‘Football’s Black Pioneers’ was featured in The Independent in November 2020. If you missed it, you can read the full article by Colin Drury here:
Colin’s article opened with the story of Jack Leslie of Plymouth Argyle which we have featured on this site before. As a Barnsley fan Colin, understandably, also wrote about Steve Mokone, Barnsley’s first black player. If there were to be an award for the least pleasant of our Pioneers then Mokone would surely be a front runner!
“Also here … is Steve Mokone, the self-proclaimed Pele of South Africa who arrived at Barnsley in 1961, played one game, and caused so much (unspecified) disruption the club terminated his contract within five days. He later served 12 years in a US prison for assault. A character, as they say.”
Colin continues “Bill Hern and David Gleave, authors of Football’s Black Pioneers, say they set out four years ago to write a dip-in-dip-out tome that would appeal to sports fans. Yet the result is only ostensibly about the (not always) beautiful game. Rather, what emerges over 92 wildly different mini-biographies, is a far wider social history about the black British experience over the last 130 years, touching on everything from slavery to Windrush and black lives mattering. Here, writ large in often agonising detail, is racism, prejudice, isolation and the loneliness of going where others have not yet been.”
“‘We started writing a book about football,’ says Gleave today. ‘But as we progressed, we found we were uncovering more and more stories that made us realise, actually, these lives offered a real sense of a wider black British history; they touch on so many issues that members of the black community – whatever their job or position – have faced down the years.'”
But, Colin adds “Yet this is by no means a bleak read. The lives here are shot through with triumph, defiance against stacked odds and genuine, real-life heroism. There are moments of levity here too. In a chapter on Willie Clarke – who, on Christmas Day 1901, became the first black player to score a league goal while playing for Aston Villa – it is noted that his marriage to a white girl was disapproved of by her father. Ada Higginbottom’s dad was not, it is hinted, overly-concerned about Clarke’s Guyanese heritage but was none too keen on his daughter marrying a footballer.”
Colin also probed our reasons for writing the book: “Gleave is 68, white and a retired civil servant by trade. But in 1981 – the year of the Brixton riots – he married Roxanne, a Guyanese teacher, with who he has three mixed-race children, all now grown-up. ‘As a couple, we knew from first-hand experience there was very little black history taught in school so we decided very early that we would have to teach this part of their heritage,’ he says today. ‘We were always keen to stress that having this mixed heritage gives you not just one culture to draw on, but two. It is far more interesting and exciting.’”
Colin continued “Thus, began a three-decade journey into black history which has seen him produce books and online packs about everything from slave campaigner Olaudah Equiano to composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
Then, four years ago, as he and Hern concluded an educational project on black soldiers who fought in World War One, the latter suggested the idea that would become this new book.
Hern is 64, also white and a retired civil servant. His passion for history had led him to focusing on black issues, he says, ‘because it is an area that is so rich but so often overlooked.'”
Colin explored how we set about the research for the book “That work included speaking to clubs (‘mainly useless’), sifting through old newspapers and programmes, chatting with local historians and going through more birth, death and marriage certificates than either man can count.
Online fan forums proved hugely useful – although not always. ‘On several occasions we had people saying to us something like, ‘Oh yes, we had an Egyptian prince play for us in the Twenties and he always played in bare foot. There are various stories of that sort doing the rounds, although sorry to say we never found any Egyptian princes.’
They interviewed about 20 of the pioneers, with Hern – a Sunderland fan now living in Yorkshire – speaking to Viv Anderson and Chris Kamara. The latter – today a semi-legendary pundit – had no idea he had been a trailblazer with Swindon, despite it being splashed all over the local newspaper at the time. ‘I also interviewed Yeovil Town’s,’ says Gleave, ruefully. ‘Then they dropped out of the football league so we couldn’t include it.'”
“If the book has a central message … it may be that work still needs to be done on tackling prejudice – in football and beyond. It points out that there remains, even in 2020, few black managers in the game.”
Quoting author Gleave again Colin wrote: “‘I think it’s quite easy for white liberal people to say things are getting better but actually, I think if you’re involved with the black community, it’s fairly obvious that things aren’t altogether better,’ he says. ‘My wife and I were abused on the street only a year ago for no reason so these things are still happening. Are things getting better? I don’t know, maybe. But what I am sure of is it’s easy to exaggerate how much better they are, and that is not a trap we should fall into. There is still a huge amount of work to be done.’”
* Football’s Black Pioneers is published by Conker Editions.