Blurring the Touchlines of Empire: The Diasporic Identities of Arthur Wharton and Walter Tull

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ISBN 978-1-137-35580-5

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IDENTITY AND NATION IN AFRICAN FOOTBALLEdited by Chuka Onwum

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IDENTITY AND NATION IN AFRICAN FOOTBALLFans, Community and Clubs

Edited by Chuka Onwumechili and Gerard Akindes

November 11, 2013 11:18 MAC/AFRIC Page-19 9781137355805_03_cha01

PROOF

1Blurring Touchlines of Empire:Diasporic Identities of ArthurWharton and Walter TullPhillip Janzen

Introduction

In March 1887, a young man named Arthur Wharton started in goal forPreston North End in a soccer match against Corinthians in London.The match, attended by the Prince of Wales, was played in honorof Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. Wharton was no stranger to thespotlight: the previous summer he had won the Amateur Athletic Asso-ciation’s 100-yard dash in a record-breaking time of 10 seconds. He wasdropped from Preston’s roster the next season, but he continued play-ing with other teams until 1902, when he retired and became a coalminer. A generation later, another young soccer player named WalterTull impressed top London club Tottenham Hotspur and he was quicklysigned to the team. He played there for two seasons before moving onto play for Northampton. However, his promising career was cut shortin 1914 when he enlisted to fight in World War I. He became an officerin 1916 and was then killed two years later at the second battle of theSomme (Jenkins, 1990; Vasili, 1996, 1998, and 2000).1

What brings these two stories together? And why do they stand out?In many ways, these two lives do not seem very distinctive. In fact,Wharton and Tull appear to epitomize the idealized narrative of turn-of-the-century British identity: disciplined and patriotic Christians whoplayed for and even died for the British Empire. However, one fac-tor makes Wharton and Tull unique and also precluded them frombeing accepted as ‘British’: they were both black.2 Wharton was bornin the Gold Coast to Fante, Scottish, and Grenadian ancestry, whileTull, though born in London, was the son of a Barbadian father and an

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PROOF20 Blurring Touchlines of Empire

English mother. Regardless of their accomplishments and their exempli-fications of British ideals, the racism that both men experienced made itclear that they could not be ‘British.’ Yet neither were they ‘African’or ‘Caribbean,’ despite the suggestions of contemporaneous newspa-per reporters. Instead, I argue, the identities of Wharton and Tull wereintrinsically diasporic, grounded only in the meandering, transatlanticitineraries of the British Empire.

Wharton and Tull’s lives are useful for the historian for two mainreasons. The first is that their stories interrogate the word ‘identity.’As Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper have argued, humanities andsocial sciences scholars have used the word with such high frequencyin the last 20 years that it has begun to lose its value as a categoryof analysis. Brubaker and Cooper (2005: 80, 83, 85) claim that theword, with its ‘connotations of boundedness, groupness, and sameness,’flattens people into ‘sharply bounded, internally homogenous groups.’They add that using the word ‘identity’ has an ahistorical effect, that itbinds ‘past, present, and future in a single word.’ Similarly, James Sweet(2009: 283–4) has made the case that group identity labels are unableto ‘shed light on the possibilities for individuals to move in and outof group or “national” categories of identity over the course of a life-time.’ Wharton and Tull’s unsettled and shifting identities, rooted onlyin rootlessness, counteract the reification of misleading and monolithicgroup identities.

The second reason their stories are useful is that they bring the his-tories of colony and metropole together into the same analytical field.A great deal of scholarship in the last fifteen years or so (Wilder, 2005;Cooper and Stoler, 1997; Conklin, 1997) has made an explicit effortto emphasize the significance of this integrated approach.3 HistorianGregory Mann (2005) writes that while these works have largely suc-ceeded in making this argument – in blurring the touchlines of empire –they tend to consider only colonial policy and ideology, and thusaccomplish their goal only at a discursive level. Mann’s work breaks withthis trend by focusing not on discourse, but on places, specifically mon-uments in France and West Africa. This chapter proposes to further thiswork by using the examples of Wharton and Tull’s peripatetic lives.4

I argue that their stories cannot be told, much less understood, with-out this unified framework. And, by focusing on their identities, thisframework can be understood in a way that moves beyond the realm ofdiscourse.

While the general structure of this chapter follows the chronologyof Wharton and Tull’s lives, my aim is not simply to reproduce the


PROOFIdentity and Nation in African Football 21

biographical work that has already been done. Rather, I want to empha-size their diasporic identities in order to make clear these two importanthistoriographical points. However, before doing so, and in order to prop-erly contextualize the world that Wharton and Tull entered, it would begood to first consider the significance of soccer in late nineteenth andearly twentieth century Britain.

Soccer and British identity

The basic rules of soccer were agreed upon in 1848 when representativesfrom several British schools met at Cambridge University (Garland andRowe, 2001). Other aspects of the game were formalized in 1863 withthe creation of the Football Association, or FA (Russell, 1999). By the1870s, Saturday had become a half-holiday for many workers in Britain,making soccer matches a weekly ritual. Gradually, the game expandedfrom the schools to professional sports clubs. The growing popular inter-est in the sport was a major factor in this professionalization – there wasmoney to be made because people were willing to pay to watch soc-cer matches. These new professional clubs carved themselves into theminds of people in the towns and cities of Britain, particularly those ofthe working class. In 1891, there were 12 professional clubs in Britain.By 1894, the number had grown to 31, and by 1923 it had reached 86(Taylor, 2005).

This rapidly increasing popularity had significant effects, especially inschools. As Jon Garland and Michael Rowe (2001: 24) have put it, soccerwas an effective way to ‘propagate an educational experience that wouldequip pupils mentally, physically and morally with the values theywould need to rely upon in the outside world.’ Historian J. A. Mangan(1981, 1985, 1992) asserts that it was in the schools and on the soccerpitches of the country that British identity and feelings of pride aboutimperialism were woven into future generations. He cites many of thepoems and songs that were used in the schools. For example,

The same old gameThe same old gameTo forget or forgo it were a shame.When we are past and goneThe young ones coming onWill carry on the same old game.

(Mangan, 1981: 186)



Many of the poems focused on athletic prowess, honor, and the impor-tance of sport in preparing the boys of England for the work ofmaintaining the Empire:

. . . the use on peaceful playing fieldsOf supple limbs and ever-quickening eyeWin for him laurels in a sterner gameGiving resource and strength that never yields,Making him such that he would rather dieThan soil the honour of his country’s name.

(Mangan, 1981: 201).

Some were more specifically didactic and oriented toward instilling‘British’ values such as discipline and selflessness:

’Tis there in friendly rivalrySchool meets with neighbouring schoolAnd English boys all ‘play the game’And learn to keep the rule.There each one plays for side, not self,And strength and skill employs,On the playing-fields of England,The Pride of English boys.

(Mangan, 1981: 201)

Others emphasized fitness and masculine strength, and the shame ofboys who did not eagerly participate in sports. This one is told from afather’s perspective:

What in the world is the use of a creatureAll flabbily bent on avoiding the Pitch,Who wanders about, with a sob in each featureDevising a headache, inventing a stitch?There surely would be a quick end to my joyIf possessed of that monster – a feminine boy.

(Mangan, 1981: 189)

Still other poems suggested that sporting ability was an adequate sub-stitute for – if not an improvement on – schoolwork and ‘bookishness.’Many of these poems also took a militaristic slant:



Could our young men have turned out so quickly;Well trained for all the hardships of the front,Had they not become quite well accustomedOf hard and nasty knocks to bear the brunt?

No they could not, gentle, thoughtless reader,Study’s necessary in its way,But not more so than are games like cricket,To keep old England where she is today.

(Mangan, 1981: 192)

These poems, all published between 1887 and 1922, tell us a lot aboutthe importance of athletics in turn-of-the-century Britain. First, theydescribe a very specific form of masculinity, one based on physical andmoral strength, discipline, selflessness, pride, and honor. They also sug-gest that understanding and developing these values required athleticability. Additionally, the imperialist undertones of the poems inculcatedyoung people with a sense of devotion to the Empire and a willingnessto defend it to the death. Most importantly, the poems helped makethese values a crucial part of what was considered necessary for becom-ing a good ‘English boy,’ and more generally, for being British. To playsoccer then was not just to play a game; it was to join a celebration ofBritish identity. While not everyone in Britain at the time was a staunchimperialist, a heroic athlete, or an uncritical believer in progress, thegrowing popularity of soccer and other sports across all ranks of societyhelped to spread and promote this very particularized notion of Britishidentity.5 How then did Arthur Wharton and Walter Tull fit into thisframework?

Arthur Wharton

Arthur Wharton was born in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1865, buthis story should begin with his parents and grandparents. Wharton’sfather, Henry Wharton, was born in 1819 in Grenada. Henry’s fatherwas a Scottish trader and his mother was a free-born Afro-Grenadianwhose mother had been a slave. Arthur’s mother, Annie Florence Grant,was born in the Gold Coast. Annie’s father was another Scottish traderand her mother was from the Fante royal family of the Ekumfie state.How did Henry, the half-Scottish half-Grenadian, meet Annie, the half-Scottish, half-Fante royal? Henry left the Caribbean for London in 1845to study at a Methodist seminary in order to become a missionary.



When he graduated, his superiors decided to send him to the GoldCoast because they thought – completely erroneously – that as a blackman he would be less susceptible to disease. In 1849, soon after arriv-ing, he met Annie Grant. She had also gone to school in Britain, as wasthe practice of many wealthy Fante. Henry and Annie married and hadten children, four of whom survived infancy. The eighth of these wasArthur.

The coastal towns where Arthur spent his childhood were generallyquite cosmopolitan, populated not only by Fante and Asante and otherlocal groups, but also by people from Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria,Europe, and the Caribbean, among other places (Jenkins, 1990). He grewup with wealth and status: his mother’s side of the family was involvedin trading palm oil, rubber, and gold around the world, while his fatherwas the General Superintendent of the Wesleyan mission in the GoldCoast by the time of Arthur’s birth. Most of the extended family, as wellas many others in Arthur’s social world, had been educated in Europe.Unlike the Asante, who generally lived in the hinterland, many of thecoastal Fante had assimilated into British culture, at least to an extent.Their language, dress, beliefs, and even occupations were largely influ-enced by Britain, yet these coastal Africans were not fully accepted asBritish. Nor did other Africans always see them in a particularly positivelight. For example, when Henry Wharton first came to the Gold Coast,he was often referred to as ‘white man’ and was considered a European(Vasili, 1998). This left him and others like him – such as his son Arthur –in a peculiar middle position.6

In 1873, the Anglo-Asante conflict emerged again. The British, some-times with help from the Fante, fought four wars against the Asanteover the course of the nineteenth century. This war lasted from 1873to 1874, and like the other wars, it disrupted trade and farming andled to mass starvation and the spread of disease. During the fighting,Henry Wharton served as a chaplain for the British, but not for verylong. In October 1873, he became sick and died. Arthur, then eight yearsold, was left to be raised by his mother and her brother, F. C. Grant,who was a wealthy merchant. They sent Arthur to school in Londonfrom 1875 to 1879. He then returned to the Gold Coast and went toa high school in Cape Coast. In 1882 he went back to England andstudied at a private Wesleyan college in Shoal Hill College in Cannock,just north of Birmingham, which other members of his extended familyhad attended. His uncle encouraged him to follow his father’s exampleand become a Wesleyan missionary or a teacher and then return to the



Gold Coast (Vasili, 1998). Instead, he stayed in England and became asportsman.

Wharton played soccer at the college, as well as for a local ama-teur team, but his breakthrough came in 1886 when he set the recordin the 100-yard dash, as described at the beginning of this chapter.This change in Wharton’s trajectory from studying to become a mis-sionary to training as an elite athlete was highly unusual. While hedid participate in sports as a boy, he did not grow up in an environ-ment where sports were seen as an important pursuit. In fact, in thecoastal towns of the Gold Coast – unlike in most British colonies –there was a strong backlash against playing sports.7 Most people,including Wharton’s uncle and guardian, F. C. Grant, believed thatsports were a waste of time. Young people were instead encouraged todevelop ‘political, business, and professional skills’ and virtues such as‘hard work, self-restraint, thrift, and educational achievement’ (Jenkins,1990: 38).

Despite these attitudes, Wharton continued on with athletics. His featon the track made him somewhat of a celebrity in England, so PrestonNorth End, one of England’s major soccer clubs, signed him to a con-tract in September 1886 (Vasili, 1998). Wharton’s status as a track andfield celebrity drew large crowds that provided the club with some extraincome, but Wharton was not signed just to attract attention – he wasalso a strong goalkeeper. During the 1886–87 season, he played in 27games and won 24 while allowing just 36 goals. And then during thatyear’s Football Association Cup tournament he allowed just four goalsin six games (Jenkins, 1990). His play earned him glowing praise fromnewspaper reporters. After one game in January 1887, Jonathan Oldbuckfrom the Athletic News described Wharton as ‘a born goalkeeper; henever loses his head, and his hands are always in readiness. His wasone of the best exhibitions of goalkeeping I have seen for a long time’(Vasili, 1998). Wharton’s reputation stayed with him throughout hiscareer, even as he grew older and moved on to other teams. In 1895,according to a reporter in the Rotherham Advertiser, Wharton’s play wasstill exemplary:

[Wharton gave] one of his best displays, and it will be a source of plea-sure to many – there were a few early on in the season who thoughthis hand had lost its cunning – to learn that he has returned to hisold form, and that his saving of the last few weeks has been donewith all the vigour and accurateness of his former days when he was



rightly regarded as prince among goalkeepers. May he still give usfurther cause for admiration. (Vasili, 1998: 121)

Later on in the twilight of his career, Wharton was still playing well,then as the captain for Stalybridge Rovers. After defeating Middleton inOctober 1899, the Ashton Herald (1899: 135) described Wharton as ‘thebest man in the Rovers’ ranks . . . a tower of strength to his side. Oneof his saves was a lovely piece of work. The ball was sent in with greatrapidity, but Wharton pounced upon it, and cleared in brilliant fashionamidst great applause.’

Alongside this praise, however, came a great deal of racism. ‘DarkieWharton’ became a common nickname used by the press and by peoplewho attended games. After Wharton’s 100-yard triumph in July 1886,the Darlington and Stockton Times (1886: 21) claimed that ‘his style ofrunning is associated with men of colour, who as a rule have a gooddeal of heel.’ Another reporter wrote that Wharton was by ‘no meansa representative Englishman in appearance’ (Jenkins, 1990: 25). Whileplaying for Preston North End, a writer from the Athletic Journal asked,‘Is the darkie’s pate too thick for it to dawn upon him that betweenthe posts is no place for a skylark?’ (Vasili, 1998: 69). When Whartonwas signed by Stalybridge in 1896, the Northern Daily Telegraph reportedthat ‘Stalybridge Rovers have bagged a real nigger as a goalkeeper inWharton, who is none other than the “Darkie” who used to guard theNorth End citadel’ (Vasili, 1998: 87). Even when these epithets were usedin an apparently ‘positive’ – or rather possessive – way (‘our Darkie’),they still betrayed the undertones of differentiation, of racism (Garlandand Rowe, 2001: 31).

These characterizations are not exactly surprising. As Vasili haspointed out, Wharton was playing during a time when scientific racismwas on the rise. In 1884, the Encyclopaedia Britannica wrote that:

No full-blooded Negro has ever been distinguished as a man of sci-ence, a poet, or an artist, and the fundamental equality claimed forhim by ignorant philanthropists is belied by the whole history of therace throughout the historic period. (Vasili, 1998: 80)

Twenty-seven years later, the entry for ‘Negro’ in the 11th edition ofthe encyclopaedia stated that ‘mentally the negro is inferior to thewhite . . . the mental constitution of the negro is very similar to that of achild, normally good-natured and cheerful, but subject to sudden fits of



emotion and passion during which he is capable of performing acts ofsingular atrocity’ (Vasili, 1998: 80–1).

These racial slurs cannot be understood only in the context of scien-tific racism, however. There were deeper roots to Wharton’s exclusionand these acts of racism should be seen as symptomatic of a longerhistory of racial thought that has opposed British identity and blackidentity (Sweet, 2003). Jonathon Glassman (2004: 725) defines racialthought as a ‘shifting field of discourse, a general set of assumptionsthat humankind is divided among constituent categories, each of whichis distinguished by inherited traits and characteristics.’8 In this light,scientific racism and the ranking of different people based on ‘inher-ited traits’ was not something new, but rather another ‘possible formof “racial thought”.’ For example, in 1601, 300 years before Whartoncame to England, Queen Elizabeth I expressed her fears about the ‘greatnumbers of Negars and Blackamoors which [have] crept into this realm.’She continued by describing them as ‘infidels, having no understandingof Christ or his Gospel,’ and called for their deportation (Sweet, 2003;Bartels, 2006).9 More recently, cultural theorist Paul Gilroy (1987: 12)has written: ‘I have grown gradually more and more weary of having todeal with . . . the forms of nationalism endorsed by a discipline which,in spite of itself, tends towards a morbid celebration of England andEnglishness from which blacks are systematically excluded.’ And out-side of academia, there has been a movement in the last few decadeson the far right of British politics to develop an ‘exclusive notion ofEnglishness built around an ethnically-white rural idyll’ (Garland andRowe, 2001: 19).

Arthur Wharton spoke English, studied at a Wesleyan college, and wasa celebrated sportsman. When he retired from soccer in 1902, he beganworking in a coal mine in northern England to support his family – hehad married in 1890 (Vasili, 1998).10 He died in 1930, and in many wayshe had lived up to the standards of Britishness outlined in the poemscited at the beginning of this chapter. Yet, he had lived in a culture thathad never fully accepted him and would never fully accept him.11 It isimpossible then, to see Wharton as having a British identity. However,it is equally difficult to see him as ‘African’ or ‘Caribbean.’ He neverreturned to the Gold Coast after leaving in 1882, and by 1901 he hadlost all contact with his family there. As for the Caribbean, his fatherwas his only connection to that world and he died when Arthur waseight years old. Thus, any notion of Wharton having a bounded identitywas fractured by migration, assimilation, and racism. Wharton lived inbetween these worlds.12 His was an undeniably diasporic identity that



can only be understood if one conceives of the lines between Britainand its colonies with a similar fluidity.

Walter Tull

Unlike Wharton, Walter Tull was born in Britain. However, his ancestryis also a story of migration. His father, Daniel Tull, was born in Barbadosto parents who had been slaves. Daniel was educated by Moravian mis-sionaries and was trained as a carpenter. He left the Caribbean in 1876and moved to Britain to look for work, ending up in Folkestone insoutheast England. There he met Alice Palmer, whom he married. Theyattended a Wesleyan Church and had five children, including Walter,who was born in 1888. This apparently stable family structure did notlast long: Alice died of cancer in 1895 when Walter was seven yearsold. Daniel then married Alice’s cousin Clara, but in 1897 he too died.Walter was an orphan before age 10, and Clara was left with the taskof raising the children, a responsibility she hired out to orphanages andfoster parents. A few months later, Walter and his brother Edward weresent to a Methodist orphanage in east London, but they were quicklyseparated when Edward was adopted by a Glasgow family. Walter spentthe next 10 years at the ‘Children’s Home and Orphanage,’ which triedto educate the children, provide them with the skills required to findemployment, and instill in them a Methodist-based moral system.

Walter Tull’s soccer career began with his orphanage team. When hewas 20, he began playing for a local amateur team, Clapton. His play atClapton, especially his ‘clever footwork,’ was noticed by London clubTottenham Hotspur and they signed him in 1909 (Vasili, 1996: 54).Tottenham had just been promoted to the first division of English foot-ball and Tull was a starting player in the first game of the 1909–1910season. Two games later, Tottenham played their first home game ofthe season in front of 32,000 fans. Their opponent was ManchesterUnited and Tull was again among the starting 11. At first, his perfor-mances were praised in newspapers. For example, after the game againstManchester, one reporter wrote that ‘such perfect coolness . . . and suchaccuracy of strength in passing, I have not seen for a long time . . . Helet his opponents do the rushing, and defeated them by side touchesand side-steps worthy of a professional boxer. Tull is very good indeed’(Vasili, 1996: 58). However, by the end of October, Tull was droppedto the reserve team. His decline in form may have been due in part tothe racism he experienced during an away game at Bristol. Accordingto one reporter writing about ‘the color prejudice’ in soccer, a group



of ‘Bristol hooligans . . . made a cowardly attack upon him in languagelower than Billingsgate’ (Vasili, 1996: 61). The widespread racial vio-lence at the time in many British cities may have also had an effect onTull. Garland and Rowe (2001: 33) say that this violence resulted in sev-eral deaths and to ‘the wholesale terrorism of black communities livingin these cities.’ Whatever the cause of Tull’s declining play, he did notshow any improvement the following season, so he was transferred fromTottenham to Northampton. Initially, his struggles on the field contin-ued, but after a position change he regained his top form and returnedto the first team, where he excelled.

‘Darkie Tull,’ as he was sometimes known, created a dilemma forracists in Britain. They had become accustomed to a ‘science’ thatassured them of their superiority over black people in all regards (Vasili,2000: 50). When Tull and other athletes such as Wharton made itclear that this was not the case, the reasoning had to change. Thus,it was now asserted that it was ‘animalism,’ a sub-human characteris-tic, ‘that allowed [black people] their physical prowess, possession ofwhich necessarily excluded ownership of civilized, cultured traits suchas a highly evolved intellect or refined sensitivities’ (Vasili, 1996: 60).In other words, scientific racism adapted its ideas in order to maintaina white-dominated hierarchy. This flexibility is a further example of thenotion of racial thought and its ‘shifting field of discourse.’ The spe-cific details changed, but the underlying principle remained the same:an uncompromising opposition of Britishness and blackness. No matterwhat black people did to challenge these misguided beliefs, they wouldalways be met with new justifications for their exclusion, new forms ofthe same racial thought.

In 1914, after three seasons with Northampton, Tull’s soccer careerwas put on hold when he enlisted to fight in World War I. This didnot come without controversy. In 1886, British Field Marshal GarnetWolseley warned that ‘if we ever begin to fill our ranks with alien races,our downfall will most surely follow’ (Vasili, 1996: 61–2). And, despitethe fact that black people had served in the British military since the sev-enteenth century, the accepted view remained that racial homogeneitywas essential to victory (Killingray and Rathbone, 1986; Vasili, 1996).Yet Tull was still allowed to volunteer, and he was sent to France in1915 as part of the 1st Football Battalion. He fought at the Battle of theSomme between July and November 1916, where more than 60,000 peo-ple were killed on the first day of fighting (Vasili, 2000). Later that year,he became sick with trench fever and returned to England. While recov-ering, he was sent to officer training school in Scotland and he returned



to the war as a second lieutenant in the 2nd Football Battalion, mak-ing him the first and only black combat officer in the British army untilWorld War II. He was sent to Italy in January 1918, and then returnedto the Somme in April 1918. There he was shot in the head and killed(Vasili, 2000).

Thinking back to the poems quoted at the beginning of this chapter,Tull’s life seems to have exemplified all of the characteristics of the idealBritish man. He was born in England, he had a religious upbringing,he played soccer in school where he learned to ‘play the game’ and‘keep the rule,’ and he displayed honor, discipline, and selflessness. Mostimportantly, however, he moved seamlessly along the trajectory fromathlete to soldier, and eventually died fighting for Britain. His obitu-ary says that he was ‘an officer and a gentleman every inch of him’(Vasili, 1996: 51). Yet, had he survived the war and returned to Britain,he may not have been treated like a ‘gentleman’ or ‘officer’ or evenaccepted as British: the law preventing black soldiers from becomingofficers was reinstated after the war, and many black soldiers who foughtfor Britain were repatriated (Vasili, 1996). These two acts of discrimi-nation indicate that Tull would also have been excluded, regardless ofhis athletic accomplishments or his military rank. Thus, one cannot seeTull as ‘British,’ yet neither can one conceive of him as ‘Caribbean’ or‘Barbadian.’ Like Wharton, his only connection to the Caribbean diedwith his father when he was nine years old. Tull lived in the metropole –in fact he was born in the metropole – but he was not of the metropole.Instead, he was caught in the middle, living a diasporic identity that canbe comprehended only if one regards Britain in the frame of an imperialnation-state.

Conclusion

C. L. R. James wrote extensively about the effects of imperialism, andhis own story of migration between the Caribbean and Britain mirrorssome aspects of Wharton and Tull’s lives. James also wrote about thepotential of athletics for inclusion, for bringing people together. In apassage not unlike the poems quoted in the first section of this chapter,James describes the leveling effect that cricket had on his community inTrinidad when he was a young boy:

As soon as we stepped on the cricket or football field, all was changed.We were a motley crew. The children of some white officials andwhite business men, middle-class blacks and mulattos, Chinese boys,



some of whose parents still spoke broken English, Indian boys, someof whose parents could speak no English at all, and some poor blackboys . . . We learned to play with the team, which meant subordinat-ing your personal inclinations, and even interests, to the good of thewhole. (Baucom, 1999: 159–60)

Arthur Wharton and Walter Tull probably experienced this sense of uni-fication, at least to a degree. Certainly not everyone they met was racist,nor were they excluded by everyone. In fact, their athletic and mili-tary accomplishments were even publicly celebrated. However, to focuson this side of the story is to overlook the racism and exclusion thatWharton and Tull did encounter. Their experiences recall the faded opti-mism that James felt as he grew up. No longer was ‘all changed’ whenhe stepped onto the sports field: ‘The British tradition soaked deep intome was that when you entered the sporting arena you left behind youthe sordid compromises of everyday existence. Yet for us to do thatwe would have had to divest ourselves of our skins’ (James, 1993: 66).Wharton and Tull were also ‘soaked deep’ with the British tradition:their schooling was largely British, they spoke English, and they camefrom Wesleyan/Methodist families. In these ways they were no differentfrom many other British people. In fact, many of their achievementsmade them ideal Britons, at least according to the views of the time. Yetthey were excluded, and what separated them and prevented them frombeing ‘British’ was their skin color.

To understand these experiences, it is impossible to use the neatlybounded analytics of ‘British,’ ‘African,’ or ‘Caribbean’ identities.Instead, it is necessary to move beyond these labels and considerWharton and Tull’s identities as diasporic, as in-between. Writer DanielDefoe had this figured out more than 300 years ago. His ironicallytitled 1701 poem, ‘The True-Born Englishman,’ challenged the ideaof English racial purity: ‘From whence a mongrel half-bred race therecame / With neither name, nor nation, speech or fame / . . . A true-bornEnglishman’s a contradiction / In speech an irony, in fact a fiction’(Baucom, 1999: 16). Echoing this breakdown of the figurative bordersof British identity, Wharton and Tull’s stories also force us to rethinkBritain’s territorial borders. Their unique lives help to tell the largerstory of the British Empire, and of the many links between colonyand metropole. In other words, Wharton and Tull’s identities blur theconventional lines – or touchlines – of empire, and do so in a very per-sonal way, one that moves beyond the discursive abstraction of colonialdocuments.



Notes

1. Vasili is the driving force behind the history of race and soccer in Englandand throughout this chapter I am relying heavily on his work.

2. Vasili is the driving force behind the history of race and soccer in Englandand throughout this chapter I am relying heavily on his work.I use the term‘black’ throughout this chapter, though as Carina Ray has pointed out, theterm ‘colored’ was more common in Britain at this time. Ray notes that ‘col-ored’ was used to describe ‘West Indians, West Africans, Portuguese, Indians,Sinhalese, Malays, Egyptians, Somalis and Arabs.’ However, she also pointsout that it is now a term imbued with colonial undertones, a ‘part of thelexicon of British racism and imperialism,’ and that it ‘has been replaced byblack in both popular and academic usage.’ See Ray (2009).

3. For an extensive list of works that ‘rethink’ national territories as ‘imperialnation-states,’ see Wilder (2012).

4. In addition to Mann’s 2005 article, my approach here draws primarily fromtwo works: Dubois (2010) and Mann (2006). Dubois’ book is a history ofthe French national soccer team. Mann (2005: 11) focuses especially on thestories of two players, Zinedine Zidane and Lilian Thuram, and argues thatthe history of French soccer ‘condenses and illuminates the complexities andironies of French colonialism.’ Mann uses the lives of Malians who foughtfor the French around the world to analyze the relationship between Maliand France. Mann (2005: 4) describes his work as ‘not only African history;nor . . . only French history.’

5. For example, author and poet Thomas Hardy was highly critical of the opti-mism he saw around him. In his 1896 poem, ‘In Tenebris II,’ he writes:‘When the clouds’ swoln bosoms echo back the shouts of the many andstrong / That things are all as they best may be, save a few to be right erelong / And my eyes have not the vision in them to discern what to these isso clear / The blot seems straightway in me alone; one better he were nothere’ (Hardy, 1994: 154).

6. This was a position that often led to tragic endings, as historian Leo Spitzer(1989) has described and analyzed so eloquently. He wrote about Joseph Mayand his son Cornelius. Joseph was captured by slave raiders near Lagos inthe 1820s, then freed by the British and raised in Sierra Leone. He convertedto Methodism, was educated in England, and became a preacher back inSierra Leone. However, he and especially his children were never consideredBritish, they would always be ‘not quite,’ to use Homi Bhabha’s term (1984).Much recent work has been done on these ‘middle figures,’ as Nancy RoseHunt (1999) has called them. See also Lawrance et al. (2006).

7. As Peter Alegi has noted, in most British colonies in Africa there was a gen-eral emphasis on ‘Muscular Christianity,’ an ideology that propagated valuessimilar to those emphasized in the poems quoted at the beginning of thischapter. For example, in 1909, a missionary doctor in Kenya wrote: ‘Ourbelief is that our games may be, when properly controlled, a mighty channelthrough which God can work for the uplifting of this race. They need to bestrengthened in the realm of their physical nature, where Satan so stronglyreigns, and how better than by such a game as football, inherent in whichare magnificent uplifting qualities’ (Alegi, 2010: 12).



8. Glassman argues that this kind of thinking is present everywhere in theworld. One example of this is that Henry Wharton was called ‘white’ byAfricans in the Gold Coast, while his son Arthur was called ‘Darkie’ when hebegan playing soccer in Britain.

9. This kind of racial thought was not unique to England. The Portuguese word‘negra’ and the French word ‘nègre’ were both synonymous with ‘slave’ bythis time.

10. Wharton and his British wife Emma did not have any children, though Vasilispeculates that Emma’s sister Martha may have given birth to one of Arthur’schildren. Family history is an important theme in both Tull and Wharton’slives as both family histories are filled with interracial intimacy. For an anal-ysis of some of the reactions to interracial couples in Britain during thisperiod, see Ray (2009).

11. In fact, until 1990 when Jenkins’ article was published, Wharton was largelyforgotten. This ‘absence of memory’ is the main focus of Vasili’s biography.Vasili remarks that even Wharton’s only living descendant, his grandnieceSheila Leeson, had never heard of Wharton’s athletic achievements. Leesonlearned about these only because of a letter from Vasili while he was doingresearch for his book. Leeson knew Wharton as a great-uncle, but had neverheard of his 100-yard record or his remarkable goalkeeping abilities.

12. For example, while Wharton generally told reporters that he was from theGold Coast, they sometimes assumed that he was from the Caribbean, andhe did not always correct them. Jenkins points out that this may havebeen a political move: people in Britain often identified the Gold Coastwith the Asante, the enemies of Britain in the Anglo-Asante wars of thenineteenth century (see Jenkins, 1990: 59). This is certainly reflective ofWharton’s strong understanding of his position in relation to British soci-ety, but his willingness to move between an African or Gold Coast identityand a Caribbean identity also suggests his awareness about the malleabilityof his diasporic identity.

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Blurring the Touchlines of Empire: The Diasporic Identities of Arthur Wharton and Walter Tull

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