The First World War had meant well-paid employment for black seamen, welcome recruits to the naval service. By the conclusion of hostilities, there were something in the region of 200,000 black people living in Britain, mostly in the ports. However, the favourable employment conditions for black seamen and their settled families were short-lived. Only a year after the war ended, they faced hostility once again from poor whites, for whom the promises of better conditions of ordinary life in Britain, ‘homes fit for heroes’, had been slow in being realized. Feelings ran high against black settlers who, wrongly in the case of the majority of Liverpool blacks, were considered aliens or at least latecomers. Some British-born Black seamen resented the fact that white foreign seamen were employed rather than recently demobilized indigenous blacks, a situation that prompted a black seaman from Cardiff to write to the Colonial Office on behalf of black seamen from all parts of the British Empire (the original grammar and punctuation have been retained):