A Bristol schoolboy who went on to become the first Black Queen’s Guardsman has written a book about his horrendous experiences and how he overcame them. And now Richard Stokes is launching the book in his home city, with an event on Monday evening.
Richard Stokes went from what is now Cotham School to the Grenadier Guards at just 16 years old back in 1988. But from the very first moment he passed out as a guard and entered his barracks in Northern Ireland at the age of 17, he was subjected to vicious racist bullying.
Within three years he was out of the Army, had joined the Navy and his case was being raised in parliament.
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Now, more than 30 years from those nightmare two years, the former soldier has told his story, in full, in a book outlining what happened to him, and how that shaped the rest of his life. It’s called Trooping the Culture, and is being launched at the Bristol Museum and Gallery on Monday evening at 7pm, at a special event that forms part of the city’s Black History Month programme.
Richard, who is now the Diversity and Inclusion manager for Avon Fire and Rescue Service, will be in conversation with another of the city’s pioneers, Sherrie Eugene-Hart, and will talk about his life both before, during and after his spell guarding royal palaces in the bearskin, serving in Northern Ireland and dealing with shocking racism.
Richard was adopted into a white family in 1969 when he was just nine months old, and raised in Bristol. Growing up a Black kid in a white family in the 1970s and 80s in Bristol was a challenge. “His family showed him love and compassion, but that was not enough to protect him from society,” a spokesperson for the event said. “Facing name-calling and hatred, he always felt the odd one out. He struggled with identity, was confused about cultural nuances and he yearned for a sense of belonging.”
As a teenager, his dad made him a deal, join the army and stick it and they’d track down his birth mother. So when he passed out from training and became a young 17-year-old member of the Grenadier Guards, his parents and birth mother were all there bursting with pride. But it quickly turned sour.
In the early 2000s, he told the BBC: “The first day I got to the camp in Northern Ireland I went into the Mess Hall. Of the three or four hundred guardsmen in there most of them just got up and walked out.
"The others threw bananas at me, stubbed their cigarettes out in my food, called me names - n*****, c**n. Before I left the army I was receiving hate mail from guardsmen in two other battalions on a regular basis,” he added.
He served three years, before he left, forging a career in the Navy instead. In 1991, as he left, his case was raised in parliament by the then relatively new MP Diane Abbot. “Who can forget the pictures of him in the newspapers in his uniform, full of pride with his white adoptive parents on one side and his Black mother who gave him up for adoption when he was very small on the other? It ought to have been the culmination of his hopes and the beginning of a career that would do credit to him, his family and the British armed forces,” she told the Commons 31 years ago.
“But what happened to Richard Stokes, who entered the armed services at 17 full of innocence and high hopes, only wanting to join what he regarded as a top regiment, was a tragedy. Less than three years after the pictures of him joining the Guards were all over the newspapers he left the Guards in disillusion.
“He had had to endure the unendurable—Nazi jibes, knife threats, racist taunts. He would enter the canteen and his colleagues would bang their plates all at the same time and make monkey noises. Colleagues of his have described the sustained humiliation and threats of violence that he had to endure throughout what must have seemed three long years in the Guards,” she added.
Now Richard has finally told his remarkable story himself. His new book, Trooping the Culture, will be available at the event, where Richard, now in his early 50s, will discuss issues including intercultural adoption, and the psychological legacy it leaves behind, as well as themes of identity, belonging and racism.
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