Caribbean Beat — March/April 2018 (#150)

on this day
Over
the line
A century ago, in the final months of the
First World War, a Barbadian-British soldier
named Walter Tull was killed in battle. He
was one of many thousands of casualties,
but he was also unique, as James Ferguson
writes: Tull was the first-ever black officer in
the race-conscious British Army
Illustration by Rohan Mitchell
The British cemetery near
the northern French village
of Favreuil contains
401 graves, the last
resting places of British
troops and a handful of
Commonwealth soldiers and Germans
killed in the First World War. Its rows of
tombstones, immaculately tended and
surrounded by tall poplars, stand secluded
by a low wall from the surrounding muddy
fields and scattered villages. Nearby, lorries
thunder along the motorway that links
Lille to Paris. The names of the dead are
recorded, and sometimes their ages, yet
there is one name of a man who was killed
at Favreuil that is missing: Second Lieutenant
Walter Tull. His body was never
recovered, and we must assume that he
lies under what war poet Edmund Blunden
evocatively called the “Flanders clay.”
Like many others, Tull died tragically
young — he was twenty-nine — in a
terrible conflict that was meant to end all
wars. Yet his death — a century ago, on 25
March, 1918 — also serves to emphasise
the exceptional strengths of a man who
not only rose from the humblest of backgrounds
but also shrugged off prejudice
and abuse to set two significant records.
Walter Tull was the first mixedheritage
professional outfield footballer
to play in England’s First Division (Arthur
Wharton, a goalkeeper born in Ghana,
preceded him in the 1880s). This he
achieved despite losing his father — a carpenter
from Barbados — and his mother
by the age of nine. Walter and his brother
Edward were sent from their home town
of Folkestone to the National Children’s
Home orphanage in London’s Bethnal
Green. The Methodist orphanage had a
football team, and it soon became evident
that Walter had exceptional talent as what
we would nowadays call a midfielder.
Edward’s interests lay elsewhere, and he
became the first mixed-heritage dentist to
practise in Britain.
After leaving school at fourteen, Tull
was apprenticed to a printing firm, but
he continued playing football and was
eventually offered a trial and accepted by
Clapton, at the time one of Britain’s preeminent
amateur clubs. In the 1908–09
season, when Tull was regularly selected,
Clapton won the Amateur Cup. His prowess
did not escape the attention of bigger,
professional clubs, and at the end of that
season he was snapped up by Tottenham
Hotspur with a £10 signing-on fee and a
weekly wage of £4.
Recently promoted Spurs got off to a
bad start in the 1909–10 season, but Tull’s
performance against Manchester United
caught the eye of a Daily Chronicle journalist:
“Tull’s display on Saturday must have
astounded everyone who saw it. Such perfect
coolness, such judicious waiting for a
fraction of a second in order to get a pass in
not before a defender has worked to a false
position, and such accuracy of strength in
passing I have not seen for a long time.”
But something bad was soon to happen.
On 9 October, 1909, during an away
game at Bristol City, Tull was subjected
to sustained and vicious racial abuse.
A journalist reported: “A section of the
spectators made a cowardly attack upon
him in language lower than Billingsgate
. . . Let me tell these Bristol hooligans
that . . . in point of ability, if not in actual
achievement, Tull was the best forward
on the field.” After seven games, he was
suddenly dropped from the first team. His
biographer, Phil Vasili, speculates that
Spurs’ directors were unnerved by “social
pressures” — i.e. racism — and preferred
to avoid further controversy.
With little prospect of first team football,
Tull moved to Southern League club
Northampton Town, then managed by fellow
Methodist Herbert Chapman, later to
become an Arsenal management legend.
Tull played 110 games for Northampton,
mostly as a half back, was considered by
the Northampton Echo as “in the front-rank
of class players in this position,” and was
reportedly on the verge of signing for
Celtic when war was declared.
Tull was the first of the Northampton
players to enlist, joining the so-called
Football Battalion, the 17th Battalion
of the Middlesex Regiment. He was
soon identified as an exceptional soldier
70 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM