This is good news for Dover - sorry it's all text, but it is a very good read and important for and to, Dover
Crossing The White Line : The Walter Tull Exhibition - opens in Dover May 11th 2009
and runs until June 26th.
"Crossing The White Line : The Walter Tull Exhibition" is coming to Dover! This small exhibition, designed by City of Westminster Council through the City of Westminster Archives and grant funded by the Professional Footballers' Association and the Heritage Lottery Fund, will be officially opened on Monday May 11th by Mr Peter Lake, Chairman of Kent County Council at Dover Discovery Centre in Dover's Market Square at 11am.
This is the last official leg of a nationwide tour that has seen the exhibition on display at The National Army Museum in The Royal Hospital, Chelsea, the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, the National Football Museum in Preston and the Scottish Football Museum in Hampden Park Stadium, Glasgow. It charts the life of Walter Tull, whose mother lived in Dover, through his football career with Tottenham Hotspur and Northampton Town to his service with the Middlesex Regiment, with whom he served until he was killed in action in 1918 on the Somme battlefield.
Walter Tull was a professional footballer in the very early part of the 20th Century, among the first black/mixed race footballers to be signed as a pro footballer; this chapter of his life, and the terrible racist abuse he suffered at one particularly infamous match in Bristol, was the subject of a BBC Television documentary about him shown in November last year, with a sizeable input from author Phil Vasili who is publishing a biography of Walter Tull, due out later this year. As a result of the racist element to Walter Tull's story, the Kick Racism Out Of Football Campaign is also associated with the exhibition, which runs in Dover until 29th June.
Much of the research for the Walter Tull exhibition was carried out by Marilyn Stephenson-Knight, Chief Researcher of The Dover War Memorial Project. Maggie, as she is widely known, is herself a native Dovorian and has family antecedents named on the Dover War Memorial; for her, it was whilst attending the Service of Remembrance at the War Memorial in 2005 that the idea of the Dover War Memorial Project was born, and the human stories that have unfolded since the research work began have snowballed into a project that is likely to take many more years of work before it is completed. The full story of The Dover War Memorial Project can be found at their website
www.doverwarmemorialproject.org.uk along with the virtual memorial that is being compiled, and which continues to grow year on year.
Walter Tull was commissioned as 2nd Lieutenant in the Middlesex Regiment in 1917 having served since the outbreak of World War One with the same regiment in the ranks, before his leadership qualities were recognised and he was recommended for Officer training. In so doing, he became the first black/mixed race soldier to be commissioned into the British Army on active combat duty. The grandson of a slave from Barbados, Tull was not actually eligible for admission to Officer rank under Army regulations of the period, nevertheless he overcame this obstacle and was so highly regarded by the men under his command that, when he was killed in action, they attempted to recover his body from No-Man's Land, a risk that was so dangerous in the bloody slaughter of The Somme, it was an almost unheard-of act. Tull's body was never recovered, and his name is one of the thousands carved into the Portland stone panels of the Arras Memorial in Northern France, as well as being one of the 800+ names on the bronze panels of the Dover War Memorial.
The Friends of The Dover War Memorial, formed in 2009 to raise funds for The Dover War Memorial Project itself, is delighted that Mr Peter Lake has agreed to take time out from his busy schedule at County Hall in Maidstone to perform the official opening ceremony on May 11th. It is hoped that many people, visitors and locals alike, will get to see this small exhibition during its stay in Dover and learn more about a remarkable man, remembered in East Kent as a local hero, and rightly so. The opening will see representatives from both Dover and Folkestone, where Walter Tull lived and went to school, and it is also hoped that, through his inspirational story, he will be seen by future generations as a worthy role model of triumph over bigotry and injustice.
Related websites:
www.crossingthewhiteline.com
www.doverwarmemorialproject.org.uk
Roger