The British Army's First Black Soldier

Presumably they mean the regular British Army, rather than colonial militias.
Seem to remember this started recently when an episode of Dr Who featured a black soldier in Victoria's army, and a professor claimed it had never happened. Only to be proven wrong.
"The Arab army had just been routed at the bloody Battle of Ginnis during the last days of 1885, but the British still had some mopping up to do.
Of particular concern were some enemy barges that held a large stock of arms and ammunition and were thought to be moored several miles north along the River Nile.
If they could be captured or destroyed, perhaps the Islamist fanatic Muhammad Ahmad and his army of Dervishes — devout Muslims — would finally be kicked out of the Sudan after four years of fighting.
A force of 100 mounted infantrymen was ordered to head downstream. Among them were soldiers from the 2nd Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry, commanded by Lieutenant Beauvoir de Lisle, aged just 21.
After covering 35 miles, the British entered the village of Kohehmatto, where the head man revealed — after, in the words of a contemporary account, ‘a little gentle persuasion’ — that one of the enemy’s barges lay some six miles away.
With the light fading fast, de Lisle took 12 volunteers to capture the vessel-.
‘In the dusk we saw the outlines of the masts of the barge,’ de Lisle recalled, ‘and soon after, we came on the party of 30 [Dervishes] pulling her upstream.’
De Lisle and his men dismounted as quietly as possible and crept forward until they were within 50 yards of the barge. Despite being outnumbered, de Lisle had the advantage of surprise and ordered his men to open fire.
Three volleys rang out across the desert, after which de Lisle and his men charged forward with bayonets fixed. The Arabs fled, leaving behind a badly wounded man with a shattered leg — and, standing on the riverbank next to a donkey, a small black boy, clearly less than two years old.
Amazingly, the child seemed unaffected by what he had just witnessed. When de Lisle approached, the boy held up his arms and the Lieutenant picked him up, then handed him to Colour Sergeant Stuart.
Stuart was enchanted by the boy he nicknamed ‘Jimmy Dervish’. The wounded man — whom the British later treated — revealed that the child’s real name was Mustapha, that his father had been killed and his mother had fled.
The boy kept pointing his finger at de Lisle and shouting ‘Bang! Morto!’ in imitation of a rifle shot and the subsequent result.
Neither Stuart nor de Lisle could bear to abandon him there alone so they took Jimmy back to camp, to decide what to do with him.
As the regimental journal The Bugle was later to record: ‘The night attack on the Nuggar [barge] has certainly altered the course of the lad’s life’.
This was an understatement — and then some. For little Jimmy, or James Durham, as he came to be known, would grow up to become, at the time, the only black soldier in the British Army. He even settled in Britain and married an Englishwoman."
Britain's first black soldier adopted from Sudan's story | Daily Mail Online

 

It is a little strange so few people of colour aren't seen at all in British movies about the times...and little to (none?) in photos etc Even as late as WW2...How many coloured people were in England at the time? I would have thought quite a few by WW2...what was their role in WW2?
Interesting the British were fighting the Muslims as far back (and further) as 1885...
PS: I liked the Dr Who episode with the coloured Victorian soldier...loved the old style words for everything...I say, we should all still talk like that what!?

 

I think perhaps we should!
Think the number of coloured people in the UK was quite low until the mass immigration from the West Indies etc in the late '50s. I remember seeing my first black person at the age of six when visiting relatives in Northampton. All through school I was surrounded by white faces; there was one girl in high school who suffered from a genetic condition which gave her an Afro-Caribbean appearance (her sister was in my class), but the rest of the family were white. The dog's abuse that lassie got was disgusting.

 

The West India Regiment and West Indies Regiment were full of Jamaican and from the other Caribbean Islands Blacks. They were recruited because it was thought that they were more resistant to Malaria and Yellow Fever. The West India Regiment was finally taken off the active list in 1927. The West Indies Regiment was disbanded in 1920. William Slim was seconded from this Regiment to the Gurkhas in the Indian Army after WW I. If you read George M Fraser's immortal MacAusland short stories you will find the story about how the Gordon Highlanders not only acquired a Black soldier he went out and earned a spot in the Pipe Band. The guy had enlisted in the Liverpool Scottish and the Highlanders got a draft from them as they were being demobilized.

Black soldiers in the British Army are not so unique going back into time. Whenever a Battalion was stationed somewhere they would recruit locals for replacements. Even the German Army had some Blacks in WWI and WWII.

 

Wonder if the MacAusland story arc was based on the above?

 

Black Britons have served in the armed forces for much longer than most people think. There have been African and Asian minorities in England as long as there has been trade with these parts.

Solders were recruited from the lowest classes of society. Ethnicity was no barrier to taking the royal shilling. The Navy freely recruited Asian and African sailors.

There was a fashion for recruiting black bandsmen in the Napoleonic era as an extension of "reversed facings" for bandsmen. IRRC one drummer in the Life Guards at Waterloo had been a runaway slave who then served in the Navy.

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I was kind of surprised and not entirely convinced that he was the first black soldier in the British army. Looks like my suspicions may have been correct. Interesting thread in any case.