Harold Moody

Harold Arundel Moody (1882-1947) was a physician in London who established the League of Coloured Peoples in 1931 with the support of the Quakers.

Moody was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1882, the son of a pharmacist. In 1904 he sailed to the United Kingdom to study medicine at King's College London.

In 1913 Moody married Olive Tranter a nurse with whom he worked at the Royal Eye Hospital.

Moody's brother Ludlow also studied medicine in London and won the Huxley Prize for physiology at King's. Ludlow married Vera Manley and both returned to the Caribbean. Charles Arundel Moody, Harold's son, became an officer in the British Army, rising to the rank of colonel.

Moody is credited with overturning the Special Restriction Order (or Coloured Seamen's Act) of 1925, a discriminatory measure which sought to restrict subsidies to merchant shipping employing only British nationals and required alien seamen (many of whom had served the United Kingdom during the First World War) to register with their local police. Many Black and Asian British nationals had no proof of identity and were made redundant.

Moody died in 1947 at the age of 64. He lived in a house in Peckham on Queens Road which now has a blue plaque dedicated to him.A play based on his life is being performed by secondary school children from the Harris Academy at Peckham at Theatre Peckham. The local drama school.