There are many great players featured in Football’s Black Pioneers, very few achieved as much as Swindon’s first black player.
- He joined Swindon as a nineteen year-old having already clocked up over 60 appearances for his previous club.
- He would go on to play in 297 games for Swindon, scoring 32 goals before moving on.
- He made a total of 778 career appearances in the League and Cups for a total of nine teams.
- He was one of the few black players who made it into management.
- He has enjoyed a highly successful career as a pundit on TV.
- Oh, and he’s a pretty good singer too!
If you haven’t worked it out yet we are, of course, talking about Chris Kamara. Chris Kamara, one of the most recognisable faces in football – when author, Bill Hern, interviewed Chris in the lobby of a Leeds hotel they were repeatedly interrupted by people coming up and asking for selfies (not with Bill!) and wishing Chris well, all received with Chris’s trademark good humour.
Chris made his League debut for Swindon at Sheffield Wednesday on 20th August 1977:
Chris gets a mention on the ‘Opponents’ page:
Chris scored in the 14th minute and, although Wednesday equalised early in the second half, he must have been pleased with his League debut. He probably liked the headline in the evening paper as well ‘KAMARA CRACKS HOME A BEAUTY – Swindon Town unearthed a new hero at Hillsborough today in 19 year-old midfielder Chris Kamara.’
Chris had made his actual Swindon Town debut the week before the game in Sheffield, playing in a League Cup game at Swansea. As if proof were needed that he was not yet a household name, they got his name wrong in the programme:
As far as we know, ‘Ben’s’ career was short-lived!
One item in the Sheffield Wednesday programme that caught our eye was the ‘Great Sportsmen Past and Present’ feature. On the slightly flimsy pretext that ‘quite recently, in the Top Rank Suite, Sheffield, professional boxing made a long overdue return to this city’, there was a handsome double page spread about Randolph Turpin. Randolph (the son of a black man from British Guiana, now Guyana, who served in the Army during World War One), was briefly boxing middleweight champion of the world in 1951:
There is a blue plaque commemorating Randolph on the house in Leamington that was his childhood home. His father, Lionel, who died as a result of his service in the so called ‘war to end all wars’, is largely unremembered (you can read about him on our sister site: https://www.historycalroots.com/lionel-fitzherbert-turpin/).
There are no blue plaques for Chris Kamara as far as we know but, who knows, one day there might be!