ABSTRACT
It is not generally known that black people have been a feature of British society in substantial numbers since well before 1945. Granville Sharpe in the 1700s estimated that such people numbered 20,000. 1 During the First World War, around 950,000 Indians, together with some 15,000 West Indians, fought on behalf of the mother country. The Second World War attracted even greater numbers. The Indian army supplied around 2 million soldiers and 40,000 West Indians joined forces on behalf of this country. Thus the surge of responses to the invitations to answer Britain’s economic needs after 1945 was really nothing new, except that now they came as a free people, and even if at the time their arrival was viewed by themselves as temporary, at least in the short run there was a permanent nature about it.
