It’s time the RFU honoured the first black international
THE RFU and Premiership Rugby are to be commended for their Project Rugby aimed to engage 12,000 new participants from the Black, Asian and minority ethnic populations in England including many, inevitably, from the poorer parts of the country.
The RFU’s track record in modern times has been pretty good in this respect but what has always puzzled me is why they haven’t made more of the Jamie Peters story, a true trailblazer for black sportsmen worldwide.
Peters has always featured prominently on American website celebrating heroes in the fight for racial equality yet he remains an unheralded hero here. Indeed for many years Chris Oti was listed as England’s first black Test cap when Peters was capped 82 years before Oti’s debut in 1988.
Peters’ father George was from Jamaica and suffered a grizzly fate when he was mauled to death in a training cage by lions while touring Britain with a circus. His mother Hannah Gough, from Shropshire, was a circus acrobat and Peters trained briefly and appeared as a child acrobat before he was abandoned and eventually washed up in the Little Wanderers’ Home in Greenwich where he learned how to play rugby.
Having trained as a printer and moved to Knowle, he played for the local rugby club for two years before members objected to the presence of a black player. Eventually he settled at the more racially cosmopolitan dockyards of Devonport where he started playing for Plymouth despite, for the last three seasons of his Union career, losing three fingers in a dockside accident.
Belated international recognition came when he made his England debut against Scotland on March 17 1906. The Yorkshire
Post wrote, “his selection is by no means popular on racial grounds” while the Sportsman commented that the “dusky Plymouth man did many good things, especially in passing”. Peters immediately gelled with Adrian Stoop and together they ran riot against France in the next game which England won 35-8. Throughout rugby, and reflective of the period, he was known as James ‘Darkie’ Peters.
Peters was a shoo-in for the opening Test of the following season against South Africa, except that the Boks had kicked up a hellish stink over his colour when they played against him in Devon and let it be known that they would object violently to his presence in an international at Twickenham.
To their utter shame, and this is probably why he became the forgotten man of English rugby, the RFU caved in and didn’t pick him against the tourists.
That’s a long time ago but it’s time for the RFU to bring Peters to the forefront of their thinking. A severely disadvantaged black orphan who was handicapped later in his career, rugby was nonetheless the making of James Peters.
It’s a remarkable, almost Dickensian, tale and it would be difficult to think of a more appropriate or inspiring modern day role model.
Greenwich Admirals Rugby League used to hold an annual match in his honour before they folded and there was one season Plymouth Albion named their beer tent after him even though Peters was a lifelong teetotaller. English rugby can do better than this.