TULL - coming to Mattison Road church (opposite Primary School)

Spurs pioneer and Tottenham war hero Walter Tull celebrated in new play

An official team portrait of Walter Tull in his Spurs kit in January 1911.

The life of “unknown” legend Walter Tull, Spurs’ first black player and a hero of the First World War, is to be celebrated in a new play debuting at Tottenham’s Bernie Grant Arts Centre.

Walter Tull during his debut for Spurs in a match against Machester United.

Tull follows the fortunes of the first black footballer to play for Tottenham Hotspur, back in in 1909.

Walter Tull was only the second ever professional footballer in Britain - making more than 100 professional appearances including a tour with Spurs to South America - but he gave up his career in sport on the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

Serving with distinction throughout the war he became the first black officer in the British Army. He fought in the Battle of the Somme and in Italy. He received a mention in Despatched, which notes him as possessing “gallantry and coolness” for leading a dangerous raid into enemy territory. He was sadly killed a few months short of the armistice in 1918.

Now a dramatic take of the compelling tale will be brought to life in four venues from this Friday.

"Tottenham is under-represented in terms of community-based theatre. All the actors in this production are from the area. And all of them are at the beginning of their careers, in the age range 17 to 23, which reflects the typical age of soldiers and footballers."

Tull director Lynda Brennan

Yet, as playwright Phil Vasili says: “Although Tull was known at the time, his name quickly fell into obscurity. It is only relatively recently that black sportsmen like Garth Crooks have recovered the memory of their forerunners.”

The play is the initial venture for The Tottenham Theatre Company, established earlier this year by two friends, director Lynda Brennan and producer Lynda Jessopp, who says: “We thought there wasn’t much live theatre in Tottenham.”

Brennan continues: “We realised that Tottenham is under-represented in terms of community-based theatre. We are keen to facilitate local creativity. All the actors in this production are from the area. And all of them are at the beginning of their careers, in the age range 17 to 23, which reflects the typical age of soldiers and footballers.”

One of the main difficulties playwright Phil Vasili had to overcome in transposing his 2009 biography of Walter Tull, All The Guns In France Couldn’t Wake Me, to the stage was somehow to represent large numbers of troops on the battlefield and the huge number of fans and players in the stadium at a football match.

An official team portrait of Walter Tull in his Spurs kit in January 1911.

Additionally, there are public demonstrations and crowd scenes in which Suffragettes - one of whom Tull was to marry - are depicted fighting with the police.

His solution is for the handful of actors – in this production there are only nine – to morph from one role to the next and back again, thereby representing some 70 specific characters as well as the massive crowds.

The effect on the audience can be dreamlike, he says, as of distant memories recalled, even while each scene dramatises a real incident in Tull’s life and is given immediacy with its dialogue.

Imagine it is 1895. Tull is shown as a seven-year-old boy in Folkestone where his father, who had emigrated from Barbados and married a local girl, was a ship’s carpenter. He is kicking a ball around with the other kids. The scene melts and reforms at the deathbed of his mother. Quickly this tableau dissolves again - a great challenge for the young actors on a stage bare except for a bench.

The Tottenham Theatre Company gets to grips with Tull during a rehearsal.

Throughout, the memory scenes are interwoven with “choreographed football” in which the actors, prepared by a professional dancer, mime the game without using a ball.

The play doesn’t shirk from Tull’s first-hand experiences of racism, nor becoming an Victorian-era orphan.

“Drama can serve both as entertainment and a platform encouraging reflection, possibly debate, on social issue such as racism, war and imperialism,” says Brennan.

Vasili says his research shows Britain then as more complex than many today might suppose: “We have to see things in the context of empire, but there were progressive people and institutions around at the time, like certain branches of Methodism and the Suffragettes, and socialist political perspectives too. Earlier there had been the anti-slavery movement.

Tull writer Phil Vasili

“Several individuals like Herbert Chapman, who has a statue at Arsenal, were a great help to him. I think it must have been a contradictory world for Tull.”

One of the many contradictions Vasili brings out in the play is that Tull was raised in an unusually nurturing, child-centred orphanage in Bethnal Green based on a German system, while a few years later he would be killed by the Germans. Another contradiction is that his wife Annie, like a large minority of Suffragettes, is shown opposing the war he supported. Another scene reveals he was denied a medal for bravery.

The contradictions continue today. Despite his undoubted historical significance there is still no statue to Tull, not even a blue plaque, nor was he ever given the Military Cross for which he was recommended. Appeals to the Ministry of Defence that the medal be awarded posthumously have so far been rejected.

+ The play is showing at four locations: The Bernie Grant Arts Centre in Town Hall Approach Road (Friday, July 18, 7.30pm), Bruce Grove Youth Centre in Bruce Grove (Friday, July 25, 7pm), and the Hub in Lordship Rec, Highgam Road (Saturday, July 26, 2pm) all in Tottenham, as well as the Guiseppe Conlon Centre in Mattison Road, Harringay (Saturday, July 26, 7pm). For tickets, call 020 8365 5450 or visit berniegrantcentre.co.uk, and see tottenhamtheatre.co.uk for more details on the theatre group.