Arthur Roberts was a black Scottish soldier who survived the first world war and ended his days in an old people’s home in Glasgow. His name would have been lost to us were it not for a remarkable sequence of events. In the autumn of 2004 a young couple found his diaries, letters and photographs in a house they had bought in the city a few years earlier. The diaries were written over the course of a single year: 1917. In his diary, he detailed his experiences of war and loss, of heavy shelling, blood-covered rations, of comrades he witnessed dying. Arthur, who had died in 1982, was miraculously returned, his voice brought back to life.

There were no black troops included in the Peace March of July 1919, a victory parade held in London to mark the end of the war. Allison O’Neill, one of the care workers in the home where Arthur spent the last of his days, said that he had felt forgotten on Remembrance Sundays. He would go and sit in his room and not watch the ceremonies on television. Perhaps he had tired of the “glory of war” and the “old lies”, and perhaps the wound cut deeper. It is one thing to make sacrifices; it is quite another thing to become the victim of a kind of national amnesia. Reading Arthur’s diaries and looking at his photographs, I felt compelled to save his face, commit him to memory.

Arthur Roberts, left, with two soldiers. Photograph: Hopscotch Films

When Arthur came back from the war, he returned to his job at Harland and Wolff shipyard to work on the vessels that made the Clyde famous. In 1919, there were race riots in port cities across the country, including Glasgow. Arthur would have come home from a place where he was fighting alongside men to a place where the same men were effectively turning on him. The Aliens Restriction Act 1914, extended in 1919, effectively made Arthur a foreigner in his own country. In the shipyards, he was called a “black bastard” a few times.

I got a very real sense of Arthur from reading his diaries – of his kindness, his empathy, his spirit, his pride, the ways he dealt with the horrors he had witnessed. At one point he writes: “The dead were so numerous it was impossible to proceed without walking on them.” When we put on our red poppies this year, we should be remembering, too, the soldiers like Arthur, who knew every type of loss yet whose dark faces were missing from the victory parades, whose stories have been lost.

• Jackie Kay’s documentary A Scottish Soldier is on BBC Four on Monday at 10pm.

The Looks of Loss

He lost the party, or the party lost him;

And the list of losses came almost nightly.

How already he’d lost his smile, his grace.

How at night, or under the morning mist, he lost face.

How for miles he plodded making his list of losses.

He knew the faces of loss as intimately as his own.

He knew loss’s husky voice, its strange frown.

He knew the way its hair fell out; the way loss fell down.

He knew loss. He’d been in loss’s town.



And the next thing he was half lying against a wagon in the rain

And who knew where he came from, or to where he would go?

After the third Battle of Ypres, they were soon dispersed

And he kept that loss close lest he should ever forget.



He knew the colour of loss, its park benches

He knew the smell of loss took him to the trenches.

He knew the glaikit gazes, the lost sons’ faces

He knew loss was not choosy: it could pick out any one.

He knew it carried no watch; grief keeps a different clock,

That to loss the morning or evening were all the same

that he could find loss stock-still, lame.

Or that it could run behind in the rain.

He knew it could jog ahead in real time.

He knew loss’s game, its hiding places.

He knew he wasn’t the only one counting down.

He knew loss. He’d been in loss’s town.



He’d watched lost ships sail down the Clyde

And listened to the noises from childhood loss

The bells and the jingles and midnight owls.

And for years after the war, it seemed that all the losses

Followed him in their old dead boots

And the losses still to come walked ahead in their old dead boots

And everywhere around him was the thud of loss,

Heavy-footed with trench feet, thickly coated in mud.

Seeking the drowsy, the exhausted, the run-down.

He knew loss. He’d been in loss’s town.



Loss like the loss he felt when he waved goodbye to his mother,

like the loss he felt when he wrote to his father.

Loss like the limbo-loss between two cultures

Loss like the loss when you’re wiped out the picture.

Loss like the loss when somebody shouted black bastard

Loss like the loss when the lance corporal died at dinner.

Loss like the loss when he nearly crossed over.

Loss like love lost like lost loves

He knew loss. He didn’t need to write it down.

He’d been in loss’s old sad town.

