Tag: Tottenham Hotspur

As part of Black History Month celebrations, the Post Office have painted four of their post boxes in the UK black. Each one celebrates the contribution of a black person to British society. We can debate whether this is tokenism of the worst sort (four? In the whole of the UK?) or whether we should accept that even a token gesture is better than nothing. We can also debate whether the ‘right’ four people have been chosen to represent the contribution black people have been making in Britain for centuries. But let’s leave those questions aside for now and express our pleasure that one of ‘Football’s Back Pioneers’ is among the chosen four.

Walter Tull was the first black player at Tottenham Hotspur (his career there spanned the years 1909 to 1911) and Northampton Town (1911 to 1914) and, according to the press release that accompanied the story, he was also Glasgow Rangers’ first black player. As far as we know Walter never played a competitive game for Rangers but at least one source states that he signed for them in February 1917 whilst in Scotland on his officer training course with the intention of playing for them after the war. Regardless of his status as a Rangers player, what is beyond doubt is that Walter was an important figure not just as a footballer but also as a soldier.

Walter served in the Army from 1914 until his death in France in 1918. He was promoted to the rank of 2nd Lieutenant at a time when Army Regulations specifically excluded anyone with non-white heritage from holding an officer rank (Walter’s grandfather had been an enslaved man on Barbados). The powers that be had a range of excuses for discriminating against soldiers of black or mixed heritage, one was that white troops would object to being led by a black officer. It’s surely worth mentioning that a number of the men Walter commanded risked their lives trying to retrieve his body from no-man’s land where he fell. His body never was recovered and so he has no known final resting place, but he is commemorated on the war memorial at Arras, one of 34,785 men remembered there who have no known grave. He is also named on the memorial in his home town of Folkestone and on the one in nearby Dover. At Northampton Town’s ground his memory is honoured with the words:

“Through his actions, W. D. J. Tull ridiculed the barriers of ignorance that tried to deny people of colour equality with their contemporaries. His life stands testament to a determination to confront those people and those obstacles that sought to diminish him and the world in which he lived. It reveals a man, though rendered breathless in his prime, whose strong heart still beats loudly”

Walter Tull deserves to be remembered and we are glad that ‘Football’s Black Pioneers’ is playing a small part in that.