Walter Tull: A True Hero That Time Almost Forgot

From an early age, Walter Tull had a flair for playing football and as he grew up, his single-minded determination helped him excel at his chosen sport.  Despite the obstacles put before him, he made a successful career out of football, forging a career as one of the first ever black professional football players, until it was cut short, when he decided to join the army to fight in World War One.  He lost his life defending his country and soon after fell into obscurity but in recent years his life story has been rediscovered.

Born in Folkestone on April 28, 1888, Walter Tull was the grandson of a slave and the son of a Barbadian carpenter who married a white British woman.  His mother died when he was seven years old and he lost his father when he was nine, so he and his brother were raised in a Methodist orphanage in Bethnal Green, London. 

Tull loved playing football from a young age and played for his orphanage side.  According to an orphanage logbook, Walter was “a stoic, laid-back character, but single-minded.”  After completing school, he started an apprenticeship as a printer and in 1908, was signed by a local side called Clapton FC, where he played inside-forward.

Over the next year, Tull’s career took off as he won the FA Amateur Cup, the London Amateur Cup and the London Senior Cup.  Soon after, he was signed by Tottenham Hotspur, becoming only the third known black footballer at the top level.

Despite his talent, Tull, was subject to racial abuse from the terraces.  After a match between Bristol City and Spurs in 1909, a journalist for the Football Star Newspaper reported;

“A section of the spectators made a cowardly attack on him in language lower than Billingsgate [London's fish market]“….Let me tell those Bristol hooligans that Tull is so clean in mind and method as to be a model for all white men who play football… In point of ability, if not actual achievement, Tull was the best forward on the field.”

It is difficult to tell how much racism he had to put up with from rival fans but considering he was routinely called “darkie” by the press and the times he lived in, it can be speculated that he would have suffered a considerable amount of abuse.