Walter Tull: A True Hero That Time Almost Forgot

In1911, Tull signed for Northampton Town, scoring nine goals in one-hundred and ten appearances from the half back position.  However Tull’s career came to an abrupt halt with the outbreak of World War One when he joined the Seventeenth (1st Football) Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment.  In 1915, he arrived in France with his battalion and fought a number of battles and was involved in The Battle of the Somme from the first day.

Although army regulations of the time forbade non-whites becoming officers, Tull’s leadership qualities were utilised by the army and by 1917, he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant after attending the officer’s training school at Gailes in Scotland.

On March 25, 1918, when he was 29 years old, Tull was leading his men in an attack on a German trench on the Somme in France.  While in ‘no man’s land’, he was hit by a machine gun bullet that pierced his neck and exited just under his right eye.  His men were unable to recover his body and today he has no marked grave.  After his death, he was recommended for a Military Cross but never received it.   One obituary said of him, “An officer and a gentleman, every inch of him”.

Tull’s story was forgotten for nearly eighty years until brought to light by football historian Phil Vasili.  More recently, he has had a BBC play made about him, two biographies written about him, had various Northampton buildings named after him,  a memorial garden has been built outside Northampton Towns ground and his career is now being taught in schools.

Although Tull showed the skills he needed to become first a successful footballer, then an officer in the British army from a young age, his future was by no means certain.  The fact that a working class boy raised in an orphanage managed to achieve so much, shows the level of character he had.  The fact that he did it as a black man, in arenas usually exclusively for white men shows that he is a forgotten heroes of black, football and military history and deserves the attention he is now receiving.