TRAGEDY AT DEAD MAN’S CROSSING 
                         

PETER SEDDON LOOKS BACK TO 1957, A YEAR OF TRAGEDY FOR THE FORMER DERBY COUNTY STAR HUGHIE GALLACHER, WHOSE RACY LIFESTYLE MADE HIM ONE OF FOOTBALL’S EARLIEST ‘BAD BOYS’.

The Scottish International Hughie Gallacher was one of the finest centre-forwards ever to wear a Derby County shirt. 40 goals in 55 games in his fleeting spell with the Rams from 1934-35 speaks for itself. And it was no fluke, for when the 5’ 6” maestro arrived at Derby, he’d already scored 359 goals in 469 matches, making him a cult hero at Newcastle United and Chelsea and an idol for followers of the Scottish national side. Ivan Sharpe, the former Derby County winger turned journalist, summed up the player’s ability in the simplest terms possible: “I have seen no centre-forward to equal Gallacher”.

Yet today he is rarely mentioned when Rams fans enter into ‘best ever’ debates. Perhaps his name simply stirs up too great a sense of disquiet, for like Maradona, George Best and Paul Gascoigne, the memory of his genius is tainted by controversy. Hugh Kilpatrick Gallacher was, in today’s parlance, one of football’s ‘Bad Boys’.

A fiery temper and disdain for authority got him into trouble on the pitch. Drinking, gambling, womanising and ‘hangers on’ did the same off it. Little changes in football. The pundits said it would ‘all end in tears’, but for the man they called ‘Magic Feet’ it was even worse than that. On June 11, 1957, a football wizard, aged only 54, took his own life.

Exactly why Gallacher became one of just a handful of footballers to commit suicide, no one will ever know. His misdemeanours, against today’s shameful shenanigans, were relatively mild. But he was a proud man who in the end simply couldn’t live with his own weaknesses, the seeds of which had surely been sown even as he took his first breath.

Gallacher was born on 2 February 1903 into the tough industrial town of Bellshill near Glasgow, a community which an official report described as having ‘far too many pubs for its size’. By the time he was 16 - working down the pit and playing amateur football - Gallacher was already familiar with their fatal charms. At 17 he married, suffered the death of his infant son, and separated within a year. A brief reconciliation produced another son, but the couple split permanently in 1923 when Gallacher was merely 20. Not the most auspicious start to adult life.

On the field, things went better. Hughie signed first for Queen of the South, then Airdrie, followed by Newcastle United in 1925. He became a Tyneside hero, captaining Newcastle to the League Championship in 1926-7 before a shock move to Chelsea in 1930, where he took London, and its nightclubs, in his stride. By the time he arrived at Derby County in November 1934, Gallacher was one of Britain’s most celebrated footballers.

The Rams manager George Jobey, a tough Geordie, knew all too well of the star’s fiery reputation, which included an infamous incident in the Newcastle United v Huddersfield Town game on New Year’s Eve 1927, which ended with Gallacher pushing the referee, the aptly named Mr. Fogg, into the team bath. Satisfying, no doubt, but a trifle unwise. The Football Association, not amused, gave him a two months ban.

Nor was that an isolated incident, for Gallacher was rarely out of the newspapers. Jobey would certainly have been aware of another infamous occasion when, during a Continental tour with Newcastle in 1929, Hughie was accused by the opposition of being ‘drunk on the field of play’. Gallacher’s response was worthy of Best or Gascoigne at their prime – “It was a boiling hot day, so I rinsed my mouth out with a wee drop of Scotch and water”.

But Jobey was a tough character, and under his influence Gallacher seemed to mellow. The manager had warned him not to stray, especially as part of the transfer deal was to pay off the player’s £200 debts direct to the Bankruptcy Court. Hugh was taken under the wing of fellow Scotsmen Dally Duncan and an old Newcastle United friend, Jimmy Boyd, and was said to have been as good as gold during his Baseball Ground days. Maybe the social life in Derby was just too tame, or perhaps his new wife Hannah kept him in check at their smart club house on Hillsway in Littleover.

But his Derby days by no means wiped Gallacher’s slate clean. Indeed Derby County were drawn into the mire. In 1941 the club were investigated by the FA over suspected financial irregularities, one of the accusations being that manager Jobey had paid Gallacher illegal signing on fees. The player refused to admit it, but Jobey, manager of the Rams since 1925, received a stunning ten year suspension for his part in the scandal.

By that time, Gallacher had retired, having moved to Notts. County, then Grimsby Town, and finally Gateshead, where he played his last game in 1939, aged 36. Despite his flaws, he surely deserved a long and happy retirement for the pleasure he had bought to his football-loving public, but it wasn’t to be.

The all-powerful FA flatly denied Gallacher the chance of entering football management, so the former football hero entered a series of factory jobs. If that proved difficult, worse was to come on New Year’s Eve 1950 when his second wife Hannah, mother of another three children, died of a heart attack. This affected Hughie deeply, sending him into a depression from which drink again proved a temporary escape.

It was against this lonely backdrop that the final act of Hughie Gallacher’s dramatic life was played out. In May 1957 his youngest son Matthew was removed from Gallacher’s care after a domestic incident during which Hughie lost his temper and threw an ashtray which hit the boy a glancing blow on the head. Wrong, certainly, but what followed owed more to Gallacher’s celebrity status than to British justice. He was virtually branded ‘guilty of assault’ without trial, and pilloried by the media and street gossips alike.

Gallacher’s eldest son, Hughie Junior, sprang to his defence, saying “people built him up as a hero figure, one of the very best, then crucified him as though he were a criminal”. Sounds familiar. Celebrity was ever thus.

The charge preyed on Gallacher’s mind more than many knew. When he confided in a friend as sections of the press went for the kill, his spirits were obviously very low: “It’s no good fighting this thing now. They have got me on this one. My life is finished. It’s no use fighting when you know you can’t win”. And that from a man who once scored all five goals for Derby County away to Blackburn Rovers.

Feeling very much trapped, Gallacher was summoned to appear before Gateshead Magistrates Court on Wednesday 12 June, 1957, but the veteran of countless sparkling football appearances never made it. The day before, at precisely 12.08, having written a heart-rending and genuine letter of apology to the Gateshead Coroner, he jumped in front of the York to Edinburgh express train close to his home. Two small boys witnessed his last desperate moments, and the decapitated body of the former goalscoring idol was found close to a spot known as ‘Dead Man’s Crossing’.

At the inquest, his letter of apology was read to the court. The little big man with the Jimmy Cagney swagger signed off showing genuine remorse: “I’ll never forgive myself for having struck Matthew, even if I live to be a hundred”. Gallacher may have been a ‘bad boy’ but those words and the incident they referred to summed up what one of his true friends said of him: ‘He was kind and generous, quite gentle really, good fun, great company, and an incredible football talent. Until the drink got to him. Then he seemed to lose control’.

A salutary lesson to all, no doubt, and one which prompted a public forgiveness. Once ‘Wee Hughie’ had gone for good the tributes flowed. Those from Derby were suitably respectful, but the Newcastle Journal said more in their seven word headline than even the lengthiest of eulogies. It simply read ‘HUGHIE OF THE MAGIC FEET IS DEAD’.

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