On 28 August 1914, just three weeks after the war began, officials from the Colonial Office asked their colleagues in the War Office to consider the possibility that a contingent of troops raised in the British West Indies might be permitted to serve abroad. The War Office responded first by questioning the fighting quality of black West Indian men, suggesting they would be ineffectual in the cold of a European winter, and then by proposing that they might be put to better use ‘maintaining order if necessary, in the islands’ of the West Indies.
