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Alex Jackson - the best footballer in the world

Stingraypoindexter

By Stingraypoindexter
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Stingraypoindexter

Stingraypoindexter

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Great article in the guardian today

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2014/nov/16/forgotten-story-alex-alec-jackson-scotland-chelsea

He was the hat-trick-scoring hero of Scotland’s greatest ever victory over England, considered by some the finest player in the world and named “the most-discussed footballer of the century” by the Mirror (albeit after only a third of it). He revolutionised the role of the winger, was traded for enormous fees, won league titles and scored in cup finals, and he was handsome, charismatic and wildly popular with supporters. Alex Jackson, in short, ascended to the very pinnacle of the sport. And then he fell.

The man they called The Gay Cavalier (sporting nicknames were different then; the likes of Keano and Greavesie simply wouldn’t have cut the mustard) was only 26 when he played his last league game. By his 27th birthday he was turning out in the Cheshire County League, and though he generated plenty of headlines when his career was at its peak he earned little more than a footnote in the papers when he died, aged just 41.

His career first blossomed, unusually, in Pennsylvania. He was born in Renton, a small town 20 miles north-west of Glasgow, in 1905. “Typical of hundreds of Scottish villages, Renton has been football-mad for generations,” he wrote. “It is just a small agricultural district where every boy and every girl plays football all year round. That football madness may seem somewhat crude to the civilised south, but there’s no question that it bred footballers.” Two of them in his family alone: Jackson spent a single season playing for Dumbarton before, in 1923, he and an older brother, Walter, travelled to the US to visit another sibling, John, and both ended up signing for a works team in Bethlehem.

Alex was only 18 but he proved the star of the side, top-scoring with 14 (one more than Walter) as his team came second in the league. At the end of the season Bethlehem played Fall River in the Eastern final. “One performer who stood out exceptionally was Alec Jackson,” reported the New York Times, “Young Jackson showed the speed of a deer despite the condition of the field and his dexterous footwork enabled him to carry the ball to within striking distance of the Fall River goal several times.”

fd7ecb01-4e6b-48ee-a615-6dc5f3c06342-680 Alex Jackson said he might have become a professional baseball pitcher after showing promise at the sport during his time in America. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images

At the end of the season the brothers told the club that they were going home to see their family. “According to an executive of the steel works, the brothers are going to Scotland purely on a visit, and have given assurances that they will return,” reported the Bethlehem Globe. “The visit planned, it is understood, will cover a period of approximately three or four weeks and will be made to the home of the Jackson brothers at Renton, a town located about 20 miles from Glasgow.”

Such naivety: on the very day that report was published, with the brothers still to embark on their transatlantic voyage, the chairman of Aberdeen was boasting at the club’s AGM of the imminent arrival of “two outstanding men”. The Jacksons’ boat docked on Monday 18 August 1924, and they made their debuts on the Thursday. In high dudgeon, Bethlehem made the USFA write a letter of protest to the SFA about their departure, but to no avail.

“Alec revealed a fine burst of speed and beat his man very cleverly,” reported the Aberdeen Journal, after Walter scored the winner against Elgin City in their first game. “He also crossed accurately. In the second half he did not impress so much, but … considering the lads have been accustomed to different underfoot conditions in America, and that they had not completely recovered from a rough passage on the voyage home, their was a creditable debut and augurs well for their success at Pittodrie.”

Walter did reasonably well at Aberdeen, moved to Preston a couple of seasons later and then returned to Bethlehem and settled in the United States. Alex, meanwhile, became a phenomenon. “Scotland this year need not have her usual difficulty about the outside right position for in A Jackson, Aberdeen has a man fit already for honours,” trilled the Glasgow Evening Times, a couple of months into the season. “He is fast with good ball control and a sinuous swerve which is very perplexing.” By February 1925 he was in the Scotland team and undroppable.

His former fans back in America may have been angered by his departure, but they revelled in his subsequent success. “If he can go home after his year of experience in American soccer and set Scottish fans wild with his display the game must be pretty near perfect in this country,” beamed the Bethlehem Globe.

ff2c3b8a-f21b-4dc2-9b67-2a6443400f60-680 Alex Jackson, Huddersfield’s star outside right, in 1927.Photograph: Bob Thomas/Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images

Following a single season in the Granite City Jackson was signed by Huddersfield, the English champions, who got their man – ahead of Bolton, Everton, Aston Villa, Sunderland and Liverpool – for a club record fee of £5,000 and one big bar tab. Before the deal went through the Huddersfield manager and future Arsenal legend, Herbert Chapman, travelled to Renton to get the blessing of the player’s father. “When all the business had been done, Chapman and my father went to the only pub in town to seal the contract with a nice glass of Scotch,” Jackson told the French magazine Paris Match several years later. “The entire population of the village, upon learning that such a famous man was in town, went down to the pub to see him. Mr Chapman, generous as always, made a sweeping gesture with his hand, inviting everyone for a drink. And, according to old Scottish custom, everyone ordered a whisky and a pint of beer. Mr Chapman might have drunk the finest Champagne in all the Ritz Hotels of the world, but I’m certain that he never bought a more expensive round of drinks.”

Chapman was to leave for London soon afterwards, but Jackson continued to shine. “He was ever on the ball and always doing something with it,” the Athletic News reported after one game. “He became an inside right, a centre-forward, in fact everything that was defensive and everything that was attack.”

A profile in the Sports Post in 1925 talked of a man “born with a genius for the game”. “He is tall, straight as a cane, but with the resiliency of a young willow tree,” they wrote. “When football breezes blow his way, Jackson bends to the work that is brought for him to do. One moment he is tall, straight, subdued; the next he is a thing of grace, of action, of fire, of … he’s just alive with every mortal picture which shows activity. He’s light, too. As a player he lacks poundage. He doesn’t turn a beam at much over 10 stone, and he’s slender. But he is like a kitten on his toes. His judgement of position play is immense. He makes up his mind in a moment, and he acts almost as quickly as he thinks. And if you think the picture has been over-drawn – well, let his career down the next decade be the referee.”

Unlike most outside-rights, who never left their station on that flank, Jackson was happy to come inside either with the ball at his feet on in anticipation of a cross from the other flank, scoring well over a goal every third game across his career. “It was Jackson who first brought home fully to British football the fact that with the change of the offside law more goals could be scored by outside men, but it was not alone by running into goal with the ball from the wing that Jackson did it,” wrote the footballer-turned-journalist Ivan Sharpe, who in 1936 became the first ever FA Cup final commentator. “He also took up the position in goal alongside his centre-forward for centres from the opposite wing, and it is this happy knack of being on the spot in this way for a chance centre that has made Jackson a menace in every match. ‘Jack in the box’ Jackson is a good description. He bobs up and scores so unexpectedly.”

Huddersfield won the league in his first season – their third in succession, and also their last – and in his five years there they also finished second twice and reached two FA Cup finals (in 1930 Jackson scored nine of their 11 Cup goals, all but dragging them to Wembley single-handed).

In 1928 he was also the outstanding member of the Scotland side that thrillingly beat England 5-1, becoming known as The Wembley Wizards. Jackson scored the stadium’s first ever hat-trick and, according to the Guardian, “stood out as the best man on the field”. At 5ft 10in he was by some margin the tallest member of a five-man attack that also featured the brilliant Arsenal inside-forward Alex James (who scored the other two) and the inspired if unconventional Newcastle striker Hughie Gallacher, who was playing his first game since returning from a two-month ban for pushing a referee into a bath.

d4d0b4b8-17d8-4aa3-80fe-3cda50eea5bb-620 England’s goalkeeper, Ted Hufton, dives in a vain attempt to stop an Alex Jackson shot during Scotland’s 5-1 win at Wembley in 1928. Photograph: Davis/Getty Images

Scotland’s team at the time was frequently irresistible. Jackson himself considered a 7-3 victory in Northern Ireland the following year to be his finest hour - “the most glorious 90 minutes of my life – our chaps moved like a beautiful piece of exquisitely adjusted mechanism” - but there were many to choose from. When in 1930 the Football League decided that clubs should not be compelled to release their players to represent any nation but England, an emphatically narked Scottish FA decided to select only players based at home and Jackson’s international career came to a premature end. He had represented his country 17 times, winning 15 of those games and losing just one.

A few weeks before his final international Jackson played his last major game for Huddersfield, an FA Cup final against Chapman’s Arsenal. “It was Alex Jackson that we feared most,” the Arsenal striker Cliff Bastin wrote of that match. “This dashing, happy-go-lucky Scot possessed an uncomfortable knack of popping up in the goalmouth, just when he was least expected. Mr Chapman concentrated on the problem which was worrying us all – how we were going to stop Alex Jackson. By the time he had finished we felt reasonably sure that, provided none of our defenders had an off-day, we would probably be able to do that, too.” Arsenal won 2-0.

That summer Chelsea, just promoted to the top flight as runners-up in the Second Division, got out their chequebook and embarked upon a then-unparalleled (now familiar) spending spree. Gallacher, another Wembley Wizard, joined for £10,000 and Alex Cheyne signed from Aberdeen. Then their negotiators arrived in Huddersfield. “Their representatives are understood to have stated they would have been prepared to give up to £12,000 for Jackson had they not already spent £20,000 on new players,” reported the Yorkshire Post. That would have been a British record fee, but after three solid days of talks and with the player keen to move to the capital, the clubs eventually shook hands on £9,500.

“I wanted a change,” wrote Jackson, “and to better myself in a football and business sense. I do not mind admitting right away that I felt the business interests I had in Huddersfield could be repeated with greater prospects in a place like London. There are obviously tremendous possibilities in London not only for football but for footballers with business instincts.” Soon Jackson was the landlord of a pub in Covent Garden, had an interest in the Queen’s Hotel in Leicester Square, and had a weekly column syndicated in local newspapers across the country.

4d3bdcc2-79e5-4a5e-b23d-8f6b16124175-620 Alex Jackson warms up before a game between Chelsea and Aston Villa in the 1930-31 season. Photograph: Colorsport/Andrew Cowie

On this occasion Chelsea were unable to buy success, but although they limped to 12th place in his first season (while Chapman led Arsenal to the title) Jackson was a hit, becoming the darling not just of the crowd but of the boardroom. “When he arrived he was fussed and petted to such an extent that he had the great privilege of being the only player allowed into the directors’ room after matches,” JG Orange reported in the Evening News. “I have seen him there and spoken to him there, and noted his remark that the other players did not like it.”

Leslie Knighton, who became manager of Chelsea in 1932, wrote that Jackson “was given privileges that no other player I have heard of ever had”, and that his life outside football was similarly unusual. “In all big football’s dramatic history there has never been a more intriguing figure than the Wandering Winger, who scored more goals than many centre-forwards and was certainly one of the biggest draw-cards the game has known,” Knighton continued. “Football gossip attached itself to him like barnacles to a ship. A genius – but with the temperament of a genius – rumours followed him anywhere.”

On the first day of his second season he was preparing to take the field when a director arrived, thrust the match ball into his hands and made him captain. But if Jackson was still the directors’ darling as the season began, he was distinctly out of favour by its conclusion. With the team still some way from challenging for the title, morale in the dressing-room was collapsing, and then an incident occurred when the side travelled to Manchester City for their penultimate away game, with Jackson centrally involved.

In the team hotel on the night before the match Jackson ordered a round of drinks for the entire team to be sent to his room. The following day he played and scored in a 1-1 draw, but when the club’s directors got wind of his transgression he was suspended, transfer-listed and told he would never play for the club again.

47e850cd-b162-425b-b9d1-5cc247f9725c-620 An undated photograph of Chelsea footballers attempt to retrieve a golf ball. From left to right: Tommy Law, Hughie Gallacher, George Barber, Bill Russell and Alex Jackson. Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images

It beggars belief that Chelsea would wash their hands of one of the great footballers of his time for such an apparently trivial offence, and the club refused to reveal any details – “We do not intend to state the reason for our decision and have nothing more to say on the matter,” insisted their assistant secretary – but that does indeed seem to be the case.

“I am relieved that the break has come for I was not happy at Chelsea, but the way in which it has come is not pleasant,” said Jackson. “I have seen it in all the newspapers, but not one word has been said to me by the club. Evidently they are taking the earliest opportunity of telling the world what a villain their captain is. As to the Manchester episode, which concerns more players than me, I am alleged to have broken training regulations at Manchester by ordering drinks to be sent to my bedroom at the hotel. That is true. I admit the responsibility of ordering enough for one drink per man after we had already had one drink each.” The club’s sudden disciplinary crackdown amounted, said Jackson, to “the stable door being bolted after at least one horse is gone”.

At the time several Chelsea players were being linked with moves to France, where footballers could earn considerably more than the £8 maximum weekly wage enforced at the time in the English league. Indeed, the Guardian carried a report about it on the morning of that match in Manchester. In due course Cheyne was to join Nîmes (he regretted it, and came back two years later), while Gallacher and Tommy Law would have gone too had their ambitious financial demands – £2,000 in advance and £20 a week – been accepted.

“Jackson was not the only player to be dissatisfied with his portion at Stamford Bridge,” wrote the Evening News. “Think of the men who would have gone to France had the money they wanted been placed in their banks. If they had been members of a happy family no lures from France, involving as they did being shut out of English football for ever, would have been considered.”

Perhaps Jackson was also agitating for a transfer, as several modern histories suggest, but whatever caused the falling-out it was very bad news. His contract expired in the summer of 1932 but the club still held his registration, and without their blessing Jackson could not play league football for anyone, anywhere. But non-league clubs were not covered, so in September 1932 the greatest player in the world signed for Ashton National in the Cheshire League. They paid him £15 a week, nearly double the wage of any other player in the country.

“I am going to Ashton for a month as an experiment,” Jackson announced. “I shall play in four home matches for a sum far greater than any League club would pay. The club approached me, and I put it to them that I was invited to play for them because of the ‘gate appeal’. They agreed. Then I suggested my payment should be on the basis of the ‘gate appeal’. Cricketers in Lancashire are paid that way – why not footballers? ‘A typically Scottish idea,’ it will be said. It is not Scottish: it is common sense. I am in football because I like the game, but also to make my living, and, like all men, I want the most I can get from my job. I tell you frankly that with the prospect of £8 as a maximum wage in the League, and unlimited possibilities when playing outside the league – well, what would you do?”

Six weeks later the directors at Ashton informed Jackson that his salary was driving the club to bankruptcy. “The only thing I could do was relieve them of financial responsibility affecting myself, and this I did immediately. I could not allow them to be out of pocket over me.” The Ashton manager, AH Jackson, lambasted the Ashton public for their failure “to repay us for our enterprise in signing such a famous player”.

In February 1933 Jackson joined Margate in the Kent League, who paid him £10 a week for the remainder of the season. At its end it was suggested that if he showed sufficient contrition there could be a way back into the fold at Stamford Bridge, but he was unwilling to plead for mercy. “I made a special journey to meet Jackson one day during that summer before my first season with Chelsea, and after a long talk I came to the view that nothing could be done – nothing at all,” wrote Knighton. “Alas there are some tasks that are beyond mere enthusiasm.”

393e2842-5dee-40cb-8cd9-700065c10c01-620 Alex Jackson in the pub he managed, the Angel & Crown Inn on St Martin’s Lane, in 1934.Photograph: Associated Newspapers/REX

Jackson could still trade on his fame. He advertised cigarettes - “Clubs is a small smoke with a big kick and certainly not penalties – in fact the best at its price I have ever smoked, and I know good cigarettes” - and then, even less advisably, a bookmaker. The league took a very dim view of such activities, and would have banned him had he only been playing. “Am I any further outside the pale than I was before? I’m certainly no worse off,” he insisted. “I have always held that I did not get a fair deal in league football. After my experience in this country I would not be sorry to put finish to my playing career.”

In September 1933 he got married – an interesting-sounding affair to which Jock Bell, a popular comedian of his day, arrived with Sandy, the bride’s spaniel. The following morning the happy couple departed “on a motoring honeymoon”, heading for Paris. Chelsea were still demanding £4,000 for his registration and no one seemed ready to pay it, so he stayed in France and played for Nice and Le Touquet before giving up on football altogether at the age of only 28. Photographs suggest that by this time Jackson was no longer “a player who lacks poundage”. If Jackson is remembered now it is largely because of the Wembley Wizards, 11 men who played together only once but produced a performance that will never be forgotten. It was a team of unique talent but also touched by tragedy: James won four league titles and two FA Cups with Arsenal but died of cancer at 51; Gallacher was 54, a bankrupt alcoholic, when he threw himself in front of a train in 1957.

Both outlived the Gay Cavalier. During the second world war Jackson fought in the Eighth Army in north Africa, and after being injured in Libya joined the Pioneer Corps. In 1940 he laced up his boots once again, for a game between the Army and the Air Force. “Lieutenant Jackson may not be quite so slim as in his playing days,” one soldier said, “but he made us all rub our eyes with his uncanny control of the ball.”

At the end of the war he extended his stay in Africa, and was assigned to the Suez Zone. In November 1946 he was driving a truck near his base when he lost control and overturned, suffering serious head injuries. He was dead before he reached hospital. The greatest player in the world, or Major AS Jackson as he was by then known, is one of 1,205 soldiers buried in Fayid war cemetery, Egypt, his grave as unremarkable as its occupant was outstanding.

Jackson and his wife Grace had twins, called – with a startling lack of originality – Alex and Grace (there is a very touching

showing the family all together). The twins were nine when their father died. One day last week I called Grace and asked about her father. “My mother told us he had a fabulous personality, very kind,” she said. “He liked all the things she liked. He was a family man at heart, he loved dogs, he was a warm man. And I don’t know, having been a footballer and then in the army, how he would have settled down to an ordinary, everyday life. For many years people used to talk to me about him. They’d say he had a huge personality, and that people really loved him. And that was always really nice for me to hear, as a daughter who never really knew him at all.”
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