A Contested Legacy

The story of players of colour in early English baseball (1873–1939) has two opposing threads: the story of individual players of colour who were able to contribute to the game because of the lack of a colour bar in UK sports versus that of teams of players of colour whose games a racist UK press treated as spectacle, not sport. It is a story of men who travelled to the UK to seize opportunities not available to them back home versus the UK’s unforgivably long love affair with blackface minstrelsy. On balance, there is more to celebrate than to regret, not least in the agency that players of colour—even those caught up in the world of minstrelsy—were able to show, and, as such, it is, I believe, a story that deserves be told. To move that process forward, in this article, I make a first attempt at a survey of the players of colour in the early English game. It builds on the work of many others, named in the article. And it begins with a game of cricket.

The Bohee Brothers

In 1889, when the Spalding World Tour passed through England, the Chicago White Stockings brought with them their teenaged African American mascot, Clarence Duval; however, Duval was, alas, only there to provide ‘entertainment’, not play baseball [2]. And so, although it is unlikely that ‘Charley White’, musician, comedian, and step dancer, was the first African American baseball player to step foot in England, he is, to the best of my knowledge, the first to be identified as such by the UK press [3]. The ‘Bohee Minstrels’ was a music hall troupe formed of African American musicians and dancers and centred on two brothers James and George Bohee. The Bohees were Canadian-born, American-raised banjo players who, at James’ instigation, formed their first minstrel troupe in the USA in 1876, before going on to join troupes formed by others later in the decade. After a tour by one of these troupes of England in 1882, the brothers decided to remain in London when the rest of the troupe returned home. James formed a new minstrel troupe, the ‘Bohee Operatic Minstrels’ (aka the ‘Royal Bohee Minstrels’), and the brothers opened a banjo academy. They were the toast of society—Albert, Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) was one of their pupils—and responsible in large part for the popularisation of the banjo in the UK in this period. The troupe, which was active until 1898, contained a revolving cast of Black Canadian and African American performers, both men and women [4]. Significantly (see below), in 1890, its members included James Carson; and later, for a period, Charles Carey and Frank Broom would also be members.

Hidden Agency

The reasons behind the tragically long popularity of the English variant of blackface minstrelsy remain a subject of academic debate [5], much of which mercifully falls outside the scope of this article. What is of relevance to us here is that, alongside the many, many white performers who put on ‘blackface’ to act out crude stereotypes of African Americans, particularly those resident in the Southern US states, there were also genuine performers of colour—like the Bohee Brothers—who [contentiously] profited from the existence of the phenomenon to obtain livelihoods denied to them in the United States, and, to a lesser degree, Canada. As we have seen with ‘Charley White’, one side effect of this was that this provided the UK with a pool of African American and Black Canadian baseball players for the early English game.

The arrival of significant numbers of African American and Black Canadian musicians and performers in England in the last quarter of the 19th Century coincided with the first flowering of the game of baseball in the country, and both can be seen as evidence of an increasingly confident post-Civil War America seeking to export elements of its folk culture to the world. To this list, as we will see, can be added Wild West Shows and their evolutionary descendent, the Rodeo. The story of this first flowering of baseball in England is told in depth in books by Harvey Sahker (‘Blokes of Summer’) and Joe Gray (‘Nine Aces and a Joker’ and ‘What About the Villa?’) and online at the Folkestone Baseball Chronicle Facebook page [6]; suffice to say here that the game took, more or less separate, root in the North of England and London, despite various attempts to sustain a national game.

As these two regions were also where minstrelsy became the most popular, it is of no great surprise that the earliest definite record of players of colour playing baseball in England, dating from the summer of 1898, involved members of a minstrel troupe engaged by a Salford theatre lessee, the Scots-born, American-raised actor—producer James M Hardie (1846—1905).

The quality of the copy of the newspaper from which the above transcript is taken is too degraded to be sure of the accuracy of the reproduction of the names of all the players; however, making use of stage notices of the period and Census returns, we can identify Benny Mercer, (Mr) Shirley Liggins, William H Cheeks, and Robert Cropp, four African American music hall artists who often performed together. Also discernable are Hardie himself, Joseph R Tate—a longtime member of Hardie’s theatrical troupe—Eugene Hardie, Hardie’s son from his first (and perhaps only legal) marriage to Katherine Bunnell, and Dr Lincoln Sterne, an American-born dental surgeon, resident in Manchester, who had been involved in baseball in Liverpool since at least 1894 [8].

Turning briefly to the ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ team: A production of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ with a ‘plantation musical interlude’ played at Hardie’s Regent Theatre the week of 18 June 1898 [9]. The musical interlude was led by none other than George Bohee of the Bohee Brothers, and the role of George Harris in the main production was played by sometime Bohee minstrel James Carson. I can find no record of who turned out for the Uncle Tom’s Cabin company baseball team, but it would be of pleasing economy if it turned out that James Carson was both a member of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin team and the member of the Bohee Minstrel cricket team of 1890 who, alongside Charley White, had played baseball in the US.

‘On the Frontier’ Cricket Team, Stage, 13 June 1895. Both ‘Looking Sky Bero’ and ‘V Bronco’ (Ra-nan-ta-ko-ra) were North American Indian performers. Note also the presence of ‘R Tate’ in the team. ‘On the Frontier was co-produced by James Hardie. Image created by the British Museum Board. No known copyright holder.

Returning to the Regent team: Alas, it is not possible to render the two remaining names into any form that would identify the ‘North American Indian’ members of the team. Hardie was the co-producer with his [common law] wife, Sara Von Leer, of the touring musical play ‘On The Frontier’, which was based in part on J Fenimore Cooper’s ‘Last of the Mohicans’. The couple produced and starred in the play in the US before travelling to the UK with the whole company for a successful five-year run of tours. The play featured a number of named North American Indian performers in its cast—John Ojijatekha Brant-Sero (O Sero), Edward Looking Sky Bero (L S Bero), Ra-nan-ta-ko-ra (Kanantakonra), V Whua Rma Bronco (V Bronco), and So-se-so Tien-ton—alongside at least eight other North American Indian musician—performers, some of which definitely travelled from the US with the company, some of which may joined the company after it arrived in England [10]. Tantalisingly, both Looking Sky Bero and ‘V Bronco’ turned out for the ‘On the Frontier’ company cricket team in 1895, so must be strong candidates for being two of Hardie’s baseball-playing ‘North American Indians’. In addition, there was a ‘Kanantakonra’ family in Quebec in this period, and one of its members, Jean Baptiste Kanantakonra (b. 1868), is of the right age to be a candidate for our ‘Kanantakonra’. There is a full list of the 13 members of the ‘Indian Musical Troupe’ included in the passenger list of the SS City of New York, which brought the Hardie—Von Leer Company to the UK, arriving in Liverpool on 25 March 1891. Kanantakonra is on that list; however, the rest of the names are as garbled as the names in the above newspaper report, and with the best will in the world, it is hard to see how any of them can be made to match the names in the newspaper article [11]. It should be noted that John Ojijatekha Brant-Sero was in Canada in 1896—1900, so he could not be one of the players.

Finally, I can find no evidence that the Regent team did go on to play in London. However, we can point to at least one instance of a person of North American Indian descent playing baseball in London in this period. To explore that, we first need to turn the clock back a few years and look at R G Knowles.

American Origins

The Thespians and the Wild West Club baseball teams, Music Hall and Theatre Review, 22 July 1892. John Yellow Horse Nelson is almost certainly the man wearing the wide-brimmed hat in the back row, six from the right. Image created by the British Library Board. No known copyright holder.

Robert George Knowles was, like the Bohee Brothers, a Canadian-born, American-raised star of the English stage, although in his case, of English descent. He started touring England in 1891, and by 1892, had settled in the country. More significantly, for this article, 1892 was also the year that he founded the Thespians baseball club, which was to become a fixture of the London baseball scene for the rest of the decade [12]. As the name suggests, it was formed of stage performers (mostly Americans), its amateur status reflecting one of the main features of baseball in London in this period that separated it from the Northern leagues. By 1894, Knowles had, with the backing of businessmen in the capital such as Thomas R Dewar, the Scottish distiller, and William B Fuller, the American confectioner, established the London Baseball Association (LBA). In 1896, he and his co-author Richard Morton published a book titled simply ‘Baseball’ designed to introduce the game to English readers [13]. I will return to the LBA shortly.

For the 1892 season, the Thespians’ most significant fixtures were the two games that they played on 13 June and 30 July 1892 at the Earl’s Court Arena against the baseball team formed of performers with the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. Tours of Europe by Wild West shows, Buffalo Bill’s prime amongst them, are probably the most emblematic example of America’s attempts to export elements of its folk culture in this period. This first encounter between players from Wild West shows and London baseball clubs will be followed by at least two more in the next century, but to return to these games: Knowles provides a scorecard for the second game in his 1896 book (page 47).

Scorecard for the Wild West Club, July 1892, published in R G Knowles and Richard Morton, ‘Baseball’, George Routledge and Sons, 1896, page 47. Public domain.

Amongst the players listed on the scorecard for the ‘Wild West Club’, one name leaps out: ‘Nelson (Mex. Vacquero, Pine Ridge)’. Pine Ridge, South Dakota, is the location of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and in this period, it was home to former US Army scout John Young Nelson, his Oglala Lakota wife, Jennie Yellow Elk Woman Nelson, and their children. Nelson joined the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show in 1884. He and his family traveled with the Show on its tours of Europe, and some of his children, including at least two of his sons and one of his daughters, would go on to become performers in the Show in their own right [14].

However, John Young Nelson was in his mid-sixties by 1892 and had a full white beard, and, as the photo that appeared in the 22 July 1892 edition of the Music Hall and Theatre Review magazine shows, the Wild West Club players were all young men. So, we can safely conclude that the Nelson of Pine Ridge who played for the Wild West Club was one of Nelson’s sons, most likely, given the date, John Yellow Horse Nelson. This is supported by the team list presented in the Daily Graphic on 30 June 1892, where he is recorded as ‘J. Nelson (vacquero)’ [15]. Although tentative, this identification gives us the first documented player of North American Indian descent in the early English game.

It is also fair to say that the presence in England of Ojijatekha Sero, Looking Sky Bero, Ra-nan-ta-ko-ra, and others a few years later was due to the interest in North American Indian-themed acts created by the success of the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show tours. In that respect, there is a common thread to this aspect of the story of players of colour in the early English game, one that, as we will see, continues into the early years of the next century.

Although the Regent Theatre team founded by James M Hardie was undoubtedly born of a love of the game, as Hardie’s participation in the games shows, there was also an element—just as with the Thespians versus the Wild West Club—of self-promotion about these efforts. This can be extended to the cricket matches that the Bohee Minstrels and the On The Frontier company played in 1890 and 1895 and was an inevitable element of teams formed by theatrical impresarios featuring artists under their control. It also gave these efforts an air more of spectacle than sport. However, at least in the case of Knowles, and possibly of Hardie too, such spectacles were seen by their promoters as a stepping stone to truly competitive sport. This Knowles at least achieved in 1894 with the founding of the LBA.

Backed by businessmen but organised and run by stage performers like Knowles, the LBA of the 1890s existed at the intersection of the arts and commerce and would attract players and team owners from both spheres. In its first season, alongside the Thespians, the teams included a team funded by the Remington Typewriter Company; by 1895, these two teams had been joined by teams backed by Dewar’s, the distillers, and Fuller’s, the confectioners. It was in this environment that the first player of colour that we can identify who played a lasting role in the early English game emerged. He was another African American music hall artist, but one who stayed in the game for several years, playing for a series of teams founded by businessmen, not impresarios, and, so, was very much his own man. His name was Charles Carey.

Behind the Mask

The Fullers (dark uniforms) and Derby teams that played in the 1895 English National Baseball Cup Final, here, alongside other teams from the London Baseball Association at Crystal Palace, London. Charles Carey is sitting in the front row, left, with his catcher’s mask on the ground in front of him. The Fullers player two places to his right (our right, his left) may be Howard P Ruggles, Carey’s battery partner. R G. Knowles, ‘Baseball In England: Past, Present, and Future‘, Windsor Magazine, November 1895. Author’s own collection.

The 1895 Fullers Baseball Team, as the name suggests was founded by the London-based American confectioner, William B Fuller. For this reason, and because of the dark colour of their uniforms, unique for the LBA, they were known as the ‘chocolate team’. For a long time, this made, in my eyes at least, the meaning of ‘a “coloured” player’ in the quote above ambiguous—was the reporter saying that Carey was a man of colour, or is this simply evidence of the heavy hand of an over-zealous copy editor ignorant of the fact that the team was known as the ‘chocolates’? (i.e., had the reporter written ‘a chocolate player’, which the copy editor, ignorant of the team’s nickname corrected for being too offensive?). However, later, I discovered a clear copy of the only photograph featuring the 1895 Fullers team known to exist, which can be viewed in low resolution online in the article in which it appeared, written by Knowles for the Windsor Magazine in November 1895 [17].

The photo shows the Fullers team alongside the players of the Derby team to which the Fuller lost in the 1895 English Baseball Cup Final alongside members of other teams in the LBA. Carey was the catcher for the Fullers [18], and, looking at the higher-resolution version of the photograph, you can make out, sitting in the front row, on the extreme left, a man of colour with a catcher’s mask lying on the ground in front of him. Carey was a man of colour.

Team lists and box score for the 1895 English Baseball Cup Final, 17 August 1895. Carey, catcher, and Ruggles, pitcher, were the Fullers battery that day. Derby Mercury, 21 August 1895. Image created by the British Library Board. No known copyright holder.

The identification of ‘Carey’, the Fullers’ catcher, as Charles Carey, African American music hall artist, although tentative, is a logical one born of everything we know about players of colour in the early English game in general, and the LBA in particular, and consistent with what we know of Charles Carey’s movements in this period. It is worth pointing out in this context, that at least two other players in the Fullers team that took on Derby were certainly music hall artists: [Albert] Le Fre and ‘Alburtus’ (Albertus). Charles Carey was born in the US (or Barbados [19]) in around 1869, making him around 26 in 1895. We first see his name in the press in connection with an ad placed in The Era by impresario Andrew Robertson, who was looking for ‘clever coloured ladies and gentlemen’ for a new minstrel troupe that he was forming, the ‘Roberton and Holmes Kentucky Minstrels’. The ad names a number of men it particularly wants to hear from; Frank Broom and Charles Carey are two of those men.

Advert in the Era, 19 December 1891, Charles Carey and Frank Broom are asked for in particular. Image created by the British Library Board. Public Domain.

I mention Frank Broom in particular as his career we can follow in detail. He was a gifted young stage performer and manager who performed with the McCabe and Young Minstrels in the USA, and was billed in the UK as ‘America’s leading coloured comedian and acrobat’. He died at the tragically young age of 29 in 1899 after contracting TB during a tour of Europe [20]. Broom and Carey both joined the Roberton and Holmes Kentucky Minstrels and—critically—we see them described as ‘two gentlemen of colour’ in a review of a performance by the troupe in the Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal on 22 September 1893; establishing beyond a doubt that Carey was a man of colour (and not a white performer who wore blackface). It is worth remarking here that Charley White was also a member of the Kentucky Minstrels for a period [21]. We can trace Frank Broom and Charles Carey’s careers as minstrels across various troupes—including that of the Bohee Brothers, as stated above [22]—across the rest of the decade. After Broom died in 1899, Carey continued working, and we see him listed in the 1901 England Census, as a ‘music hall artist’ and ‘foreign subject (America)’, 32, lodging in Holborn, London [23]. Therefore, he was in the right place—London—at the right time—across the 1890s—working in the right profession—music hall—to be a player in the London Baseball Association.

What sort of player was Carey? We have already seen him praised for his strength and judgment. The scorecard for the Fullers (losing) game against Derby in the 1895 English Cup Final shows that he scored 3 of the Fullers’ 16 runs alongside 4 base hits, the best batting performance of any player on the field that day. He was known for his all-round skills, and he and his battery partner, [Howard Palmer] Ruggles (described as the ‘finest pitcher in England’), were a formidable combination.

The Fullers team folded at the end of the 1895 season, and Ruggles returned to the USA. However, Carey remained in the game, turning out for St Jacob’s Oil and Dewars in the 1896 season and Crystal Palace in the 1897 season [26]. He is consistently named as one of the best-performing players in the games in which he played, and his absence is also remarked upon for the games he misses—the sign of a key player [27]. It is also telling that R G Knowles, who was player—manager for Dewars in the 1896 season, told a Music Hall reporter on 29 May that ‘before the season is much older, he intends to have the Dewars in such form that even the all-conquering St Jacob’s Oil will have to fear them’ [28]. Knowles’ solution? To poach Carey from St Jacob’s Oil.

R G Knowles, comedian, Ogdens Cigarettes 1902 Card B Series. Author’s Own Collection.

This movement between teams shows that Carey was his own man, showing agency, not moving as directed by an impresario. His presence in the LBA also demonstrates that it had no colour bar, despite being largely [white] American-run. This is not to claim that it was a perfect world of enlightened attitudes toward people of colour, of course. In his ‘day job’, Carey had to share the stage with white performers of blackface minstrelsy, and he had to do the same with the baseball diamond—one of the stalwarts of the LBA was American actor Eugene Stratton, one of the most famous white performers of blackface minstrelsy of the period, whose bill matter was the title of his most popular song, the appalling ‘The Dandy-Coloured Coon’ [29]. Carey had to put up with a lot to pursue his love of the game

Alas, we lose sight of Charles Carey after 1901 [30]. In a way, this is appropriate, as this was the year that the London Baseball Association folded. Baseball in London—at least at an organised level—then underwent an interregnum before the birth of the British Baseball Association (BBA) in 1906. This, for the first time, was a largely British initiative, led by the chairmen of several London Association Football clubs, some of whom made available for their grounds. It was, by extension, a much more egalitarian league than the LBA, drawing its players from the same pool of players as Association Football of the time-—working-class labourers and tradesmen from the outer boroughs of London—alongside the usual imported American contingent. There was, however, a significant transnational component to the BBA in British-born players who had emigrated to the USA and Canada, learned baseball there, and then returned to live in the UK. For a broader view of the story of the rise and fall of the BBA, readers are directed to Daniel Boyce’s 2006 article ‘A Very Peculiar Practice—The London Baseball League, 1906–1911’. As of writing, research has not turned up any players of colour in the BBA. However, in June of 1912, a year after the league folded, a group of boxers who were using the Brentford FC ground, which had hosted some of the BBA games, for training included baseball in their exercise programme; at least one of the boxers was a man of colour—Young Johnson (a relative of the much more famous Jack Johnson)—who is seen pitching in a photograph of one of the training sessions. A second man of colour is looking on; based on the accompanying photo of the boxers posing for the camera, this would seem to be another boxer, Aaron Lister Brown, known as the ‘'Dixie Kid’. However, this incident belongs really to the story of the complicated relationship between boxing, boxing promoters, and the early English game [31].

One aspect of the existence of the BBA is that it provided a pool of players who would play a walk-on role in the next chapter of the story of players of colour in the early English game. This chapter marks the beginning of three decades in which that story would reach both its zenith and its nadir, with its two threads springing fully into life. It begins with Europe on the verge of war and the arrival in the UK of another Wild West Show.

Apples and Oranges

Anglo-American Exposition. (2023, September 10). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-American_Exposition. Public Domain.

The Anglo-American Exposition of the summer of 1914 was a curate’s egg of disparate American folk culture elements and British Empire ethnographic exhibits, backdropped by large-scale re-creations of American natural wonders, and wrapped in calls to a ‘common heritage’. It was assembled by the London-based Anglo-American Society, whose mission was to dispel myths that the British had about America by organising events open to the London public on US holidays, principally the 4th of July [32]. The significance of 1914 was that it marked 100 years of peace between the USA and the UK, following the end of the War of 1812–1814.

Alongside triumphalist caricatures of the peoples who had ‘benefited’ from being embraced by the British Empire, the Exposition served an unhealthy dose of all three elements of American folk culture that we have encountered thus far, with a ‘picaninny band’ serenading visitors to the Exposition’s White City site, most of whom had come to see the 101 Ranch Wild West Show [33] perform a programme that, on the 4th of July itself, included a baseball game against a team formed of players from the defunct BBA.

Overall, the game was a repeat of the 1892 Thespians–Wild West Club game in intent and staging, belonging to the same category of spectacle that some of the London participants at least would have liked to have seen lead to a revival of the sport.

The Wild West Show team included seven North American Indian performers from the show, which, in this instance, was viewed as one of the selling points of the encounter. Although this leaned into the spectacle element of the game, it also led the press to present us with at least some of their names. Drawing on press reports and passenger lists, we can identify: John Little Cloud, 32, Henry Pretty Horse, 24, John Spotted Horse, 25, Martin Spotted Horse, 34, and the pitcher, Jenning Felicite Bear Claw, 37. The London team emerged victorious 17–10 [34].

Whatever hopes the London team had going into the game of a London baseball league being re-established were all too soon dashed. War was coming.

The Canadians are Here

Baseball team of the 26th Battalion of the New Brunswick Regiment after their victory in the Canadian 2nd Division Baseball Championship, 26 June 1918. Rankin Wheary is in the back row, second from the right. Image downloaded from: https://boormanfamily.weebly.com/military2.html accessed 20 January 2025.

Rankin Wheary (often spelled ‘Weary’, particularly in period sources) volunteered in January of 1916 and was transferred to the Canadian Army’s training centre in Shorncliffe Kent, England, as a member of the 104th Bttn, in the summer of that year. At Shorncliffe, he turned out for the 104th Bttn baseball team, becoming, as far as we can tell, the first Black Canadian soldier to play on English soil. In December 1916, he was posted to France to serve in the 5th Canadian Mounted Rifles, taking part in the Battle of Vimy Ridge in April 1917. At the end of the battle, he was invalided back to England with a case of trench foot and assigned to the 13th Recovery Bttn. During his convalescence, he turned out for the 13th’s baseball team, pitching it to victory in a series earning it the right to call itself Champions of the Overseas Canadian Forces in England. Once he had recovered from his trench foot, he was posted to the 26th Bttn in France. He pitched the battalion baseball team to victory in the 2nd Division Baseball Cup on 26 June 1918. Tragically, he was killed at the Battle of Cambrai on 7 October 1918 [37].

Charles Edward Kelly served in the segregated No. 2 Construction Battalion (2CB). However, after he arrived in England in April 1917, his skill on the diamond was noticed and he was transferred to the Canadian Forestry Corps and recruited into the Corp’s integrated baseball team. He pitched for the Canadian Forestry Corps in an October 1917 game at Windsor watched by King George V and Queen Mary and other members of the royal family; the Forestry Corps would go on to participate in the 1918 Anglo-American Baseball League (AABL), which was organised by London-based American baseball old-timer Arlie Latham under the patronage of Admiral William S Sims, commander of US Naval forces in Europe [38]. The Foresters, renamed ‘Sunningdale’ (where they were based), played against American and Canadian teams with Kelly as its pitcher. For many of the players in the American teams in the AABL, this would have been the first time that they had experienced integrated baseball. Kelly survived the war and went on to play baseball back home in Ontario for the integrated Ingersoll Baseball Team. As to the question of how Kelly’s talents came to be recognised after he arrived in England? His original unit, 2CB spent only a few short weeks in England before being transferred to France on 17 May 1917, where it was reorganised into the 2nd Construction Company (2CC). Kelly was one of the soldiers left behind in England as a base company. The conventional story is that it was in this period that his talents were recognised; however, there is a tantalising alternative version of events. Although we cannot say for certain that 2CB took part in any baseball games while in England, we know from an account written after the war that 2CB took part in a Sports Day at Seaford in Late April or early May 1917 against other Canadian units. While we do not know what events were included in that Sports Day or its date, we do know that Sports Days in the area organised to celebrate Victoria Day a week after 2CB left for France did include baseball, as did other Sports Days at Seaford throughout that summer. It is a tantalising possibility that baseball was a feature of the competition in which 2CB participated and this is where the Forestry Corps first saw Kelly play, in a Black Canadian team playing against white Canadian opposition in England. One possibility is that the Sports Day mentioned in the post-war account is a Victoria Day event and involved those men of 2CB like Kelly who had been left behind when the bulk of the battalion left for France. Both of these scenarios are worthy of further exploration [39].

Meanwhile, the story of Canadian First Nation players in the CEF in England in this period is still to be told. The Forestry Corps—the unit that Charles Kelly played for—was famous for including First Nation and mixed heritage troops in its ranks. The names of some of these troops found their way into British newspaper reports, such as Captain Frederick Ogilvie Onondeyoh Loft, a Mohawk pine tree chief and activist, Privates Daniel, Gilbert, and James Quachigan of the Piegan Nation, and Private Augustus Adolphus Pocha of a Saskatchewan métis clan. Because of the presence of such men in the ranks of the Forestry Corps and, more generally, because of the unit’s association in the popular imagination with the ‘frontier’ reports of baseball games featuring the Foresters/Sunningdale were rife with the iconography of dime novel depictions of North American Indians. Thus, in June 1918, we see a Canadian hospital team celebrating their [unexpected] victory over the Foresters by ‘imitating an Indian pow-wow (dance)’. The following month, a US Army Air Service team that lost to Sunningdale was described as having ‘left their scalps there […] tucked safely under their opponents’ belts’. It does not help, in this regard, that, before one of their matches, the Foresters staged ‘scenes from frontier life’, i.e., a Wild West Show, with a ‘Pte Pocha’—probably, but not definitely, Augustus Pocha—playing the role of ‘Chief Big Smoke’, leading a ‘horde of savages in full war paint’. That some of the First Nation and mixed heritage troops of the Corps played baseball during their time in England is likely, although nothing definite has, to date, come to light. Research in this area is ongoing [40].

The Americans Too

We do, however, have reports of American Indian serving soldiers and sailors of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) playing baseball in England. American Indian soldiers and sailors served in integrated units, which gave them an individual presence in the records denied to their segregated African American comrades (see below). In the summer of 1918, Captain Scott R Fisher, a graduate of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, officiated at baseball games in Leicester and Nottingham between US Army teams (at least one of which consisted of players using pseudonyms). That same summer, in Lincolnshire, Jerome The Calf Takes a Seat Kennerley, of the Piegan Nation, another Carlisle graduate, played baseball for the 158th Aero Squadron Team [41].

A more substantial role was played by US Navy sailor Theodore Fierros, a member of the Papago Nation (Tohono O'odham) of Arizona, who was still a teenager when he saw service. Fierros was the shortstop for the US Navy team in 1918—1919, including in the AABL, and even played for a King’s College London team while studying there in 1919 as part of his US Navy Service. In a [breathless] write-up of a match played between US and Canadian teams in Glasgow in late July, Fierros is described as an ‘American Indian’ with the nickname ‘Snowball’ (which, alas, we will encounter again) ‘on account of his complexion’ who had played in the ‘Oklatown’ (Oklahoma?) State League. Fierros was the shortstop for the US Navy team that played at Stamford Bridge on 4 July 1918 in front of King George V, and he can be seen in photographs of the US Navy team from this game and in a souvenir programme produced by the AABL. Jim Leeke’s book ‘Nine Innings For the King’, is a key resource on Fierros, the 4 July 1918 game, and AEF baseball in England in general in this period. More research will likely result in more players of American Indian heritage being found [42].

There are more instances of American-born players of colour taking the field for a game of baseball in the UK in this period that we can attest to, these concerning African American players. The first is a charity game between American and Canadian teams in Belfast on 31 October 1917. The circumstances were unusual in some ways and typical in others. African American musician and band leader Louis (‘Lewis’) Mitchell, who toured the UK in the war years, was in the city for an engagement and offered his services to the American team. They turned him down because of his race, only for their pitcher to injure his hand in the seventh inning on match day. Mitchell was in the crowd and stepped in and saved the day. The story sounds incredible, but we have contemporary press reports of the game to confirm what happened on the day at least (although this does not discount what happened on the day being a publicity stunt cooked up by Mitchell and the player—manager of the American team, J G Lee). Mitchell will make a second appearance in our story later [43].

The next two instances both concern games that took place in Hyde Park in the summer of 1918 organised by the YMCA. The first was in July 1918 and involved a team formed of African American servicemen, who, based on the caption of a photograph in the US National Archives showing the players, were from a [segregated] US Army regiment. Their opponents on the day were a [white] team from the US Navy. It should also be noted that, once again, the UK press viewed this game through the lens of performative minstrelsy, going out of its way to emphasise how much comedy the African American players usually injected into their games. Alas, neither the names of the players nor their unit are recorded. A number of African American units passed through transit camps in the South-East of England in 1918. And then there is the 510th Engineer Support Battalion. Raised in Virginia, this African American formation was sent direct to France. However, in April 1918, 150 men from the unit were reassigned to duty in England, arriving there in early May 1918. After a few days at Winchester, the men were sent to work in the cement mills in Swanscombe in Kent. At some point during their service, they attended a Sports Day in Slough, on the other side of London, an event captured by the cameras of British Pathe. Research is ongoing to determine if the 510th were still in the London area in August of that year [44].

Later that summer, there was a game between two teams from units of the British Army based at Hyde Park Barracks. The players were given a scant two weeks to train for the game and as a consequence, the first two innings were error-strewn. At this point, we are told, two African American servicemen who were among the spectators stepped forward and offered to coach the teams. The offer was accepted and the rest of the game passed without further embarrassment for anyone concerned [45]. It is noticeable that, coincidentally, this incident shares some similarities with the Louis Mitchell incident in Belfast. It makes one wonder how often, outside formal competition, the courses of games have been altered by the intervention of someone from the stands?

Finally, it should be noted here that the presence of segregated US Army units in the UK in 1918 suggests that many more games involving African American servicemen were played, information on which is still to be found.

The story of individual players of colour able to make a contribution to the early English game that begins with Charles Carey springs fully to life with the arrival of Canadian troops in England at the start of the First World War. The Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) was, like the British Army, integrated. Although Black Canadian volunteers experienced racism as they attempted to sign up to serve in France, and there were both integrated and segregated units, well over 1,000 succeeded in being enlisted [35]. These included men already active in Canadian baseball leagues who would turn out for their regimental baseball teams in matches played across the UK—matches watched by tens of thousands of British people from all works of life, including royalty.

Once again, Andrew Taylor’s Folkestone Baseball Chronicle is a key source for information on these players and games—the Folkestone area was home to a number of large Canadian Army camps and hospitals—in this instance, alongside Stephen Dame’s comprehensive 2022 article ‘Coloured Diamonds: Integrated Baseball in the Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914-1918’ [36]. In sketching here the stories of two of these players, I am following in Dame and Taylor’s footsteps in order to illustrate my main point: in teams formed of their peers, fellow soldiers, Black Canadians were able to transcend the prejudice they experienced elsewhere, even within the CEF, and be judged only on their merits as players, facilitated, once again, by the lack of a colour bar in English sport.

Left: US Navy Team from the AABL. Theodore Fierros is front row, extreme left. Photo kindly provided by Jim Leeke. Right: Players from a segregated US Army regiment baseball team alongside players from their US Navy opponents, Hyde Park, July 1918. US National Archives, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/26431306, accessed 01/02/25.

Still Over Here

By the start of the 1920s, in America at least, minstrel shows had been replaced by musical revues infused with the syncopated rhythms of jazz. The success of ‘Shuffle Along’ in 1921, created and performed by African American artists, led to the creation—by a white promoter (Lew Leslie)—of the ‘Plantation Revue’ the following season. Although the name has its origins in the Plantation Club, where several of its songs were premiered, it is still indicative that, although more positive in terms of agency and representation, these revues were still heavily reliant on the comedic stereotypes of the old minstrel shows. The ‘Plantation Revue’ was built around one of the break-out stars of ‘Shuffle Along’, Florence Mills, and featured music composed, arranged, and performed by Mills’ longtime arranger Will Vodery and his orchestra. The cast featured Mills’ husband U S Thompson, blues singer Edith Wilson, and Black Canadian composer and musician Shelton Brooks.

At the close of Plantation Revue’s initial 1922 Broadway run, British theatre producer (and boxing promoter) Charles B Cochran contracted a slimmed-down Plantation Revue company to travel to London to form the second half of his new musical revue at the Pavillion Theatre, ‘From Dover Street to Dixie’ (the first half featured white English performers). All of the principal players and Will Vodery and his Orchestra made the trip, as well as specialty acts like the Three Eddies. The revue opened at the Pavillion in June 1923 [47].

The end of the First World War saw Europe awash with demobbed US and Canadian soldiers who, for whatever reason, were in no rush to return home. One side effect of this was the formation of the American Legion, in Paris in 1919, an organisation of war veterans. Branches of the American Legion in London and Paris would go on to form their own baseball teams. In London, Arlie Latham, the guiding light of the Anglo-American Baseball League of 1918, formed the Anglo-American Baseball Association, which, centred on its representative teams, first, the All-Star Legionnaires and later, the London Americans, would do much to try to keep baseball alive in the capital across the 1920s. Despite its name, after Latham’s return to the US in 1923, the driving force behind the AABA for the rest of its existence was a Canadian, Charlie Muirhead [46].

Alas, the AABA, for all its sterling efforts in support of the cause of baseball, would also be a participant in the nadir of the involvement of players of colour in the early English game—although, to be fair to the AABA, it is the British press that takes the lion share of the blame for its representation of the players of colour concerned.

That same month, a ‘Plantation Nine’ formed of members of the cast and musicians played a baseball game against the AABA All-Star Legionnaires team, an event that was to trigger the most overtly racist reporting of a baseball game involving players of colour yet seen in the UK, something that would echo down through the next 15 years to impact representations of the most important player of colour in the English game in the interwar period. In the eyes of the press, at least, this game was nothing more than performative minstrelsy. Alongside the racial slurs, was the caricaturing of African Americans as carefree, their faces painted with perpetual grins, derived directly from blackface minstrel caricatures [48].

The nadir of UK press representation of players of colour in early English baseball. The Westminster Gazette, 18 June 1923. Image created by the British Library Board. No known copyright holder.

The Legionnaire team’s view of the game is harder to discern. They lent the revue team a pitcher and catcher, which, as Andrew Taylor has pointed out, suggests they wanted to make a game of it. However, ultimately, the game must be seen as a further example of an impresario, in this case, Charles B Cochran, seeking to use the publicity from an exhibition of baseball to promote a theatrical endeavour. That Cochran—who was said to ‘have an eye for a stunt’—was likely the driving force for the staging of the game is suggested by further games that the AABA played in future seasons against other teams that sprang from Cochran productions, which I discuss below [49].

In terms of the identities of the players in the ‘Plantation Nine’, I know of no record that includes the names. However, for reasons that will be explained below, it seems possible that one or more of the Three Eddies (led by Earle ‘Tiny’ Ray) was involved.

The International Rodeo, British Empire Exhibition, 1924. The Westminster Gazette, 16 June 1924. Image created by the British Library Board. No known copyright holder.

The 1924 British Empire Exhibition, famous now for bringing into being the original Wembley Stadium, paradoxically, played host to an all-American rodeo (although, admittedly, with a strong Canadian and even Australian element). The evolutionary descendent of the Wild West Shows of the previous century—stripped of the shoot-em-up re-creations of historical events that the nascent movie industry could do so much better—the rodeo focused on presenting ‘cowboy skills’, roping, riding, and steer wrestling. The so-called London ‘International Rodeo’ of 1924 was produced by Charles B Cochran and created and managed by Tex Austin. Its cast of 150 performers included Yakima Canutt, who would go on to become a legendary Hollywood stuntman and stunt coordinator [50].

Almost certainly at the instigation, once more, of Cochran, performers from the International Rodeo played two games against the Legionnaires in June and July 1924. The Legionnaires won the first game 10–3. The shortstop for the Rodeo team in both of those games was 32-year-old Riley Burgess of the Creek Nation. Although not part of our story, it is worth noting here that the Cowboy team battery was Montana twins Aubrey and Mayberry McDowell [51].

Breaking the timeline a little to bring this story of the Wild West shows in England to a conclusion: Tex Austin returned with a new rodeo in 1934. It was a disaster; met by protests and a [failed] prosecution for animal cruelty from the R.S.P.C.A. and indifference from the British public, the show folded after only a month with debts equivalent to £3 million today, its only legacy, the passing of the Protection of Animals Act 1934, which banned the roping and wrestling of animals, effectively banning rodeos from the UK in their original form [52].

Nineteen Twenty-Four has another significance in this story, as in July of that year, the Paris All-Stars team traveled to London for the first game of a two-game series to decide the ‘Champions of Europe’. The All-Stars’ roster included two African American players, both musicians, ‘Happy’ Certain and Louis Mitchell—the Louis Mitchell we last met [for certain] in Belfast in 1917. Mitchell at least played that day and was also the All-Stars’ coach. The Paris team won both this game and the return match in Paris in late August. Mitchell had moved to Paris at the end of the war and went on to become the first Jazz musician to record in Paris. The story of the baseball team that he founded and ran in Paris, the ‘Club Clef’ team, belongs really to the history of baseball in France, but it is worth noting here that, once again, we have players of colour from the entertainment world stepping onto the diamond in Europe to play in integrated teams, something that was denied to them at home [53].

As the 1920s progressed, the centre of gravity of the AABA moved away from First World War veterans to younger expatriates, many of whom, like the members of the LBA of the 1890s, were entertainers and sportsmen, albeit in the bohemian world of nightclubs and jazz-infused revues (Charlie Muirhead’s contact address in this period was Soho’s Cosmo Club). The representative team of the AABA in this period was the London Americans, which, alongside Charlie Muirhead, featured the likes of actor Bernard Nedell and boxer Young Stribling [54]. Perhaps because of the infusion of new blood from the world of entertainment, the AABA’s attempts at headline-grabbing became increasingly theatrical.

That is not to say that the AABA did not have serious and important encounters on the diamond in this period, for example, those involving teams formed of, or including, players from Japan, which I cover in depth elsewhere [55]. These teams included a London Japanese team made up of employees of Japanese companies based in London and teams formed of crews of ships of the Japanese mercantile marine (particularly, the NYK line). Cambridge University also fielded teams during this period that included Japanese students in their roster. These games might be characterised as demonstrating the respect shown to people of colour when they are backed by an army and a navy. However, set against such games, many of the AABA’s activities had an air of schizophrenia, such as mentoring teams from the emerging women’s game, including the key players in this development, the works teams of the Kodak company, while simultaneously dressing chorus girls in oversized baseball uniforms and having them engage in Keystone-Kops-like antics for the entertainment of the London press [56].

In something of the same vein, we see the AABA display tolerance in the makeup of its teams and choice of opponents—again, there was no colour bar here—but also choose to stage yet another encounter with a team formed of African American variety artists recruited from the London stage, an encounter that, whatever the motives of the AABA and the variety artists involved, provided the London press with yet another excuse to treat the whole exercise as nothing more than performative minstrelsy, breathing new life into an attitude toward players of colour that some sections of the press would carry into the new decade.

The variety artist team, recruited, unlike the ‘Plantation Nine’ of the previous decade, from across the London theatre and nightclub world, called itself the ‘Lincoln Giants’, presumably in homage to the ‘Negro Leagues’ team, the New York Lincoln Giants [57], rather than in imitation of it, given that the true identities of all the players was well known. I present the names of the players here as they appeared in the period press for a number of reasons: to acknowledge the participation of these players in the early English game, to demonstrate what a double-edged sword it was seeking to promote the sport of baseball by feeding a racist press stories featuring variety artists of colour, to lay the groundwork for demonstrating the impact these two games would have on at least one part of the player whose career I will cover in the last part of this story, and because of what it can tell us about the origins of these games. Regardless of my motives, I recognise that it makes for uncomfortable reading.

One name immediately leaps out of this listing: Cochran. Once again, it seems probable that impresario Charles B Cochran was behind the staging of these games. The ‘Blackbirds’ Revue was the sequel to the ‘Plantation Revue’, with Florence Mills the lead in its original staging, and brought to London by Cochran in 1926. The other familiar names are the Three Eddies, who appeared alongside Mills in ‘From Dover Street to Dixie’. Their presence here suggests that Earle ‘Tiny’ Ray, at least, may also have been a member of the 1923 ‘Plantation Nine’ team (Williams and Woody joined the act after 1923). The final names to note here, although in this case, for future reference, are ‘Snowball’s Dad’ and ‘Young Snowball’.

Apotheosis

Programme. Author’s own collection.

Starting in 1934, Moores, in his position as founder and president of the National Baseball Association (NBA), set about promoting baseball based on the American code (to differentiate it from an English/Welsh version of the sport that had a small following in Wales and North-West England), first in Liverpool, where Littlewoods had its headquarters, and then across the North-West. By 1935, the NBA was making inroads into the London baseball scene, setting up amateur leagues, and launching a professional league—the London Major Baseball League (LMBL)—the following year. By 1937, there were NBA-run professional leagues in Lancashire, Yorkshire, and London, fielding players imported from the US and Canada alongside local players, supported by amateur leagues that were intended to act as incubators for the local talent that it was anticipated would one day replace the imported players. Alas, the latter was not to be, as, by the end of the 1937 season, the wheels started to come off the NBA train; the LMBL folded at the end of the 1937 season, while the Yorkshire and Lancashire leagues were merged to form the Northern League for the 1938 season. To counter criticism that the leagues were dependent on imported players, which led to imbalanced games in which experienced batteries tore apart the batting order of novice teams, the NBA introduced a quota capping the number of professional and/or imported players (effectively, the same thing) to two per team. While this ended the problem of imbalanced games, it also decreased the quality of play. The NBA limped into 1939 before the outbreak of war put it out of its misery.

Like the LBA, BBA, and AABA, before him, Moores used visiting foreign teams and teams of resident expatriates to help promote the sport and give locally raised teams a chance to play against opposition versed in the finer points of the American code. What sets the NBA apart from earlier efforts is the level of organisation it brought to these efforts, staging games from Edinburgh to London and Middlesbrough to Bristol. It even organised mini-tours by its best teams of parts of the country yet to commit to the NBA cause.

In the early years of the NBA, one of its chief assets was its relationship with the Edinburgh University Baseball Club, which was formed of American medical students exiled from their own country by the bigoted admissions practices of medical schools back home. The touring team of the Edinburgh club—which Moores shamelessly marketed as the Scottish national team so that he could stage ‘England–Scotland Internationals’ based on the American code to rival the England–Wales Internationals mounted under the English/Welsh code—played as far west as Liverpool and as far south as London in support of the NBA cause. The club’s guiding hand throughout this critical period was its captain, African American New Yorker Joseph L Washington.

The AABA continued to stage and promote baseball games into the 1930s, of which, the fixtures that included games between women’s teams like the Kodak Hawk-Eye, were probably the most important in terms of developing the sport. However, the story of baseball in England in the 1930s is dominated by the attempts by Littlewoods Pools magnate John Moores to establish professional baseball leagues based on the American code across the UK. As I have said elsewhere, this effort—by far the largest and most well-financed effort yet seen—is treated in depth in books by Josh Chetwynd and Brian Belton (‘British Baseball and the West Ham Club’) and Harvey Sahker (‘The Blokes of Summer’), and in an academic paper by Daniel Bloyce (‘John Moores and the ‘Professional’ Baseball Leagues in 1930s England’) [59]. The following brief overview of how Moores fared is taken from these sources.

Joseph L Washington, 1928. Clipped from the photo of the Colby College 1928 Baseball Team, here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.351636.

I have devoted an entire article to Joseph L Washington and the other Edinburgh exiles [60], so I will restrict myself here to saying that Washington’s four-year career playing baseball in Scotland and England serves as an exemplar of what individual players of colour could achieve in a sport without a colour bar, both in the number and geographical extent of the games that he played and in the level of his play. He played for and led the Edinburgh team for at least three seasons, two of which overlapped with stints in the Lancashire (Salford Reds, which he also captained, 1935 season) and London (Hackney Royals, 1936 season) leagues; this was followed by a season in the Yorkshire leagie (Sheffield Dons, 1937 season), before he finished his English baseball career in the shortlived breakaway International Baseball league (IBL), which played across the North-West and North-East of England (1938 season). (Able to play in the NBA leagues before 1938 because of their lack of a colour bar, after they introduced a quota on imported players at the close of the 1937 season, he found himself excluded from them because of his nationality.) He was the leading run-scorer in most of the teams he played for, as comfortable at bat as running bases, and capable of game-winning plays when fielding (at third base, or shortstop). Considered a star of the game in his day, the fact that he is now all but forgotten, even in British baseball circles, can be attributed to the period UK press’s indifference towards the sport in general and to any player on the field who was not the pitcher in particular. I have used the following quote, from a report on a 1935 game, before, but it bears repeating here.

This is not to say that Washington escaped discrimination completely. Picking up the theme I introduced earlier about the unintended long-term negative effects that the AABA’s promotional activities could have, we need to look at the collateral damage they inflicted on Joe Washington, at least for a period. In the last gasp of a racist press that still insisted on viewing all African Americans in public life in the UK through the lens of blackface minstrelsy, Washington, on his transfer from the Lancashire to the London leagues, was handed the nickname ‘Snowball’. Although we cannot be certain at this distance about the origin of the nickname, the fact that, as I showed above, Fierros, the US Navy player of 1918 and 1919, and two of the African American variety artists who turned out for the ‘Lincoln Giants’ in August 1930 all had nicknames/stage names that included the word ‘Snowball’, shows that it was in the collective US baseball fan consciousness and transferred to the collective consciousness of London baseball fans in 1930, where is resided, waiting for Washington’s arrival in the London game in the summer of 1936.

What is not in doubt is that hearing the nickname conjured in the mind of at least one reporter the blackface minstrels of old, as the caricatured description of Washington below, taken from a report on an NBA promotional visit to South-West England, shows.

This was a direct legacy of the missteps that had gone before. Thankfully, in time, Washington shook off the nickname. I, for one, have no doubt that this was because there was too great a gap between his commanding presence and the caricature that the nickname conjured in the minds of those who heard it.

Washington is also the connecting thread between the final two players that I will cover in this first attempt at a survey of the players of colour in the early English game. Alongside Washington’s team, the Hackney Royals, the 1936 LMBL season included, at least for a time, a team formed largely of the players from the Streatham and Mitcham Rugby League Club, the Streatham and Mitcham Giants. The launch of the baseball team was an attempt by the founder of the rugby club, Sydney Parkes, to bring in more revenue in the face of falling attendance [63]. Ultimately, the scheme failed, and in 1936, both the baseball and the rugby team went out of business. However, for the duration of both teams’ short existence, the star of the baseball team was the star of the rugby club: New Zealand Māori rugby player George Nēpia (Hōri Nēpia). Nēpia had learned his baseball at a missionary school in New Zealand (or while at school in the US—accounts differ), and it was anticipated that he would prove as adept at the game as he was at rugby. Alas, in the few games that the Giants played, Nēpia made little impact [64]. His presence in the game serves largely as simply another example of its lack of a colour bar.

South London Observer, 30 July 1937. Image created by the British Library Board. No known copyright holder

The final player in this survey, however, made a considerable impact in the game, turning around the fortunes of the first team that he joined (Corinthians, LMBL, 1937 Season), and pitching his second team (Romford Wasps, London Senior Baseball League, 1938 season) to victory in the league championship. His name was Hidezo ‘H’ Nishikawa, and he was, for the briefest of times (a single game), a teammate of Washington’s (Hull Giants, IBL, 1938 season).

Nishikawa’s career in the English game is also one that I have given its own article [65]. Suffice it to say here that he was one of the top three or four pitchers in England for the two seasons of baseball he played in the country. What is apparent from the press coverage of Nishikawa—and of relevance to us here—is his treatment as an exotic other in some reports, specifically, a ‘wily oriental’.

In many respects, this sets him apart from Washington, who, as an American and a medical student and later, a doctor, who spoke English as his first language, was treated in a much more straightforward fashion. We have interviews with Washington in the press that provide us with rich biographical detail; meanwhile, the British press of the time did not even record Nishikawa’s given name (the principal reason, in my view, why he has been forgotten). It took the combined effort of researchers in the UK and Japan to discover his identity.

However, at the same time, there is a connection between the worst of the press treatment of Nishikawa and the worst of the press treatment of Washington in that they were both the result of the press of the time viewing the men through the lens of the prevailing caricatures of people of their respective ethnicities propagated by the popular entertainment of the day. In Washington’s case, this was blackface minstrelsy, and in Nishikawa’s case, yellowface villainy. Nishikawa, like, Washington, did not let this hold him back.

As with Charles Carey, Theodore Fierros, Louis Mitchell, and the other players of colour, named and not-named in this survey before them, it is a testament to the tolerance of the early English game that it could accommodate such players and a testament to the strength of character of the men themselves that they could rise above such challenges and give their all for love of the game.

Jamie Barras, January 2025.

Acknowledgments: This article would not have been possible without the contribution in the form of useful discussions and prior scholarship of Andrew Taylor of the Folkestone Baseball Chronicle Facebook page and author Jim Leeke.