Westminster Abbey, the ancient cathedral where British royalty have been crowned, and married, has numerous memorials to the famous including Shakespeare. On Sunday 31 May 1931 it had a somewhat unusual congregation – “50 negroes, with their wives and children, [who] bowed their heads in prayer” (Scotsman, 1 June 1931, p 10). They were members of an African American social group, the “Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World”, a devout Christian society founded in the United States in the late 1870s. It had thousands of members, including a Jamaica-born resident of Philadelphia, Beresford Gale. Gale encouraged black Britons to join the Elks.

The Elks (women had a separate organisation) laid floral tributes on the “graves or statues of those famous in the fight for the abolition of slavery”. In Parliament Square, equidistant from the abbey and parliament, was a statue of Abraham Lincoln. The Elks gathered there, and placed a tribute on the memorial. A eulogy was spoken by Dr Harold Moody, described by the Daily Herald as “a Negro, practising medicine in London”.

Later that day Moody was elected chairman of the League of Coloured Peoples at its inaugural meeting at the Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street in central London. The hall, used by progressive political groups from the 1870s, was where the British Labour Party had been founded in 1900. The hall was supported by the Congregational Church, and Moody was a stout Congregationalist. He was strongly associated with the League of Coloured People until his death in 1947 – in fact, the League and Dr Moody were inseparable.

Moody said “the League had been brought into being because of difficulties experienced by a certain number of their people in this country” (Nottingham Journal, 6 June 1931, p 1). The London Daily Express of 6 June (p11) reported the comments of American actor-singer Paul Robeson, who had disobeyed his doctor’s orders to attend the League’s founding, who remarked “In England I have found that the people are always very kind, and we negroes can move about as human beings”.

One suspects that Beresford Gale and other Elks would have been at hall. Author-actor Gale had a role in the film Sanders of the River (1935) the year he died – Robeson starred in it. Gale first arrived in England in the summer of 1930, to establish the Elks in Britain (Daily Express, 1 August 1930, p 11). This was noted by the Daily Herald on 20 September 1930 (p 9).

As with John Barbour-James’s activities, and the Brotherhood Movement’s widespread appeal, we can see that representatives of Black people in Britain included men and women who were not always left-wing although historians have concentrated on those anti-imperial individuals and their groups.