Thank you!!

For in-depth biographies, see the Africans in Hull & East Yorkshire project (africansinyorkshireproject.com/lilian-bader.h…) and Stephen Bourne's "The Motherland Calls: Britain's Black Servicemen and Women 1939-45" (2012).

Together they are a testament to the experience of the Black British community during the Second World War and there are many stories just like theirs that is waiting to be told.

Ramsay Bader survived and saw the war through to the fall of Nazi Germany. So did Lilian. They would go on to live long lives. Ramsay passed away in 1992 and Lilian in 2015.

That’s what worried me more than anything, but he came through.” (Quoted in The Independent, www.independent.co.uk/news/people/...)

On the eve of D-Day, Lilian remembered: “I didn’t know if Ramsay was alive or dead… I remember kneeling in the chapel and praying like blazes that Ramsay would be saved. It was a terrible time because you knew some people were going to be killed, and Ramsay couldn’t swim! He hated water.

Any mention of Ramsay Bader is incomplete without also mentioning Lilian Bailey who served in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and reached the rank of Acting Corporal. Lilian Bailey and Ramsay Bader married in 1943.

That, I think, would be an interesting question to explore. The borderland between two competing 19th century notions of warfare. Chile considered itself more European, white and civilized than its enemies. Would Europeans agree?

Excellent point! I’m thinking of framing it in ways of Othering and exoticizing South America (or perhaps resisting it, in the case of Officer Ekdahl). Do Swedes frame warfare in S. America as primitive/barbarian vs civilized Europe in the late 19th century?

I think I would write it in Swedish, but I’m not sure if it’s too much.

For more about my book, see this link.

www.degruyter.com/document/doi...

I presented a paper about this subject, titled “Counting Black Faces: The Marginalization of Black British Soldiers in Response to 1917” at the @AskHistorians
Digital Conference 2021. You can watch it below. youtu.be/yTFIbdYPwHw?t=