The Toon by Hutchinson Roger

Author:Hutchinson, Roger [Hutchinson, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Wembley Masters: 1948–55

They enjoyed themselves back at the top. Some players reckoned that Division One was actually easier than Division Two, after the lower flight’s desperate scramble for the precious pair of promotion places, and with its Chesterfields, Burys and Brentfords fighting hard to keep Newcastle down and keep that lucrative visit to St James’s Park on their own agenda. These were impossible to ignore: the First Division found the club’s gates as irresistible as had the Second – although the average, as United cruised to a comfortable fourth spot in the league, was down a couple of thousand on the previous, record-breaking promotion year.

And the players achieved recognition. The players past and present. On 20 September 1948 both Newcastle’s Jackie Milburn and Sunderland’s Len Shackleton were chosen for the Football League Select (a kind of full international second team, in those days before under-23s and under-21s) to play against the Irish League in Liverpool.

Shackleton – who a few months previously had helped his new club to escape relegation while his old club was winning promotion – found himself on the same train from the North-east as the Newcastle director George Rutherford. ‘You can get Jackie into the England team, Len,’ urged Rutherford. ‘You know the sort of passes he likes. Give them to him all the time and we’ll have Jackie in an England shirt.’

Shackleton smiled to himself at this director, one of the men who had sold him just eight months earlier, calling upon him to display such selfless loyalty. But he did the job for Milburn. Jackie (who, incidentally, shared a Liverpool hotel room that weekend with yet another débutant, the Tottenham full-back Alf Ramsey, who insisted on staying up half the night talking tactics) got a hat-trick for the Football League, and later paid tribute to Shack’s service.

And so two weeks later, on the evening of Monday, 4 October 1948, Milburn picked up the Evening Chronicle and read that he had been picked for the full England side to face Northern Ireland in Belfast that Saturday. A few days after that the official letter confirming this arrived from the FA’s International Committee, who naturally informed the media of their decisions before writing to the players.

He scored once in a 6-2 thrashing of the Irish. It was the beginning of what would, in the end, be a somewhat disappointing international career. Hampered by injury (which he reckoned cost him some 20 caps), and obliged to compete for his place with such as Manchester United’s Jack Rowley, his old team-mate Roy Bentley of Chelsea and, later, the formidable Nat Lofthouse, Jackie Milburn won only 13 England caps. But in those 13 matches he managed to score nine goals – a superb ratio which, had it been allowed to be spread over a greater number of matches, would have made Milburn one of the most celebrated England strikers.

As it was, Jackie settled down to becoming a hero of Tyneside. It was always enough for the Ashington boy, in between the transfer scares.

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