Brilliant all-round sportsman who blazed trail in the world of football
WHEN footballer Arthur Wharton first took to the pitch, the professional game was in its infancy.
Of royal Ghanaian lineage on his mother’s side, Wharton came to the UK to study as a Methodist missionary, as his Grenadian father had been, when he was 17.
He could have enjoyed the upper middle class lifestyle of a colonial official - but chose the more precarious life of a sportsman in late 19th century England.
A hugely talented all-rounder, Wharton set the 10-second world record for the 100 yard dash at the Amateur Athletic Association championships in 1886, four years after he came to the UK.
He set a record time cycling between Blackburn and Preston, played cricket professionally from his teens until his fifties, and also made a number of Rugby Union appearances.
It is for his footballing exploits that he is best remembered, however.
Wharton turned professional in 1889, playing both as a goalkeeper and winger, months after the Football League was formed.
A contemporary of Manchester City great Billy Meredith, Wharton played for Ashton North End and was Stalybridge Rovers’ playermanager.
Wharton played his last-ever game for Stockport County in 1902 against Newton Heath - the club that would become Manchester United - at their Bank Street, Clayton ground. It was an era when mass spectator sports were taking off, as working conditions had improved and people had the disposable income for tickets, betting and newspapers.
But the sportsmen of the day were not well-paid, and there was no social division between them and working people in the crowd.
Sportsmen did other jobs to supplement their wages - Arthur Wharton was running a tobacconist at Old Street, Ashton-under-Lyne, at the time he retired from professional football.
Like his successors in the game, Wharton wasn’t immune from racism - the ‘dusky flyer’ was one of the more polite names he was called in the press.
But Britain’s first black professional footballer was intelligent, strong-willed, and hard as nails; ‘Good Old Wharton’, as fans called him, was an early hero of the terraces.
He served in the Home Guard during the Great War, and died in 1930 after 20 years as a coal miner.