‘You couldn’t do it on your own’: meet the Caribbean soldiers campaigning for their own war memorial – Telegraph.co.uk

When Albert Jarrett moved to Britain in 1943, he was not prepared for the weather. Volunteering for the Royal Air Force at the age of 18, he moved from his native Jamaica to an airbase near Sutton Coldfield, and struggled at first with the biting winter mornings.

There was quite a bit of frost when I looked out in the morning. The ground was white. My first thought was, I wish I could go back home, Jarrett recalls.

76 years later, Jarrett does not struggle to remember any details of his story as he sits with his wife, Shirley, in an Italian cafe in central London. But he is worried thatother British people have forgotten his contribution to the Second World War, as well as that of the hundreds of thousands of other foreign troops who fought for Britain between 1939 and 1945.

And he is not alone in his concern: this year, in the run-up to Remembrance Sunday, the Royal British Legion is campaigning to highlight the contribution of soldiers from all over the world, irrespective of nationality, creed, colour, or race.

During the Battle of Britain, as many as one in five of the RAFs pilots came from abroad, and campaigners worry that many non-British troops have been written out of the national story. Indeed, watch a Sixties cinema classic like The Battle of Britain or Where Eagles Dare, and most of the characters are white, public-school types with cut-glass Queens accents. In more recent years, directors have tried to present more diversity: in 2017, Christopher Nolan was praised for having Churchills We will fight them on the beaches speech read by a working-class Tommy in a northern accent, in his Oscar-winning masterpiece Dunkirk. But some groups, like Caribbeans and east Europeans, still struggle to get a look-in.

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'You couldn't do it on your own': meet the Caribbean soldiers campaigning for their own war memorial - Telegraph.co.uk

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