GOALS AND GLORY... TORMENT THEN TEARS
Hughie Gallacher was invincible with the ball at his feet — but guilt, grief and shame were opponents that he could not beat in a life that came to a tragic end
ALITTLE after midday on June 11, 1957, 13-yearold trainspotter Gordon Glaholm and his ten-year-old sister Elizabeth crouched by a railway embankment in Gateshead. Clutching pens and paper tightly in anticipation, they awaited the passing of the York to Edinburgh express.
Close by, a middle-aged man in a flat cap and work dungarees was also looking out for locomotive 60934 as he paced up and down the bridge spanning the street now known as Eastern Avenue in a state of obvious agitation.
When steam began to filter into the north-east air, the little man scrambled hurriedly down the other side of the embankment. As the train picked up speed he reached the side of the track, glanced up at the young trainspotters, mouthed the word ‘sorry’ and then launched himself into the path of the speeding train.
His decapitated body was discovered 100 yards from a spot known locally as Dead Man’s Crossing. Hughie Gallacher, legendary Scotland striker and title-winning captain of Newcastle United, was gone.
Anyone who has ever met a sporting hero tends to find the business an underwhelming anti-climax. The annals of football are riddled with flawed workingclass men granted a level of adulation their manners and lifestyle didn’t really deserve.
Players who prompt adoring fans to circle the wagon are almost always the ones who rip their hearts out and leave them crying at the church. Hugh Kilpatrick Gallacher is a case in point.
Gone 13 years before this writer was born, Bellshill-born Gallacher has never been a personal hero in the conventional sense. His posters never hung on the wall, no one I knew ever saw him play.
The modern generation of supporters won’t even know the name. Yet his story became a source of fascination while researching a book on the flawed geniuses of Scottish football in 2009.
Five foot five, with a stocky frame, a quick temper, a nicotine habit and a taste for the hard stuff, wee Hughie was a very Scottish idol. His marriage to Annie McIlvanney at the age of 17 was the result of a teenage pregnancy, the baby barely surviving a year.
Later the couple had another son Jack, who went on to play for Celtic during the war years. Yet Gallacher was abusive towards his first wife, the union ending in a costly and acrimonious divorce which rendered him bankrupt.
He survived a bout of double pneumonia. He survived accusations of accepting payments under the table as a Derby County player. He survived losing his licence for drink driving. He withstood countless suspensions from the Football Association, including a ban for pushing a referee into a dressing-room bath.
What he couldn’t survive was the death of his second wife Hannah at the age of 43 on the last day of 1950.
Gallacher’s suicide stemmed from a potent cocktail of grief, alcohol, temper and shame. Tagged with the label of ‘child abuser’, charges levelled against the Scot in May 1957 were physical rather than sexual in nature. Over a pint in Gateshead a decade ago, his son Hughie junior told me reports of his father’s alcoholism were exaggerated. Nevertheless, he had been drinking the night he lost his temper with his 14-yearold son Matthew and threw his ashtray — Woodbine butts and all — at the teenager.
When the missile drew blood, the boy left the house in a state of distress and ran to find his older brother at a friend’s house. What happens next remains a source of intense guilt and regret to Hughie in his advancing years.
‘There was a knock on the door and Matthew came in with blood around his ear. My friend’s mother asked if she should phone the police.’ Pausing to remove his glasses, he added: ‘I said yes.’
Removed from his father’s care by the NSPCC, Gallacher was charged with assault and neglect of his offspring and ordered to appear at Gateshead Magistrates Court on Wednesday, June 12. The day before the hearing, he took matters into his own hands.
‘I suppose when I’ve had a drink now I wonder if I should have done something different,’ his son pondered that night.
‘Events got out of control — I didn’t think so much would come of that. I didn’t speak to Dad for days after the incident with my brother. I was a bit upset. In fact, I didn’t speak to him at all before what happened.’
What happened was a sobering, cautionary tale of the peril of the football hanger-on. A footballing god in Newcastle, Gallacher never had to put his hand in his own pocket to buy a drink. Alas, that was part of the problem. A pocket dynamo with a potty mouth and a nose for trouble, he was everyone’s favourite drinking buddy. In every sense he was the talk of the Toon.
FOR all his human failings off the pitch, a scoring record of 463 goals in 624 games in Scottish and English football would be outstanding in any era. He failed to score in just nine of his 20 appearances for Scotland. The 5-1 rout of England 92 years ago this week was one of them, a telegram informing of his sister-in-law’s premature death arriving hours before kick-off.
Yet the genius of the Wembley Wizards was book-ended by a run of internationals when Gallacher carried Scotland’s national team on his slender shoulders. An
The annals of football are riddled with flawed men of working class
astonishing 13 goals in eight caps meant Jimmy McGrory — a Celtic icon — couldn’t get a game. But for the SFA imposing a ban on Anglo players appearing in dark blue, Gallacher would surely have set a goalscoring record beyond the reach of Denis Law or Kenny Dalglish.
Steve Clarke would kill for a player with his predatory, ruthless capacity for smashing the ball into the net.
He spent just five years at St James’ Park, scoring a remarkable 140 goals and winning a league winners’ medal as captain. Alan Shearer might have scored more goals in a black-and-white shirt but, as the centenary of their last great hoorah approaches, Newcastle remain the great non-achievers of English football.
Hughie Gallacher Jnr probably put it best when he said: ‘Look at Shearer. They paid £15million for him and that was enough to convince people he was a superstar. But he didn’t win a championship with Newcastle, did he?’