quite different they were mainly various armed police forces raised in places like West Africa now the graphics depiction of this imperial military brotherhood these are our colonial troops obscured as much as it revealed I would argue it represented a range of types of military units that performed different roles that were made up of men of different ethnicities and religions some that were part of the British army others that were not and the only thing that they had in common was that their rank and file were raised across the British empire including India rather than in Britain itself and one of the effects of lumping all these units together was to eject the West India regiment figuratively from the British army and instead to place it amongst the company of our colonial troops it was not unique in this exclusion but the West India Regiment what was the oldest of this rather cumbersomely entitled imperial colonial core perhaps one of the reasons why it sits so central in the image it should also be recognized that while placing the West India regiment representative in this diverse company would at first sight seem to be an act of color blindness a sense that's reinforced by the familial sentiment of Tennyson's poem the simultaneous effect was to render the British army the rest of the British army who of course do not appear in this image as white and metropolitan in whose company African Caribbean soldiers do not really belong now the issue of where and how the West India regiments fitted in within Britain's global military forces was a long-standing one in the same year that the graphic published this colored print the third battalion of the West India regiment was passing through Portsmouth on its way to Garrison the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic the navy and illustrated newspaper expressed its regret that its visit to Britain was such a short one and it expressed its wish that a larger public would have been able to see a complete battalion of this quote most picturesque and serviceable core responding to its readers presumed lack of understanding about the nature of the West India regiment the newspaper explained that it was nothing more than an ordinary line infantry regiment albeit one composed as to rank and file of colored men and of course that its status required such qualification confirms the general public ignorance despite the efforts of military insiders and more specialist in military publications so what I want to do in this paper then is to consider how in a sense the West India regiment ends up in this company amongst the colonial troops by the end of the 19th century rather than symbolically appearing alongside other units in the regular British army and it does so by examining the contested and the uncertain place of the West India regiment within overlapping cultures of militarism and popular imperialism that characterised late 19th century Britain and I'm interested in the kind of the way in which the West India regiment were written about the way in which they were depicted visually but also about their physical participation in embodied events in this period the 1890s represented the period in which the regiment came to the greatest prominence in British culture so the image on the left is from the army and navy gives that very famous series of types of the British army which many many images of the kind of British army from this period come from this this series that was published over years this is the one when the issue in the West India regiment is featured the image on the right is a doll of the West India regiment so just the examples of kind of the way in which the West India regiment do feature within the kind of material culture and visual culture of the late 19th century moreover by virtue of the role of the West India regiment in a series of campaigns in West Africa they also featured in the newspapers and the illustrated press so people were writing about them people were talking about them people were depicting them small detachments also participated in the Royal Military Tournament in 1896 and in the Diamond Jubilee a year later but despite the coverage they received including the well-publicized presence of Sergeant William Gordon who was the only the second African Caribbean man to win the Victoria Cross such prominence did not mean did not equate with an understanding of their place and history within the British army instead the West India regiment was often marginalised lumped in with native troops on the basis of the ethnicity of their rank and file in short even as they were brought home the men of the West India regiment were rendered somewhat exotic and strange their century as part of the British army occluded okay so what i'm going to do then i'll start by briefly explaining like for those of the people who know nothing about the West India regiment there's no reason why people should i'll give you a little bit about the history and again i'm very happy to say more about this if people wish so um after Britain went to war with the Revolutionary France in February 1793 the Caribbean became a very significant theater of conflict as it had been throughout much of the 18th century initially things went well for the British um their forces captured parts of Sandaman what's now Haiti and captured Tobago the year later Martinique Saint Lucia Guadeloupe were all seized in 1794 but the military balance began to shift against the British in from February 1794 after the national convention in Paris formally ended colonial slavery in the French colonies and this left Britain as the primary defenders of slavery in the region the arrival of Victor Oog another Jacobine commissioners stiffened French resistance across the French islands and their agents sought to promote unrest and resistance amongst French-speaking free non-white and enslaved populations in places like Dominica and Grenada as well as amongst the so-called black caribs of Saint Vincent facing conventional and in regular warfare British forces were driven out of Guadeloupe by the end of 1794 and from Saint Lucia the following summer that same year 1795 there were also serious revolts in the British colonies of Grenada and Saint Vincent as well as the Trelawney town maroons uprising in Jamaica but it was in France's key colony the most valuable colony of all Sandaman that things really turned most against the British a small expeditionary force of 2000 troops had landed there from Jamaica in the autumn of 1793 and occupied key ports but in 1794 Britain's military situation was transformed from an expedition against French Republicans into an all-out war against the coalition of black commanders led by Toussaint Louverture overall the British committed almost 25 000 troops to Sandaman of all of whom two-thirds died there opposed by Louverture's forces and suffering further losses from disease the situation in Sandaman deteriorated into what's been described as one of the most tragic episodes in British military history and a crushing blow to British national pride the British withdrew in 1798 and evacuated their remaining forces now crucially the the setbacks that the Britain faced across the Caribbean in this period provided the impetus for the authorization and establishment of the first West India regiments from 1795 this is a wonderful image this came on the market a few years ago it's those of you people who know this is now was purchased by and displayed by the National Army Museum and a really really striking image and I'm one that just reiterates that these were these the West India regiments formed part of the regular British army these are not colonial auxiliaries or anything like that they were trained they were uniformed they were armed they were paid they were rationed along the same basis as regular regiments of foot consolidating some existing units including African Americans who fought for the British in the American Revolutionary War their numbers were greatly augmented through the conscription of enslaved African men purchased directly from slave traders and indeed in the late 1790s and early 1800s the British government purchased more than 13 000 enslaved Africans for the regiments making the British state the largest individual purchaser of enslaved people in this period at a cost of almost a million pounds sterling after slavery was formally ended in the British Empire in the 1830s the regiments became more African Caribbean in character recruited within the region although there were still enrolments in West Africa their officers were white and British until right at the end of the 19th century where you begin to see some evidence of non-white officers during their existence of more than 130 years West India regiments soldiers served across the Caribbean including in the continental enclaves of what were British Honduras and British Guyana and also participated in the war of 1812 from the 1820s they were also deployed at Sierra Leone the Gambia the Gold Coast Lagos and elsewhere in West Africa numbering 12 regiments at their peak of a single battalion each a single regiment comprising two battalions was all that remained after 1888 and then briefly a third battalion was created but disbanded the final regiment was disbanded in 1927 throughout this history this long history the martial capabilities the martial capacities of the West India regiments was constantly questioned at the most extreme we see this right at the beginning of their history when we see a serious dispute and conflict between on the one hand the British military authorities in the region who were desperate for soldiers and then white West Indian colonists in places like Jamaica for whom the idea of arming African men is seen as not a military boon but actually an existential threat to the system of racial slavery on which they rely although such sentiment did recede even decades later there were many including very senior military figures as I'll explain who continue to express skepticism and doubts about the military value of the West India regiments and fundamentally a lot of this turned on basically on thinking around race so there was there were ideas that they were either kind of too cow childlike and cowardly to be soldiers on the one hand or else they were too savage and brutish to be sold as on the other hand so you know like the kind of certain understandings of kind of Africanness within the kind of European imagination in the 19th century and all of this form part of a of a of a debate about the status of the West India regiments and about how they fitted in or didn't fit in with in Britain's imperial military forces and by the late 19th century as I'll I'll show in this paper this is now playing out and the kind of a public stage and in the realm of the kind of militarized mass culture that characterizes characterizes late Victorian Britain now despite the longevity in place within the British army the West India regiments were relatively little known in Britain itself for much of the 19th century this is because as I said they served primarily in the Caribbean and West Africa although some detachments were sent to Britain for specialist weapons training the most significant military role in the second half of the 19th century which did have an effect on how well they were known was during the Anglo-Shanty war of 1873 74 I'm not going to say much about this the conflict basically begins when a shanty army attacks and defeats local British allies fancy allies in land of what the British call the gold coast and begin and essentially challenge Britain's commercial dominance in that part of what's now southern Garner the British eventually respond by dispatching an expeditionary force under the command of Garner Joseph Wosley which draws the Ashanti army back and West India regiment forces participate in the war in the conflict for more than eight months even before Wosley arrives and before the reinforcements arrive but when the British forces enter the Ashanti capital of Kumasi at the climax of the campaign the West India soldiers are not allowed to enter the Ashanti capital Wosley does not permit the West India regiment men to go into the Ashanti capital now the conflict of 1873 74 is an interesting one in lots of ways and I can say more about it people wish it's Britain's first significant military expedition into the tropical african interior it's also the first British colonial campaign that really catches the public imagination and in some ways sets the store for the kind of later interesting within British popular culture in kind of imperial warfare imperial affairs which kind of tied up with the scramble for Africa later on the expedition is accompanied by a number of special correspondence newspaper correspondence who go on to produce published accounts of the war as do a number of worlds these handpicked staff officers many of them would also form parts of the influential Ashanti or wosley ring now even though locally based West India regiment forces had played an important part in the first half of the campaign they were pushed aside by wosley converted to baggage handlers for white troops not permitted to enter Kumasi as I said and were rather marginalised in published accounts and as such the war was kind of assimilated into what Bruce van der Voort terms the myth of the all conquering western way of war by which small numbers of white soldiers were able to defeat vastly more numerous non-white warriors usually through kind of superior tactics and weaponry in fact this conflict and indeed the later scramble for Africa saw European powers rely on indigenous armies using cast off firearms sometimes with the support of imperial forces like the West India regiments so whilst this first kind of colonial media war may have made household name and military hero of wosley and was an important moment in the awakening of the militarized mass culture that characterised Britain in the final decades of the century it did little for the reputation of the West India regiments themselves who had been involved from the start now the idea that West India regiments could not be relied upon and this was kind of wosley's view and again I can say a little bit about if people wish more about the origins of that there were people who sought to kind of push back against this so the final two decades of 19th century saw the publication of the first book length histories of the West India regiments Alfred Burden Ellis's history of the first and James Caulfield's history of the second and both were by former or current senior officers with a long-standing association with the regiments and interestingly both men Ellis and Caulfield had been junior officers during the Anglo Ashanti war and both wrote about the kind of dismay that they had felt when West India regiment forces were not allowed to enter Kumasi and Ellis actually describes it as a deliberate slight on the regiments in response they sought to put the record straight so Ellis for example provides a kind of comprehensive historical account of the West India regiments operations including the battle on as they'd received their actions in the Caribbean later in West Africa and he also sketches out the history of some of the other regiments and in a sense he was trying to sort of stress how valuable they were how important they were he also sought to take on some of the negative views of the West India regiments particularly those he associated with wosley and some of his supporters so one of the criticisms of the West India regiments which wosley would would write about in an article was about what's to do with the kind of relationship between the changing demographic makeup of the regiments and how that impacted on their martial capacity so wosley argued essentially when in the early years of the regiments they were mainly made up of Africans who could fight well in close combat they were savaged they were naturally savaging and were good in close combat as over time they became more African Caribbean in other words they were recruited in Jamaica or Barbados or Antigua and as as was understood at the time they became more civilized and they lost that kind of natural savagery but didn't make up for it by becoming better at fighting at firing good rifles so you know this is a kind of all argument that wosley made and Ellis sought to try and tackle this very directly and one of the ways he does this is with this is one of the two images that appear in the book this is a very unremarkable image it just shows some soldiers standing you know firing a practicing marksmanship but actually if you look at the visual archive of the West India regiments if you look at images of them they are very very very very rarely ever actually shown firing guns most images of the West India regiment look like that whatever uniform they're wearing whatever style of uniform wearing normally they're just standing around almost as if like you know in the middle of a drill or as if they're being kind of um inspected so this image and the argument that Ellis builds around it that they were in fact steady reliable marksman who was uh was actually striking in how unusual it was so what we see then here is a kind of a another instance of um this kind of debate around the West India regiments regarding their military value and professionalism which we can trace back to the very origins as I mentioned before and something and it also remained a feature of the coverage of the regiments in the late 19th century so they're involved in a series of campaigns in West Africa in this period and um we see again they kind of they you know there's a lot of coverage of them they know their public profile is raised but we see these kind of two contrasting images of the regiments so um we can sort of again I'll contrast them visually so on the one hand we have an image like this which was produced by um Haldane McFall who was a junior officer in the West one of the West in the remaining West India regiments who produced images for the graphic newspaper and this is again an unusual image because it shows the West India regiments firing actually in combat which is uh is not the usual case and it's a very you know it's it's a it's an image of soldiers fighting um but this is much more typical this is an image from Henry Charles Sepping's right um who was the special artist for the Illustrated London News who was also on the in the field with the West India regiments but wasn't wasn't an officer he was an outsider and his images tended to show the West India regiments in kind of either just sort of passively standing around or in these kind of like semi-comical uh sort of uh scenes and you know we don't think we don't need to scratch the surface too far here to sort of we can think about kind of the the kind of racist comic traditions of the period kind of minstrel sea and ideas about blackface and the figure of the coon and so on there's it's it's not overt but there is essentially this isn't these are not professional soldiers this there's a use um the immaterials of of humor uh rather than a professionalism and that contrast between this kind of image and this kind of image I think characterizes this this debate this uncertainty about um their value and and how the relationship between the kind of inside of you and the outside of you now one of the problems that Ellis identified in his history of the first West India regiment was that West India regiments were never seen in England and as a result the British public knew nothing about them now that's not strictly true as I mentioned before African Caribbean soldiers did come um in small numbers to to do weapons training more also uh moreover the the regimental band performed at the colonial and Indian exhibition of 1886 where Alfred Lord Tennyson read that poem and the coverage at the time noted with approval that they were quote all Christians and spoke English and again the the fact that that need to be stated the surprise that they were in fact good speakers of English and Christians again speaks that kind of ignorance about their composition and history a decade later a detachment of West India regiment soldiers featured in the royal military tournament this has been inaugurated in 1880 and ran for a fortnight during the the London season and took place at the Royal Agricultural Hall in Islington um it consisted of two daily performances of competitions and displays and from 1895 historical parades were added as a new feature in 1896 a new event was added which was the Sons of the Empire pageants which featured representatives of British regiments as well as others typical of our Indian and colonial regulars volunteers and militia reflecting the militarized mass culture that was an important element of late Victorian Britain press uh the newspaper coverage had little doubt that this element would be the most popular with the British public and one of the kind of sentiments that's commonly expressed in coverage of this event is that it provides quote the most valuable object lesson on the greatness of the British Empire so that the the kind of the display of soldiers themselves becomes like almost like um a way of mapping out how much of the world is pink now the arrangements for the Sons of Empire pageants had been made by Lieutenant Colonel Edward Ward um his service in Sudan and Ireland in the 1880s and 1890s had brought him to Woesley's attention and was chosen by Woesley to serve during the Anglo-Ishanti War of 1895-96 which was the final war that Britain and the Kingdom of Ashanti fought which West Indian regiment soldiers participated in and he would definitely would go on to form to serve as the Deputy Assistant Adjutant General in the home district staff in London in organising the pageants he divided it into six sections symbolising the armed forces of Britain, India, Canada, South Africa, Australia and finally a collection of other colonies the in turn each section comprised the four individuals drawn from different units on parade in the case of the sixth section this was headed by representatives of the the white volunteer Trinidad-Yulman recovery and then behind them and indicated by this arrow followed on on foot were the West India regiments as well as various forces from West Africa the Jamaican militia the Hong Kong regiments and the British Guyana police so what we see then here is an imperial logic coming to the fore rather than a military one which served to place non-white elements of the British Army including the West India regiments in the final section of the pageants which was often referred to as the colonial forces so they're separated from the the rest of the British Army at the back interestingly the parading soldiers of the West India regiment were often singled out and we get this this is a coverage from the relatively recently founded Daily Mail which turned on and described the the kind of the the the swagger of the West India regiments soldiers and the the trope of teeth and eyes listening of course is a you know is a patronising and basically a friendly this is kind of part of a kind of a racist way of thinking about people of African descent which is common in this period and this alongside rather dismissive accounts of their supposedly showy Zawar uniform which again I can talk about if you wish to discuss that uniform and this was a manifestation of the marginalisation of the West India regiments in late Victorian popular culture and indeed despite a lot of the kind of rather lofty rhetoric around the pageant that it portrayed it was kind of a symbol of military fraternity it was actually an imperial and to a lesser extent racial logic that was to the fore and this went beyond just casting the West India regiment towards the rear of the procession only a few weeks after the military tournaments it was reported that the British Army was considering a plan to bring each West India regiment battalion to Aldershot for periods of training the proposal was widely criticised in the British press it was noted that while it was perfectly normal for white British soldiers to serve alongside non-white British soldiers in the empire as they've done most recently during the Anglo-Shanty war of 1895-96 the idea of stationing large numbers of non-white soldiers in Britain alongside white British soldiers was seen as unprecedented and it was stated that this would not be popular amongst white British soldiers and the plan was never enacted so whether on show or in training the men of the West India regiments found themselves pushed to the rear their place as part of the regular British army compromised by the imperial and racial logics that were coming to the fore in this period a year after participating in the first sons of the empire pageant detachments from both the first and second battalions of West India regiment travelled to Britain again for an even more significant public event and this was Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee there'd been little public political enthusiasm for the 1887 golden jubilee but that of a decade later was transformed by the conservative union government and especially by Joseph Chamberlain who was the colonial secretary into a true celebration of empire all 11 prime ministers of Britain's self-governing colonies were invited along with contingents of soldiers from India and the rest of the empire the visiting premiers were treated like royal foreign dignitaries and there was a real effort by Chamberlain to impress them with the display of metropolitan wealth and power and Chamberlain's hope was that this would he would be able to obtain mutually beneficial agreements on commerce and imperial defence so as such empire took on centre stage at the diamond jubilee and this moment has often been regarded as like the definitive expression of the ideological dimensions of British imperialism and it was also accompanied by what historians have described as a sense of kind of British race sense sentiments or Britannic nationalism which is at its peak at this period the diamond jubilee itself was celebrated between the 19th and 24th of June with a range of ceremonial festivities displays speeches and official processions in London as well as across Britain and the rest of the empire the unimaginative but flamboyant heart as it's been described of the event was a six mile procession on the 22nd of June from Buckingham Palace for a Thanksgiving service at St Paul's Cathedral hundreds of thousands of spectators watched us as some 50,000 people mainly comprising of troops as well of course as the monarch herself paraded through London over the course of two and a half hours the procession was headed by mounted British troops the colonial escort as it was described in the official program came after the carriages carrying foreign envoys and representatives and pride of place within this colonial escort was given to the 11 colonial premiers the focus of Chamberlain's charm offensive who were accompanied by mounted soldiers from their respective colonies in Canada Australia New Zealand and South Africa near the rear of the escort behind other mounted troops from various colonies came to bodies of colonial infantry now the whole event was widely covered in the press there's a lot of kind of free supplements for newspapers collectors cards the whole paraphernalia that's produced around this moment and in such coverage the presence of the colonial infantry often drew comments the illustrated London news wrote of a mockly array of infantry terrible and yet beautiful to behold Sikhs Chinese from Hong Kong Malays from Singapore Diak Sinhalese houses West India regiments Negroes from British Guyana and dusky warriors from Trinidad in the daily mail GW Stevens wrote as follows up they came more and more new types new realms at every couple of yards an anthropological museum a living gazetteer of the British empire with them came their English officers who they obey and follow like children and you began to understand as never before what the empire amounts to not only that we possess all these remote outlandish places and can bring men from every end of the earth to join us in honoring our Queen but also that all these people are working not simply simply under us but with us that we send out a boy here and a boy there and the boy takes hold of the savages of that party comes to and teaches them to march and shoot as he tells them to obey him and believe in him and die for him and the Queen the sentiments expressed by Stevens are perhaps the clearest window into late Victorian ideas about race and empire which were at their absolute for the pinnacle of the diamond during the diamond you believe we see a kind of strict racial hierarchy albeit once often by the metaphor of family we see the idea of the military itself as a model for empire and for imperial rule of what Stevens called savages and we also see the use of that kind of anthropological museum metaphor such that every color every constant every race every speech was displayed and ordered through the military procession itself now as the illustrated London news had noted the West India regiment was deemed part of this motley away motley array even though it was a regular part of the British army 12 men and non-commissioned officers representing both battalions representing both battalions the diamond jubilee including this man here Sergeant William Gordon they were led by Lieutenant Colonel Jordan Madden commander of the first battalion and as well as marching in the main procession on the 22nd of June the soldiers also participated in a large military review at Aldershot on the 1st of July and joined other colonial troops in visiting Windsor Castle the following day as with other mainly non-white troops they were often subject to a kind of an ethnographic eye during the diamond jubilee and also we get accounts of how and while they were courted at Chelsea barracks they were the subject of much the object of much public interest like people coming up to sort of see them and find out about them and Gordon who was singled out for being the only coloured soldier in her Majesty's service who has the Victoria Cross often featured prominently and amid the kind of array of military types from across the British Empire present at the diamond jubilee the West India Regiment found itself classified as another colonial unit and again you see often this kind of material this kind of almost like semi anthropological kind of categorisation of the soldiers in the West India Regiment and all the non-white forces especially. Now this is not to say that military distinctions went unacknowledged so for example the Illustrated London News sought to ensure that the quote excellent Negro troops of the West India Regiment would not be confused with merely local bodies of armed police from Trinidad and Guyana and of course the fact that they had to clarify that was as I've mentioned a few times before itself a manifestation of contemporary public understanding the misunderstanding. But in the procession on the 22nd of June as with during the Sons of the Empire pageant which can be seen as a kind of trial run the West India Regiment was placed among the motley array of colonial infantry rather than with the rest of the British army and this was also echoed in contemporary accounts so press coverage often drew a distinction between British bread colonials on the one hand Canadians Australians etc who attest them and eat the greatness of the British race and then native colonial troops on the other including the fine fighting West India Regiment so we see a kind of a racial logic becoming coming to the fore in the way in which they're talked about to describe such racialized logics and the kind of sensitivities that could accompany them were also evidence elsewhere during the Diamond Jubilee. At the old shot review on the first of July the West India Regiment soldiers again paraded alongside other representatives of colonial units separate from the British from British metropolitan units. However perhaps because of the military setting they were given pride of place at the front of the colonial infantry forces and in so doing they marched ahead of white colonial soldiers including those of the Western Australia first infantry volunteers and the press reported the unhappiness at the sequencing and describing this as a national slight which ignored Australian sensitivities around race. It was claimed that this insult was also felt more widely amongst other white units who were parading behind the West India Regiment. Whether such reports reflected a genuine sense of grievance or not they certainly articulated the view held by some that the West India Regiment's personnel should be kept in their place within the racial imperial hierarchy. Let me draw some conclusions. The West Australia first infantry volunteers who were so supposedly so incensed because they'd had to march behind the West India Regiment soldiers also featured in the graphics print of our colonial troops with which I started. Published a year after the Diamond Jubilee a striking feature of the image is the conspicuous presence of this West India soldier who stands in the crowd at the middle of the crowd. The white of the shirt and the yellow gold trim on the jacket serves to make the figure stand out from the scarlets and dark blues that characterize most of the other infantry something enhanced of course by the Zawah of uniform and headwear whilst cavalry and other troops at the rear are a rather less distinct presence. The result is to make the West India Regiment a rather unique figure in this scene, something that's reinforced by his immediate setting. So the man's immediate rear stand meant from the Hong Kong European police, the Sierra Leone Frontier Force and the Royal Malta Engineers. Engineers, their darker uniform serving to accentuate his. While two Canadian soldiers from the Governor General's footguards and the Toronto Royal Grenadiers flank him on either side, a similar attire serving as a kind of frame. Meanwhile the corporal from the Trinidad Light Infantry sits at his feet. The central and prominent place of the West India Regiment soldier may have been no more than an artistic choice given the unusual nature of the Zawah of uniform, although there are other Zawah uniforms in this image and those people are right at the edges. But actually if you look at similar prints to this, West India Regiments often are in the middle, which is kind of interesting. I think it also serves to illustrate how the West India Regiment was a kind of prominent feature in late Victorian practices of military display and pageantry and often served as kind of focal point for questions for discussions about race, empire and military service. Indeed, I argue the coverage of the West India Regiments up to and beyond the 1897 Diamond Jubilee turned on this kind of uncertainty about their place in the British Empire and its global military forces. This was there from the very beginning when there were intense disputes about their creation and service, but this sense was reinforced in 1897 by the kind of sheer weight, ideological weight the Diamond Jubilee carried. To put it another way, this supreme moment of Britannic nationalism, as you've been put it, served to clarify the place of the West India Regiments, not only in the amongst kind of military elites, but also in a kind of wider public imagination in that they didn't really belong in, they didn't really count as part of the British Army. Indeed, despite the efforts of Ellis and others, the increased public attention that West India Regiment forces received at this period, this did not secure their place within the British Imperial imagination. And this came down to more than public ignorance, though this did not help. Rather, the symbolic removal from the ranks of the British Army so that they were cast as part, albeit a prominent part, of our colonial troops was the result of their longstanding symbolic and military marginalization. Almost 30 years after the Diamond Jubilee, 20,000 people watched the final trooping of the colour by the West India Regiment at U Park Camp in Jamaica in a ceremony that was described as impressive and full of pathos. The regiment was being disbanded. Lieutenant Colonel W. Miller, its most recent commander, requested that the regimental colours be presented to George V and deposited at Windsor Castle. The War Office agreed, but it refused to pay the travel fares of any soldiers returning from Britain to the Caribbean. In consequence, no African Caribbean personnel could accompany the colours, which were instead taken by seven white British officers and warrant officers who were returning home. Most went straight on leave, leaving Miller with little time to put together a reasonably sized party of men who had only some quite loose connections to the West India Regiment to attend the palace. The presentational party was received at Buckingham Palace with no ceremony other than brief flanks from George V, who acknowledged the fine record of gallantry under the most arduous conditions. And the scene was poignant, not for what occurred at Buckingham Palace. The whole thing took less than 20 minutes, but for how little ceremony there was, and also because of course, who was not there. Of the men who made up the regiment and whose predecessors had been responsible for Dominica, Guadalupe, Sierra Leone, etc., and indeed of the splendid uniform that they've been wearing since 1858, there was no sign. And I think that's an appropriate place to leave this discussion of what it means when the West India Regiment went home. Thank you. Thank you very much for that, David. I'm just going to stop the recording now, everyone, and we can take some questions from the audience.