Caribbean Beat — March/April 2018 (#150)

Tull’s commanding
officer wrote: “Now he
has paid the supreme
sacrifice; the Battalion
and Company have
lost a faithful officer;
personally I have lost a
friend”
and was rapidly elevated to the rank of
sergeant. Posted to northern France in
November 1915, he wrote to Edward: “It
is a very monotonous life out here when
one is supposed to be resting and most
of the boys prefer the excitement of the
trenches.” But this enthusiasm would
soon be tempered when he suffered from
shellshock and trench fever and was
repatriated to convalesce.
It was at this point that Tull scored a
second first. Military regulations, in
the spirit of the times, explicitly stated
that “any negro or person of colour” was
barred from achieving officer status. As
Vasili points out in his book Colouring
Over the White Line, the Army’s top brass
“argued that white soldiers would not
accept orders issued by men of colour and
on no account should black soldiers serve
on the front line.” Yet, almost inexplicably,
Tull was not returned directly to the
trenches, but was sent to Scotland to train
as an officer. In May 1917 he was commissioned
as a lieutenant.
When he was dispatched to the Italian
front, it was — as the excellent Spartacus
Educational website’s article on Tull
remarks — “an historic occasion because
[he] was the first ever black officer in
the British Army.” At the Battle of Piave
in January 1918 he was commended in
dispatches for his “gallantry and coolness,”
providing inspiration to the men
he led back to safety. Several weeks later,
he was to be moved back to France to
take part in the British offensive against
German lines.
In the terrible churned-up mud of
Favreuil, Tull was ordered to lead his
troops on an attack on the enemy
trenches. On 25 March, as his
party entered No-Man’s-Land, he
was hit in the head by a German
bullet and died instantly. Such was
the ferocity of the fighting that his men,
despite several attempts under machine
gun fire, failed to recover his body. It was
never found.
In his brief life, the grandson of a
plantation slave in Barbados had become
both a path-breaking sportsman and,
unprecedentedly, an officer in the (then)
highly colour-conscious British Army. On
17 April, Tull’s commanding officer wrote
to Edward: “Now he has paid the supreme
sacrifice; the Battalion and Company
have lost a faithful officer; personally I
have lost a friend. Can I say more, except
that I hope that those who remain may be
true and faithful as he.”
Today, Walter Tull is commemorated
by a memorial at Northampton Town’s
stadium, a statue in Northampton Guildhall,
and a blue plaque on the house where
he lived during his Tottenham days. A
series of books, articles, and a play have
kept his memory alive since 2000, and
in 2014 the Royal Mint announced the
release of a commemorative £5 coin
featuring Lieutenant Tull. A campaign for
a posthumous Military Cross, however,
has met with no success. Poignantly, too,
he possesses no headstone in Favreuil’s
tranquil cemetery, where many of those
who fought alongside him lie. n
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