Gemma Romain
In Race, Sexuality and Identity in Britain and Jamaica Gemma Romain explores the intersections of the diverse aspects of Patrick Nelson’s life. She demonstrates how such marginalized histories shed light on our understanding of broader historical themes such as Black LGBTQ history, Black British history in relation to the London art world, the history of the Second World War, and histories of racism, colonialism and empire. NOTCHES is grateful to Bloomsbury for permission to publish this edited extract.
In December 1945 Patrick Nelson wrote from Jamaica to his former lover and lifelong friend, the Bloomsbury Group artist Duncan Grant, that one day he would be sure to write his life story. To my knowledge this life story was never penned and both this sentiment and the material absence bring to the fore the loss to historical memory arising from the many lives that have never been or never will be documented in historical accounts, memoirs or autobiographies. Patrick’s compelling and fascinating life story is more accessible than most as his many personal letters have been preserved within archival holdings. This book […] examines his life in various ways, by exploring Patrick as a queer black Jamaican man, a queer black migrant in interwar London, a serviceman in the Second World War, a prisoner of war (POW) and a witness to Jamaican histories of colonialism and decolonization. His story truly exemplifies how important it is to remember diverse histories and lives within mainstream historical and public memory relating to modern British history.
Leopold St Patrick Nelson was one of many Caribbean people who migrated to Britain in the early twentieth century. Born in Jamaica in March 1916, he grew up in a working-class black family and as a young man worked in Jamaica’s growing tourism industry as a valet at the Manor House Hotel in Kingston. He first travelled to Britain in April 1937 to work as a valet for Lyulph Stanley (the younger brother of Lord Stanley of Alderley) in rural North Wales. Returning to Jamaica for a brief period later that year he remigrated to Britain in March 1938 and went on to serve in the British Army in the Second World War. Captured during May 1940, he was made a POW, imprisoned in various camps including Stalag 8b/344 for over four years. He met the Bloomsbury group artist Duncan Grant at some point during the late 1930s; the pair became lovers and Patrick also modelled for him during this time. They then maintained a long-distance friendship for almost twenty-five years through correspondence which took place in the late 1930s, throughout Patrick’s POW captivity and post-war life in Jamaica. Remigrating to London in the early 1960s, Patrick died in 1963.
This biography explores Patrick’s life by utilizing letters, paintings and drawings, along with newspaper articles. In particular, the breadth and detail of his personal letters allow the biography to document significant and unexplored insights into wider histories relating to Britain’s empire, sexuality and race. The biography posits Patrick’s life within histories of Jamaican migration to early-twentieth-century Britain and examines themes and topics including the interwar Bloomsbury group; sexuality, love, class and race; the diverse and complex black presence in interwar Britain; the prisoner of war experience, black POWs and the effects of captivity on post-war life; and empire and colonialism in post-war Jamaica.
In 2012 Caroline Bressey and I embarked on a research project entitled Drawing over the Colour Line: Geographies of art and cosmopolitan politics in London, 1919–1939 based at UCL and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), which sought to uncover the life experiences of artists and artist models of African and Asian heritage in interwar London. Within a British context, research on the interwar black presence within art history writing and histories of modernism has been neglected. There have, however, been notable exceptions such as Mary Lou Emery’s 2007 Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature which explored the 1930s art of Jamaican sculptor Ronald Moody. Similarly, as regards black British history writing, important works have been published focusing on interwar black London in regard to literature and politics, but there is limited research on the experiences and presence of black people in London’s interwar art world in relation to the broader black presence. Drawing over the Colour Line’s main focus was an exploration of the history of black artists and artist models, examining their experiences in posing for portraits and also positioning these narratives within a wider political and social historical context of the black British presence. First coming across the name Patrick Nelson in a paragraph of Frances Spalding’s 1997 biography of Duncan Grant, which mentioned they had been lovers, I sought to research Patrick’s personal letters mentioned in this work and find out about his experiences of living and working in interwar London. […]
[R]econstructing Patrick Nelson’s life and background has been and continues to be a complex and difficult endeavour, as is writing the life of anyone who is not famous or an elite or whose life was not the subject of much public attention during their lifetime. However, reading along and against the grain of archival sources can uncover stories and experiences which help to construct life histories. In using the term ‘reading against the grain’ I refer here to historians and archivists who read and use archives keeping in mind the reasons for the collection’s creation and the methodology used by the creator of the collection, but also read the archive in a different way to that intended by the creator of the document or archive. This reading is undertaken in order to uncover ‘marginal’ or ‘hidden histories’ such as those found within archives organized by colonial elites, which shed light often unintentionally on the lives of colonial subjects. The archival practice and theory relating to ‘reading along’ and ‘reading against the grain’ of the archive has recently been explored by Ann Laura Stoler. Stoler has explored colonial archives by understanding that scholars need to explore the reasons for their construction (by reading along the grain of the archive) and then explore how these reasons serve to shape the contents of the archive. Stoler argues that ‘scholars need to move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject’ and ‘that scholars should view archives not as sites of knowledge retrieval, but of knowledge production, as monuments of states as well as sites of state ethnography’. […]
It is the aim of this book that Patrick’s life experiences be examined from (where possible) his own perspective and not primarily through the lens of elite friends or lovers such as Duncan Grant, though these connections are explored extensively as they were an important constituent of his identity and life story. Patrick’s letters provide an immediate and intimate way in which to explore his identity and experiences. Letters preserved in archives are a key source of information for historians and are utilized by scholars of language, sociology and biography. Liz Stanley has found that ‘letters disturb binary distinctions: between speaking and writing and private and public, as well as between here and there, now and then, and presence and absence.’
However, letters written by African and Asian people in Britain are often not reflected on or included as sources in constructing histories of modern Britain. Santanu Das has investigated some of the thousands of letters Indian troops wrote from France during the First World War by exploring extracts of the letters now preserved in the British Library, and Das’ investigation is of particular resonance for this book. Between March and April 1915, Das states, about 10,000 letters a week were written by Indian soldiers in France and, though the original letters are not preserved in the archive, extracts of the letters were translated by colonial censors and these extracts are now preserved in the India Office Library. Das argues, ‘More has been written about the four major English war poets than the four million non-white colonial men who served.’
This biography also focuses on Patrick’s emotion and affect; how through his letter writing he comprehends and makes sense of not only significant political and military histories but also his personal role in these histories. He also documents and explores his personal life and experiences including his queer identity, his sexuality and experiences of love and affection. Patrick utilized letter writing for various reasons – to keep in touch with lovers and friends such as Duncan, to help with loneliness, and to share news and ideas. In the Tate Archive, we only have Patrick’s letters sent to Duncan so we cannot understand Patrick’s experiences of letter writing in relation to keeping in touch with family members and other friends besides Duncan. However, in these letters to Duncan, he expresses a range of viewpoints, reactions and thoughts on political events, religious identity and queer identity. Many of his letters were written during his confinement as a POW in the Second World War. Here we have a crucial narrative formed by a black colonial POW expressing detailed, day-to-day wartime experiences. These are letters composed according to the conventions and censor restrictions imposed on POWs. They nevertheless convey much about Patrick’s personality, experiences and emotions from his own point of view. […]
Patrick’s life intersected with several key moments within British and Jamaican history [and] provides rich detail and greater clarity to historical reflections of a range of topics and themes. Marginalized or under-explored voices and memories, as found in sources such as private letters, can provide historians with more complex, multifaceted and nuanced understandings of broader historical phenomena. Through an examination of Patrick’s life story – his experiences of life in the hotel industry of 1930s Jamaica, of being a black migrant in both rural Wales and cosmopolitan London, interacting with members of the Bloomsbury Group and Queer and Black 1930s and 1940s Britain in addition to his life in post-war Jamaica viewing the political processes of decolonization – we learn much about interwar, wartime and post-war Britain and Jamaica.
Gemma Romain is a historian of the Caribbean and Black Britain. She researches, curates and writes on Black British queer histories, and African-Caribbean diasporic histories with a focus on Grenada and Jamaica. She has worked at The Equiano Centre and is an Honorary Fellow of The Parkes Institute. She was the co-curator with Caroline Bressey, Emma Chambers and Inga Fraser of the Tate Britain display ‘Spaces of Black Modernism: London 1919–39’.
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