When the war started in 1939, Learie Constantine was one of the most famous black men in Britain. Born in Trinidad, he was a first-class cricketer when he accepted an offer from Nelson, a prominent Lancashire league team, to play for them in a professional capacity. He settled in Nelson in 1929. He played for them for eight seasons until 1937, and made the town his home. When war broke out, Constantine could have taken his wife, Norma and their young daughter Gloria to the safety of Trinidad, but he believed he owed something to the country that had adopted them. He said: ‘I couldn’t run away. I had got a standard of life in England that I could never have achieved in my country. I had made a lot of friends. England to me stood for something and now that war had started, I would have felt like a little dog to have run away from England.’ The Constantine family stayed. 

Though nearly 40, Constantine expected to undertake some form of military service but instead he was offered a job as a Welfare Officer for the Ministry of Labour and National Service, in conjunction with the Colonial Office, in the north-west region of England. His organisational ability, personal prestige, experience of Lancashire and Trinidad background made him the ideal person to deal with the arrival of West Indians into the north-west. His main wartime role was to look after the interests of African seamen in Liverpool, and munitions workers and trainees from the West Indies in the north-west. Many of them had been hastily recruited from rural areas of the Caribbean. The government needed someone to act on their behalf and Constantine accepted. He was helped by an assistant, Sam Morris, who was active in the League of Coloured Peoples. The work began in October 1941 and Constantine was initially based in Liverpool’s famous Royal Liver Building. It was in Liverpool that he experienced wartime bombing, but he was not troubled by the German air raids: ‘I was a good sleeper in those days. I’d hear the siren but not the all clear because I had slept all through the bombing!’

In Liverpool a great number of West Indians were employed as welders, tin plate workers and dockers in the Gladstone Docks. Sometimes, if there were racial tensions, Constantine intervened and mediated. It could be tough and demanding work, but he rose to the challenge: ‘I had to do almost everything for them. I had to see they were comfortable in the factory. I had to make arrangements to see that they sent their money home. I had to look into the hostels that housed them while they were here. I had to help them to find digs when they were working in Birkenhead and places like that.’

Constantine worked tirelessly on the behalf of the West Indian war workers at various levels: with government departments, the League of Coloured Peoples, the churches and the United States forces. He also negotiated with trade unions and employers who flatly refused to employ black workers. Constantine also made regular wartime broadcasts for the BBC to the Caribbean in programmes like Calling the West Indies and to listeners in Britain. 

This information is from Stephen Bourne's books Mother Country: Britain's Black Community on the Home Front 1939-45 (The History Press, 2010) , The Motherland Calls: Britain's Black Servicemen and Women 1939-45 (The History Press, 2012) and War to Windrush: Black Women in Britain 1939-48 (Jacaranda Books, 2018).

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