The legend of Dixie Dean and Everton
Sixty goals in a season, 500 in a glittering career, all for a lousy eight quid a week. Remember the great Everton and England centre forward with pride as the 100th anniversary of his birth approaches.
When I was a kid we always knew when we were going to visit Uncle Tom. Dad would make me and my brothers put on the blue-and-white striped ties that were kept in the sideboard drawer for that sole purpose.
Uncle Tom was a Liverpool supporter. We supported Everton. Our home was a museum of Everton iconography. In addition to the ties, our mother knitted tea cosies and hot-water bottle covers in royal blue and white.
In a nearby cupboard – it was too big for the drawer – was a gigantic rattle that I could barely lift, let alone turn. Festooned with blue-and-white ribbons, it was, like the fading blue-and-white rosette beside it, a souvenir of dad’s greatest moment, his trip to Wembley in 1933 with his brother - my Uncle Bert - to see Everton win the FA Cup. (In the 1901 census, their address reads “Everton Road, Everton”; I suppose they had little choice.)
Everton’s star at the time was a centre forward – they weren’t called strikers in those days – called William Ralph Dean. If Everton was our faith, 'Dixie' Dean, as we called him, was our spiritual leader. Although I was too young to go to the match, the scoreline is engraved on my mind, Everton 3, Manchester City 0. Scorers: Stein, Dean, Dunn.
Dixie was a goalscoring genius, less famed for dribbling finesse than for raw courage, skill in the air (half his phenomenal haul of goals were from headers) and instinctive positioning. The earliest reading matter I can remember were crumpled clips from the Liverpool Echo recording Dixie’s greatest performance, achieved in the 1927-1928 season, when, at the age of 21, he scored more League goals in a season than anyone before or since, taking Everton to the League Championship in the process.
With three matches of that season still to go, only the most committed Dean fans believed that he could reach, let alone beat, the 59-goal record of Middlesbrough’s George Camsell. With only three matches left, he still had 'only' 51 to his name. But after hitting six goals in the next two games, two against Aston Villa and four against Burnley, he needed a hat-trick in the last match against Arsenal to take the record.
On May 5, 1928, supporters packed Goodison Park, despite the fact that the Championship was already in the bag, to see Dixie’s bid for a place in the record books. He scored in the first five minutes, then, midway through the first half, Everton were awarded a penalty, which was converted by you know who.
But with eight minutes to go, the score at 2-2 and 60,000 people looking anxiously at the clock, it began to look as though Dixie wouldn’t make it. Then left winger Alec Troup sent in a corner with Dean’s name on it. Dixie soared above the Arsenal defence, and when he came down, the ball was in the net and football history had been made. Even Arsenal’s late equaliser couldn’t dampen the spirits of the ecstatic Goodison Park crowd.
I had heard so much about that match as a child it that I used to believe that I was actually there. Later, dad would point himself out in a sea of faces, in sepia newspaper photographs of the open-topped bus that carried the team through the Liverpool suburbs.
Those 60 goals in 39 matches, plus the 40 he scored in internationals, Cup-ties and friendlies in the same season, brought his total to an amazing 100, a figure that is unlikely ever to be beaten, despite today’s crowded football schedules, longer seasons and additional European and domestic championships.
Dixie Dean scored almost 500 goals in his career, including 37 hat-tricks, before retiring to run a pub in Chester. The pub, the Dublin Packet, became a Mecca for former fans; my Uncle Bert was one of the many who made the pilgrimage from Liverpool.
After a long retirement, Dixie died in 1980, appropriately watching the Blues play their historic rivals from the other side of Stanley Park (Liverpool won 2-1.) At his funeral, huge crowds lined the streets of Liverpool in silent tribute. Bill Shankly, the Liverpool manager and football’s king of the one-liners, remarked that Dixie, dead, could draw a bigger crowd than today’s Everton, live.
In a series of postage stamps commemorating the 2000 European Cup, the 19p stamp featured a typical Dean header, and was captioned “Dixie Dean, 1907-1980” -- long-overdue recognition of the football legend who transferred to Everton from Tranmere Rovers at the age of 18 for £3,000, and at the peak of his career earned £8 a week.
On January 22, the football world will celebrate the centenary of Dixie’s birth on January 22, 1907. I, my son and grandson, Everton supporters all – will be wearing blue
