The complicated legacy of Charlie Williams, the Black footballer who became a comedian
By Oliver Kay
Working down the coal mines in the 1940s, hundreds of feet underground, there were no white faces to be seen. The nature of the work saw to that: drilling, blasting, digging, trudging through dark tunnels for hours at a time — faces, like lungs, blackened by exposure to coal dust.
It was at ground level at the start of each day, before another gruelling shift, that Charlie Williams stuck out as the only Black face at Upton Colliery, West Yorkshire. He cracked jokes with the other miners, telling them their faces would look as black as his as soon as they got down to work. He used to say that his colour didn’t matter a jot down the mines because nobody had time for “daft stuff like that”.
But his second career was a different matter. When he left the mines to join Doncaster Rovers, becoming one of the first Black players to appear in the Football League, Williams attracted quizzical looks, sneering laughter and racial slurs from opposition players and supporters alike.
This was the 1950s, long before the racial abuse that players such as Cyrille Regis, Laurie Cunningham, Viv Anderson, John Barnesand others faced in the late 1970s and 1980s. There were only a handful of Black players in the Football League at the time, such as Roy Brown, who played for Stoke Cityand Watford, and Lindy Delaphena, who played for Portsmouth, Middlesbroughand Mansfield Town.
Terrace shouts of “get back to Africa” were commonplace — never mind that Williams, whose father Charles arrived from Barbados in 1914 and served in the First World War, had been born and raised in the village of South Hiendley, near Wakefield. Testimonies from the time suggest at least one opposition centre-forward told Williams: “I’ll kill you, you Black bastard.”
“Charlie was openly taunted and he would never react,” says Doncaster’s club historian, John Coyle. “If you were Black and playing football in those days, you needed to have a very thick skin in terms of dealing with the abuse.”
Williams, an uncompromising old-school centre-half, prided himself on rising above the provocation. Unlike his abusers, he did not discriminate; he didn’t care who he kicked. “Sometimes the player will get past me and sometimes the ball will get past me,” he liked to say with a laugh, “but never both at the same time”.
He made 171 appearances for Doncaster between 1950 and 1959, making such a strong impression that decades later, the club’s supporters voted him as their all-time greatest cult hero. “This was the most successful team in our history and Charlie was a very big part of it,” says Doncaster supporter Martin O’Hara, who produced a display at the club to commemorate Williams for Black History Month in 2017.
But it is not as a trailblazing footballer that Williams was best known. Years after his playing career fizzled out at non-League Skegness Town, he found fame as Britain’s first high-profile Black stand-up comedian.
It was an accidental career. He had started out as a singer, joining his Doncaster team-mate Alick Jeffrey and Jeffrey’s father in a three-piece, initially playing at the local working men’s clubs. Stand-up was never part of the plan, but Williams told a few jokes between songs and they went down a storm.
Struggling to find employment at home — reportedly rejected for a job at a bakery after being told customers might object to having their bread delivered by a Black man — he accepted an invitation from his former team-mate Jeffrey to join him as a player-coach at Australian club Auburn.
He had his bags packed, ready to start a new life Down Under, only for his immigration forms to be rejected because, as a statement from Australia House in London said, “it is not our policy to accept coloureds, except students, for a limited period”.
He was eventually cleared for a visa after all, but he no longer wanted to go where he was not wanted, so he stayed put. A succession of low-paid jobs followed, leaving him to try to supplement his income by resuming his singing and stand-up act in the local clubs.
It had been rare enough to see a Black person on a football pitch. To see someone like Williams on stage in a working men’s club in mining villages in the 1960s was unheard of. “It sounds horrible, but back in those days, people would have been looking at him and saying: ‘There’s a darkie in the room’,” his friend and long-time agent Neil Crossland says.
And then Williams would start his act. “Ey up, me old flowers!” he would say in an accent that was pure, unrefined Yorkshire — and, whether immediately or over the course of his act, the ice-cold atmosphere would be broken, replaced by howls of laughter.
Eventually, after years touring the clubs of Yorkshire and then further afield, he hit the big time, joining the revolving cast for The Comedians, a popular ITV show featuring the most popular stand-up comics of the day. In 1972, he had a six-month season at the London Palladium and appeared in front of the Queen at the Royal Variety Performance.
There was one notable difference between Williams and the rest of the Comedians cast (though a second Black comic, Jos White, soon joined the team). It shocked people — studio audience and viewers at home alike — to see a genuine Black face in a prime-time TV slot in an era when the most popular sitcom was Love Thy Neighbour, which was littered with racist insults and tropes, and when the BBC was still running The Black and White Minstrel Show, in which bizarre skits would feature white singers performing songs wearing blackface.
But then… “Ey up, me old flowers!”, that wonderful laugh and that white-friendly, self-disparaging routine — and the audience would be on his side.
As far back as his days on the Yorkshire club scene, Williams had deduced what worked well with his audiences and what did not. What always went down well, on top of his observations about everyday life and his truly infectious laugh, were jokes about his colour: saying it was so hot up there under the lights that he was “leaking chocolate”. There were jokes about cannibalism. He used racial slurs directed at Black or South Asian people and warned hecklers that “if you don’t shut up, I’ll come and move in next door to you”.
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It was low-level stuff in comparison to some of the jokes peddled by some of his fellow acts on The Comedians, but it also fuelled unease within the Black community at a time of growing social tension and division. If a Black comedian was making jokes about Black people eating missionaries in Africa or bringing down neighbourhoods in the UK, it was taken as an endorsement of racist routines. Not that some of the comedians of that era needed any encouragement.
Leroy Rosenior, who played for Fulham, Queens Park Rangersand West Ham Unitedin the 1980s, wrote about the negative impact of Williams’ routine in his autobiography, It’s Only Banter. “When these programmes made white people feel it was OK to mock Black people for having rubber lips and Velcro hair, then it takes a nastier turn,” Rosenior wrote.
Crossland describes Williams as “one of life’s gentlemen”. He says that while “there are things you watch back now that can make you cringe a bit”, Williams would have been horrified by the suggestion that he offended Black people or indeed anyone else. “He would never have thought any of it was offensive,” Crossland says. “He just liked telling jokes and making people laugh.”
Sir Lenny Henry, who became Britain’s most high-profile Black comedian in the decades that followed, talks of having undergone various stages in his appraisal of Williams: first idolising him and wanting, as a wannabe comedian, to emulate his success and his act; then, in adulthood, resenting the nature of his routine and the way he appeared to endorse racist jokes rather than stand up against them; then, latterly, to saying in Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain that “those were the times and you did what you could to get by (…) and survive in a predominantly white world”.
In the 2015 BBC audio documentary Looking for Charlie Williams, the Saint Lucia-born actor Joseph Marcell, who grew up in London and is best known for playing the butler Geoffrey in the 1990s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, said of Williams’ routine: “You have to remember that we were immigrants. We were people in a new country, trying to make a life for ourselves, and we had to go beyond being embarrassed (to gain acceptance). What was important to us was that we were being seen — and he was helping us be seen.”
Harder to understand is Williams’ decision in 1976 to travel to what is now Zimbabwe at the height of the Rhodesian Bush War, when the country’s despised white-minority government was under international sanctions, and to perform at what reports at the time described as “a multi-racial club… except for Africans”.
He started out by telling his all-white audience in Salisbury (now Harare) that “Rhodesia is a wonderful country(…) and if I have any bother from you lot, I’ll take it back” before moving on to more familiar territory about topping up his suntan.
By the late 1970s, Williams’ star had waned and he faded from the public eye, though he continued to play to packed audiences in Yorkshire and on cruise ships. But in 1999, he was awarded the MBE for his charity work and a year later, he was given a lifetime achievement award at the Black Comedy Awards, which recognised he had “broken down barriers”.
When Williams died in September 2006, aged 78, having lived with Parkinson’s disease and dementia in his later years, the pioneering aspect of his legacy was reinforced. The questionable jokes were discussed, but so were the hostile environments he had encountered and the barriers he had to overcome.
“He had three distinctly different careers: first as a miner, then as a professional footballer, then as an entertainer and television personality,” O’Hara says — and in all three of those professions, he was a rarity, breaking new ground, facing social challenges very few people in Britain had faced before. “It’s amazing when you look at it like that,” O’Hara says.
In 2011, a blue plaque was unveiled in his honour at Barnsley Civic Hall, complete with his catchphrase: “Ey up, me old flower. In’t it a lovely day?” Six years later, he was inducted into Doncaster’s hall of fame.
“He was a lovely man,” Janice Brown, his second wife, says. “He had a wonderful personality. He was so down to earth. He never forgot where he came from, never wanted to go above his station — although I do remember him meeting Prince Charles (now King Charles III) and telling him, ‘You’re very lucky to be named after me, Your Highness’.”
Williams was always at his happiest when cracking jokes and making people laugh. If his legacy is complicated, it is perhaps because his approach to life was far less so. He never asked or expected to be a trailblazer — and probably never stopped long to dwell on the fact he had become so, or on the prejudice he had overcome along the way, smiling and laughing as he went.
The complicated legacy of Charlie Williams, the Black footballer who became a comedian
By Oliver Kay
Working down the coal mines in the 1940s, hundreds of feet underground, there were no white faces to be seen. The nature of the work saw to that: drilling, blasting, digging, trudging through dark tunnels for hours at a time — faces, like lungs, blackened by exposure to coal dust.
It was at ground level at the start of each day, before another gruelling shift, that Charlie Williams stuck out as the only Black face at Upton Colliery, West Yorkshire. He cracked jokes with the other miners, telling them their faces would look as black as his as soon as they got down to work. He used to say that his colour didn’t matter a jot down the mines because nobody had time for “daft stuff like that”.
But his second career was a different matter. When he left the mines to join Doncaster Rovers, becoming one of the first Black players to appear in the Football League, Williams attracted quizzical looks, sneering laughter and racial slurs from opposition players and supporters alike.
This was the 1950s, long before the racial abuse that players such as Cyrille Regis, Laurie Cunningham, Viv Anderson, John Barnesand others faced in the late 1970s and 1980s. There were only a handful of Black players in the Football League at the time, such as Roy Brown, who played for Stoke Cityand Watford, and Lindy Delaphena, who played for Portsmouth, Middlesbroughand Mansfield Town.
Terrace shouts of “get back to Africa” were commonplace — never mind that Williams, whose father Charles arrived from Barbados in 1914 and served in the First World War, had been born and raised in the village of South Hiendley, near Wakefield. Testimonies from the time suggest at least one opposition centre-forward told Williams: “I’ll kill you, you Black bastard.”
“Charlie was openly taunted and he would never react,” says Doncaster’s club historian, John Coyle. “If you were Black and playing football in those days, you needed to have a very thick skin in terms of dealing with the abuse.”
Williams, an uncompromising old-school centre-half, prided himself on rising above the provocation. Unlike his abusers, he did not discriminate; he didn’t care who he kicked. “Sometimes the player will get past me and sometimes the ball will get past me,” he liked to say with a laugh, “but never both at the same time”.
He made 171 appearances for Doncaster between 1950 and 1959, making such a strong impression that decades later, the club’s supporters voted him as their all-time greatest cult hero. “This was the most successful team in our history and Charlie was a very big part of it,” says Doncaster supporter Martin O’Hara, who produced a display at the club to commemorate Williams for Black History Month in 2017.
But it is not as a trailblazing footballer that Williams was best known. Years after his playing career fizzled out at non-League Skegness Town, he found fame as Britain’s first high-profile Black stand-up comedian.
It was an accidental career. He had started out as a singer, joining his Doncaster team-mate Alick Jeffrey and Jeffrey’s father in a three-piece, initially playing at the local working men’s clubs. Stand-up was never part of the plan, but Williams told a few jokes between songs and they went down a storm.
Struggling to find employment at home — reportedly rejected for a job at a bakery after being told customers might object to having their bread delivered by a Black man — he accepted an invitation from his former team-mate Jeffrey to join him as a player-coach at Australian club Auburn.
He had his bags packed, ready to start a new life Down Under, only for his immigration forms to be rejected because, as a statement from Australia House in London said, “it is not our policy to accept coloureds, except students, for a limited period”.
He was eventually cleared for a visa after all, but he no longer wanted to go where he was not wanted, so he stayed put. A succession of low-paid jobs followed, leaving him to try to supplement his income by resuming his singing and stand-up act in the local clubs.
It had been rare enough to see a Black person on a football pitch. To see someone like Williams on stage in a working men’s club in mining villages in the 1960s was unheard of. “It sounds horrible, but back in those days, people would have been looking at him and saying: ‘There’s a darkie in the room’,” his friend and long-time agent Neil Crossland says.
And then Williams would start his act. “Ey up, me old flowers!” he would say in an accent that was pure, unrefined Yorkshire — and, whether immediately or over the course of his act, the ice-cold atmosphere would be broken, replaced by howls of laughter.
Eventually, after years touring the clubs of Yorkshire and then further afield, he hit the big time, joining the revolving cast for The Comedians, a popular ITV show featuring the most popular stand-up comics of the day. In 1972, he had a six-month season at the London Palladium and appeared in front of the Queen at the Royal Variety Performance.
There was one notable difference between Williams and the rest of the Comedians cast (though a second Black comic, Jos White, soon joined the team). It shocked people — studio audience and viewers at home alike — to see a genuine Black face in a prime-time TV slot in an era when the most popular sitcom was Love Thy Neighbour, which was littered with racist insults and tropes, and when the BBC was still running The Black and White Minstrel Show, in which bizarre skits would feature white singers performing songs wearing blackface.
But then… “Ey up, me old flowers!”, that wonderful laugh and that white-friendly, self-disparaging routine — and the audience would be on his side.
As far back as his days on the Yorkshire club scene, Williams had deduced what worked well with his audiences and what did not. What always went down well, on top of his observations about everyday life and his truly infectious laugh, were jokes about his colour: saying it was so hot up there under the lights that he was “leaking chocolate”. There were jokes about cannibalism. He used racial slurs directed at Black or South Asian people and warned hecklers that “if you don’t shut up, I’ll come and move in next door to you”.
Advertisement
It was low-level stuff in comparison to some of the jokes peddled by some of his fellow acts on The Comedians, but it also fuelled unease within the Black community at a time of growing social tension and division. If a Black comedian was making jokes about Black people eating missionaries in Africa or bringing down neighbourhoods in the UK, it was taken as an endorsement of racist routines. Not that some of the comedians of that era needed any encouragement.
Leroy Rosenior, who played for Fulham, Queens Park Rangersand West Ham Unitedin the 1980s, wrote about the negative impact of Williams’ routine in his autobiography, It’s Only Banter. “When these programmes made white people feel it was OK to mock Black people for having rubber lips and Velcro hair, then it takes a nastier turn,” Rosenior wrote.
Crossland describes Williams as “one of life’s gentlemen”. He says that while “there are things you watch back now that can make you cringe a bit”, Williams would have been horrified by the suggestion that he offended Black people or indeed anyone else. “He would never have thought any of it was offensive,” Crossland says. “He just liked telling jokes and making people laugh.”
Sir Lenny Henry, who became Britain’s most high-profile Black comedian in the decades that followed, talks of having undergone various stages in his appraisal of Williams: first idolising him and wanting, as a wannabe comedian, to emulate his success and his act; then, in adulthood, resenting the nature of his routine and the way he appeared to endorse racist jokes rather than stand up against them; then, latterly, to saying in Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain that “those were the times and you did what you could to get by (…) and survive in a predominantly white world”.
In the 2015 BBC audio documentary Looking for Charlie Williams, the Saint Lucia-born actor Joseph Marcell, who grew up in London and is best known for playing the butler Geoffrey in the 1990s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, said of Williams’ routine: “You have to remember that we were immigrants. We were people in a new country, trying to make a life for ourselves, and we had to go beyond being embarrassed (to gain acceptance). What was important to us was that we were being seen — and he was helping us be seen.”
Harder to understand is Williams’ decision in 1976 to travel to what is now Zimbabwe at the height of the Rhodesian Bush War, when the country’s despised white-minority government was under international sanctions, and to perform at what reports at the time described as “a multi-racial club… except for Africans”.
He started out by telling his all-white audience in Salisbury (now Harare) that “Rhodesia is a wonderful country(…) and if I have any bother from you lot, I’ll take it back” before moving on to more familiar territory about topping up his suntan.
By the late 1970s, Williams’ star had waned and he faded from the public eye, though he continued to play to packed audiences in Yorkshire and on cruise ships. But in 1999, he was awarded the MBE for his charity work and a year later, he was given a lifetime achievement award at the Black Comedy Awards, which recognised he had “broken down barriers”.
When Williams died in September 2006, aged 78, having lived with Parkinson’s disease and dementia in his later years, the pioneering aspect of his legacy was reinforced. The questionable jokes were discussed, but so were the hostile environments he had encountered and the barriers he had to overcome.
“He had three distinctly different careers: first as a miner, then as a professional footballer, then as an entertainer and television personality,” O’Hara says — and in all three of those professions, he was a rarity, breaking new ground, facing social challenges very few people in Britain had faced before. “It’s amazing when you look at it like that,” O’Hara says.
In 2011, a blue plaque was unveiled in his honour at Barnsley Civic Hall, complete with his catchphrase: “Ey up, me old flower. In’t it a lovely day?” Six years later, he was inducted into Doncaster’s hall of fame.
“He was a lovely man,” Janice Brown, his second wife, says. “He had a wonderful personality. He was so down to earth. He never forgot where he came from, never wanted to go above his station — although I do remember him meeting Prince Charles (now King Charles III) and telling him, ‘You’re very lucky to be named after me, Your Highness’.”
Williams was always at his happiest when cracking jokes and making people laugh. If his legacy is complicated, it is perhaps because his approach to life was far less so. He never asked or expected to be a trailblazer — and probably never stopped long to dwell on the fact he had become so, or on the prejudice he had overcome along the way, smiling and laughing as he went.
