Dick, Dixie, and the Greatest Football Story You’ll Ever Hear

One of the last living people to witness Dixie Dean’s record-setting 60th goal of the 1927-28 league season was buried today. 

Dick White was a great friend of mine and all my family. He got to know my late grandfather, Charles Mills (who I write about here) in the early-1950s. They shared two passions – the Catholic Church and Everton Football Club – and the lives of our families have overlapped ever since. Matchgoing, church, their sons (my uncles) sharing the same school, my father and Dick’s son working together, and so it goes on. He lived a long and good life (he was 96 when he passed away last week) and remained fiercely passionate about Everton until the end. I remember sitting in his retirement flat in Formby a few years ago, as he agonised over the final minutes of an inconsequential end-of-season game on teletext (he couldn’t bear listening on the radio) and the relief and joy when a win was confirmed by the flicker of a screen was palpable.

Dick still attended Goodison Park until in his nineties, a tradition he had started in the mid-1920s, when he went with his Dad, a policeman from Cork. He witnessed the entirety of Dixie Dean’s career and was present on the afternoon the great man plundered his sixtieth league goal at the end of the 1927-28 season. It was on the afternoon that the greatest feat of goalscoring was completed that Dick was the central character in the finest football story I’ve ever heard. He recounted it to me for my first book, Everton: The School of Science, and kept 600 Evertonians enraptured by the same tale when he recounted it at the launch dinner at the Adelphi Hotel in October 2003.

I recount it here and will raise a glass later to one of the finest men I knew:

 "I kept saying to my father, in the week leading up to that game, “Hey, Dad, we’re going to have to be up there early.” My father was never a man to hurry, though. Although he was no longer a policeman he had that majestic, slow policeman’s gait — he walked that pace everywhere. And he always insisted that I went up to the ground with him." 

On the day of the Arsenal match, the youngster was particularly on edge: "We lived 10, 15 minutes’ walk away from Goodison, but you wouldn’t believe, on this particular day, he still left at the same time and insisted I was with him in case I got lost! We walked up to the ground, along Walton Lane, up Bullens Road and into Gwladys Street. The old Boys Pen was on the Bullens Road, just around the corner of Gwladys Street, and my father always paid his bob (1 shilling... or 5p in today’s money) and stood under the clock on the corner of Gwladys Street and Goodison Road. We got to the corner, he put his hand in his pocket and produced fourpence, which was what it cost to get in the Boys Pen, and said: “Now, at the end of the game, meet me on the corner, by that lamp-post.” I said, “Yes, all right, Dad, I’ll be there.” And off he went and I got in the queue." 

The streets around Goodison were filled with throngs of expectant and excited fans. As 3 o’clock neared, the long queue to the Boys Pen was shortening, but Dick White was still far from the turnstiles. When he was within five boys of the front of the queue, disaster struck. The gates shut. "I was distraught. I’d been looking forward to this for weeks, months. It was history in the making. I was weeping and all sorts of things were going through my mind. Shall I go home? Or shall I wait until three-quarter time (when they opened the turnstiles)? If Dad comes out and I’m not here, he’ll be worried, so I’ll have to wait…"

Tears streamed down his face. "Then this gentleman was walking along, and stopped, and looked at me. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. So I unburdened my sorry tale on him. “How much money have you got?” he asked. “Fourpence,” I said. “Well, you need a shilling to get in,” he told me. “Yes,” I said. “I know.” And he gave me eightpence! I don’t think I even thanked him! I legged it to the nearest turnstile, paid my shilling and fought my way through this mass of people behind the Gwladys Street goal, around to the far side, as near as I could get to the players’ subway, and fought my way down, almost to the well."

 Dick White, thanks to his Good Samaritan, had seen Dean’s last two goals and the record broken, and met his father, as planned, at the lamp-post outside Gwladys Street School: “Wonderful to see the great man get his record,” he said. “Yes, Dad,” I replied. “But I very nearly missed it.”

So I told him the story and he stopped, and looked at me. “He gave you eightpence?” he said. “Yes.”

“EIGHTPENCE! You know what that would buy? (It would probably have paid for about four pints.) Who was he?”

“I don’t know, Dad. He just came and saw me.”

“Did you thank him, then?”

“I don’t remember.”

For weeks after, he’d show me to people and tell the story, and he’d always end it with: “And this unknown man gave him eightpence!”’

» Read also: Resting in Blue Heaven – A Tribute to Dick White by David Prentice

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