Private James Henry Kelly served in the 6th Battalion, East Lancashire Regiment in World War One. He was a weaver in a cotton Mill in Lancashire, England, when he was drafted at the age of 26 to join the army. He came from a working class family of 10 children. He was married at the time with a young wife and three children, all girls, aged three years, two years, and the youngest about three months. The middle child, Agnes, was the mother of my wife Vivienne.
James Kelly was not the first or last of my wife’s close relatives to fight in major wars going back to the Boer war in South Africa. Her great grandfather Harry Ryecroft, whom I wrote about previously, fought in the Boer War in 1900 to 1902 and in the First World War 1914–1918, characterized as the Great War or the war to end all wars. Miraculously he survived both wars. Both men came from Burnley in Lancashire, England The husbands of James Kelly’s three daughters all served in the Second World War 1939 –1945 and survived.
James Kelly enlisted in the so called “draft” in April 1915. When the war broke out in 1914, there was a rush of volunteers to join up for Britain, together with others from various parts of the British Empire, including the Caribbean. Many poor British working class youths enthusiastically enlisted, seeing it as a means of getting fed on a daily basis! After the first year of war in 1915, casualties were such that more men were needed to fill their places. A list was made of British men and “canvassers” came knocking on doors, seeking enlistment in the war effort. Not surprisingly, a number of men changed their residences regularly at this time to avoid the draft.
According to Vivienne’s mother, her grandfather James Kelly was taunted by a Suffragette, an organization of women agitating for women’s rights to vote at that time. The woman reportedly waved a white feather in his face on the street, a symbol of cowardice, to pressure him to enlist. Ironically, the vast majority of soldiers going to war at that time did not even have the right to vote in an election.
James Henry enlisted, despite his views on war and reluctance to leave his wife and young family. My mother-in-law incidentally became active politically and a lifelong pacifist as a result. James Henry’s wife went to live with her mother, taking the three children with her. They never saw their father again. By 1918, six million men had joined up, one in four of the male U.K. population (Imperial War Museum Report). During the war, 886,342 British troops were killed. Among the Allies, there were 5.7 million military deaths and 3.7 million civilian deaths.
James Kelly enlisted in April 1915. He left England on his birthday month of November in 1915 when he turned 27 years old. His wife Jane sent several letters and parcels to him, but he only received one of the parcels. She received a few letters from him and when they came, they came in a bunch with the censors blotting out a number of lines. Sadly a last letter from him arrived on the same day that she received a telegram reporting his death. The choir boy from Burnley would sing no more. A good tap dancer, he would dance no more.
Vivienne’s mother passed on to her, two of James Kelly’s letters from the front which he had sent to a sister and brother. The first one was dated December 12, 1915. It was a Christmas letter in which James indicated that he was in Alexandria, Egypt. He described the camels, the desert and the local people. He said he was not far from the Holy Land.
He ended his Christmas letter with these poignant words: “I wish you all a Happy Xmas and a bright New Year. Let’s hope the war is over by then and we are all back home before long, reunited and together again, never to part again. This will close with love for all. Remember me to all relations and friends. Give them my best respects. Your brother, Jim.”
The other letter was dated March 25th, 1916. He was in Mesopotamia, now called Iraq. Now on the front line, he wrote this letter in a tent, in the trenches, under siege by the Turks. Reports on the conditions of British and Indian units in the battle of Mesopotamia are shocking. The army was under-supplied with guns, shells, small arms and ammunition. Some weapons were literally considered “museum pieces”. It was extremely difficult to supply arms and necessities so far upstream from the Persian Gulf, 500 miles away. Extremes of temperature (over 120F) and an arid desert, flooding, flies, mosquitoes, and vermin led to disease and death.
Reinforcements were half-trained. The wounded spent two weeks on a boat before reaching any kind of a hospital. The British advance to Baghdad had suffered a resounding defeat by the Turks in November 1915 which led to the retreat to Kut-al-Amara. The army in Kut was surrounded and besieged until April 1916 when they surrendered to the Turks. British losses in the action were estimated at 1,300 killed and wounded and 9,000 soldiers surrendered – 3,000 British and 6,000 Indian. This was considered the greatest defeat and loss in British military history up to that point in time.
James Kelly was one of the starving soldiers in Kut-al-Amara. During the siege, rations for the soldiers consisted of horse and mule meat, grass and other unpalatable fare! Some soldiers refused to eat the meat (horse and mule) on religious or other grounds and were further terribly weakened.
On March 25th 1915, during the siege, Private Kelly wrote this letter to a sister and brother. He indicated that he had got two letters from his wife the day before and one from her mother. He indicated that they were on the banks of the Tigris River. He said the troops depended on the Tigris River for everything they got. He said “God only knows what we would do without it.” He continued, “If you think of sending presents, send them in a kind of food please. It is the best thing that you can send.” (He was starving at the time and it seems that the censors went to work to block out parts of the letter to spare the relatives the details). “We get tobacco now and again and clothes are no good because it is hot in the day but damn cold at night. It is just the Indian weather.” (The British were fighting alongside Indian troops.)
He continues, ”We can see and hear the firing, rather lively at times but of course it is all in war. We only get a bit of news. I don’t know anything about the war. I wish to the Lord it was all over. Even the camels are fed up. They have got the hump.” (A form of British humour meaning the camels are fed up). “We have to keep on struggling. Surely it cannot last forever, can it? So buck up.” (cheer up). “I hope and pray for it every night. Where I am, I am well. This will close my letter this time. Remember me to all friends and give my best respects to all. Excuse the writing. Only very little room in a tent. Your faithful brother, Jim”. About one week later, Private Jim Kelly took a bullet in the head! (To be continued...)
Sources: The Burnley Express Newspaper, 1917. Personal family letters of James Kelly from the Front, World War One, and other correspondence passed on to Vivienne Heydorn by her mother Agnes Niles (1913 – 2000); Imperial War Museum Report; The Long, Long Trail – The story of the British Army in the Great War of 1914-1918 Mesopotamia.

By Romeo Kaseram

Sylvia Wynter was born on May 11, 1928, in Holguin, Cuba, to Percival and Lola Maude Wynter. Both Percival and Lola Maude were Jamaican nationals, with father a tailor, and mother an actress. When Wynter was two, the family moved back to Jamaica, where she was educated at the St Andrew High School for Girls. In 1946, Wynter received an award, the Jamaica Centenary Scholarship for Girls, and traveled to King's College London, where she acquired her Bachelor of Arts in Modern Languages (Spanish Literature) from 1947-1951. In December 1953 she was awarded a Master of Arts degree from the University of Madrid for studies in the Golden Age in Spanish Literature, for her thesis on a Spanish comedia, Á lo que obliga el honor.
The publisher, Peepal Tree Press, notes Wynter’s university studies became the basis for her forthcoming writing and scholarship in its “rethinking of the modern world system, as first initiated by the voyages of the Portuguese into West Africa and the Spanish into the Americas”. Following her university studies, Wynter worked with the BBC’s Caribbean Voices, and for its Third Program, creating and adapting radio dramas. She met the Guyanese novelist Jan Carew in 1956, who became her second husband. The couple collaborated on a radio drama, The University of Hunger, which was later rewritten for television as The Big Pride. In 1958, Wynter completed Under the Sun, a full-length stage play, which was performed by the Royal Court Theatre in London. Her novel, The Hills of Hebron, was published in 1962 by Simon and Schuster.
Also in 1962, Jamaica gained political independence from Britain, and a year later, after separating from Carew, Wynter returned to the homeland, joining the faculty at the University of the West Indies, Mona, as an assistant lecturer in Hispanic Literature. Peepal Tree Press notes the return to newly-independent Jamaica and its changed, political landscape to be an important juncture in her career: “The anti-colonial movement that had cut across her childhood and which had provided the themes of her earlier writing, would now serve as the theoretical point of departure for her decolonising reconceptualisation of the history of Jamaica and the Caribbean, as founding regions of the Western world-system, and therefore of contemporary modernity.” It adds, “Doing so, she was to form part of a generation of Caribbean and Black American thinkers who sought to reinterpret the history of the modern world from the perspective of the plantation system of the ex-slave archipelago of the Americas.” Additionally, Peepal Tree Press notes as part of this movement, Wynter helped to found the Jamaica Journal, and became a contributor to the Caribbean Quarterly, New World Quarterly, and Savacou, publications that were involved in a similar post-colonial imperative.
Wynter taught at Mona until 1974, when she was invited to join the faculty of the University of California at San Diego. As Peepal Tree Press notes, this invitation was made on the solid foundation that had been built by Wynter’s scholarly work and writings, notably in her essays, along within “the context of the myriad political and social movements of the 1960s United States”. At the University of California at San Diego, Wynter taught in the new Literature and Society in the Third World Program. In 1977, Wynter moved to Stanford University following another invitation, where she taught in the two departments – Spanish and Portuguese, and in what had then grown to become the new post-1960s Afro-American Studies Program.
Writing in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, Michael Reckord tells us the body of Wynter’s major, imaginative work include her only novel, The Hills of Hebron, a few published poems, and several plays. Reckord adds the plays are diverse in form and subject matter. The work, Shh ... it’s a Wedding (1962) is a musical; 1865: Ballad for a Rebellion (1965) is the story of a major peasant rebellion; and Under the Sun is a full-length stage play that became the basis for the novel, The Hills of Hebron. Her Rockstone Anancy (1970), with Alex Gradussov, is a Jamaican pantomime; Maskarade, a folk musical, was published in West Indian Plays for Schools (1979), and was co-written with Jim Nelson and Olive Lewin. Under the Sun was bought by London's Royal Court Theatre, and broadcast in a radio version in England, the US, Denmark, Canada, and Jamaica.
Additionally, Reckord notes, “Wynter's critical work is extensive and is concerned with issues of race, African heritage, art, culture, literature and the effects of colonialism. In We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism (Jamaica Journal, 2, 1968-69), she states that she writes to define herself as ‘a Jamaican, a West Indian, an American’. In Creole Criticism: A Critique of Caribbean Cultural Concepts' (New World Quarterly, 5, 1973) she strikes out at attempts by critics to negate ‘the African centrality in the cultural dynamic of the Caribbean peoples’.”
In describing Wynter’s scholarship, Wikipedia notes her “work is highly poetic, expository, and complex”. It is an attempt “to elucidate the development and maintenance of modernity and the modern man”, with Wynter interweaving “science, philosophy, literary theory, and critical race theory to explain how the European man came to be considered the epitome of humanity, ‘Man 2’ or ‘the figure of man.’” It adds: “In Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument, Wynter explains that the West uses race to attempt to answer the questions of who and what we are – particularly after the enlightenment period that unveils religion as incapable of answering those questions.”
Writing in Global Social Theory, Lisa Tilley notes Wynter’s body of work to be a “formidable canon” that spans “many creative and intellectual modes of expression”. Tilley adds: “All of these varied expressions are denominated by a profound anticolonial ethos, making up works of hope and redemption, as well as of pain and injustice. Wynter’s central themes include the sociogeny of Fanon and the secularisation of humanism as a formative world event – from which she traces the rise of Europe out of the ‘epochal redescription’ of the human by Renaissance humanists.”
Wynter is Professor Emerita following retirement from Stanford in 1994, and lives in Northern California’s Bay Area. In 2010, she received the Order of Jamaica for services in the fields of education, history, and culture.

Sources for this exploration: Wikipedia; Global Social Theory: https://globalsocialtheory.org/thinkers/wynter-sylvia/; Peepal Tree Press; and, Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-colonial Literatures in English.

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