October is Black History Month, and it’s an opportunity to recognise some unsung heroes whose contributions and accomplishments are often overlooked or forgotten about. Many people of colour have played vital parts in our nation’s history, and one of them has links to our very own Frimley: Lucean Arthur Headen.
Lucean Arthur Headen was born on 26th August 1879 in Carthage, North Carolina. He was born the child of former slaves, and his family was made up of inventors and entrepreneurs: his grandfather was a wheelwright, his great-uncle was a blacksmith, and his father and uncle started a sawmill.
Although the Jim Crow segregation laws at the time blocked him from completing advanced official training, Headen started building his own inventions at an early age, and his early designs were connected to his business manufacturing car bodies and engines. His first patent, filed in 1930 and shared with white inventor Henry Petit, introduced a new ignition method that made it easier to use cheap crude oil in automobiles and lorries designed to run on petrol.
Lucean Arthur Headen was one of the first Black Americans to learn to fly, and cut his chops at Mineola, Long Island in 1911, in part to test out an aeronautical stabilizer that he had invented. During the First World War he demonstrated an “optical camouflage” method to both the British and the American navies to help with underwater warfare.
In May 1931 Headen moved to England where he enjoyed a successful career as an inventor and entrepreneur. In total he received eleven patents, most of them related to improving an engine’s efficiency at burning crude oil. He moved to Surrey to manufacture his products, and set up shop in a factory off Victoria Avenue in Camberley.
Headen seemed to settle well in Camberley and was accepted by the community. In September 1940, at the outbreak of World War Two, he joined the Camberley regiment of the Surrey Home Guard’s 1st Battalion and became one of the very few Americans to ever join the Home Guard. At the end of the war Headen married a local girl, Gladys Hollamby of Frimley Green, and moved to her home village to be closer to her family. In 1948, the couple adopted a child and named him Lucean Arthur Headen Jr.