So little research has been undertaken on the part played by United Kingdom-based Black British soldiers in the First World War that as recently as 2009 a newspaper felt moved to publish an article on the discovery of just one image of a Black Tommy rescued from a skip in northern France. The image was one of almost 400 snaps of British soldiers taking part in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Preserved on glass plates, the photographs had lain undisturbed for more than ninety years in the attic of an old barn some ten miles behind the Somme battlefields and only came to light when the barn changed hands in 2007. They are a poignant reminder of the British Army's part in the Battle of the Somme, the single most murderous battle of the war in which 400,000 British and colonial soldiers died. The image of the single Black Tommy in this instance is just one of many whose memory is preserved only because his image was stumbled upon by military enthusiasts.

IDENTIFICATION OF BLACK BRITISH RECRUITS

As photographs of black First World War soldiers in local archives were so rare, in 2013–14 Karen O'Rourke, Curator of the Kings (Liverpool) Regiment Gallery of the Museum of Liverpool, instigated a project aimed at encouraging local black families to research their First World War family histories in order to collect memories to fill a gap in the museum's archives. In the course of this project, the particulars of some Black British soldiers were found to be already held in the museum's collections, but until families came forward and identified their ancestors, their race had not been known. This was just one of the problems of identification making it extremely difficult to ascertain accurate figures of ‘Black Tommies’.

There is perhaps some irony in the fact that researching individual soldiers and military statistics in the First World War relating to black troops from relatively geographically distant African and Caribbean regiments can sometimes be easier than identifying the race of British soldiers born or resident in the United Kingdom at time of recruitment. There are a number of reasons for this archival invisibility, causing the image of the First World War Black Tommy to be considered perhaps something of an anomaly in our time, despite the common presence of black soldiers in the present-day British Army.