Blackburn Rovers were founder members of the Football League in 1888/89, it was ninety nine years later, in 1987, that a black player represented them for the first time. For other founder members the wait wasn’t quite as long: Bolton Wanderers (96 years); Burnley (also 96 years); West Bromwich Albion (89 years); and Wolverhampton Wanderers (a mere 87 years). Others galloped to this particular milestone much more quickly, Aston Villa had a black player, Willie Clarke, in 1901 and Arthur Wharton played for Preston North End in 1886, two years before the league was even founded! There doesn’t appear to be any particular pattern, largely it seems to have been pot luck.
Cambridge United joined the Football League for the first time for the 1970/71 season and their first black player, Dennis Walker, had joined them in 1968 so for them the gap between joining the League and fielding a black player was 0 years.
Incidentally, we said ‘for the first time’ because United are one of those clubs that epitomises the rollercoaster nature of the game for those clubs outside the gilded elite. They climbed, a little unsteadily it must be said, to Division One (what would now be called the Championship) where they spent the 1992/93 season. The sojourn was a brief one and by the end of the 2004/5 season they finished bottom of the bottom division and were relegated from the Football League. It was 2014/15 before they joined the Football League for the second time.
But it is that first entry to the League that interests us and, particularly, Dennis Walker.
Dennis appears twice in our book, Football’s Black Pioneers, as he was the first black player at Manchester United as well as Cambridge (he also spent four seasons with York City where he definitely wasn’t their first black player – one day we will tell the interesting story of some of the black players to represent York). You can read about Dennis’s one and only first team appearance for Manchester United[1]Dennis was the only one of the famous ‘Busby Babes’ who was black in our book or on the Manchester United page of this site, here we will focus on the Cambridge chapter of Dennis’s story and on his first game.
His Cambridge debut was in the Southern League, away at Poole. Programmes for Poole home games in the ’60s are hard to find on the internet, if anyone knows of one for the game between Poole and Cambridge United on 10th August 1968 we would love to hear from you!
We have had more success with Dennis’s games once United joined the Football League. He played in the 1st round League Cup tie at Colchester on 19th August. The programme names him as substitute but in fact he played the full game in the No.8 shirt. It was an inauspicious start as Colchester ran out 5-0 winners.
We often find that our first black players are not mentioned in the programme of their debut game but here, not only is Dennis named, he also features in the team photo on page 8 of the programme (front row, on the far right).
There was a fair amount of confusion about Dennis’s ethnic heritage when we started researching our book but, with the help of Dennis’s daughter, co-author Bill Hern was able to establish that Dennis had a white Irish mother and his father was of Iranian/African heritage, there is more on this in our book.
Dennis scored on his Football League debut away at Northampton Town (a game United lost 2-1) but it is the programme for Dennis’s home debut that we feature here. He played for the full ninety minutes wearing the No.4 shirt:
Dennis went on to make 35 appearances over the course of the season (scoring two goals). He was a less regular starter in the 1971/72 season and played only five more games at the start of the 1972/73 season before leaving Cambridge for non-league Matlock. He had made 58 appearances for United, scoring four goals. In total he played in over 200 Football League games.
There are other ‘Busby Babes’ who went on to have far more illustrious careers than Dennis Walker but Dennis is the only one who achieved the distinction of being Cambridge United’s first black player.
References
| ↑1 | Dennis was the only one of the famous ‘Busby Babes’ who was black |
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