Though all but forgotten today, the remarkable life of the black working-class Jamaican bisexual Patrick Nelson is recovered and brilliantly contextualized in this painstakingly researched “labour of love” by Gemma Romain, one of the leading historians of twentieth-century black British “everyday histories and memories” (48).

Patrick Nelson (oddly, referred to by Romain as “Patrick” throughout) was born into a quite conservative, Catholic, working-class family in downtown Kingston, capital of colonial Jamaica in 1916. His father, Leopold Constantine Nelson, was a shoemaker and well-known local cricketer who had played for the Jamaican national team and was the long-standing and brilliant wicket keeper for Lucas Cricket Club. In the institutionally racist and racially stratified world of colonial West Indian cricket, Lucas Cricket Club not only provided, as Romain notes, “a space for black working-class cricketers to play” (14) but also would regularly inflict defeats on the long-established clubs of the white colonial elite, such as Kingston Cricket Club. Yet Leopold Nelson does not seem to have been particularly politically radical or influenced by Garveyism. He had served as a gunner in the First World War in the Jamaica Militia Artillery, defending this colonial outpost of the British Empire. Patrick Nelson's mother Gertrude was a domestic, a higgler (street vendor), and a washerwoman, and she raised seven children.

Patrick Nelson's identification with “imperial Britishness,” as Anne Spry Rush has termed it, can be seen from his active membership of the Jamaican Scouts over thirty years. He also took elocution lessons and was later described as having a “natural Oxford accent,” though the latter may have arisen primarily from his early work as a valet (34). Nelson worked as a valet at Manor House Hotel in Kingston, a former plantation “great house” now redesigned as a luxury resort aimed at European and American tourists. In 1937, Nelson, aged twenty-one, “found favour with Lord Stanley” and left “Jamaica to enjoy the patronage thus transmitted to him and so characteristic of British aristocracy—the recognition of character,” as noted by the local conservative paper, the Jamaican Gleaner (9). Had he stayed, it is possible he may well have been caught up in the Jamaican labor rebellion of 1938, out of which formed new unions, including the Jamaica Hotel Employees’ Association.

With respect to this black colonial subject's “journey in” to imperial Britain, Nelson then went first to North Wales, to Penrhos, to work for L.V.H.O. Stanley for a brief period as a gentleman's valet. Though of very different backgrounds, both Nelson and Stanley were gay men around the same age, and Romain alludes to a possible relationship between the two. After a spell back in Jamaica and then in Bristol, in 1938 Nelson moved to London, where he met Duncan Grant, an important artist at the center of the Bloomsbury Group and whose grandfather Sir John Peter Grant had been a colonial governor in Jamaica in the 1870s. Romain's study of their relationship—when Nelson posed for a number of portraits for Grant—opens up a window on “black life” in “queer interwar venues” in London, and she details the various “spaces for sexually diverse patrons,” particularly in Soho (93).

Nelson served in the Second World War in the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps (76 Company)—originally formed in the First World War as the Labour Corps—after possibly having been blocked from joining the Royal Air Force as a result of institutional racism. He was posted to France with the British Expeditionary Force before being wounded and captured in May 1940 near Dunkirk by German forces. Held as a prisoner of war in Germany for four years, he was able to communicate and receive parcels, including books on law sent by Grant, though he suffered mental ill health as a result of his experience and treatment in captivity. Nelson later explained to a reporter that he never made any attempt at escape as “it would have been easy to pick up a man of his colour in Germany; so he remained patiently awaiting the Allied victory” (146). Though not covered in Romain's book, the story of Captain Birendranath Mazumdar, who was sent to Oflag IV, Colditz testifies to the fact that some other British colonial subject prisoners of war of color did, however, attempt escapes, against the odds.

The remainder of Nelson's life was a quiet, and indeed quite sad and lonely one spent mainly looking for odd bits of work in both postwar Jamaica and then London, tracked as far as possible through Romain's meticulous contextualization of scattered letters ranging over a twenty-five-year period. Though then a witness to decolonization, Nelson was an observer rather than a participant in the nationalist movement and clearly always retained a certain respect for British imperial values.

Amid the homophobia of Jamaica and wider contemporary Anglophone Caribbean today—a legacy of the British colonial era when homosexual acts were criminalized as “unnatural offences” (49)—the importance of recovering Caribbean lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender lives like that of Patrick Nelson remains self-evident. While Nelson never had the fame of the black queer Jamaican revolutionary writer Claude McKay, Romain's “biography from below,” to use the term of Marcus Rediker, demonstrates that a pioneering work of microhistory about an individual life such as this can still act as a prism to cast light more widely on both queer interwar Jamaica and “black London,” and her work stands as an outstanding contribution to the emerging field of “queer black histories” in general.