31 Oct 2012

Justice for Walter Tull, victim of racism in sport and war

Presenter

Black footballer and army captain Walter Tull died at the Somme, but he never got his medal for bravery. Author Michael Morpurgo tells Channel 4 News why his new book aims to put that right.

For the War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, writing books that people love isn’t enough. He believes he has a responsibility as a novelist to do much more than that.

In his first television interview about his new book, he tells me that, like Dickens, he wants to “shine a light on injustice”.

A Medal for Leroy draws inspiration from the remarkable story of Walter Tull, the first black officer in the British Army and one of the first black players in the Football League.

Mr Tull, an orphan born in Folkestone in 1888 to an English mother and Barbadian father, played for Spurs before joining the Army.

He rose through the ranks – despite Army rules stipulating officers had to be “of pure European descent”. But here’s the injustice: he was recommended for a military cross, but for whatever reason, he never got it. Now Mr Morpurgo wants to right that wrong.

I spoke to him and Tor Justad, who married Mr Tull’s great-niece, at the Spurs ground in White Hart Lane on Wednesday.

“I think a book with a purpose is fine. I have a feeling that Charles Dickens, when he wrote Oliver Twist, had a purpose in mind. There’s nothing wrong with literature, it seems to me, to shine a light on injustice, cruelty and poverty, and that’s what I have tried to do,” Mr Morpurgo told me.

Mr Justad supports the move to give the family legend the recognition he clearly deserves. But he’d like Mr Tull to be honoured not just for military bravery, but for standing firm against racism – having endured taunts during his time at Spurs.

It struck all three of us today that there was something desperately sad talking about a man who was the butt of racist abuse at White Hart Lane when a century later another investigation into football racism rumbles on.

Was there a sense, I asked Mr Morpurgo, that the game was institutionally racist? “I don’t think football is any more than the rest of us are. I think it just shows more because people are there together shouting, getting over-excited. It’s inside us all if we’re not careful, this kind of awful chauvinism if you rub it, we become tribal rather than patriotic,” he says.

Perhaps honouring Mr Tull would help keep the tribalism in check.