FOLKESTONE FOOTBALLER AND WAR HERO – WALTER TULL

EARLY YEARS

Walter was the son of a Barbadian carpenter Daniel Tull, and Alice Palmer who was born in Kent.  Daniel’s father had been a slave in Barbados.  Walter went to school at North Board School, now Mundella Primary School, Folkestone.

Sadly, Walter’s mother died of cancer when he was just seven, and a year later his father married Clara, Alice’s cousin.  Just three months after Clara gave birth to a daughter Daniel died and Clara was unable to cope so Daniel and his brother Edward were put into foster care.

FOOTBALL

Tull signed as a professional footballer with Clapton in London in 1908 and signed for First Division Team Tottenham Hotspur in the summer of 1909.  Despite great success, he only made 10 appearances before being dropped to the reserves.  This may have been due to the racial abuse he received from opposing fans.

The match report of the away game with Bristol City in October 1909 by Football Star reporter, “DD”, was headlined “Football and the Colour Prejudice”, possibly the first time racial abuse was headlined in a football report.

He later played for Northampton Town, making 111 first team appearances and scoring nine goals.  The day before the RMS Titanic sank on 15 April 1912, Tull scored four goals in a match against Bristol Rovers.

ARMY LIFE

Then came World War I…

Walter became the first Northampton Town player to enlist in the British Army, and served in the two Football Battalions of the Duke of Cambridge’s Own (Middlesex) Regiment, the 17th and 23rd, and also in the 5th Battalion. He rose to the rank of Lance Sergeant and fought in the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

When Tull was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant on 30 May 1917, he became one of the first mixed-heritage infantry officers in a regular British Army regiment, and then served on the Italian Front before being killed in action near the village of Favreuil in the Pas-de-Calais on 25 March during the First Battle of Bapaume, the early stages of the German Army’s Spring Offensive.  His body was never recovered, despite the efforts of, among others, Private Tom Billingham, a former goalkeeper for Leicester Fosse, to return him to the British position while under fire. He is believed to be buried somewhere in the Somme, but it has been suggested that he may be buried in an unmarked grave at Heninel-Croisilles Road cemetery.

In a letter of condolence to his family, the commanding officer of the 23rd Battalion, Major Poole and his colleague 2Lt Pickard both said that Tull had been put forward for a Military Cross. Pickard wrote “he had been recommended for the Military Cross, and certainly earned it.”  However, the Ministry of Defence has no record of any recommendation but many records were lost in a 1940 fire.

In 1940, an article in the Glasgow Evening Times about Tull being the first “coloured” infantry officer in the British Army reported that he had signed to play for Rangers after the war. Rangers have confirmed that Tull signed for them in February 1917, while he was an officer cadet in Scotland at Gailes, Ayrshire.