STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
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Britain’s first black Olympian
ALEX HALL is fascinated by the cosmopolitan life and internationalist values of the black sprinter and humanitarian, Harry Edward
STAR COMPETITOR: Harry Edward, English Athletics Championship, Stamford Bridge, 1-2 July 1-2 1922
[Pic: Agence Rol/Public domain]
TOM STONE urges you to catch the last dates of a New York singer/songwriter, never afraid to challenge her audiences musically or politically
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
The bard recalls advice received 50 years ago from his TRB muse, and sorts out appropriate legislation for football club ownership
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MAYER WAKEFIELD is frustrated by a production of Ibsen’s classic study of an anti-heroine that fails to elucidate her motivations
PETER MASON tunes his ear into the domestic affairs of a Carribbean couple with a troublesome son
Harry Edward: When I Passed The Statue of Liberty I Became Black
Harry Edward, Yale University Press, £18.99
ALTHOUGH billed as a sports memoir, Harry Edward’s book is more a microcosm of the 20th century. Originally written in the 1970s, the manuscript was rejected by publishers until it was rediscovered by TV producer Neil Duncanson in the Amistad Research Centre in New Orleans. It is now published in full.
Edward’s father had come to Berlin in 1894 from Dominica to work in restaurants and cabarets; his Prussian mother was a teacher of piano. As such, Edward was born a British subject in Berlin in 1898, and had a very cosmopolitan upbringing, becoming fluent in French and German as well as his native English. He soon showed a remarkable aptitude for athletics.
World War I intervened and all British military-age men in Germany were interned as prisoners of war. Despite the harsh camp conditions, detainees established education, training and dramatic societies, preparing the men for their eventual release at the end of the war.
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