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The Goldsmiths lecturer’s role in ending World War Two in Europe

Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery signing the Instrument of Surrender of the German Armies in the northern part of Germany at Lüneberg Heath 4th May 1945. Image: Malindine E G (Capt), No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit. Public Domain. From the archive collections of the Imperial War Museum.

It is not widely known that a senior Goldsmiths lecturer played a key military and translation role in the surrender of Germany and bringing an end to the Second World War in Europe.

Norman Kirby was a valued member of General Bernard Montgomery’s headquarters’ military security. He was fluent in French and German and he was selected by ‘Monty’ to be the British soldier who translated and provided the words in German to Field Marshal Keitel delivering the Allies’ final terms for the surrender of all their armed forces.

Norman also witnessed and experienced the worst of war’s cruelty in France, Belgium and Germany which would, he poignantly observed, endure through the mutilation of minds as well as bodies.

At Goldsmiths he was a leading figure in the Education Department. He wrote a memoir which stands out as one of the most thoughtful and humanitarian accounts of the Second World War.

His writing is eloquent and memorable, and it can be argued his work deserves wider recognition.

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There Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack by Professor Paul Gilroy

Professor Paul Gilroy is one of the world’s most influential academic intellectuals with a distinguished career of Professorships held at leading universities in the UK and USA.

He was first appointed Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London in 1997 and in the absence of any corrective information from other sources it could be posited that he was the University of London’s first black professor. He is currently Professor of the Humanities and Founding Director, Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism & Racialisation at UCL (University College London).

The front cover of his first monograph has a striking portrait photograph by the Observer’s legendary photojournalist Jane Bown. A proud black British serviceman stands to attention at a Remembrance occasion wearing seven Second World War medals, but the title: ‘There Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack’ strikes the discordant and critical note- for the subtitle of the book is ‘The cultural politics of race and nation.’

It was first published by Unwin Hyman Ltd in 1987 and reprinted by Routledge from 1992.  At the time Paul Gilroy was Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths’ College. He had taught at South Bank University and the University of Essex and held a Visiting Professorship at Yale.

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