Still a town at the time – it wasn’t granted city status until 1992 – Sunderland was a different world to the one in which Gregoire had grown up. Born in 1958 in the Toxteth area of Liverpool to Windrush Generation parents from the Caribbean island of Dominica, he was raised in Bradford, another multi-cultural city.
By contrast, according to the Census figures, barely 1% of a Sunderland population approaching 300,000 in 1981 was of African-Caribbean origin.
A fifth of the League’s 92 clubs had yet to sign a black player by 1978, the year Nottingham Forest’s Viv Anderson became the first to claim a senior England cap.
“I knew only one other black fellow in Sunderland, he was at the polytechnic,” remembers Gregoire. “Wayne Entwistle [a white striker, who signed the same day in a £30,000 deal from Bury] shared digs with me for a while and was a good guy, but it was quite a lonely time.”
Gregoire cites the club’s 1973 FA Cup-winning captain Bobby Kerr and experienced midfielder Mick Docherty as two colleagues who made him feel welcome, in a debut season where he made eight first-team appearances.
But he felt the dressing room attitude towards him change in the summer of 1978, with a couple of notable incidents on a pre-season tour of Kenya.
“After one game, all these children ran on to the pitch and went up to one of our players and gathered round him,” he says. “But when they’d gone he came to me and wiped his hands on my shirt. I thought that was disgusting.
“It was like he thought those children had disease, and wanted to wipe it on me! Why me? Because I’m black, is that why?”
Later, at a post-match reception at the home of a wealthy local white family, the team lined up to meet the hostess.
“She shook the hand of the players on my right, bypassed me, then shook the hand of everyone else,” he says.
“I didn’t waste a second. I just calmly and coolly walked out of the house and on to the team bus. I would rather be out there, with lions and hyenas, than be inside, being insulted like that.
“Not one person came to see how I was, or to offer some comfort. It was only when they’d finished eating and drinking, laughing and joking, that they came filing back on to the coach.
“I thought that was a disgrace. That woman insulted me, and by insulting me she insulted the club. There was no loyalty, no integrity – I felt abandoned.”
