Captain Black

Captain Black may sound like a Cleudo suspect but in fact this short article responds to an enquiry from a visitor to this site who wanted to know who the first Black captain was? Not an easy one to answer but here goes!

Before diving in, I thought I would Google the attributes of a good captain. An AI summary came up with:

A good football captain is a leader who inspires and motivates their team, and is able to communicate effectively with their team mates and coaches. They are also hard-working and set a good example for their team. 

OK as far as it goes but clearly a lot of that is subjective and we have to remember that our Black footballers were operating within a society where racist assumptions prevailed. The generally held view was that White people were inherently superior to Black people simply by virtue of the colour of their skin. A Black footballer with aspirations to be team captain would inevitably have had to overcome this prejudice. Only someone of exceptional quality need apply!

We begin our search with the English National Football Archive. This is an invaluable resource concerning appearances and goal scorers in the Football League from the inception of the Football League in 1888/89 right up to the present day, but it does not identify who captained teams. We will have to look elsewhere for our answer.

There are some obvious people we can rule out. Some years ago Paul Ince was acclaimed as the first Black manager of a Premier League club (Blackburn Rovers). Not, you notice, the first Black manager anywhere, that was Tony Collins at Rochdale in 1960: https://footballs-black-pioneers.com/tony-collins-first-black-manager/.^[1]Tony spent his first season at Rochdale as a player/manager, it isn’t clear whether he was also ‘captain’ of the team but it must at least have been a possibility The article in the Guardian that carried the story^[2]https://www.theguardian.com/football/2008/jun/23/blackburn.premierleague1 made passing reference to Ince having been the first Black player to captain England, clearly he had what it takes to captain a team, perhaps he is our man? We have checked his career record and also his Wikipedia entry, our conclusion is that he did indeed captain both Middlesbrough (1999) and Wolverhampton Wanderers (2002). But this is relatively recent when you consider there have been Black players in the English game since 1895. Surely we can go back further?

Paul Ince’s career started at West Ham which gives us the opportunity to mention a Black player who did captain his team, but not in the Football League. This was none other than the legendary John Charles who was captain of the Hammers Youth team that won the FA Youth Cup in 1963. We have written about John before: https://footballs-black-pioneers.com/west-ham-united-1962-63/ but we have no qualms about mentioning him again as he is one of the great unsung heroes we discuss in our book. Although John did play for West Ham’s first team between 1962/63 and 1969/70, his career coincided with Bobby Moore’s time at the club. As England’s only (at present) World Cup winning captain Moore monopolised the role at West Ham and there was no opportunity for John to captain the senior team, so John is not our man and the search continues.

Perhaps we are approaching the question from the wrong direction, instead of working our way backwards from the present day, might any of the earliest Black players have captained their team?

The earliest Black player in our book was Arthur Wharton. Before discussing him, we should mention Andrew Watson who was the first Black player to win an international cap (for Scotland in 1881), indeed he captained the Scotland team that day. Depending on the question you ask, Andrew Watson may well be the answer and we can stop the search at this point, but the focus of our book was the English Football League and Watson never played a game in that competition.

Returning to Arthur Wharton, he played only one game in the top division of the Football League for Sheffield United in 1894/95 and is unlikely to have captained the team that day. He played more games (40 in the League and FA Cup) for Rotherham Town^[3]Long since defunct and not to be confused with Rotherham United) who were in the 2^nd division of the League at the time. Although a respected member of the club, we are not aware of any evidence that he captained the team.

Looking at other very early players: it seems unlikely that John Walker, who signed for Lincoln City from Hearts in 1899 for a fee of £25, was ever captain. Although he was already a seasoned professional, he played  only six first team games during his one and only season with the club and died in August 1900, less than a year after making his debut.

Other players in the pre-World War One era, Fred Corbett and Willie Clarke, look marginally more likely in that, unlike John Walker, they played more games and didn’t die at the age of twenty two, but only marginally. Hassan Hegazi was well educated and from a wealthy Egyptian family but he played only one game for Fulham, enough to make him their first Black player, but surely he wouldn’t have walked straight into the captaincy of the team?

One name that merits serious consideration is that of Walter Tull, the first Black player at Tottenham Hotspur and Northampton Town for whom he played 111 games between 1911 and 1914. At Tottenham he faced such virulent racist abuse from fans that the club hierarchy were happy to offload him to Northampton Town and it is unlikely they ever contemplated making him captain. But Northampton? We know that Walter had leadership qualities, he served as an officer in the British Army at a time when officers had to be of ‘pure European descent’ which Walter was not. He led his men, White soldiers, in battle and lost his life in the killing fields of Flanders doing just that. So, he was a leader and an outstanding character, just the qualities our AI guide suggested were necessary. We know that he inspired his men in battle as they made repeated attempts under heavy enemy fire to retrieve his body when he died in no man’s land between the British and German trenches.

Was Walter our man? Perhaps, but there is no evidence we are aware of that he ever captained Northampton, equally we cannot be sure that he didn’t. We can dodge the question a bit by pointing out that Northampton were in the Southern League during Walter’s time with them so, if we are looking for the first Black player to captain a Football League team, Walter has to be ruled out.

Which leaves us with a man who we know did captain a team in the Football League and that man, drum roll, was Jack Leslie of Plymouth Argyle.

Jack’s life story has been meticulously researched by author and Plymouth Argyle fan, Matt Tiller. Matt tells Jack’s full story in The Lion Who Never Roared – Jack Leslie, the Star Robbed of England Glory.  The evidence that Jack captained Plymouth in 1930^[4]it is possible he had filled in as captain occasionally before that comes in chapter 15, appropriately enough titled ‘Captain Jack’. Newly promoted from Division 3 (South) to the old Division 2, Argyle were finding it tough going. Jack took over the captaincy when the existing captain, Fred Titmuss sustained a long term injury and Jack ‘would lead the side in his friend’s absence, including the last twelve matches that took them to safety.’  They narrowly avoided relegation that year but for the 1931/32 season, still led by Jack, they finished 4^th, which remains the highest position Plymouth Argyle have ever achieved. Fred Titmuss was approaching the end of a long career and now Jack was appointed ‘club captain’.

There is much more that can be written about Jack’s time at Plymouth, including his time as captain, but you will need to buy Matt’s book to read it, here I will close this article with a short quote from Matt:

In becoming the first black captain of a Football League team, he had broken down a barrier.

The same can be said of so many of those who feature in the pages of Football’s Black Pioneers, today’s players face many difficulties but generally they do not do so alone, it is in the nature of being a ‘pioneer’ or the ‘first’ that you are, almost by definition, ‘alone’. Truly today’s footballers stand on the shoulders of giants and Jack Leslie, the first Black captain of a Football League side, was one such giant.