Arthur Roberts War Against Prejudice

Glaswegian Arthur Roberts was Scotland’s first black soldier and fought during World War One. His name was forgotten for many years and only recovered when a couple found his diaries in a house they had bought in 2005 – 23 years after his death.

When Arthur came back from the war, he returned to his job at Harland and Wolff shipyard to work on the vessels that made the Clyde famous. In 1919, there were race riots in port cities across the country, including Glasgow. Arthur had come home from a place where he was fighting alongside men to a place where the same men were effectively turning on him. The Aliens Restriction Act 1914, extended in 1919, effectively made Arthur a foreigner in his own country. In the shipyards, he was subjected to racial abuse.

Poet Jackie Kay said ‘I got a very real sense of Arthur from reading his diaries – of his kindness, his empathy, his spirit, his pride, the ways he dealt with the horrors he had witnessed. At one point he writes: “The dead were so numerous it was impossible to proceed without walking on them.” When we put on our red poppies this year, we should be remembering, too, the soldiers like Arthur, who knew every type of loss yet whose dark faces were missing from the victory parades, and whose stories have been lost’.

Artist’s Response
I was assigned the story of Scotland’s first recognised black solider during the First World War. I was touched by the soldier’s life history I researched, where I found out about the battles Roberts had to fight back at home, all of which stemmed from the colour of his skin – this shocked me more than the stories of war.

I had no idea of the struggles black servicemen had to go through 100 years ago. For that reason, I aimed to ensure that no black soldier was forgotten by incorporating the number of each serviceman, I used black and red in my print but inverted the poppy to black to signify the lack of acknowledgement black soldiers received for representing the British Army.

Arthur would have come home from a place where he was fighting alongside men who effectively turned on him, shunned from the pale faced victory parades, 15204 black faces of the British army with lost stories on Remembrance Day. Many black soldiers lost their lives during the war, only for it to be forgotten. I felt compelled to create a print that would give respect to every black serviceman for the heavy contributions they paid for their country. Lest we forget.

“He knew loss. He’d been in loss’s Town… And the next thing he was half lying against a wagon in the rain… He knew it carried no watch; grief keeps a different clock… And for years after the war, it seemed that all the losses followed him in their old dead boots” -extract of a poem ‘The Looks of Loss’ by Jackie Kay

Amy Smith
City of Glasgow College

Amy Smith is currently a second year HND Contemporary Art student who mainly works with mixed media and digitally manipulated photography. However, for this project, Amy was required to learn some new skills using woodblocks, special instruments to carve the Japanese plywood with, and the Eagle Press which is inside the Glasgow Print Studio.