History does not record whether there was any contact during the first world war between the men of the Indian army who were being treated in hospitals in Brighton for injuries sustained on the western front and the men of the British West Indies regiment training further along the Sussex coast in Seaford. If there was, they’d have had much to discuss, both in terms of the camaraderie between soldiers and the racial discrimination that followed these men who had volunteered to fight for the empire.
Khudadad Khan of the Indian army, the first Indian to receive a Victoria Cross, might have had something to say about the scandal that erupted in 1915 when the Daily Mail ran a picture of him in hospital with a white nurse standing beside his bed. The following month, the army council issued a directive calling for the removal of all white nurses from three military hospitals where Indian soldiers were being treated. Perhaps the soldiers of the British West Indies regiment would have thought this a petty grievance compared with their own. Having signed up, they discovered they were not allowed to fight because black men could not be trusted with guns. Instead, they were relegated to labour battalions, often on the front lines.
During the first world war, 15,600 men served in the British West Indies regiment and more than a million in the Indian army across the eastern and western fronts. Until recently, their stories have been almost completely whitewashed from history. Among the organisations that have sought to put forward a more complete picture of the war during its centenary commemorations is HMDT Music, an award-winning arts education group.
Over the last four years, its project Trench Brothers has involved 50 schools and 4,000 children aged nine to 11. They have learned about the war and its minority ethnic battalions through a series of activities that culminate in a musical theatre performance at each school, focusing on a particular soldier. Tertia Sefton-Green, the creative director of HMDT, says that part of the aim of Trench Brothers was “to show that this is so many more people’s story than the white story so often represented”. The idea of using the Brighton Dome as the finale for the project came when they discovered that it had been used as a military hospital for Indian soldiers during the first world war.
And so, on 17 October at the Dome, the men of the Indian army and the men of the British West Indies regiment will meet – perhaps for the first time, perhaps not – in an evening of musical theatre that fictionalises the stories of a number of real soldiers to bring them together in one narrative. The performance will involve schoolchildren as well as the jazz singer Cleveland Watkiss and acclaimed opera singer Damian Thantrey, with musical compositions by Julian Joseph and Richard Taylor. Sefton-Green has written the libretto, which is partly based on the “letters home” that students have written from the point of view of various historical characters.
There is also a new, extended Letter Song, written and composed in collaboration with seven schools in Brighton, Seaford and surrounding areas. The subject of this song is Manta Singh, an officer of the Indian army who fought at Neuve Chapelle. There he saw his comrade Lt James Henderson sustain serious injuries. Singh found a wheelbarrow in no man’s land and used it to carry Henderson to safety, but he was seriously injured in the process and eventually died of his wounds at Kitchener Indian hospital in Brighton. The Letter Song evokes “bullets … slicing the blood-filled air” on the battlefield and later, in Brighton, the “chandelier that looks like a million stars stolen from the night sky”.
Sefton-Green said it was difficult to find redemption in the stories of the war, other than in individual tales of bravery and brotherhood. In the midst of the larger story of discrimination, there are the smaller ones that suggest other ways of interacting – as with Henderson and Singh, whose sons fought together in world war two and formed a friendship that continues in the next generation of their families. In the wake of the Windrush scandal, though, it may be hard to watch a play about soldiers from the Caribbean willing to risk their lives for Britain only to be treated with the utmost shoddiness, without thinking about everything else that has continued from one generation to the next.
Trench Brothers is at the Brighton Dome on 17 October.
