Fred Hanley: Paving the way

In May 1938, Chelsea announced the arrival of a young forward from Merseyside who had shown great promise in the lower leagues of English football and was now ready to move to London in order to try and fulfil his potential.

Fred Hanley was 20 years old, two-footed, six-foot tall, and weighed just under 12 stone. He had been spotted playing for Skelmersdale United, a village team in the Liverpool County Combination League, which is about as unlikely a source for a Chelsea player in the late 1930s as you can imagine.

However, he joined at the same time as another well-known Merseyside talent, Alf Hanson, who had scored 50 league goals for Liverpool. That was enough of an angle for the Daily Express to run a feature about the pair ahead of the new campaign.

“Hanley is the most interesting Chelsea signing of the close season,” it read. “But the most important importation is Hanson, headline winger from Liverpool. Strange that the known and the unknown should have come from the same city.”

You can see why there was a bit of hype around Hanson’s transfer – a “headline winger from Liverpool” wasn’t going to go unnoticed coming through the doors at Stamford Bridge.

But what was it about Hanley, the youngster from Skelmersdale, that made him the “most interesting” of Chelsea’s summer signings?

The answer to that question could be found at the start of the story, which made much of Hanley’s skin tone. It ran under the headline: ‘HANLEY WILL PUT COLOUR IN CHELSEA’ and the opening sentence continued the theme.

“Chelsea have signed a coloured footballer, and from the legends of talent which have followed him from north to south he is going to put a lot of colour into Chelsea football.”

The article included several racial tropes in its description of the promising young player, clearly fascinated by the idea of a footballer who wasn’t white. “Take Hanley out of his studded boots and he still tops six feet,” it read. “His husky-shouldered build carries his height perfectly, and when he smiles, which is often, he smiles wide.

“Hanley is grateful to Chelsea. Because when the future seemed to stop at the monotony of the daily chores in Liverpool, Chelsea invited him to step up into fame.”

The piece went on to point out that Hanley’s gratitude to the club was due to their decision to overlook his race in signing him, which was not a given at a time when only white boxers could fight for British titles.

“You see the point of Hanley’s appreciation,” the article continued. “Some clubs have a colour-bar. “But Chelsea have always been broad-minded. Provided the talent is there, so long as the player can be expected to behave reasonably, Chelsea will stand against any form of bias.”

The Blues manager at the time, Leslie Knighton, believed he had snapped up a player with plenty of potential. “I expect much from Hanley,” he said. “I can see him shaping into one of the great personalities of the game.”

Hanley wasn’t the finished article when he arrived in west London. He had scored seven goals for Skelmersdale the previous season, and they were operating at a decent level back then, consistently finishing among the top positions in a league that included Everton and Liverpool ‘A’ teams.

But he was just out of his teens when he upped sticks and moved down to London.

It is difficult to imagine how intimidating that move must have been for Fred, who had been through a lot during his childhood. He was born in the infirmary of Brownlow Hill workhouse and had spent time in Olive Mount Children’s Home.

His mother, Margaret, was a widow who had lost her husband during the First World War, drowned in an enemy submarine attack. Fred’s father is believed to have been a Jamaican sailor she met between her first husband’s death and her second marriage.

It is very likely Hanley became the first black player to sign for Chelsea. He didn’t play a single game for the first team in his year at the Bridge, instead leading the line for the reserves in the Midweek League and finishing up as our top scorer in the competition, with 10 goals.

When you consider the first team struggled to a 20th-place finish – one position above the relegation places – you would have thought Hanley might have been offered a chance to prove himself. However, that opportunity to represent the first team never arose.

Knighton, the manager who had brought Hanley to the club the previous summer and had such high hopes for him, stepped down in April 1939, which may have played a part in Hanley’s departure from the club the following month.

The youngster appears in a photograph (below) of the players presenting Knighton with a bag of golf clubs as a leaving gift, suggesting he was very much a part of the first-team squad.

Hanley’s next move took him to Clapton Orient – as the east-London club were known prior to their move to Leyton.

He quickly announced himself with a goal for the reserve team in a game against Coventry City on 2 September 1939. The following day, however, the United Kingdom declared war on Germany and his hopes of becoming a first-team footballer were put into stark perspective.

The Football League season was abandoned after three games and Hanley returned home to his mother’s house in Toxteth.

He played some football for South Liverpool in the months that followed, before joining the army, who based him in Perth, Scotland, where he turned out for local sides, Jeanfield Swifts and Tannadice Rovers.

It’s unclear if Hanley played on at a significant level after the war, but there is some record of his life away from football. He married twice, in 1944 and 1961, and suffered personal tragedy when he and his second wife-to-be, Doris, lost a new-born baby in harrowing circumstances while it was out of their care.

He seems to have lost touch with his wider family in later life. ‘My mum tried to find Freddie in the late 1970s,’ his niece, Joan Andrews, told Chelsea historian Rick Glanvill a generation later, ‘but she failed to trace him.’

Hanley died at the age of 70, in April 1988, after suffering from prostate cancer, but his story went untold until his family were reunited with a box of documents and photographs in the 1990s.

The collection had been found by a distant relative in the loft of a council house that was being knocked down in Liverpool. One of the documents was the contract he had signed when he joined Chelsea in August 1938, stating his pay as £1 6s per week, to be doubled if he scored a goal.

‘It also tells him how to get by train and bus to Stamford Bridge,’ his niece told Glanvill in Chelsea FC: The Official Biography.

Revisiting Hanley’s story today, it is troubling to see the way in which the press focused on his racial characteristics.

Following his move to Orient in the summer of 1939, two different local papers introduced him as a “dark-skinned centre or inside forward,” prioritising this over the fact that he had spent the previous season at Chelsea.

The Nottingham Journal gave a few more column inches to a fuller description of Hanley, but still opened by calling him “one of the few coloured players in football,” which does at least go some way towards explaining the fascination.

Today, we would refer to that kind of treatment as ‘othering’ – highlighting an aspect which marks someone out as different to the majority.

Leon Mann, a journalist and anti-racism campaigner, who has worked with Kick it Out and subsequently set up the Football Black List and the Black Collective of Media in Sport, discusses the impact he believes that language may have had on Hanley.

‘For someone in 2023 to be able to reflect on that is really difficult,’ he said. ‘If you were to talk about someone being ‘othered’ today, I could take you through all the complexities of that and all the ways in which we could challenge it, and the communities that people could fall back into for support.

‘But those communities of people with lived experience just didn’t exist then, so you were truly isolated and you had to manage these things by yourself. I can only think about how difficult that must have been.

‘Equally, there would have been allies, there would have been people who would have supported the likes of Fred, and said, “Ignore it, it’s rubbish. You know we all value and appreciate you.”

‘I think there’s something to be said about that, because we often focus on the negative side of those experiences, understandably. All those allies who pushed back on the nonsense and helped people like Fred to navigate those situations were vital.

‘They were central to black footballers being able to survive those deeply complex and hurtful situations, to go on and achieve and, vitally, open the door for the likes of Paul Canoville who followed them.’

Hanley’s story was forgotten for decades, but now it is being rediscovered and explored by a new generation, including Xaymaca Awoyungbo, a filmmaker and Chelsea supporter who is exploring the club’s complicated history with race in his film, Blue is the Colour.

It is one of two projects being backed by the Blue Creator Fund, a partnership between Chelsea and the sports media platform VERSUS, which supports the work of young British creatives from under-represented backgrounds.

“I had never heard of Fred before I started work on my film,” Awoyungbo says. “but because I’m doing this piece about being a black Chelsea fan, his name came up.

“I think the context is really interesting – that Chelsea would have a black player in the ’30s. Even in the ’80s, Paul Canoville was getting abuse, so to have a black player in the ’30s feels like a radical move to me. There weren’t many black footballers in England at the time.

“The drive for me to make this film was because people would ask me, ‘How can you be black and a Chelsea fan?’ A lot of my friends are Arsenal fans and I think people just assume that if you’re black and you live in London, you’re going to support Arsenal.

“So that was the drive – to get rid of that and to show that we are part of this history as well, to highlight stories like Paul’s, Fred’s, and also my own. It affirms my place as a fan.”

Hanley lived just long enough to see the lineage of black Chelsea players continue, when Canoville and a new generation of black players represented us in the 1980s.

They suffered abuse and overcame discrimination to establish themselves at the highest level of the game, and in the years since then, black representation in English football has soared.

That legacy serves to re-emphasise the significance of players like Hanley, who would have been the only non-white player on the pitch far more often than not during his career, in paving the way for the diversification of our game.

‘Undoubtedly, without the contribution of those pioneers from the ’30s and ’40s, it would have been even more difficult for those that followed,’ adds Mann.

‘Without them, we wouldn’t have the situation that we have today, where we have 43 per cent black players making up the Premier League, and 34 per cent black players making up the EFL.

‘We owe the likes of Fred a great deal of gratitude, and we should also thank those allies who would have stood alongside him through the difficult times, for the role that they played.’

This piece was first published in our match-day programme for the Carabao Cup second-round tie with AFC Wimbledon. You can order every edition of this season’s programme by clicking here.