Tragic tale of the first black footballer to play at the highest level in the UK

Tragically, he was killed in action just weeks before the end of World War One – a story tragically all too little known, something Dougie Blaxland (book & lyrics) is hoping to change with the musical drama Our Little Hour (New Theatre Royal, Portsmouth, October 24, original score by Chris Anthony). It tells the story of the grandson of a Barbadian slave who overcame incredible odds.

Dougie said: “The piece came really on the back of my last play which was called On The Ropes about a British boxer who broke the Windrush story. Somebody came up to me afterwards and said ‘Do you know the story you really should be writing?’ and they said Walter Tull.”

Telling Tull’s story became a commission from the Show Racism the Red Card organisation “Really it started out of the context of my own writing, what I write and what my niche is. I write plays about sporting heroes and I had actually heard of Tull before. I wrote a play called Getting The Third Degree (the deeply moving story of Laurie Cunningham who came to prominence with West Bromwich Albion in the late 1970s), and I had come across Tull while I was doing the research. Show Racism the Red Card wanted another way to engage audiences and to find audiences around the issues of racism and prejudice in football, and this really intrigued me. Walter Tull was not just a footballer. He went beyond the stereotypes of the sportsman. He broke the big glass ceiling to become the first man of his heritage to become a British Army officer. And you read the military manual of law at the time which says that officers should be of pure European descent. There was so much opposition to him becoming an officer but a guy called Colonel Craig Brown, who was actually killed on the same day that Tull was, pushed for him. He was also a footballer and there is something egalitarian about fellow footballers being together. And Tull wasn't just a good footballer. He rose to the highest level to play for Spurs which I think says something about the level that he was playing at. And the friendship between them was something like the friendship between Jesse Owens and his German counterpart in 1936 who became lifelong friends.

“Walter Tull was an incredibly good-looking guy – not that that particularly matters, but he was very charismatic and very charming. All the letters indicate that he was a quietly-spoken man with humility but also always very engaging. You had the feeling with him that you were the only person he was talking to, and he was a very good listener but in terms of what his men said about him in the war, they always said that he would never ask them to do something that he wouldn't do himself.”

Alongside these qualities was resilience: “By the age of eight he was an orphan. There were six children but he and his brother Edward had to go to an orphanage in Bethnal Green separated from the others. And then Walter was left alone when his brother was adopted, and that must have been a real feeling of rejection. He was left alone from the age of six to 18 and there was a resilience in him that I think we can all learn from. Walter clearly developed resilience and I think it was these difficult experiences that must have shaped him and given him a sense of purpose that was really quite remarkable.”