Re: The Thomas Ball Death in the Nineteen Twenties
From The Northern Echo website:
THE murder at Brick Kiln Cottages - and not many top professional footballers may these days have an address like Brick Kiln Cottages - was said to have caused a sensation in Midland football circles. It stirred the North-East, too.
Tommy Ball, the victim, was born in Chester-le- Street in 1900, brought up at Usworth, near Washington, won his first medal as a 10- year-old with the school team, was down the pit at 13 and at 20 moved from Wardley Villa, to Aston Villa, already six times champions since the Football League's formation.
It was a house swap perhaps unessayed before or since.
Tommy Ball was the supposed answer to Tuesday's question: the only Football League player ever to have been murdered.
There's an objection, however. Neil Mackay in Lanchester proposes the inclusion on that lugubrious list of Ted Robledo, left back in Newcastle United's FA Cup winning side who - says Neil - was thrown to his death from a train.
Our correspondent is thus all at sea (or not, as the case may be.) Robledo, a Chilean who was four when his family fled to England, was signed by Newcastle from Barnsley in 1949, though (and this may sound familiar) United didn't really want him.
The target was his brother, George, deemed the better player. So great their fraternity, however, that one wouldn't move without t'other. George was also in the Wembley side, the first time that two foreign players had been in the same Cup winning team.
After retiring from football, Ted worked on an oil tanker, posted missing in what were said to be "mysterious circumstances." Though it was rumoured that he had been thrown off the ship and drowned, no charges were ever brought or body found.
Neil's case must thus be found not proven, as the Scots would have it, and we return ruminatively to Tommy Ball.
Settled in Birmingham, he'd married Beatrice Richards - daughter of a well-known pork butcher, pie maker and lard refiner - and swiftly became Villa's first choice centre-half.
England honours were confidently forecast.
Ball's arrival could hardly have been better timed, for Frank Barson - a somewhat abrasive character with the perhaps unique distinction of being sent off in his own testimonial - had been transferred to Manchester United.
Tom and Beattie lived in Brick Kiln Cottages, one of an isolated pair in Perry Barr. George Stagg, their 45- year-old landlord - a former Birmingham policeman who'd been wounded and gassed in the war - occupied the other half.
Stagg shot him in the late evening of Armistice Day 1923, the day after Villa's 1-0 win at Notts County had moved them up to a challenging third in the old first division.
That Sunday evening, Tom and Beattie had been for three halves of mild at their local in Perry Barr, returning shortly after 9.
30pm, which in those days was closing time.
While Beattie made the supper, Tom went out into the garden to exercise the dog.
Stagg didn't like the dog, it was subsequently suggested, nor greatly approve of his neighbours' chickens scrattin' about the place, either.
As the Northern Echo put it the following Tuesday morning, an altercation followed.
Stagg didn't even try to flee the scene, poor Ball's body found on the sofa, with his killer awaiting the police.
The first shot missed, it was said. The second had passed straight through the victim's chest, leaving a hole the size of a half crown.
We'd also reported that November morning that Middlesbrough had won just six out of 33 games in 1923, that Durham City had beaten Crewe Alexandra 3-0 in the Third Division (North), that South Shields were improving in the second division and that Coxhoe Pottery FC had disbanded, leaving just five teams in the Mid-Durham League. The previous season it had had two divisions.
At this point, however, the story is taken up by "The Murder of Tommy Ball, an Aston Villa Tragedy", a little book written by Paul Lester, published in 1996 and kindly loaned by that wellknown arch-Villan the Rev Leo Osborn, chairman of the Newcastle upon Tyne district of the Methodist church.
Tommy Ball, says Lester, quite literally had the world at his feet.
"It is not too much to suppose that he would have gone on to become a player of acclaimed greatness."
Lester also includes a contemporary poem about the incident, which could almost be sung - perhaps it was - to the tune of the Trimdon Grange Explosion.
It began: Twas on a Sabbath evening In drear November days, Two friends were heard creating', In Perry Barry's byways, High words just fed the anger, Now this young man's life is fled, A shot and then another!
And Thomas Ball lies dead.
Lester's sceptical of the "pet hate" theory. Rather, he supposes, that on Armistice Day of all days, Stagg was feeling a bit sorry for himself and probably a bit envious, too.
Ball earned £8 a week, plus a regular £2 win bonus, and could afford his halves of mild at the Church Tavern. Stagg was on a pittance police pension, plus a few shillings more because of his war wounds.
Stagg claimed the shooting was accidental, which didn't altogether explain what he was doing in his garden late at night with a loaded shotgun.
Found guilty, he was sentenced to death despite the jury's recommendation for clemency.
After an appeal, the sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life.
They blamed the soft new Labour government.
Tommy Ball was buried in Perry Barr cemetery, his once-ornate grave - footballs on every corner - now much vandalised. George Stagg was 87 when he died, in a mental hospital, in 1966.
"It was the saddest football tragedy of all time,"
said the Birmingham Sports Argus, but that was 35 years before the terrible events of Munich.
