My friend Allan Wilmot, who has died aged 96, was one of the oldest surviving Caribbean second world war veterans. Allan was unusual as a black serviceman during the conflict because he served in both the Royal Navy and the RAF.
The youngest of five children, he was born to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica, which was then under British colonial rule. His father, Charles, was the captain of a merchant navy ship. His mother, Alice, brought up Allan and his three sisters and brother and did voluntary work in the community. In his 2015 autobiography Now You Know, Allan wrote: “I soon became aware of the poverty that many other Jamaicans families experienced.”
From Wesley school, Allan won a scholarship to Wolmer’s high school. Aged 16 he volunteered for the Royal Navy in 1941, responding to an advertisement for recruits in the Jamaican Daily Gleaner newspaper. He served on HMS Hauken in Caribbean waters where German submarines lurked, sinking many British ships. Allan starred in my 2015 BBC TV film Fighting for King and Empire, Britain’s Caribbean Heroes, and he told me his search and rescue team pulled hundreds of sailors out of the sea. Because his naval career was not progressing, in 1943 Allan heeded the call for Jamaican and other Caribbeans to join the RAF.
After the war, in 1947 he docked in Southampton on the HMS Almanzora, then made his way to London, living for a while in an abandoned railway carriage and washing dishes at the Cumberland hotel in Marble Arch. He was joined the following year by his brother Harry, who sailed on the Empire Windrush.
In the early 1950s they both became members of a soulful singing group, the Southlanders, which was the first of its kind to achieve widespread success in Britain and the longest-running black British hitmakers in the 1950s. Their cover version of Alone (Why Must I be Alone), which sold more than a million copies and got to No 2 in 1957, was their biggest seller. The 1958 novelty song The Mole in a Hole, is, perhaps, the best remembered, with its line “I am a Mole and I Live in a Hole” sung by Harry (whose son, Gary, also went on to be an entertainer). Allan bought a new convertible car with his first royalty cheque.
After leaving the Southlanders in 1974, Allan became a Post Office telephone operator. Five years later, he was promoted to assistant supervisor at the Balham telephone exchange.
He helped set up the West Indian Ex-Servicemen’s Association, which originally met at the YMCA in central London’s Tottenham Court Road in the early 1970s, and then moved to its own building at Clapham, in south London. It’s now known as the West Indian Association of Service Personnel.
Allan was proud that, as a war veteran, he went to Buckingham Palace several times to meet the Queen and Prince Charles - the photographs had pride of place on the memorabilia-adorned living room wall of his home in Gipsy Hill, south London.
Allan’s wife, Joyce (nee Fletcher), whom he married in 1966, died in 2020. He is survived by four daughters, Alison, Sandra, Audrey and Michelle.
