Earlier this year, 43,000 people gathered at Rangers Ibrox Stadium in Glasgow for a pre-season friendly. The game between Tottenham Hotspur and Rangers was intended to honor the memory of a soccer player who died more than 100 years earlier.
Walter Tull’s life had been extraordinary—a “testimony,” according to Phil Vasili, the author of his biography, “to the determination to face those people and the obstacles that he and the world in which he lived tried to reduce.”
Tull was born in April 1888 in the coastal town of Folkestone, England. His father, Daniel Tull, was a black carpenter from Barbados whose parents had been enslaved. His mother, Alice Elizabeth Palmer, was a local white woman.
When Tull was nine years old, both of his parents had died. That is why he and his brother Edward were sent to an orphanage in Bethnal Green in east London. When Edward was later adopted by a family in Glasgow, Scotland, Tull was left alone.
He sought comfort on the orphanage soccer team, where his skills attracted the attention of local amateur team Clapton FC. Tull joined them in October 1908 and quickly inspired them to win the FA Amateur Cup, the London County Amateur Cup, and the London Senior Cup. The Football Star, a London magazine, declared him the “catch of the season.”
Soon, one of the biggest clubs in the country called. In the summer of 1909, Tull signed with Tottenham Hotspur, making him only the third mixed-race player to appear in the top division of English football, the First Division.
His first two games for Tottenham were with Inside Forward against Sunderland and FA Cup holder Manchester United. During his brief stay in North London, Tull scored two goals in 10 games and was named by The Football Star as “Hotspur’s smartest striker… so clean in his head and with his method that he is a role model for all white men who play soccer.”
But only 0.04 percent of Edwardian Britain’s population was black, and Tull faced racism from the stands.
On October 1, 1909, there was a game in Bristol City when Tull was relentlessly abused. The Football Star reported that “some of the crowd cowardly attacked him in a language lower than Billingsgate” — a word that had become synonymous with foul language used centuries earlier on the London fish market.
Tottenham responded by throwing Tull into their reserve team. It is unclear whether they intended this for his own protection or whether the decision was made to appease the racist mobs, but Tull languished there for two years until Northampton Town, a Southern Football League team, signed him in October 1911.
Herbert Chapman, the manager who signed Tull, had his first job in soccer management. He later established himself as one of the greatest managers in English football of all time, winning four First Division titles in the 1920s and 1930s with his famous teams from Huddersfield Town and Arsenal. Tull continued to play 111 games for Northampton before his career was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914.
From soccer field to battlefield
In December of the same year, Tull joined the 17th Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment of the British Army. Known as a soccer battalion, it was created to show that professional soccer was contributing to the war effort. By spring 1915, around 200 professional soccer players had enrolled in the battalion. They were joined by club staff, amateur players, and even fans who wanted to fight alongside the players they were used to watching from the terraces.
Tull arrived in France in November 1915. Towards the end of 1916, he took part in the Battle of the Somme, in which more than a million soldiers were killed or wounded within four months. The British Army alone suffered around 420,000 casualties, including 125,000 deaths. Tull survived but suffered a “shell shock” and was sent to England to recover.
By this point, Tull had impressed his senior officers so much that, before returning to France, he was sent to the officer cadet school in Gailes, Scotland, which defied military regulations that prohibited “any black or person of color” from being commissioned as an officer. The Army ignored its own rules to make the most of Tull’s talents.
While Tull was in Scotland, he was approached by Rangers, who signed him to play for them when the war was over.
In May 1917, he had risen to the rank of lieutenant. Between November of that year and March 1918, he served on the Italian front, where he led 26 men in a nighttime raid during the Battle of the Piave River. Tull and his troops crossed the river in northern Italy into enemy territory before returning without casualties. He was praised for his “bravery and coolness” under heavy fire.
“He ridiculed the military council’s firm view that white ordinary soldiers would not take orders from black people,” said Tull’s biographer Vasili. “[He was] a soldier who aroused such love, which was contrary to common sense notions and official rules and regulations.”
Tull moved to northern France on March 8, 1918, with the 23rd Battalion being stationed near Arras. In the early morning hours of March 21, before the sun rose, the Germans began bombing the British and French troops. This was their spring offensive and their last concerted effort to win the war.
Within five hours, 6,600 German guns fired 3.5 million explosive shells at British and French positions. Unbeknownst to it, the British were forced to fight back in a defensive operation that lasted four months and claimed 418,000 victims. Among them was Walter Tull.
On March 25, 1918, Tull was shot dead during the First Battle of Bapaume near the village of Favreuil in Pas-de-Calais.
Under heavy fire, Private Tom Billingham, a former Leicester Fosse goalkeeper, tried to bring back Tull but was unsuccessful. His body was never found.
Mocking the “Barriers of Ignorance”
The name of one of the first black players in British football and the first black officer in the British Army to lead a battalion of troops is engraved on the Arras Memorial in France, along with those of 34,794 other soldiers who lost their lives but did not receive a proper burial.
The commanding officer of Tull’s battalion, Major Poole, stated that he was being proposed for a military cross, one of the highest awards in the British Army, but he never received it. Vasili believes he has found evidence in the form of a top-secret memo explaining the army’s reluctance to recognize Tull. In the memo, which contains heavily racist language, the British Army Recruiting Director in New York explained: “We are now refusing to send men of color into ‘white units. ‘”
It could have been a final example of the racism directed against a man who, according to Vasili, “ridiculed the barriers of ignorance that tried to deny people of color the equality of their contemporaries.”
It took many decades, but Tull would be remembered. In 1999, a memorial to him and a memorial garden were built in front of Sixfields Stadium in Northampton Town. The Walter Tull Way and a nearby pub were also named after him.
In October 2021, Tull was inducted into the National Football Museum Hall of Fame at a ceremony in Manchester attended by his great-grandnephew Edward Finlayson and former Tottenham and England defender Ledley King.
“Since I found out about Walter Tull as a young player at Spurs, I’ve been a big fan,” said King. “He is a real inspiration to me and a pioneer for every black footballer who has done it since then.”