Jack Leslie – the first black player to be called up by England is honoured with statue in Plymouth
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Jack Leslie’s three granddaughters agreed that the man himself may have raised eyebrows at the beautiful ceremony outside Home Park in Plymouth.
“We lived with Grandpa in East Ham,” Lesley explained. “It was our family home with seven of us in the house, sometimes a little full, but it was a fun loving happy family and Grandpa was the rock.
“He had a charisma. He drew people to him and he was so humble that he never spoke about his football career. I don’t think he realized how great he was. We think if he could see us, he’d say, “What’s all this fuss about?”
Jack Leslie played for Plymouth Argyle from 1922 to 1934 and was chosen to play in the 1925 England squad, but was not allowed to wear the England shirt because his father was a black man from Jamaica.
Argyle legend Leslie was honored with a 12-foot-tall statue in Plymouth outside Home Park
“It wasn’t until Viv Anderson played for England and the Daily Mail did an interview with Grandpa that people started talking about it and he told us exactly what had happened.
“When he told us, we knew this had happened. He wouldn’t have made up a story like that, and yet the number of times we talked to people about it and you’d see them go glassy because they thought if he didn’t get the cap it was because he wasn’t good enough. We knew that wasn’t the case.’
Jack Leslie is a Plymouth Argyle legend. Signed to Barking Town in 1921, he was an inside left who scored 137 goals in 400 appearances for the Devon club and developed a fruitful partnership with left winger Sammy Black.
They won promotion and then took the joint highest finish in their history, fourth in the second tier in 1931-32, a season in which Leslie was the top scorer with 21 goals.
Yet there is more to his story. There is even a place in this country’s football history as he was called up by England in 1925 but was deposed when the selection committee realized he was black, his father born in Jamaica.
“Suddenly everyone stopped talking about it,” Leslie told Brian James of the Daily Mail in 1978, when Viv Anderson became the first black footballer to win an England senior cap. ‘It became kind of dead quiet. Don’t look me in the eye.’
Fans came to see the unveiling of the statue crowdfunded by Plymouth supporters
His statue is decorated with images of Leslie’s life and the story of the cap that never was
By this time, Leslie was working in the West Ham trunk. He had run a pub in Truro, Cornwall, when his career ended, before returning to his East London roots to work as a boilermaker.
When he retired, he joined the ground staff at Upton Park, rejoined the football family, but was still too modest to talk about his own achievements, as his granddaughters Lesley, Lyn and Gill discovered during the 3-3 England’s draw against Germany last month.
“We were talking to Sir Trevor Brooking,” Lesley said. “He knew Grandpa when he worked at West Ham and seemed fond of him, but said Grandpa never told him about the cap that was taken.”
When Leslie died in 1988, at the age of 87, his true place in history was not widely known, and it remained obscured until a group of Plymouth supporters launched a campaign to create a statue in his honor.
The response was phenomenal. Argyle fans supported the crowdfunding project, raising the money in a jiffy, and Leslie’s handsome bronze by Andy Edwards was unveiled yesterday, standing 12 feet high on a granite pedestal decorated with images of Leslie’s life and the cap’s story. it never was.
Leslie is a Plymouth legend, scoring 137 goals in 400 appearances for the Devon club
“A great day and a great event,” said Argyle’s CEO Andrew Parkinson. “It has been a tireless campaign by our supporters to recognize Jack, who was a great player in his own right, but it was also important to recognize his story as a decision should never be made based on a man’s skin color.” .
“This day summed it all up: the story, Jack’s pioneering spirit and the power of football supporters to bring something to life.”
The day brought together more than 40 of Leslie’s descendants, some of them meeting each other for the first time. There were representatives from Barking and West Ham, a moving recital from spoken word artist Big Scoop, and hundreds of Argyle supporters, including 96-year-old Charlie Trevethan, who remembers jumping the turnstile at Home Park to kill Leslie and Black. to be seen in full. flow.
Perhaps most impressive of all, the campaign has forced the FA into action. Less than five years ago, they were adamant that they couldn’t do anything to acknowledge Leslie’s treatment nearly a century earlier. Nothing but an apology from an FA spokesperson to Sportsmail for an article about the campaign.
This week, however, FA president Debbie Hewitt agreed that a posthumous cap would be honored to Leslie. It might have been nice if it had come earlier, in time for it to be enjoyed by his only child Evelyn, who died in April, aged 94. But better late than never. And a perfect addition to a day of tribute to one of the great pioneers of English football.