Roly Gregoire: Sunderland’s first black player reveals the impact of racism

It was still a city – it wasn’t granted city status until 1992 – Sunderland was a world apart from the one Gregoire grew up in. In the year Born in the Toxteth area of ​​Liverpool in 1958 to parents of the Winrush generation from the Caribbean island of Dominica, he grew up in Bradford, another multicultural city.

By contrast, according to census figures, in 1981 about 1% of Sunderland’s population of around 300,000 were of Afro-Caribbean descent.

A fifth of the league’s 92 clubs did not have to sign a black player in 1978, and Nottingham Forest’s Viv Anderson became the first to win England’s top flight.

“I only knew one other black person in Sunderland and he was at the polytechnic,” Gregoire recalls. “Wayne Entwistle (the Whites striker who signed from Bury on a £30,000 deal that same day) shared the digs with me for a while and was a good guy, but it was a very lonely time.”

Gregoire cited the club’s 1973 FA Cup winner Bobby Kerr and experienced Mick Docherty as two of his teammates who welcomed him.

But in the summer of 1978 he felt that the dressing room’s attitude towards him had changed, with a few strange incidents on the pre-season tour of Kenya.

“After one game, all these kids ran onto the field and went up to one of our players and gathered around him,” he says. “But when they left, he came up to me and wiped his hands on my shirt. I thought that was disgusting.”

“He thought those kids had a disease and he wanted to blame it on me! Why me? Because I’m black, is that why?”

Later, at a post-game reception at the home of a wealthy white family, the group lines up to meet the hostess.

“She shook the hands of the players to my right, passed me, then shook everyone else’s hand,” he says.

“I didn’t waste a second, calm and cool, I left the house and went to Tim’s bus. I’d rather be there than to be inside, with lions and hyenas, being insulted like that.

“Not one person came to see how I was, or to comfort me a little. When they had finished eating and drinking, laughing and joking, they went back into the coach.”

“I thought that was a shame. That woman insulted me, and by insulting me she insulted the club. No loyalty, no loyalty – I felt left out.”