Stanley Stair

In 2007, the Hanover Chamber of Commerce started a campaign to erect a cenotaph to honour local heroes of the First and Second World Wars, including Stair. The year after his death, two of Stair's grandchildren in London were interviewed by Ian Hislop for the Channel 4 series, Not Forgotten, in an episode called "Soldiers of Empire".

In 2004, Stair was honoured with an award from the Hanover Homecoming Foundation for his contributions to the Hanover Parish. He died in Animal Hill – the community in Lucea, Jamaica, which he had helped to name – in April 2008 at the age of 107. He was at the time of his death the last surviving Caribbean World War I veteran who had served on the western front.

Following the war, Stair returned to Jamaica and worked on sugar plantations through the 1960s. For four years, he worked as a labourer in Cuba for nine months of the year. He then returned to the Haughton Court Estate in Jamaica, where he worked his way up to the role of plantation overseer. Stair was married twice, had nine children. and raised a total of fifteen children.

In March 1916, Stair was one of 1,140 volunteers who left Jamaica on the ship Verdala, which was diverted to Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the way to France to avoid a German gunboat. There, a severe Arctic blizzard caused 600 men, wearing only their summer uniforms, to suffer from exposure and hypothermia; five men died, and there were more than 100 amputations due to frostbite. Stair avoided injury and finally arrived with the 3rd Battalion in France in September 1916. As part of the manual labour corps, his unit dug trenches, and were shot at as they carried artillery shells up to the field guns to be loaded. According to British journalist Ian Hislop, the work the Black soldiers performed was "dangerous drudgery".

Stanley Stair was born in Bellview, Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica, to Adolphus and Sarah Stair (née Campbell). In 1907, they moved to Haughton Court Estate, the plantation where both his parents worked.

Charles Stanley Stair (20 October 1900 – April 2008) was a soldier in the British West Indies Regiment, who was at the time of his death the last surviving veteran from the Caribbean to have served in World War I. He enlisted into the labour corps in 1916, and was sent from Jamaica to France and Italy as one of more than 15,000 men who volunteered for "The Coloured Regiment". At the end of the war, he was awarded the British War Medal and the Victory Medal. He lived to be 107 years old.