As Britain marks 100 years of the RAF defending the empire by dive-bombing and shooting freedom-fighting locals, PETER FROST remembers one RAF hero with quite different story to tell.
AS THE entire country celebrates the centenary of the founding of the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1918 it would be all too easy to believe the airborne heroes of the defeat of nazism were all Boris Johnson lookalikes who took off from the playing fields of Eton.
In fact 574 Battle of Britain pilots came from countries other than Britain. Over 7,000 West Indian men and women served in the RAF and there were thousands of others of every nation who answered Britain’s call and helped to defeat Hitler and his nazis. Others of every race and colour came from Africa, the Indian subcontinent indeed almost every corner of the Earth.
Here we’ll tell the story of just one of them. It’s a great story, interesting enough that Lenny Henry once tried to make it into a film. Sadly his script — A Wing and a Prayer — never made it to the screen. A film about a black hero was fine, but not one about a black communist hero it seems.
This is the story of Billy Strachan, a young Jamaican descended from a family of slaves. He was one of the very first volunteers arriving in England in March 1940, aged 18, just three months after he had left school.
He had sold his beloved saxophone, his bike, indeed all his possessions to raise the boat fare to Britain. With £2.10 in his pocket and a suitcase containing one change of clothes he arrived in a dank, wet, most un-Caribbean-like London.
After a night in the YMCA he went straight to the Air Ministry in Kingsway to try to join up. But this was racist London where “No dogs, no blacks” signs were common in rental premises. “Nigger” was so common a word that famous squadron leaders even used it to name their dogs.
The RAF guard on duty outside the ministry told him to shove off, in far from respectful terms. A sergeant came by and told Strachan, who had come nearly 5,000 miles to join the fight against Hitler, that he and his sort should go back where they came from and join up there.
Finally a young officer came by. He told Strachan he was educated and knew precisely where Jamaica was. It was in west Africa. Strachan decided it might be best not to correct him but to follow him inside. Here he was given strict medical, education and intelligence tests. The next morning he was wearing his RAF uniform.
After 12 weeks of basic training as a wireless operator and air gunner, he was made a sergeant. He joined a squadron of bombers making nightly raids over heavily defended German industrial targets.
Strachan’s first crew were from various countries of what was still the British empire. They flew a bomber named Vizagapatam, named after the people of the Indian district who paid for the plane.
Strachan (far left in picture above) flew 30 raids over enemy territory. Others were not so lucky. The casualty rate in Bomber Harris’s command was very high.
Those heroic 30 tours could have entitled Strachan to a job on the ground but instead he applied for pilot training.
A fast learner, Strachan was allowed to fly solo after only seven hours’ training. His instructors were less keen on his tricks and joyriding and a crash landing in training severely damaged his hip, but he still qualified as a pilot in record time.
Then came 15 missions as a bomber pilot. He said: “I suppose we had the overconfidence of youth. We never thought it would happen to us.” In fact one raid resulted in a German bullet in the leg.
Sergeant Strachan was promoted twice more, first to flying officer and then flight lieutenant. Promotion brought a personal servant, his own batman. The man had actually been batman to King George VI. Strachan described him as a real smooth Jeeves type.
“I was a little coloured boy from the Caribbean and I instinctively called him ‘Sir’,” Strachan recalls.
“No, Sir,” the batman hastily corrected, “It is I who call you ‘Sir’.”
Strachan would become a legend among the RAF aircrew. He was famous for his avoidance of German fighters.
“The trick,” he explained, “was to wait until the enemy was right on your tail and, at the last minute, cut the engine, sending your lumbering bomber into a dive, letting the fighter overshoot harmlessly above.”
Strachan’s reputation grew but on his 15th trip as a bomber pilot his nerve finally snapped, before he had even left Lincolnshire:
“I remember so clearly. I was carrying a huge bomb destined for German shipping. Our flight path was directly over Lincoln city and its magnificent cathedral (below) perched high on a hill. It was a foggy night, with visibility down to 100 yards.
“The climb to clear the cathedral spire was always difficult, particularly with a heavy bomb load. I asked my engineer to make sure we were on course to clear the spire on top of the cathedral tower. He replied: ‘We are just passing it.’ I looked out, shocked that the spire was not where I expected, below us, but just a very few feet beyond our wingtip. I hadn’t seen the spire at all — and I was the pilot!
“There and then my nerve went. I knew I couldn’t go on — this was the end of me as a pilot! I flew out to sea, dropped my bomb load and flew back to the airfield.” He would never pilot a bomber again.
After the war, most of the black airmen and airwomen returned to Africa or the Caribbean, justly proud of the part they had played in the defeat of the nazis.
Some did stay only to find post-war Britain was not universally welcoming to those with darker skin, even war heroes.
After the war Strachan served as a liaison officer in the RAF sorting out racial disturbances. Defending some of the cases gave him a taste for law and advocacy.
Once demobbed, he returned to Jamaica for a short while and tried for various jobs. Racism would often raise its head, Strachan’s family were quite light-skinned for Jamaicans — what islanders call “high colour.”
At one job interview he was asked: “Which of your parents is European?” Billy was having none of this. “Neither of my parents is European,” he snapped back before turning on his heel and leaving without another word.
In the end Strachan resolved that he would study law in Britain, so that he could eventually go back to the Caribbean with skills useful for the liberation struggle.
A close friend, Dr David Lewis, who would become famous as a round-the-world-yachtsman, expert on traditional Polynesian sailing craft and an east London GP and huge enthusiast for the new National Health Service, introduced him to Marxism and Strachan became a communist.
Much later in life, he would tell one of his three sons, Chris: “Because of the way my life was to go if I hadn’t discovered Marxism I would have undoubtedly ended up in a mental institution.”
Strachan’s overriding passion was his hatred of racism. He always described it as a deeply vile philosophy. A more physical problem was his crushed hip.
An air crash early in his career had left him with a really painful leg. It wasn’t until 1952 that it was operated on by a communist doctor friend in Prague. Even then he would walk with a noticeable limp for the rest of his life.
Post-war his ambition was to help get the British out of the West Indies and he dedicated his life to this but he knew he would need to live and support himself so he also set about building a professional career.
What he actually built was a powerful reputation in the world of justice becoming senior clerk to the magistrates in courts all over London.
He would author several definitive legal guides on subjects from drink driving to adoption.
Alongside his professional reputation he earned an equally powerful position as a leader of the anti-imperialist struggle, particularly all across the Caribbean.
In the Communist Party (CPGB) Strachan became a leading worker on the party’s Caribbean advisory committee.
Along with Fenner Brockway, Kay Beauchamp and Tony Gilbert, he would found the Movement for Colonial Freedom (now Liberation).
He would spend much time and effort working in this and other broad organisations fighting racism.
This work across the world made him many friends and political allies but some serious enemies too. In the red-baiting height of the late 1940s and early 1950s Strachan was flying to Jamaica with Ferdinand Smith, the Jamaican and US communist trade union leader.
The British government had tried to ban them from international travel and US McCarthyite anti-communist forces diverted Strachan and Smith’s plane to take them to jail in New York.
Strachan recalled that “ironically, I could see the Statue of Liberty through the bars of my cell window.” This illegal arrest sparked a major diplomatic incident and it took a huge campaign led by British Labour MPs like Maurice Orbach to free the pair.
Back in London wherever Strachan and his wife Joyce set up home, the flat or house would become a both a welcome refuge and a hotbed of political activity for all sorts of Caribbean and other colonial radicals, communists and freedom fighters.
In 1952 Strachan launched one of the first left-wing newspapers for Caribbean people living in Britain. Strachan envisaged his Caribbean News as a tool to combat the right-wing West Indian immigrant paper the Gleaner.
Ranji Chandisingh, another communist, joined Strachan as editor. The pair would spend many an evening together discussing politics or putting the latest issue together.
Strachan went on to introduce Chandisingh to his friends, Cheddi {below} and Janet Jagan, leader and general secretary of the People’s Progressive Party of Guyana. Chandisingh would become a Guyana minister and eventually Guyanese ambassador to the Soviet Union.
This is not the place to tell the detailed story of Guyana’s long and troubled fight to throw off British imperialism’s yoke but suffice to say much of the planning was carried out in any one of Strachan’s humble front rooms.
One comrade to whom Strachan rented a room was Trevor Carter from Port-of-Spain, Trinidad.
In 1954 Carter came to London as a student. He moved in with the Strachans and soon joined the Young Communist League (YCL).
Carter’s cousin, Claudia Jones, (below) was the communist famed for founding the Notting Hill Carnival in 1958, in the aftermath of the Notting Hill riots of that year.
Strachan had seen the Notting Hill riots for himself. Indeed, on one occasion he had averted much of the violence by encouraging young West Indians not to respond to racist provocation. Strachan’s home was the scene of many an early discussion of the carnival — now Britain’s biggest anti-racist cultural event.
In 1963, on Strachan’s advice Cheddi Jagan invited Carter to come and work with the People’s Progressive Party in Guyana.
Carter spent three years developing the country’s outstanding education programme.
When he returned to London Carter would play a major part in developing progressive education policies.
He joined the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) as a senior education liaison officer, later becoming the head of equal opportunities. Carter was offered an MBE for services to education but refused to accept the award.
In 1947 Strachan’s attended the Caribbean Labour Congress (CLC) in Trinidad. The CLC was an organisation uniting all the people of the British-controlled Caribbean and in fact dated back to the 1920s.
He returned to London having agreed to set up a branch in the capital of the empire — the heart of the web of evil and exploitation that was the British empire.
Strachan was elected secretary of the London branch that represented in London all the British-controlled Caribbean territories fighting for national independence. Under Strachan’s leadership the CLC became a leading anti-imperialist organisation.
Strachan’s political circle included Britain’s first two black peers, Learie Constantine and David Pitt. Others he met with and advised in his London home included his long-term comrade, Forbes Burnham from Guyana, Michael Manley from Jamaica, Errol Barrow from Barbados and Jack Keishall from Grenada.
Strachan worked closely with Granticy Adams, president of the Barbados Labour Party; Vere Bird, president of the Antigua Labour Party and Robert Bradshaw of St Kitts and Nevis.
A key figure in these struggles was Richard Hart, the secretary of the CLC, who was based in Jamaica and who worked closely with Strachan and his many London-based comrades.
Just a year before his death in 1998 Strachan spoke at a memorial meeting for Cheddi Jagan. His speech is a masterly summing up of the fight for freedom in the Caribbean. Sadly it is far too big a story to tell here.
Strachan finished his speech to the packed meeting with a final tribute to Cheddi Jagan.
In reality that tribute will serve us well as a lasting epitaph to Strachan and the many other comrades who, after playing their part in defeating Hitler, knew there was another just as important battle to win.
“We passionately believed that the abolition of exploitation of man by man, oppression and human degradation and then a fair distribution of social wealth could be achieved not simply by superficial measures, but through a deep-going transformation of the existing socio-economic order.
“We instilled these ideas in our minds. They served to inspire the imagination of our people. We were internationalists. Ours was a global and dialectical outlook that linked our own many-sided concerns to the multifaceted struggles and trends taking place globally.
“We were certainly not passive observers but active participants in various events and actions. We were workers, thinkers, internationalists and socialists.”
He never lost his political skill and his ability to attract significant political allies. Towards the end of his life, Strachan, who had always loved horse riding, played a key role in founding the Disabled Riders Association.
Skilfully Strachan took the vice-president role but left the more prestigious position of president to Anne, the Princess Royal.
Strachan concluded his remarks at the Cheddi Jagan meeting by declaring he believed Jagan was the greatest Caribbean political figure of his era. That may be true, but no single man or woman deserves the praise alone.
It takes many people, and in the still to be won battle for a free Caribbean, Strachan and a hundred other comrades also deserve a place of honour as heroes of that struggle.
Strachan finished his working life as he started it, flying high in the battle to liberate the workers of the world. It is a battle we have still to win.
So when you are looking at those TV and newspaper tributes to the part the RAF played over its 100-year history in places like Korea, Aden, the Falklands, the Gulf, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iraq and 100 other squalid imperialist adventures, just remember there were other sorts of heroes too who played their parts in far more decent and honourable battles.
This article first appeared in the Morning Star 31 March 2018.
Frostys ramblings a left look at life 