The Black General

Brigadier-General Horace Sewell was one of the most distinguished British cavalry officers of the First World War.

In action from the very start of British involvement on the Western Front, he survived the desperate mounted charge with cold steel against artillery and machine guns at Audrigines on 24th August 1914. By March 1915, he had risen to command his regiment, while battlefield bravery won him a DSO in June. A grateful French Republic bestowed the Légion d'honneur the next year. Earning a bar to his DSO at Cambrai in 1917, he was promoted to command the 1st Cavalry Brigade in April 1918, which he led until the war's end - the youngest British cavalry general in the Great War. He was twice wounded, five times mentioned in dispatches, and, after the Armistice, inducted into the noble Order of St Michael and St George. Only a knighthood or a Victoria Cross would have been higher honours.

At first sight, General Sewell appears to have been a conventional hero of a hundred years ago: a younger son of a Victorian gentleman, born in a Welsh mansion and raised in a Gothic castle on the Isle of Wight, he attended Harrow and Cambridge before joining the Army in 1900. On leave in 1916, he married a New York heiress (very much the "in thing" in those days), and after the War, he acquired a medieval manor house in Warwickshire, a coat of arms, and the requisite entry in Burke's Landed Gentry. His son later married a sister of Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, co-heiress of the longest noble pedigree in the British Isles.

In World War II, General Sewell was sent to Washington, D.C., to head up the British public-relations campaign in the USA. He became the prototype of the retired general who enlivens the TV news with informed commentary, and took advantage of his posting in America to spend more time at the Jamaican mansion he had inherited from his elder brother.

That last detail conceals a truth that passes without mention in the memoirs of his comrades, and the biographical sketches that grace the pages of family histories and society almanacs.

Horace Sewell was, as his American acquaintances of the 1940s succinctly put it, "black".

The British general was the grandson of a Caribbean slave.

Mary McCrea was the property of Colonel Malcolm, the pious Scottish proprietor of a Jamaican sugar plantation. William Sewell was the Colonel's accountant, a man with a short, pugilistic temper and a physique to match, born apparently in England's tough north-west and bred in London's rough East End.

Jamaican tradition describes the romance of the slave girl and the book-keeper as a love match, and when the pious Colonel insisted that Mr. Sewell needed to marry a white woman or resign his post, he simply walked out. Mary followed, along with their son Henry.

They opened a small store in a village nearby, selling rum and other supplies. It was an unconventional decision for a white man on Jamaica in the 1830s, but perhaps it was the natural response of a mixed-race couple to the sudden transformation of the island's society. The enslaved population won full emancipation in 1838, and most of them promptly left the plantations to settle down in small communities in the backwoods. Without the inhuman social division of slavery, with no way to compel a large labour force to work for low overheads, conventional wisdom said that the days of the great sugar plantations were over.

Colonel Malcolm's heirs moved back to Argyll, and invented the West Highland Terrier.

But now, William Sewell saw an opportunity. The plantation owners were selling out for any price they could get, shifting to bananas or cutting back production; but the accountant and shopkeeper knew that a collapse in the sugar supply would be followed by a sharp rise in demand, and thus in prices and in profits. The story goes that the agent for a group of absentee owners, desperate to sell, offered to loan him the capital he needed to buy them out; he talked it over with Mary, and they took the risk. Another plantation followed, and another. Within twenty years, William Sewell had built up a vast "sugar empire", and moved from his little rum shop to one of the island's grandest mansions.

The Sewells sent their mixed-race son Henry back to England, where he seems to have taken some pride in the scandal of being a "nigger from Jamaica"; he married a respectable English wife, and the family settled in some style at Llanwrin in Wales, where Horace Somerville Sewell, the future general, was born in 1881. Later, giving up Plas Llwyngwern to the Marquis of Londonderry's sister, they moved to the even grander Steephill Castle overlooking the English Channel; but they always tried to spend part of the year in Arcadia, their eighteenth-century mansion on Jamaica - courtesy of the three-masted sugar clipper Vale Royal, which doubled as a family yacht.

Jamaican historians have described Henry Sewell as "structurally white", a man whose economic power made his origins irrelevant. Contemporary writers pass over his mixed-race ancestry in silence, and the family tradition describes Mary McCrea as a mulatto with a white father, even an admiral's daughter - a claim that, her modern descendants have suggested, may be rather whitewashed.

Jamaican history says that she was happy in her widowhood with a little self-sufficient croft, saving her annual revenue from her son's plantations: when one of her granddaughters, Horace's sister, fell in love with a man who Henry regarded as unsuitable, she provided the girl with a handsome dowry and told her to marry the man she loved.

Presumably she spent time with her youngest grandson, too.

This, then, was the background of Brigadier-General H.S. Sewell, CMG, DSO (and bar), commanding officer of the 4th Dragoon Guards and the 1st Cavalry Brigade on the Western Front.

In hindsight, it seems obvious why the General's nickname was "Sambo", but until the truth was known, scholars simply put this down to the arcane logic of the British soldier, perhaps connected to his three-year secondment leading native troops in West Africa before the war, perhaps to some private joke.

Modern historians were nonplussed when the real reason for his nom de guerre emerged.

But what is more remarkable is that no-one mentioned it. Comrades remembered Sewell as a handsome man (as his father had been), wearing civilian riding-breeches to war, brown corduroy in preference to his uniform jodhpurs. They didn't think it was worth mentioning why they called him Sambo.

Such attitudes weren't completely unprecedented: shortly before the War, a major English novellist had created a plucky mixed-race heiress as a memorable literary heroine (and, like the officers of the 4th Dragoon Guards, he didn't bother to spell it out for the reader, either).

To an extent, these omissions were obviously a way of tacitly stepping around conventional prejudices - they may even be a way of negotiating the writers' own prejudices; but even if they were, they also indicate a tacit truth. In the absence of the enforced barriers that had been supposed to embody a black-and-white distinction between one human being and another, that distinction ceased to exist at all.

Old Etonian officers and strapping young troopers from the Home Counties followed the grandson of a Jamaica slave, the man they called Sambo: they followed him willingly, with drawn sabres, into the shrapnel of the Western Front.

It is somewhat sobering to note that Horace Sewell remains the only general officer in the history of the British Army to be identified as "black".