2026/03/29 by Jim Phillips, Theo Williams · 2 voices
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies #Race, History, and American Society #Scottish History and National Identity
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/03086534.2026.2644431
The experiences of roughly 900 Black lumberjacks, serving in the British Honduran Forestry Unit in Scotland, demonstrate that citizenship for Essential Workers was racially constrained in Second World War Britain. These men, who produced timber for pit props, underpinning Britain’s industrial-military effort, are shown to have been undervalued economically, receiving 55 per cent of the basic weekly wage paid to comparable white foresters. The unit’s effort was criticised in racialised terms, without objective foundation, by landowners and Ministry of Supply officials, who also deplored friendships cultivated by Black foresters with white neighbours in Scottish rural communities, including women. These war-time friendships are presented as evidence of interracial conviviality, normally understood as a metropolitan phenomenon of the later twentieth century. Elite-driven racialised aggression forced the unit’s disbandment. The Colonial Office nevertheless enabled the foresters to remain in Britain. An estimated 134 did so. Their stories, relayed in Telling the Truth, a memoir published in 1985, and an engaging documentary film, Tree Fellers, 2004, shape the analysis, informed by oral history theorisation of subjective narrative, along with close reading of Colonial Office files. The men’s experiences in Britain since the 1940s influenced their memories of life as foresters, resisting racialised marginalisation as Black Essential Workers.