Six RAF pallbearers carried Brown's flag-draped coffin on their shoulders as Edward Elgar's “Nimrod” was played on the pipe organ during the procession. We seem to be ignored everywhere, every time, so that’s the reason why I’m here today.” They’ve been buried in pits, mass graves, our soldiers, our Black soldiers. “They have not been given a proper grave with a proper headstone.
“Our Black soldiers who have fought for this country in World War I, as well as World War II, have had no recognition,” she said. Susan Hutchinson, who has spent the last four years trying to get recognition for troops from the Caribbean who fought for England in both world wars, said that, if Brown's neighbors hadn't drawn attention to his life, she fears that he would have been another Black service member buried in a pauper's grave and forgotten. What had once been planned as a modest service at a crematorium had to be postponed and relocated to the spiritual home of the RAF, the expansive church dating back 1,000 years that had to rebuilt after being mostly destroyed by a German incendiary bomb in 1941. As news of his death spread, historians, military researchers, genealogists, and community groups took up the cause, and interest grew. When Brown died at his home in December, the Westminster City Council tried to find his family.
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