BLACK CANADIAN CHARLEY KELLY PLAYED A ROLE IN INTRODUCING THE GAME OF BASEBALL TO BRITAIN

A game played on Smith’s Lawn in 1917 attended by the Royal Party, this colourised photo (courtesy of Macleans) shows a batter at the plate –- possibly Charlie Kelly. In his authoritative book Nine Innings for the King, Jim Leeke  tells us that in 1918 Sunningdale played in bluish-grey uniforms with a maple leaf on the pockets – and the colourisation of this uniform suggests maybe this is the same team. Note the umpire behind home plate is a uniformed Canadian Army officer.

With thanks to the Folkestone Baseball Chronicle and the Canadian Baseball History web sites we learn of Charlie E Kelly, a native of Ingersoll, Ontario, who was the first Black star of Baseball in Britain.

Charlie Kelly “was an outstanding baseball pitcher and hard hitter” – so begins his Ingersoll (Ontario) Sports Hall of Fame nomination. The next paragraph gives highlights of an extraordinary career.

“While with the Canadian Army overseas in 1917, he pitched against an All-Star USA Team in London, England winning 2-1. Charlie pitched against Herb Pennock, a star in the Major Baseball League. King George was a spectator and congratulated Kelly with a hand shake for his 2-1 victory.”

Inducted into the Ingersoll Sports Hall of Fame 69 years after the games in Britain and 53 years after he passed away, the Charlie Kelly story is probably a little difficult to follow due to the patch work of reports from the WW1 period.

Private Charlie E. Kelly

Kelly enlisted in the Canadian Forestry Corps in February, 1916, at 25 years of age (service number 675459). On his attestation papers he listed his occupation as an “athlete” perhaps implying that he was professional.

By the summer of 1917 units from the Forestry Corps were based at Sunningdale, England, just a few miles outside of Windsor. Permission had been given for them and other Canadian units to play baseball on Smith’s Lawn, part of Windsor Great Park which constituted a portion of the overall grounds of the Royal Residence of Windsor Castle. 

The Reading Mercury newspaper (15th September 1917) reported on a match between the Foresters and the Orpington Military Hospital on Smith’s Lawn attended by the King and Queen.

The contest went scoreless through 7 ½ innings until the bottom of the 8th when Kelly, “their pitcher, who is a coloured man, secured the first run of the match…the excitement was intense, and the cheering deafening.” Orpington tied the score in the top of the 9th only for the Foresters to snatch the win in the bottom of the inning when a dropped catch allowed a run scored, the Foresters winning 2 to 1. 

After the game the King mingled with the players and officers. The newspaper report notes that he shook hands with many of them.

The Reading Mercury later reported the following: “The King and Queen have taken the greatest interest in baseball since a Canadian Forestry Corps has been encamped in the Windsor district, and they have frequently motored over to see an important game decided.”

Kelly again pitched for the Foresters in a 17-13 win over the Astorias (a team drawn from the Convalescent Hospital at Cliveden House in Taplow, owned by Waldorf and Nancy Astoria, after whom the team was nicknamed). Played on the Dolphin Grounds at Slough, the high scoring game was attributed to the rough state of the ground.

Such was the success and popularity of the Forestry Corps team that in 1918 they were invited to join the Anglo-American Baseball League, their proximity to London and the unlikelihood of players being transferred to the front were additional bonuses. In the AABL the team played under the name of Sunningdale. Initially successful, and unbeaten in the early rounds, Sunningdale faded away finishing the league in fifth place (out of eight) with a 5-7 (.417) record. Among the Canadian teams only Epsom finished higher (third place).

It is known from a number of reports that Charlie Kelly featured prominently in all games played by the Sunningdale team.

The AABL, and before that the exclusively Canadian Military Leagues took baseball across the country and brought the game to regions previously untouched in British Baseball History.

Private Rankin Wheary

Back home after the war Charlie Kelly continued playing baseball in the Ingersoll district of Ontario until illness cut short his career in 1927. Although not the first black player to play baseball in Britain (there were all-coloured teams as early as 1898 about whom there is little information) – and not the first black player to be mentioned in the press (*Canadian soldier Rankin Wheary, a talented shortstop, also played for Folkestone in 1916) – he was the first to receive national prominence and to be photographed widely in the national press.

Footnote: * Rankin Wheary was the product of a humble home: his father was a labourer whose grandfather had come to New Brunswick, probably with the loyalists; his mother was a domestic servant from Scotland. A year after his father’s death in 1911, Rankin left the College School in Woodstock and worked around town to help support his mother and younger sister. He then went off to war.

In turn-of-the-century Woodstock, a loyalist shire-town on the Saint John River, relations between whites and the small black community were friendly and segregation was not readily apparent. Baseball was popular and young Rankin took up the game with enthusiasm. He played schoolboy ball and then was a star pitcher and hitter for the Woodstock Federals, playing teams along the river valley and across the border in Maine. 

British Baseball was integrated long before the Major Leagues, and the examples of Wheary and Kelly, the two most prominent Black Canadians playing in Britain elicited no negative comment in the British press. This is not to say that they had it easy, nor that they didn’t encounter prejudice (they did – notably Black Canadians initially had extraordinary difficulty in enlisting and it took intervention from the Federal Government to confirm they were allowed).

Even in the 1920’s a handful of match reports in the British press indicated that certain team’s were all-Coloured, and though not negatively expressed as such, certain epithets that today would be deemed derogatory and unacceptable were openly published. 

Similarly though Kelly and Wheary seemingly had no difficulty playing integrated baseball in their home towns, not all Canadian leagues at the time were integrated and vice versa. 

A clipping from the Daily Mirror newspaper.