Connie Mark was born in Kingston, Jamaica and when war was declared, she remembered ‘a mood of fear in Jamaica’. She said the English ‘put the fear of God in us’. She said: ‘We were definitely positively told that the Germans wanted us because we were a stepping stone to the coast of America. So we were on our tenterhooks all the time. Like England, Jamaica is an island. We depended on boats bringing things in. So if you are short of oil because the boat coming in was torpedoed, then the whole bloody island has no oil.’ Connie also remembered the English officers who would ‘go into all the little corners of Jamaica and they would beg, literally beg you to come and fight for England because we were brought up that England was our mother country and obviously when your mother has problems, you’ve got to come and help her.’
Connie was just 19 years old in 1943 when she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) in Jamaica. Unlike other women from the Caribbean islands who joined up and left for England, Connie served in the ATS in Jamaica. She worked as a medical secretary at the British Military Hospital in Kingston. Her duties included typing up the medical reports of those who had been injured in battle. Connie found herself documenting the terrible injuries men had sustained in bombings and combat:
When you are in the army you are on 24 hours duty. The Military Police would come to get me wherever I was and I had to be down at that troop ship. And that’s really when the reality of war came home to me because you saw men leaving hale and hearty and you see them coming back on stretchers, you see them coming back in wheelchairs, some blind.
Connie later founded the Mary Seacole Memorial Association in 1980, which continues to combat inequality by promoting entrepreneurship and achievement.
When the war ended, Connie’s commander had put her up for the British Empire Medal (BEM), but she was not awarded it. She believed she was overlooked because she refused to clean the houses of the English ATS officers. However, in 1992, she did finally receive the BEM, nearly forty years after she had left Jamaica and made London her home. In 2008 Connie was posthumously honoured with a Nubian Jak Community Trust Blue Plaque. It can be seen on the outside of her former home, Mary Seacole House in Hammersmith, London.
This information is from Stephen Bourne's books Mother Country: Britain's Black Community on the Home Front 1939-45 (The History Press, 2010) , The Motherland Calls: Britain's Black Servicemen and Women 1939-45 (The History Press, 2012) and War to Windrush: Black Women in Britain 1939-48 (Jacaranda Books, 2018).
SECOND WORLD WAR CONTENTS:
COMING SOON!
Profiles People
Living through Conflict
A Fight For Freedom
Commonwealth War Graves Commission Stories
Commemoration and Legacy
Artistic Responses to Conflict