White locals stood shoulder to shoulder with black soldiers at the Battle of Bamber Bridge
Americans didn’t just bring glamour and nylons to Britain during the war; they also imported the systemic racism of the segregated United States. David Barnett on a little-known mutiny near Preston in 1943
Bamber Bridge lies just to the south of Preston, now connected by urban sprawl from the Lancashire city, but a community with its own strong identity. It’s referred to locally as Brig, and though there’s a strong following for nearby Preston North End, Bamber Bridge has its own fiercely supported Northern Premier League side. During the Second World War it was also home to an American army base at Adams Hall, pretty much just a collection of huts and barracks housing the US Eighth Army Air Force Station 569. This included a Quartermaster Truck Company attached to the unit, which was primarily composed of black American soldiers, under the command of a few white officers.
American GIs were famously overpaid, over-sexed and over here during the war, as Allied troops gathered in Britain preparing for the push into Europe to fight the Nazis. But the Americans didn’t just bring glamour and nylons with them; they also imported something far less palatable. The systemic racism of the segregated United States.
And that led to an astonishing incident that is little known outside Bamber Bridge, where it has achieved the status of local legend: nothing less than a mutiny.
On the night of 24 June 1943, a group of black soldiers were drinking in the Olde Hob Inn, a historic pub at the heart of Bamber Bridge that dates back to the 17th century and – a devastating fire in its thatched roof recently notwithstanding – still survives today. In the pub that night were locals, British soldiers also stationed nearby, and the group of black Americans. Due to the wartime curfew, the bell for last orders was rung at 10pm, as usual. In high spirits, one of the black soldiers tried to inveigle more drinks out of the barmaid.
Lancashire barmaids are not to be trifled with, and the soldiers would most likely have been sent packing with a good-natured ticking off, but for the sudden and unexpected arrival of two Military Police (MPs) officers from the Adams Hall base.
To understand what happened next, and why, we have to also understand the strange situation that existed for black soldiers serving in the US military at that time. Alan Rice is a professor in English and American Studies at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, and he says: “When American troops started to be stationed in Britain there was a problem in that segregation was practised in the US but not here. And the US struck a deal with the British government that troops would be subjected to American military law, whether they were on the base or not. This meant that if a soldier committed an offence, even on British soil, then it would be a matter for the MPs rather than the British justice system. It also meant that segregation could be enforced on the military bases.”
Black soldiers were not allowed to be combatants at the time, instead assigned manual work and becoming, as Rice terms it, “tolerated hod-carriers for the war effort”. They were treated, as on American soil, as second-class citizens by the army, forced to be quartered together and eat together and work together, away from the mainly white majority.
When the white MPs, who had been just passing the pub, entered to see what was going on, the black soldiers might have just complied with the order to return to base. But there was another factor that meant tensions were riding high among the black soldiers at that time. A few days earlier in Detroit there had been violent riots prompted by an influx of migrant workers to shore up the city’s famous automotive industry, which was working overtime for the war effort. False rumours about crimes committed by black people fed growing tensions which spilled over into violence, and the mostly white police force and federal troops weighed in, with the violence causing the deaths of 25 black people, mostly at the hands of the authorities.
The news of Detroit was just filtering in to the black troops at Bamber Bridge. “Tensions were high,” says Rice. “And that might have been a contributory factor to what happened next.”
When the African American soldiers were going about their lives locally, off the base, they were getting welcomed in ways that would never have happened in America
What happened next was that one of the black soldiers, Private Eugene Nunn, was picked on by the MPs for not wearing the full correct uniform. Again, had circumstances been different, the black soldiers might have just gone with the MPs. They certainly would if they’d been in America. But there was yet another factor at play here.
The good people of Bamber Bridge simply had no truck with the segregation and racism that the Americans had brought with them.
Rice says: “When the African American soldiers were going about their lives locally, off the base, they were getting welcomed in ways that would never have happened in America. The British public were treating them on the whole much, much better than what happened at home. They were seen as collaborators in the war against the Nazis.”
As the black soldiers resisted attempts by the MPs to remove them from the pub, a tussle ensued, escalating to punches being thrown. And rather than just watch from the sidelines, the British soldiers and local people stood up and got involved. On the side of the black soldiers. One British soldier stood up to the MPs and, according to Rice, said: “Why do you want to arrest them? They’re not doing anything or bothering anybody.”
According to interviews done in the 1970s and 1980s with people who remembered the incident, local pubs in Bamber Bridge, when asked by the US military to impose a colour bar — with typical dry, Lancashire humour — put up signs saying “Black Troops Only”. Prof Rice recalls one barmaid telling how the white American troops would expect to be served before black soldiers, but she always refused and served the beer to whoever was there first.
So the night of 24 June saw quite a remarkable happening; white British soldiers and the residents of a Lancashire community standing shoulder to shoulder with a small group of black Americans against what they saw as the bullying, racist, unjust tactics of the MPs. Knowing they were beaten, the MPs fled. But the night was not over by a long shot. And at the end of it, one of the black soldiers would be dead.
After the crowd had seen off the MPs, the black soldiers began to walk back to the base. But the MPs had not gone for good; they had merely gone to get reinforcements. And they came back in large numbers to apprehend the group.
What had been fisticuffs in the pub became more serious in the streets. The MPs, their numbers swelled and armed with weapons, tried to apprehend the black soldiers, who fought back, throwing cobblestones at the police. Rice says that the black soldiers would have been unarmed, being off duty in the town.
The MPs apparently had no compunctions about discharging their weapons in a residential civilian area. Rice reports that one bullet went straight through a window of a house and narrowly missed a mother nursing her newborn baby. Witness reports that were gathered much later on from residents who remembered the night said that the shooting went on until 3am. One of the back shoulders was killed during the confrontation. Private William Crossland had been shot in the back.
Even as the MPs overpowered the black soldiers at last, though, the night was not over. The remaining black soldiers back at the Adams Hall base had started to hear what happened. And, fearing that the MPs had their blood up and were out to target black soldiers, they took action.
The morning after the incident the military police apparently went around the whole area, digging bullets out of the brickwork and removing any evidence about the incident
What had begun as an argument in a pub was now a full-blown mutiny. Details are sketchy once the action was removed back to the base, but in 1978 a professor of history at Radford College, West Virginia, named Dr Ken Werrell, unearthed some records which were published in a magazine called After The Battle.
Dr Werrell wrote that a crowd of around 200 soldiers gathered on the base and some of the black GIs broke into the armoury to liberate the rifles, and tried to get back into Bamber Bridge in search of the MPs, but they were talked out of it by the unit’s only black officer, who said that he would get the white officers to listen to their grievances.
But perhaps the flames had been fanned too much by Detroit, and the black soldiers maintained their arms, until an armoured vehicle turned up, containing about a dozen MPs and fitted with a machine gun.
There was more exchange of gunfire and several soldiers were injured. The battle ran on until the early hours, some six or seven hours after it had begun in Ye Olde Hob Inn. The uprising had been quelled, and with the loss of one life, which Rice says in some ways is remarkable given the amount of gunfire that was exchanged.
In the wake of what has become known locally as the Battle of Bamber Bridge, around 35 soldiers were charged with mutiny, seizing arms, rioting, firing on officers and MPs and ignoring orders. At military trials conducted in Lancashire and Bushy Park, Teddington, they were handed various sentences ranging from three months in prison to 15 years. Within a year most of the men were back on active duty.
The Battle of Bamber Bridge was a major incident, and yet it seems to be largely forgotten today, outside of the immediate local area. And that might not be an accident, says Rice.
In fact, it was 40 years after the night of violence, which had then been forgotten even by many local people, when it came to light again. Clinton Smith, who worked for the Milk Marketing Board, was doing some work in Bamber Bridge and noticed on the exterior of the NatWest bank, what he jokingly referred to as big termite holes to a friend, who told him that they were, in fact, bullet holes.
Smith, who is now the chair of the Preston Black History Group, then learned the story of the Battle of Bamber Bridge for the first time, and he says that over the next few years it “haunted” him, until he decided to find out more. His research resulted in meeting Rice and the pair planning a symposium at the university which was held to mark the 70th anniversary in 2013.
For Smith, the incident has achieved almost folklorish status. He says: “People remember a version of it, or bits and pieces of it, that have been passed down to them.
“For me, the thing that stands out most is that the local people of Bamber Bridge sided with the soldiers. They stood up to the American military and said, ’this is our back yard. You can’t be coming and doing that here’.”
The local feelings ran beyond that night of violence, too. Smith says: “When the first trials were held locally, a lot of the locals considered them to merely be a kangaroo court, nothing better than lynchings, so they lobbied for fairer trials.”
Smith is hoping to mark the 80th anniversary of the battle, in 2023, with another event. “The importance of it is huge,” he says. ”This was more than 20 years before the civil rights movement got going properly in America, and the Black Lives Matters protests today have resonances as well. The more you look at what happened that night, the more commonalities we can find with other events through history.“
Rice says: “The morning after the incident the military police apparently went around the whole area, digging bullets out of the brickwork and removing any evidence of the incident. Although those who had witnessed it and taken part in it locally had full memories of it, it only made one paragraph in the local paper. It was massively played down by the American military.”
The importance of the incident should not be underestimated, says Rice. “The irony is that we were fighting a global war against fascism and right here in Britain we were allowing that to happen with a Jim Crow army. Can you imagine, a segregated army fighting fascism? What was presented as a liberating army was utterly compromised by segregation. The officer class was often southern white men and the soldiers were policed by a fundamentally white police force.”
At the time, Bamber Bridge would have been a very white community. Probably exclusively so. Preston has a large Afro-Caribbean population today but that was not established until the 1950s and 1960s. Does the fact that the white population essentially stood with the black soldiers illustrate some kind of precursor to today’s Black Lives Matter protests?
Yes, and no, says Rice. “The people of Bamber Bridge had no truck with the segregation and racism the Americans brought over. But by the same score, having different people in your community, if you know it is a temporary thing, is very different to having other cultures come in due to permanent migration. Obviously, segregation was a very visible example of racism, but British racism was exhibited in other ways once waves of migration began to appear after the war.”
That said, the mutiny in June 1943 could have heralded a sea change in attitudes… if it had been allowed to. “There was a moment, that Bamber Bridge moment, when something could have happened. Something could have changed,” says Rice. “There could have been an opportunity for everyone to look at what had happened, for the British authorities to say, look, we cannot allow this kind of segregation to take place in our country. But instead everyone doubled down on it, and the incident was allowed to be hushed up and the Americans got away with it. It could have been a point where everything changed.”
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