Herbert Whittall

Herbert Whittall was the son Herbert Octavius Whitall, and was one of five members of the Whittall family in the Smyrna team that won the 1906 Olympic football silver medal. His cousins Albert, Edward, Godfrey and Donald Whittall, along with two other cousins, Jacques and Edmund Giraud and Percy la Fontiane made up the majority of the Smyrna team. Hebert Octavius was at one time the ‘manager’ of the Bournabat (now Bornova) Rugby & Football team in its early days.

Herbert, Jr., was educated in England at Cheltenham College and excelled at music and track and field athletics, notably the shot put. He used to enjoy shooting and hunting and it was in 1953 that he was to lose his life when the Jeep he and his cousin Albert were traveling in on their way to a hunting trip was hit on an unmarked level crossing by a train. Herbert died instantly while Albert was hospitalized for some time

Sport was very much a hobby in the Levant at the turn of the 20th century despite the Bournabat Rugby and Football Club being founded in 1894. It was never taken seriously as the Whitall’s first priority was the commercial world they were engrossed in. That all started in 1809 when Liverpool-born Charlton Whitall, the great-grandfather of eight members of the 1906 Olympic football team, went to Smyrna, a major sea port in Western Turkey, on behalf of the Liverpool trading company he worked for when just aged 18. Two years later he established his own trading company, C.Whittall & Co, and they exported Turkish produce to England. It became part of the Levant Trading Company which had been established since 1581 to regulate and control trade between England and Turkey. When Charlton died in 1867 he was one of the last surviving members of the Levant Company. The Levant became a community consisting predominantly of Westerners (mostly British, French, Dutch and Italian) who settled long term or permanently in the Ottoman Empire and the 1906 Smyrna Olympic XI consisted of nine British and two French players.