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.