Imperial Flights and Encounters: recovering the experiences of People of Colour in Scottish wartime aviation, 1914-1945

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This PhD will be the first sustained attempt to recover and reconstruct the presence of Personnel of Colour within the RAF in Scotland during the two world wars. This project aims to demonstrate the diversity of people connected to flying in Scotland between 1914-1945, understand the contributions made and experiences of those individuals, and evidence this through material culture and archival research. It will involve a re-examination of Scottish aviation collections in order to consider how such stories are, or could be, represented in museum collections and displays. In 1945 an Air Ministry memorandum estimated that 422 Caribbean, West African and South Asian people had served as aircrew with the RAF during the Second World War, with a further 3,900 serving as ground crew. In the First World War men from India also played active roles in the Royal Flying Corps, and the Royal Indian Airforce was formed in 1932 with men and women from India being trained and serving in the UK and India throughout the Second World War. It is difficult to know the exact figures of men and women from across the British Empire that served with the RAF, as ethnicity was not automatically recorded on enrolment. At East Fortune airfield in Scotland, now the National Museum of Flight, it is known from personal recorded testimonies and from the airfield's own Operations Record Book that people came to be trained from all around the world, including pilots and aircrew from Trinidad and Jamaica. Their connections to Scotland range from initial arrival, to being based in Scotland as part of a squadron, attachment to air bases or travelling to Scotland for training. However, their contributions to the war effort are not reflected in the histories told at the National Museum of Flight nor at any of the other aviation museums in Scotland. This project aims to recover and reconstruct narratives and stories of service personnel of colour from across UK and international museums, archives, service associations and other cultural societies. It will broaden our understanding of the experience of war in Scotland, Scotland's historic connections with Atlantic slavery, enduring imperial relationships and reciprocal diasporic legacies. As well as analysing narratives and peopling the histories of places in Scotland, this project is also an opportunity to identify surviving material culture to enhance the collections and contribute to future displays at National Museums Scotland.The project will fit in line with contemporary military historiography which puts the experiences of people at the forefront of the research. In addition, it will also parallel current museology theory relating to how museum collections can be used to empower the communities they serve and how museums are increasingly becoming activists in their own right. Relating to this, the findings of this PhD will link closely to the goals outlined in the Museum Association's Decolonising Museums and Empowering Collections campaigns.