Football’s Pioneers: Roy Brown
In October 1944, the Staffordshire Evening Sentinel ran an illustrated feature called ‘Brothers in Arms’ as part of its celebration of the county’s servicemen and women.
The three brothers it covered – Roy, Eugene, and Douglas Brown, all of them corporals – were black, members of a small minority in the county at this time. Roy, an Army Physical Training instructor, took star billing: he was a Stoke City professional.
The Browns’ father, Eugene, had moved to England from Nigeria to study, and had then joined up to fight in the First World War. In 1917, he married a white woman from Stoke, Daisy Preston, and the three brothers were born over the next six years, with Roy arriving in 1922. Their father died in 1928, and Daisy brought the three boys up in Hartshill.
Roy showed a talent for sport, and his local club, Stoke City, spotted him. He became the club’s first black player in the regionalised league games of the Second World War, turning out just 11 times as he, like his team-mate Stanley Matthews, juggled his service commitments with his sport.
When normal football resumed for the 1946/47 season, Roy stayed at Stoke, making his full debut against Preston North End in September 1946. However, he found it hard to break into the first team, making only 13 appearances until 1950 before making 60 appearances over the next three seasons. His best service came in 1952/53, when he scored eight goals in his 16 games. However, the club dropped to the Second Division, and Roy moved on to Watford in the Third Division South.
Roy joined black Londoner Tony Collins in the forward line. The press celebrated Roy as the ‘Brown Bomber’, ‘one of the most brilliant headers of the ball in the game to-day’, a skill put to great effect in a 3-3 draw against Brighton in September 1953. ‘Roy Brown the Watford Hero’, said the Daily Herald: ‘Watford’s “Black Flash”…put on a Dixie Dean heading exhibition for two of the goals'.
He was the club’s top scorer in his first season, with 21 goals in 37 appearances.
Roy stayed at Vicarage Road until 1958, clocking up 147 games and 41 goals, before moving to Non-League Chelmsford. He settled in Hertfordshire, and died there in 1989.
In October 2020, The Potters celebrated his pioneering place in their past in their Black History Month project.