Donald Whittall

Donald Whittall was one of five members of the Whittall family in the Smyrna FC team that won the 1906 Olympic silver medal. His cousins Albert, Edward, Godfrey and Herbert Whittall, along with two other cousins, Jacques and Edmund Giraud and Percy la Fontiane were eight members of the XI. Out of the eight, Donald was the last surviving member of the five silver-medal winning Whitalls and was uniquely the only one of the five to compete in another sport at the 1906 Games when he took part in the coxed fours rowing event. The crew consisted of four Greeks and Donald and they finished seventh out of eight crews.

Donald was the son of Richard Watson Whittall, one of the grandsons of Charlton Whittall, the founder of the C.Whittall & Co trading company and Richard, along with his brothers Edward and Herbert Octavius Whittall eventually headed the company and it was the sons of those who made up the five footballing Whittalls at Athens in 1906. Richard Watson Whittall had the distinction of bringing the first motor vehicle into Turkey in 1905.

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