Black Tommies by Costello Ray;

Author:Costello, Ray;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liverpool University Press

MEDICAL OFFICERS

A number of black medical practitioners resident in the United Kingdom, or who had returned to the West Indies, were graduates of British universities and applied to join the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC). This would have entitled them to a commission in the army as doctors, but they faced the problems encountered by other black applicants. The War Office and Colonial Office were keen to stress the futility of black men applying to join as medical officers, officially documented in May 1915, when the Colonial Office was told that only government medical officers from the West Indies of ‘pure European descent’ were likely to be accepted as officers in the RAMC.50

Dr Jenner Wright, Dr S.J. Allwood, Dr James Jackson Brown and Dr James Samuel Risien Russell

The British-born Dr Jenner Wright, the son of a prominent Sierra Leonean lawyer, was brought up in Britain by his mother. Newly qualified at the outbreak of the war, he joined his fellow doctors at the recruiting office to volunteer as a medical officer. His white contemporaries were accepted, but Wright was told to wait. After a time, he received a letter from the authorities telling him to go ‘home’ to Sierra Leone and seek employment there. He took this advice, and was forced to serve in West Africa with the inferior rank of ‘Native Medical Officer’, an experience that left him a greatly embittered man. Similarly, Dr S.J. Allwood of Jamaica was told by the War Office in August 1915 that he should apply to the Commanding Officer of the Jamaica contingent for employment in his field. A particularly sad case was that of Dr James Jackson Brown, who had not only studied medicine at the London Hospital, but practiced in London. The only post he was offered in the RAMC was as a Warrant Officer, which he accepted, tired of arguing that his qualifications entitled him to a commission.51

It is worth remembering that by no means all officers and other military personnel served overseas during the First World War. Dr James Samuel Risien Russell (1863–1939) was yet another son of a white plantation manager and a black mother. His father, William Russell, had successfully run the Leonora sugar plantation in Demerara since the 1840s, presiding over the change from what he called ‘old time labour’, meaning workers who had been freed slaves, to the newly indentured Indian and Chinese ‘coolies’, as he calls them in a letter to a British-based agent, perhaps a reflection of the racist linguistic norms of the time considering his marriage to a black, or at least mixed-race, woman. In the same letter, William Russell seemed to show an interest in the health and well-being of his charges (for very good reason in that post-slavery period), possibly providing the germ of medical interest picked up later by his young son.52 James and his brother William (born 1867) were sent to the Academy in Dollar, Scotland. Dr James Samuel Risien Russell studied at Edinburgh University from 1882 to

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