Football Racism 100 Years On

Jack Leslie, who played for Plymouth Argyle, was mentioned on both Coronation Street by Steve McDonald and also on the Antiques Road Trip in the first week of October 2021.

Jack was born in 1901 in Canning Town, London to a Jamaican father, also called John Francis Leslie, a gas fitter labourer in London, and an English mother, Annie Leslie from Islington, a seamstress. Working as a boiler maker Jack played for his local team, Barking Town, and scored more than 250 goals in helping them win the Essex Senior Cup in 1920 and the London League Premier Division title in 1921. He was then one of three Barking players spotted and offered professional terms at £10 each by Plymouth Argyle's manager Robert Jack in 1921. Plymouth themselves had been elected to the Football League only the year before but Jack struggled to break into the first team during his first two seasons. However a move to inside-left transformed his fortunes and by the mid-1920s he was a regular in the team. He was described as being versatile and able to provide cover wherever needed and there was a 'buzz' in the crowd whenever he got the ball. Well respected by his team mates, it was their decision for him to captain the team after only a few years.

In October 1925, Jack was called into the office of his manager Bob Jack who said, "I've got great news for you. You've been picked for England." Speaking to sports journalist Brian Woolnough in 1978, Jack Leslie recalled: "Everybody in the club knew about it. The town was full of it. All them days ago it was quite a thing for a little club like Plymouth to have a man called up for England. I was proud — but then I was proud just to be a paid footballer." At that time, selection for the England national team did not rest with one manager, but an International Selection Committee comprised of a group of coaches and trainers selected by the Football Association. Before the advent of television coverage, it is unlikely that any of the selectors had seen Jack Leslie play, but his record spoke for itself. However, Jack's dreams of representing his country were soon to be dashed. He remembers, "All of a sudden everyone stopped talking about it. Then the papers came out a day or so later and Billy Walker of Aston Villa was in the team, not me. I didn't ask outright. I could see by their faces it was awkward. I did hear that the FA had come to have another look at me. Not at me football, but at me face. They asked, and found out they'd made a ricket. Found out about me daddy, and that was it. No-one ever told me officially, but that had to be the reason. They must have forgotten I was a coloured boy. They found out I was a darkie and I suppose that was like finding out I was foreign." His place in England football history was never recorded in the minutes of The FA Selection Committee written many years later. The FA claimed at the time that he had never been picked and that the press reports of his inclusion were a mistake. In later years, he was occasionally touted as a potential international but was nothing happened. In 1933, one national newspaper said of Leslie, 'Had he been white he would have been a certain English international.' It made no further comment. Racial discrimination was perhaps simply a matter of fact.

Across a total of fourteen seasons at Argyle he scored 133 league goals in 384 games, making him Argyle's ninth record highest appearance maker and the club's fourth highest goal scorer. Jack Leslie was one of two black footballers known to be playing in the Football League at the time. The other, Eddie Parris, would become the first black man to play for Wales in 1931. Jack married a white girl from East London and faced racism both on the pitch and in his personal life, as mixed marriages were not common.

His career was shortened by an eye injury and following his retirement in 1934, he captained the Fairbairn House Old Boys in a charity match against West Ham at Upton Park in April 1935 and after a spell working as a publican in Cornwall and scouting for Argyle, he returned to East London to work as a boilermaker. In the 1960s, Ron Greenwood offered Jack the chance to become part of the West Ham backroom staff working as a boot-boy. Over 15 years at Chadwell Heath, he cleaned boots for the likes of Bobby Moore, Harry Redknapp and Trevor Brooking.

Jack had led the way for the likes of Albert Johansson who was the first black man to play in an FA Cup Final when he played for Leeds in 1965 and for Mike Trebilcock who became the first black mixed heritage player to score in a Cup Final the following year for Everton in 1966. Finally in 1978 Viv Anderson became the first black player to represent England at football. In 2020 it was announced that the campaign for a statue of Jack Leslie outside Plymoth Argyle's Home Park had reached £100,000.