Walter Tull 1888-1918 – Officer Footballer

From The Observer:

The football career of Walter Tull – a glittering amateur spell with Clapton, a handful of games for Tottenham Hotspur during the Edwardian golden age and sterling Southern League service for Northampton in the years before the first world war – pales by comparison with the other achievements of a remarkable black pioneer chronicled in this engaging and thought-provoking biography."

Tull's courage took him from the Somme to the Alps and back again and was recognised by his commission as a second lieutenant, which defied army regulations prohibiting "men of colour" from serving as officers. His character got him over that hurdle but exceptional as his qualities were, it seems they were not enough to persuade the top brass to award him the Military Cross for which his commanding officer had recommended him, nor for the ongoing campaign to have him honoured posthumously, yet to prove successful.

Vasili tells this poignant story well and the account of Tull's death at Arras in 1918 is particularly heart-rending. In the absence of a diary recording his subject's thoughts, Tull's feelings and motives are necessarily ambiguous and elusive. The author gets round this by using circumstantial evidence, wishful thinking and conjecture, but it is done plausibly and always with a dramatist's eye.

I'll have to keep an eye out for this one.