"We Want Practical Sympathy": Disabled Veterans' Activism in the Interwar British Caribbean

Nearly 16,000 men from the British Caribbean enlisted in the British West Indies Regiment (BWIR) during the First World War. While deployed overseas, BWIR soldiers experienced a host of medical maladies and over 2,500 were wounded. Infectious diseases like pneumonia, tuberculosis, malaria, meningitis, and influenza spread rapidly among troops. Soldiers also endured catastrophic injuries as a result of frostbite, artillery blasts, and workplace accidents. Although many soldiers recovered from their illnesses, hundreds of men were permanently disabled due to amputation, blindness, hearing loss, or psychiatric disorders.

In the aftermath of the war, disabled soldiers and their families embarked on a new battle, facing off against parsimonious officials who sought to limit the state’s financial obligation to colonial subjects. This paper chronicles the multi-decade campaign by disabled BWIR soldiers in Jamaica and Trinidad to secure vocational assistance and financial support from the state. While historians have richly documented the political battle over disability pensions in metropolitan Britain, scholars have only recently begun to reconstruct the grassroots campaign led by disabled Black and coloured servicemen in the Caribbean colonies. This paper reveals how disabled soldiers challenged racist pension policies, which offered lower rates of pay to colonial troops, while also demanding that the state provide vocational training, free medical treatment, and robust welfare payments. In their demands for “practical sympathy,” disabled soldiers insisted that the colonial government had an inviolable obligation to care for them and proclaimed that colonial subjects were entitled to the same welfare benefits granted to Britons living in the metropole. Ultimately, their pioneering movement would help to galvanize the massive civilian-led campaigns for political and economic reform that swept across the British Caribbean during the 1930s.