A critical element of Littlewoods Pools magnate John Moores’ 1930s attempts to introduce professional baseball leagues based on the ‘American code’ to the UK was allowing locally recruited players to gain experience playing teams of players already familiar with the code in exhibition games that it was hoped would also excite the interest of sports fans. These teams came from three sources: visiting US and Canadian warships, visiting Japanese Mercantile Marine ships, and ex-patriate Canadians and Americans living in the UK. Chief among the latter was the touring team formed of American students studying Medicine at the University of Edinburgh and led by African American New Yorker Joseph L Washington.

“Base-ball matches” at the Crystal Palace, 1895, programme, author’s own collection. See text below for more on the 1895 Fullers team.

There had been an Edinburgh University Baseball Club formed of both American and Canadian medical students active in the first, brief flourishing of baseball in the UK at the end of the 19th century [2], and its players had served much the same mentoring function on behalf of the fledgling Baseball Association of Great Britain and Ireland. Two Edinburgh medical students (T B Moore and H A Sheffield) spent their 1890 Easter vacation teaching novice players in the North-East of England as part of the association’s—successful—attempt to plant the seeds for a North-East England League. Subsequently, teams of players from the Edinburgh club staged several tours of Scotland and England before fading from public view and possibly existence, much like this first attempt to establish baseball in the UK, in the mid-1890s [3].

The impetus for the re-founding—or at the very least, re-emergence as a touring team—of the Edinburgh University Baseball Club appears to have been the playing on 19 May 1930 at the Marine Gardens in Edinburgh of a baseball game between teams from the US Navy (USN) battleships USS Arkansas and USS Florida, then anchored in the Forth. This was not, as advertised, the ‘first baseball game played in Edinburgh’, but it was by far the largest, a crowd of 10,000 people watching the ‘Arkansas Giants’ score in the final innings to beat the ‘Florida Red Sox’ 5–4 [4].

Joseph L Washington—New Yorker, African American, medical student, and future star of British baseball—was almost certainly in the crowd [5].

Joseph L Washington, aged 25. Image source: see next image

Joseph Leonard—Joe—Washington was born on 19 March 1902 in Jacksonville Florida to Joseph and Leonia Washington, the second of their five children. By the time Joe Jnr had turned five, Joseph Snr had moved the family to Brooklyn, where he found work as a red cap [6]. Joe Jnr attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, and there, as well as turning out for the school baseball and football teams, he served as an editor of the Flying Dutchman III, the 1920 Erasmus Hall yearbook.

After graduating from Erasmus, Washington went to New York University on an athletic scholarship. There, while majoring in Military Science with pre-medical studies, he played both football and baseball, although, despite playing for the NYU baseball team throughout its unbeaten 1923 season, he was left out of a tour of the Southern states [7]. It is also possible that his membership in the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity dates from this period. What is certain is that it was at NYU that he met and became friends with Paul Robeson—who also played both football and baseball and was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha—a friendship that was to last for at least the next 20 years [8].

Baseball 1927: (Back Row, Left to Right) Eddie Roundy (Coach), Ralph H. Ayer ’28 (Manager), Durward S. Heal ’28, Meade J. Baldwin ’28, Pierre L. Fourcade ’28 (Asst. Manager), (Middle Row) Joseph Washington ’27, Edward P. Niziolek ’29, Andrew C. Klisik ’30. 1927. Black & white print, 9.6 x 13.8 inches. https://jstor.org/stable/community.351636.

After two years at NYU, Washington moved to Colby College, Maine, where he majored in Chemistry while continuing his pre-medical studies. He also turned out once more for both the baseball and football teams. The 1927 Colby College yearbook includes a photo of Washington alongside his football team teammates, while the 1928 Yearbook shows him alongside his baseball team teammates [9].

Washington graduated from Colby in 1927. While searching for a medical school that would take him, he worked briefly as a red cap, like his father, and turned out for the Red Caps football team [10]. Alas, the search for a medical school in the USA that would admit him would prove fruitless. Like many of his compatriots in the same situation, and indeed, like his friend Paul Robeson, he would instead find himself crossing the Atlantic; in his case, to Scotland and Edinburgh University.

Ben Geringer and Oscar Sokoloff were second-generation Jewish Americans—Geringer, a New Yorker, and Sokoloff, a New Jerseyite and son of a shohet. Also playing for Edinburgh University that day (2 June 1934) were more New Yorkers: Dean Lederfeind, son of a widowed Jewish Austrian junk dealer, Moe Dinowitz, son of a Jewish Russian suit presser, and Vincenzo Bellafiore, Italian American and son of a stone mason (the full team list is given in the Appendix). All of these Edinburgh University ball players would become doctors in the next few years [12]. Together with Joe Washington, they represent a trifecta of the types of men that American medical schools of the period were actively trying to keep out, as exemplified by the oft-quoted instruction issued by Yale Medical School Dean Milton Winterwitz: ‘Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all’ [13].

The introduction of so-called ‘Jewish quotas’ in the 1920s drove many prospective students abroad. Scotland was the most popular alternative place of study for Americans in general and Jewish Americans in particular, and the overwhelming majority (96%) of the Jewish Americans who chose Scotland were from New York and New Jersey [14]. This influx of American students in the 1930s is remarkable not least because it marked a reversal of the trend in the period immediately before the First World War when the number of overseas students in the Edinburgh Medical School saw a decline as the quality and prestige of medical education in North America and elsewhere in the Anglosphere improved [15].

In short, the members of this incarnation of the Edinburgh University Baseball Club were bound together not just by their love of the game and their nationality but also by their shared exclusion from a medical education back home. They were exiles. However, if the USA did not have a use for their talents, the UK —and John Moores—did.

programme, author’s own collection

The story of the 1930s attempt by Littlewood Pools magnate John Moores to establish professional baseball leagues under the US and Canadian code is covered 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’). Readers are directed to those works for the background to the events I will cover here. Moores’ Littlewood Group had its headquarters in Liverpool and in 1933, Moores announced his intention to fund a league based on the American code in the city. This distinction ‘based on the American code’ must be made here, as it was at the time, as there was already baseball based on the ‘English’ (AKA ‘Welsh’ or ‘British’) code being played in the city in a league run by the ‘English Baseball Association’ (EBA). With Moores’ financial backing, a ‘National Baseball Association’ (NBA) was set up, which set about promoting the rival American code in the city. This involved gifts of equipment, the importing—as in the 1890s—of American and Canadian experts to tutor interested local players, and, critically, the pitting of locally raised teams against touring teams familiar with the code.

The two June 1934 games between Edinburgh University Baseball Club and a Liverpool side, the first at Edinburgh and the return game at Bootle on Merseyside, both of which Edinburgh won (23–4 and 4–0, respectively), were billed as ‘Scotland’ against ‘England’ in the first international games under the American code played in the UK [18]. This ‘branding’ was applied to put the newly fledged NBA on par with the long-established EBA, which had for several decades, along with its sister organisation in Wales, been staging its own international games between England and Wales [19]. The games were the culmination of the NBA’s strategy for boosting American baseball in Liverpool and were played immediately before the launch of its first league. The starting point of that strategy, games that were advertised as the first games ‘ever in Liverpool played under 100% American rules’ [20], had been played the previous summer. These were between a local team, the Liverpool Amateurs, and teams drawn from the crews of two ships of the Japanese Mercantile Marine that called at Liverpool, the NYK cargo–passenger liners the Lima Maru and Toyooka Maru [21]. The story of the role played by baseball teams formed of crews of the ships of the Japanese Mercantile Marine in boosting British baseball in this period I tell elsewhere, but it is worth noting here that such games took place not only in Liverpool but also in London, and possibly, in Middlesbrough [22].

After the Liverpool game, the Edinburgh University team returned home (in triumph), and completed its 1934 season with two games at Edinburgh against US opposition, specifically, cadets from the USN training ships, the Empire State and Annapolis. Joe Washington spends the winter of 1934/35 playing rugby for local Edinburgh teams—a continuation of a career that began no later than 1930 [23].

The Edinburgh team’s successful 1934 tour made it inevitable that they would continue their ‘missionary work’ the following summer, again at the behest of the NBA [24]. However, there were to be a number of differences between this tour and that of the previous year, starting with the fact that the American players of Edinburgh University would be joined by American and Canadian players of Glasgow University in a team that would have more claim to the name ‘Scotland’ than the purely Edinburgh team the previous summer. Then, there were the places the games would be played; Liverpool again, yes, but also, for the first time, London—not coincidentally, that year, the NBA was seeking to establish a professional baseball league run under the American code in London to launch the following summer [25]. Finally, there was the question of who was to captain the new combined team. The answer was Joe Washington.

It is worth studying this quote from the 9 June 1935 game in London further. The correspondent praises Joe Washington’s skills as a captain without feeling the need to refer to his race; this was a feature of reporting on Washington’s baseball skills in general and captaining skills in particular. That is not to say that there were no references to Washington’s race in the period press using the language of the time (‘Negro from New York University, ‘the coloured New York University “star”’ [26]), even on one occasion, extending to what even at the time would have been regarded as a slur—although one uttered, it would seem from the context, by a [fellow] ‘New Yorker’ [27].

No, it is that there is a disconnect between references to Washington’s race and his skills as a baseball player and captain (with one exception that I will discuss below). This can be seen in the context of the familiar phenomenon in sports, particularly association football, of the setting aside by fans, however temporarily, of a player’s racial identity [28]. However, it also has to be recognised that in the context of Joseph L Washington in the 1930s, this was only possible because of the lack of a colour bar at any level of UK sports. This can be illustrated by examining the experiences of two association footballers and men of colour who were contemporaries of Washington: Jack Leslie and Eddie Parris [29].

Jack Leslie captained Plymouth Argyle in the early 1930s, while Eddie Parris played for various clubs in the South-West in the same period and turned out for Wales in 1931. We see the same pattern with Leslie and Parris as we do with Washington—race is mentioned using the language of the time (e.g., ‘dusky’ in the above quote) but is treated as something separate from the discussion of their skills as players [30].

Modern Jack Leslie football card, author’s own collection

However, it has to be acknowledged that, as players in a sport with more mass appeal in the UK than baseball, Parris and Leslie received more, and, by extension, more varied press than Washington. Thus, Washington was at least spared, unlike Parris, being referred to as a ‘darkie’ [31].

It is also worth pointing out here that, although Washington was periodically described as ‘the only coloured player in the country’, for example, in the Sports Special (Green ‘Un), on 8 May 1937, it should not be understood from this description that Washington was the first African American to play a game of baseball in the UK.

The story of American American and Black Canadian players in the early English game has an article of its own, and some elements of the story do not intersect with that of Joseph Washington; however, there are two threads worth exploring in the context of Joseph Washington’s experience in the game. The first is the story of Black Canadian servicemen stationed in the UK as part of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) of the First World War. The CEF was integrated; thus, as with Joseph Washington and his fellow medical students, we see individual Black Canadian players playing alongside their white comrades and peers. To give the two most prominent examples: Charles E Kelly pitched for the Canadian Forestry Battalion in an October 1917 game at Windsor watched by King George V and Queen Mary and other members of the royal family; the Forestry Battalion would go on to participate in the Anglo-American Baseball League (AABL) as ‘Sunningdale’ against American and Canadian teams with Kelly as its pitcher. Meanwhile, Rankin W(h)eary turned out for the 104th Bttn baseball team in Folkestone in 1916 and the 13th Reserve Bttn in Guildford in 1917. The contribution of Black Canadians of the CEF to breaking the colour barrier in Canadian baseball is explored further in works by Stephen Dame [32].

We can contrast this to the experience of African Americans in the segregated American Expeditionary Force (AEF). In July 1918, the Daily News reported that ‘a coloured baseball team will oppose a side from the American Army camps’ in a game to be played in Hyde Park, London. This is most likely a reference to a team from an African American US Army regiment, but the language of the piece suggests that it could also be a team that belongs to the second thread of this story: the story of African American musicians and actors playing baseball in England. African American musicians and actors started appearing on the English stage in considerable numbers in the middle of the 19th Century with the rise of ‘minstrel’ shows and African-American-themed stage plays such as the theatrical version of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’. The earliest we can positively identify baseball games featuring these performers is 1898, when Salford theatre-owner James M Hardie put together a baseball team out of the artists appearing at his Regent Theatre that included ‘both North American Indians and American Negroes’; one of the games they played was against a team from the touring company of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’; we know the names of at least three of the African American players: Benny Mercer, William Cheeks, and Robert Cropp. Jumping forward in time, while acknowledging that the team involved in the 1918 Hyde Park game may have been stage actors, we have two instances of teams that we can positively identify as formed of African American variety artists recruited from London theatreland playing series of games against London baseball teams, the first in June 1923, and the second in August 1930—this latter series of games may have direct relevance to the Joe Washington story (see below). The 1923 team was dubbed the ‘Plantation Nine’, while the 1930 team was billed as the ‘Lincoln Giants’, seemingly in homage to the ‘Negro Leagues’ team, the New York Lincoln Giants. The extent to which the teams participating in these games can be said to be engaging in the type of performative minstrelsy that characterised some elements of the early American game is an open question; it is certain that the British press viewed these games through that lens, but this does not mean that the organisers and participants did [33].

The latter thread of the African American and Black Canadian British baseball story largely stands apart from the Joseph Washington story (although, see below); however, there is one element that does bear closer examination in that respect: the London Baseball Association (LBA) of the mid-to-late 1890s featured a player by the name of ‘Carey’, who was described in the 27 July 1895 edition of the Derby Daily Telegraph as ‘a “coloured” player of considerable strength’. Carey was the catcher for the Fuller’s Baseball team that year, forming a formidable battery with the team’s ace hurler, [Howard P] Ruggles, and turned out for the St Jacob’s Oil, Crystal Palace, and Dewar’s teams in future seasons. I have covered the evidence that ‘Carey’ the baseball player was Charles Carey, the African American music hall artist, elsewhere. He ranks alongside Joseph Washington, Charles Kelly, Rankin Wheary, et al. as an individual player of colour who contributed to attempts to popularise baseball in the UK [34].

Setting aside the very brief UK baseball career of New Zealand Māori rugby player George Nēpia (Hōri Nēpia), who played for the short-lived 1936 iteration of the Streatham and Mitcham Baseball Team [35], to conclude this section of our analysis, a comparison can be made between the press treatment of Washington and that of ace Japanese hurler Hidezo ‘H’ Nishikawa, who turned out for London teams Corinthians and Romford Wasps in 1937 and 1938, respectively, and was even, very briefly, a teammate of Washington’s (see below). Nishikawa was inflicted with the nickname ‘Nip’ (probably by his boss, Archer Leggett [36]) and treated as an exotic ‘other’, in a way that Washington—American, fluent in English, and a medical student and then doctor—was not.

The focus on Washington’s skills not his race is best represented by a piece that dates from late in the summer of 1935 (see below), which belongs to the next chapter in the story of the American exiles in Edinburgh and their impact on the spread of American baseball in 1930s England; namely, the scouting of Edinburgh and Glasgow players by English league teams, a process that began with Joe Washington’s recruitment to become captain of the Salford Reds [37].

That same season, Leo Fred signed for the Oldham Greyhounds as their new pitcher, and the following season would see Vincenzo Bellafiore, Ben Geringer, and Dean Lederfeind—all three also veterans of the 1934 team— joining Washington and Fred in juggling their medical studies with summers spent playing baseball. Bellafiore and Geringer signed for Liverpool Giants as a battery, while Lederfeind joined Hackney Royals. In addition, Roland Brown and William ‘Bill’ Lubansky, third-year Edinburgh medical students, signed for Sheffield Dons for the 1936 season, and their compatriot, Chester ‘Chet’ Adams became player—manager for Hull in 1937 [38].

A report from Washington’s time with the Salford Reds (Formby Times, 17 August 1935 [39]) on a game against Formby in the NBA Challenge Cup, gives us one of the most comprehensive accounts of Washington’s approach to the game. The report is also one of the most complete descriptions of a game of baseball in the period British press, taking in not just the game itself but also the pre-game and post-game. For both these reasons, it is worth quoting at length here. After setting the scene and mentioning that the Salford Reds team included ‘that well-known star Joe Washington, the coloured university student’, the report continues:

As an aside, it is worth noting here that this is the earliest reference in the period press to Washington being a switch-hitter [40].

In the 31 articles that I have been able to find that report on Washington’s playing (i.e., not including articles that simply list him in the team), there is an almost 50:50 split between articles that do mention his race and those that do not (14 and 17, respectively). Although, this should be seen as an exhaustive list. Similarly, this analysis ignores instances (four in total) when there is no explicit mention of Washington’s race, but there is the use of the nickname that he acquired in the next stage of his career, which represents the most overt connection made between Washington’s race and his role as a ball player and the most obvious example of Washington being subjected to casual racism during his time in the leagues [41].

For the 1936 season, Washington had made the move south to London to turn out for the Hackney Royals (alongside Dean Lederfeind, and, briefly, Vincenzo Bellafiore [42]) in the newly created London Major Baseball League (LMBL), the culmination of the plan that had seen the Edinburgh–Glasgow team play a London team in London the previous summer. The first mention that I can find of this ‘Snowball’ nickname is in an article in the Daily Mirror on 18 July 1936 [43]. It is worth noting here that one of the African American variety artists who played for the ‘Lincoln Giants’ in 1930 (see above) went by the name ‘Snowball’s Dad’ Harris and one of the substitutes was ‘Young Snowball’, so the name would have been in the collective memory of baseball fans in London in this period, and there are definite echoes of press coverage of those games, rife with minstrel-inspired caricatures of the behaviour of the African American male, in this piece (e.g., ‘his face is always in a huge grin’). Thankfully, the nickname makes its last appearance less than a year later, in June 1937 [44], and does not appear to have been a feature of the rest of Washington’s career in the English leagues.

programme, author’s own collection

The Hackney Royals folded at the end of the 1936 LMBL season, and the league itself would last only one more season, the most obvious evidence that the efforts of Moores and his supporters, which had begun so strongly just four years before, were beginning to falter. The reasons for this change in fortunes are discussed at length in the article by Bloyce mentioned above but can be summarised as a combination of British sports fans’ aversion to ‘foreign’ innovations in sport and the game’s lack of ‘spectacle’ due to the devastating effect an experienced battery could have on a team that included novice players—the usual situation in the NBA leagues.

Washington would finish up the 1936 season by returning to the Edinburgh University team to help the NBA once again by taking part in a series of exhibition matches between Edinburgh and Hull, the best of the Yorkshire teams, to be played in the North-East of England in, what would prove, a forlorn hope of sparking interest in American baseball there [45].

programme, author’s own collection

Nineteen thirty-seven was a banner year for Washington, first and foremost, as this was the year that he gained his medical degree [46]. So, it was as ‘Dr Joe Washington’ that he would make his appearances for Sheffield Dons in the 1937 season [47].

However, 1937 would also mark the end of Washington’s association with the NBA. In the face of a continuing decline in attendance at games, the NBA decided to make two big changes for the following season: the merging of the Lancashire and Yorkshire leagues into a single Northern League, and the imposition of a quota system on the number of professional and imported players in teams [48].

Thus, Washington, whose race had not been a bar to him playing for NBA teams, now found himself excluded from the league because of his nationality. He was, of course, not alone in this, and the 1938 season would see the introduction of a new, rival league, the International Baseball League (IBL) [49], with teams in the North-East and North-West of England, formed largely of the professional and imported players shut out of the NBA leagues [50]. Washington joined the Hull Giants (distinct from ‘Hull’, which continued to be a dominant force in the NBA Northern League). He is pictured with his Hull Giants teammates in a photo published in the Daily Mail (Hull) on 28 May 1938; to the best of my knowledge, this is the only photograph of Joe Washington from his time playing baseball in the UK [51].

programme, author’s own collection

Alas, despite the IBL featuring some of the brightest talents in British baseball, such as ace hurlers Ross Kendrick, Jerry Strong, and Hidezo ‘H’ Nishikawa [52], it struggled to put together teams, with matches often being played between composite teams (e.g., Hull–York versus Newcastle–Middlesbrough, 26 May 1938 [53]), and folded after only one month [54].

Joe Washington’s time in British baseball was at an end. His star had shone brightly for the four years from 1934 to 1938, although, alas, in a sport that received little attention in a largely indifferent UK press, to which can be ascribed the fact that his contribution to the spread of American baseball in the UK is largely forgotten now, as are the contributions of his comrades in exile, the other American medical students of the Edinburgh University Baseball Club.

In many respects, Joe Washington’s life after the end of his time in British baseball was even more remarkable than during it, with two marriages, service in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the Second World War, the US Army in the Cold War, and work as a surgeon in hospitals in the UK, the US, and Liberia—the latter as a hospital director—before, finally, returning to the UK to serve in the Royal Fleet Auxiliary [56]. However, these aspects of his life fall outside the scope of this work, and I leave them to others to explore.

Joseph Leonard Washington died, aged 84, on 22 April 1986, and was buried at Douglas Bank Cemetery, just outside the tiny hamlet of Pattiesmuir in Fife, Scotland [57]. His contribution to British baseball in the 1930s is now largely forgotten, unjustly so in this author’s view. It is my hope that this work will go some way to rectify this.

Author’s own collection.

Acknowledgements. I would like to thank my colleagues in Japan for supporting this project. I would also like to thank Gabriel Fidler Of the British Baseball Federation and Andrew Taylor of the Folkestone Baseball Chronicle for useful discussions and encouragement.