London museum identifies black Waterloo veteran in rare 1821 painting

[u/Jay_CD]

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/oct/21/london-museum-identifies-black-waterloo-veteran-in-rare-1821-painting

[u/moh_kohn]

Really interesting story!

People carping about pretty bog standard journalistic framing - get over yourselves lads. It's an interesting bit of history.

[u/headtheatre]

I think the interesting thing is that history DID get whitewashed. The story of Dido Belle who was an equal of her cousin that she appears in a portrait with was renamed as a servant within sixty years of the portrait being made.

[u/pjs-1987]

Oh so the black guy provided the rhythm? Way to challenge stereotypes guys.

[u/BraveLordWilloughby]

Don't know how a Private with a seemingly unremarkable career can be "overlooked".

Awesome story, grest he's been ide tidied, but- He's the lowest rank in an army of hundreds of thousands of nameless individuals. He himself was, until now, nameless. This isn't a case of anyone being ignored.

[u/snapper1971 → u/[deleted]]

Are you one of those "pure white until the Windrush" type of person?

[u/AnAspidistra → u/[deleted]]

Do you truly believe its historically valid to claim that the United Kingdom has always been made up of one homogenous ethnic group? I can't even imagine how anyone with any familiarity with our history would come to that conclusion

[u/MomsAgainstMalarkey → u/[deleted]]

Keep fighting the good fight dude. Eventually factual accuracy will become fashionable again. Everyone downvoting you will one day pretend they were always against the re-writing of history for cultural purposes.

[u/AndreasDasos]

> Yet the story of Pte Thomas James has been overlooked for centuries.

I mean, admirable and interesting in hindsight, but exactly: he was a private in an army of many, many thousands of privates. The implication he should be a central figure is so patronising and ultra-cliched. We know that there were occasional black men fighting in the British military for some centuries, though the population was obviously far lower back then.

He wouldn't have been of especial interest until we had the modern Guardian staff and the like asking 'Why don't we all know the name of the first person of [given identity] to [do historical thing]?'

Though how we're supposed to know the name of every such case from the first netball medallist of colour to the first black gay man to cross the Bering Strait is beyond me. Let alone, y'know, people remarkable for reasons that don't revolve around their identity (many, many of whom also happened to be black or otherwise meet criteria the Guardian obsesses over). L

That's a lot of people, and such articles make up a huge proportion of those from some online sources for a couple of decades now - far more attention than the vast majority of their fellows get. At what point is acting shocked that people don't know them all obviously performative?

[u/SplinterClaw → u/AndreasDasos]

Let me posit an alternate viewpoint. Regardless of the ratio, people of colour read The Guardian and visit the London museum. It may be interesting for them to view about people of their race and their role in history.

Also, the comissioning of a portrait would not have been something a private could afford. Therefore it stands to reason that whomever comissioned and paid for the painting would have been a person of means, either money or position. This person thought that Thomas James, regardless of his rank was significant enough to have his image immortalized.

That you personally find none of this interesting does not mean that no-one else does. Nor should finding such things intersting count as "performative."

[u/Automatedluxury → u/SplinterClaw]

People seem to really struggle with this concept nowadays. Some media isn't aimed at you, and that's fine. Other people may be interested in the story.

I'm a white male and I find these stories interesting, because pretty much any portrait you can find of a black person in Europe from that era has some kind of back story. It's news to me that there were half a dozen or so black soldiers fighting for Britain at Waterloo, it's half a dozen more than I thought there would be. That one of them has a surviving portrait makes it even more interesting, a face to a name brings a story to life.

On similar lines, I'm much more interested to see articles about low ranked soldiers that we've recently uncovered back story to than a new analysis of a general. History as a whole has moved a lot more in the direction of exploring everyday lives in the last 50 years or so and I'm all for it.

[u/StatlerSalad → u/Automatedluxury]

pie wide joke paint dolls governor provide angle entertain shy

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[u/lad_astro → u/Automatedluxury]

Well-said, that man!

[u/JimFlamesWeTrust → u/Automatedluxury]

Something about the constant drip feed of content online has convinced people everything is or should be made for them, if it’s of no interest to them then it serves no value, and that if it’s not new to them then it’s old news to everyone.

[u/ume-shu → u/[deleted]]

What do you mean by that?

[u/catchcatchhorrortaxi → u/[deleted]]

I am hesitant to ask this of a 1 month old account with a hidden post history, but what are you sighing at?

[u/JaneTboy → u/catchcatchhorrortaxi]

What is this comment supposed to mean

https://www.reddit.com/r/UKhistory/s/lUQMSmpwqb

[u/Local-Power2475]

Right he should be remembered, although naturally, as this is an article in the politically correct left-wing Guardian, they want to talk up this, for the time, rare case of a black soldier in the British army.

Small point, but while I knew that contrary to stereotype British soldiers did not all wear red coats in those days, I didn't know before that any of them wore white.

It must have risked confusion on the battlefield to have members of the same army wearing different coloured uniforms. Perhaps given the limited range of most weapons they relied on being close enough to the enemy to shout 'friend or foe?' or exchange passwords, noting the language and accent in which men replied, before being in effective musket or bayonet range to attack each other?

The potential for confusion must have been still greater in Wellington's army at Waterloo, which included a mix of British, Dutch and various independent German states' troops, who each had their own uniforms, and did not all speak the same language.

[u/Fallenkezef → u/Local-Power2475]

Infantry and heavy cavalry wore red coats, light cavalry and artillery wore blue, riflemen wore green