Stephen Wynn - Against All Odds: Walter Tull the Black Lieutenant

Against All Odds

Walter Tull The Black Lieutenant

by

Stephen Wynn

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

Pen & Sword Military

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street

Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright Stephen Wynn, 2018

ISBN 978 1 52670 404 7

eISBN 978 1 52670 406 1

Mobi ISBN 978 1 52670 405 4

The right of Stephen Wynn to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Whilst writing this book a friends wife sadly passed away after losing her battle with cancer. I would like to dedicate this book in her memory:

Julie Hopton 25 October 1958 24 October 2016 Gone from this world, but remembered for ever more.

S tephen is a retired police officer having served with Essex Police as a constable for thirty years between 1983 and 2013. He is married to Tanya and has two sons, Luke and Ross, and a daughter, Aimee. His sons served five tours of Afghanistan between 2008 and 2013 and both were injured. This led to the publication of his first book, Two Sons in a Warzone Afghanistan: The True Story of a Fathers Conflict , published in October 2010.

Both Stephens grandfathers served in and survived the First World War, one with the Royal Irish Rifles, the other in the Mercantile Marine, whilst his father was a member of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps during the Second World War.

Stephen collaborated with Ken Porter on a book published in August 2012, German PoW Camp 266 Langdon Hills . It spent six weeks as the number one best-selling book in Waterstones, Basildon between March and April 2013. They have also collaborated on other books in this local history series.

Stephen has also co-written three crime thrillers, published between 2010 and 2012, which centre round a fictional detective named Terry Danvers.

Against All Odds: Walter Tull the Black Lieutenant is one of numerous books which Stephen has written for Pen and Sword on aspects of the Great War, including several in the Towns and Cities of The Great War series which commemorate the sacrifices made by young men up and down the country.

W alter Daniel John Tull was many things to many people, but above all else he was a determined individual who, in his comparatively short life, fought against adversity, inequality and racism.

He was a passionate man who gave one hundred per cent to everything that he did. In some aspects black people faced very difficult times throughout the United Kingdom at the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth centuries. For a black person to get on in life was not easy; Walter Tull was one of those who managed to do so. His sporting prowess opened many doors for him, but that did not mean that he had it easy, far from it. During his footballing career, not only did he have to deal with the sometimes vitriolic crowd abuse from away fans, but opposing players spent most of the game trying to kick lumps out of him, in a day and age when football boots were more akin to a pair of heavy Dr Martens bovver boots, than the ultra light, multi-coloured footwear of todays footballers.

The 2001 Census records that there were more than one million black people living in the United Kingdom, with just one per cent of the entire population describing themselves as being Black Caribbean. This was broken down further to 0.8 per cent classing themselves as Black African, and 0.2 per cent being Black other. It would be fair to say that the 1901 version of the United Kingdom which Walter Tull found himself growing up in, consisted of very few black people, in fact the colour of a persons skin or their ethnicity, wasnt even one of the ten categories included in the 1901 Census, more than likely because it was either assumed that nearly everybody living in the United Kingdom at that time was either white, or those who were not, accounted for such a small percentage, it was deemed not worth recording.

Walter proved, by way of example, that a man, no matter what the colour of his skin, or his social standing in society, could achieve most things in life if he wanted it badly enough and if he applied himself in the right way. Despite coming from a poor, immigrant family and losing both parents at a relatively young age, he went on to become a professional footballer, representing both Tottenham Hotspur and Northampton Town football clubs, as well as becoming a professional soldier in the British Army.

He was only the third black man to play professional football in the top flight of the English Football league, in what is now the Premiership, and he became the first black officer to lead white troops into battle, during the Great War of 1914 1919.

Soon after the outbreak of the war, and despite being a regular in Northampton Towns football team at the time, he was one of the first footballers to enlist and go off and fight. For him, it was never going to be a case of waiting around to be called up. He enlisted initially in the Army as a private soldier in the 17 th (1 st Football) Battalion, Middlesex Regiment. He quickly worked his way through the ranks, and in May 1917 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the same regiment.

He was a principled man who knew what he had to do, and he died doing what he believed in. A truly remarkable individual who was admired and respected by nearly everybody who got to know him as a person, and who could see past the colour of his skin.

T he story begins in Barbados with the birth of Walters father Daniel Tull. Barbados, a sovereign country situated in the Lesser Antilles, in the Americas, is a small island, only 21 miles in length and 14 miles across. Its size helped foster a tight-knit community amongst those who lived there.

The island was first settled by the English in 1627, later becoming first an English and then subsequently a British colony. The Olive Blossom , a trading ship owned by English merchant William Courteen and commanded by Captain John Powell, had first landed at the islands St James Town in 1625, claiming it in the name of King James l.

The main crops grown on the island had originally been ginger, indigo, cotton and tobacco, these items were added to in 1640 with the beginning of the sugar cane industry, and with it came an increased use of slave labour, but not just from the African continent. Initially much of the labour force was European, coming in from all over Britain, and over the course of time this also included prisoners of war, vagrants picked up off of the streets of the United Kingdom, forcibly transported to Barbados, and then sold as servants to the rich land owners.