Since the beginning of hostilities, there had been other black soldiers waiting in the wings to join Black Tommies in the United Kingdom. The men of the British West Indies, Canada, and Britain's African possessions were all a potential source of manpower in her hour of need, but each had their own difficulties to overcome in order to fulfil what for many was a patriotic desire to serve the Mother Country. British-born Black and black volunteer Tommies, not only from the West Indies, but from other parts of the Black Diaspora, were to find themselves bound in a brotherhood based on race, rather than nationality, conjoined by the machinations of the Colonial Office and the War Office. Although the practice of casual dispersing black troops throughout the British Army could be found in operation at the beginning of the war, as it progressed and with the arrival of the British West Indies Regiment (BWIR), some individual British-born or domiciled black soldiers would be placed into homogeneous units of this regiment or other ‘coloured’ units, such as the Royal Engineers Coloured Section mentioned below. The historian David Killingray comments that it is unlikely that black recruits were always refused, owing to individual recruitment officers being either ignorant of, or disinterested in, policy, not to mention Colonel Abdy, a commissioning officer seen in Chapter Four, who chose to ignore it. This is borne out by the black soldiers recruited in the previous chapter even before the war had begun, such as Mustapha/James Durham, who was formally attested in 1905, and others.

Later inconsistencies in the recruitment of black soldiers in the United Kingdom are difficult to understand without some scrutiny of what was happening in the West Indies. At the beginning of the war, the intransigent War Office resisted the argument for the use of blacks in the war effort, preferring to continue the call for more white soldiers, whether enlisted or, later, conscripted. One of the most bizarre arguments originally put forward was the view that the Germans might object to the use of black soldiers. Even though the Colonial Office shared the prejudices and concerns of the War Office, it was very conscious of the widespread public agitation in the West Indies for a black contingent.