G emma R omain . Race, Sexuality and Identity in Britain and Jamaica

In 2013, Juliet Gardiner spoke on a BBC Radio 4 broadcast, expressing her uneasiness about shots of a black soldier at Dunkirk in a 2007 film. The film—Atonement—was well known to Gardiner because she had acted as its historical consultant. It was “almost impossible,” Gardiner claimed, that a black soldier would have served in the British Expeditionary Force in France, and his inclusion in the film therefore gave “a misleading impression of how Britain was at the time” (quoted on 201). Gemma Romain includes this information about Gardiner’s claim in the epilogue to her book Race, Sexuality and Identity in Britain and Jamaica: The Biography of Patrick Nelson, 1916–1963. In 1940, Patrick Nelson was a black soldier serving in the British Expeditionary Force in France, where he was captured and held in various German prisoner-of-war camps until 1944. Nelson had emigrated to Britain from Jamaica in 1937, returning briefly to Jamaica after several months and then emigrating again to Britain in 1938. There were further journeys between Jamaica and Britain, and he ultimately died in Britain in 1963.

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