Harmless row over chickens ended in football prodigy’s murder
WHEN Tommy Ball took the bus home from the Church Tavern pub with his young wife Beatrice almost 99 years ago, he had the world at his feet.
Handsome and moderately wealthy – by the standards of the early 1920s – Ball was an emerging centre-back for Aston Villa, at that time one of the most successful teams in world football.
From a brutally tough upbringing, initially working in the pits of North-east England, his skills were first noticed after turning out for Felling Colliery works team in Durham.
But Ball’s burgeoning career as a topflight footballer was stopped in its tracks at the age of just 23 due to a dispute which resulted in him becoming, to this day, still the only active British professional footballer to be murdered.
“Chickens got me into this story,” reveals Colin Brown, author of a new book – The Armistice Day Killing – that explores Ball’s bizarre murder.
“There are so many supposed ‘truths’ that turned out to be total myths which I discovered over the four years it took me to research and write the book – though it certainly is true that an argument over chickens really did play a part in Tommy’s death.”
As Colin’s book demonstrates, the causes of what became known as the Armistice Day Killing still, almost a century on, pose a string of intriguing questions.
Living in a cottage in what was then the village of Perry Barr, to the north of Birmingham, Tommy and Beatrice’s home was rented out to them by their next door neighbours George and Alice Stagg.
George was a retired policeman who had seen active service in both the Boer and First World War, sustaining a serious leg injury after being shot near Lens, France.
‘His wife was adamant Tommy never hit her’
Looking far older than his 45 years, George had recently served his tenants with an eviction notice for reasons that he would later claim in court were due to Ball’s acts of domestic violence against his wife.
“There’s absolutely no proof of this at all,” says Colin. “Tommy’s wife was absolutely adamant that he had never hit her or abused her in any way. It’s possible George Stagg did hear the couple arguing in a way that most couples do sometimes and perhaps mis-heard or exaggerated this later in court to help his defence.”
What’s beyond doubt is that there was a bitter neighbour dispute over Tommy’s chickens which, due to a lack of a dividing fence between the two gardens, were often crossing over to the Stagg property.
Ball, so it seems, was not too concerned about the problem. He was, by November 1923, an established member of the Villa first team, playing what would be his last game at Meadow Lane, the home of Notts County, in a 1-0 win for Villa.
“It doesn’t really suit the ‘tragic hero’ narrative but it seems Ball was a good rather than a great player,” reveals Colin. “He definitely had one excellent season forvilla but there’s a queue of players who can say that.
“It’s telling to me that the Villa manager George Ramsay had recently bought a new centre-back named Vic Milne, who cost a huge amount of money at the time.
“It seems likely to me that, if Ball had lived, then Milne would have replaced him in that position. I doubt Ramsay would have spent that money on Milne just to have him playing in the reserves.”
Armistice Day – the 11th of November – was, it is safe to assume, a difficult day for George Stagg, a time when brutal memories of war would have dominated his mind and made him all too aware of his declining health, in stark contrast to the wealthy, youthful sporting celebrity who lived in the cottage next door.
What happened that evening can probably never be fully explained as accounts from both Stagg, Ball’s wife Beatrice and two witnesses all differ.
What does seem to be true is that, after drinking around three halves of beer at the Church Tavern, Tommy and Beatrice walked home to find their dog had escaped.
After walking the local lanes alone to find his pet, Tommy, according to Stagg, began shouting abuse to his landlord outside his front garden before attempting to climb over the front gate.
Roused from his armchair, Stagg claimed he went outside calmly to confront Tommy, before being scared of his drunken abuse.
Firing his loaded hunting rifle into the air as a warning shot, Stagg then claimed that Tommy attempted to wrestle the gun from him. In the process, the gun was accidently discharged again, fatally wounding Tommy who died within minutes.
“Oh, Bella,” he gasped with his final breaths as his wife ran to his side. “He has shot me.” Colin insists: “There are so many holes to Stagg’s story. He claimed that he had time to go back into the house and reload his gun before firing the second shot.
“With his bad leg he just would not have had time to do this.and, given that the shot that killed Ball was fired from three feet away, this doesn’t chime with Stagg’s claim that there was a physical altercation.”
As the story made headlines across the country, Tommy’s team-mates were given no compassionate leave by the Football Association, having to play a match just
four days later against Liverpool. Not surprisingly, Villa’s form plummeted in the weeks after Tommy’s death, with his traumatised team-mates winning just three of the next 12 games in the First Division.
As for Stagg, his full charge was that he “feloniously and wilfully, and of his malice aforethought, did kill and murder Thomas Edger Ball against the peace of Our Lord The King, his Crown and Dignity”.
As a former policeman, it is probable that Stagg had a more than typically unpleasant experience in Winson Green prison, Birmingham, while waiting for his trial.
But with speed that would be impossible today, he took the stand on February 19, 1924, three months after Tommy’s funeral.
The last rites were recorded in the Aston Villa News And Record: “The road to Perry Barr was lined with sorrowing spectators.” Thousands of mourners attended and his team-mates acted as pallbearers.
“This is my story and I am sticking to it,” was Stagg’s most memorable line, uttered in the Winter Assize, Stafford, as his life hung in the balance. Adamant that a drunken Ball had screamed he would “bash your brains in”, Stagg claimed all he had done was act in self-defence.
Aston Villa’s chief trainer Alfred Miles claimed during the trial that, as a professional footballer, Tommy was not a heavy drinker, and both the landlord of the Church Tavern and the bus conductor who took Tommy and Beatrice’s fare on their way home also attested to Ball’s sobriety.
More decisively, a doctor acting on behalf of the defence stated that Ball’s movements after being shot were “more consistent with his having staggered back after letting go of a gun, than if he had not been holding the gun when he was shot”, thus damaging Stagg’s claim Ball had tried to grab the gun.
The jury needed less than two hours to find Stagg guilty of murder, a crime punishable by death.
Yet fate intervened in the form of new Home Secretary Arthur Henderson who, as a critic of the death penalty, commuted Stagg’s sentence to life imprisonment.
Almost all of it would be spent in Broadmoor, after he was declared insane within eight months of his term beginning.
Stagg lived to be 87 – his name now rightfully all but forgotten. As for Tommy Ball, Colin believes his story serves as a salient lesson about confrontation and escalation.
“I think the lesson here is one that applies to everyone, including football fans actually.
“This was a situation where two men’s personality traits came to the fore. We had nothing more than a footballer who had lost his dog and a landlord who had been woken up after dozing in his armchair.
“There was no need for a situation like that to end up with a man dead.what I’ve learnt from working on this book is that it always pays to keep your cool and know when to walk away.”
The Armistice Day
Killing, by Colin Brown,
Pitch Publishing, £19.99