In 1913, Sunderland won the First Division Championship, and played in the the FA Cup Final against Aston Villa at Crystal Palace. We had a good team – Charlie Buchan, ‘Geordie’ Holley, Charlie Thompson, &co. We played the final before a (then) world record crowd of 120,081 people. But we lost 1 – 0 on a late headed goal by Villa wing-half, Tommy Barber. And so disappeared our best-ever shot at winning ‘the double’, Barber is recorded by Arthur Appleton, the great SAFC historian of the 1970s, as being from the Newcastle area, and played amateur football for Todd’s Nook, Shankhouse, and West Stanley – all clubs in County Durham. Sadly, Tommy Barber was not to enjoy his fame for long. He had both legs blown off at the Somme in 1916, and died a couple of days later, whether from loss of blood or from infection, I don’t know. But then there is a curious little twist. In 1919, Aston Villa loaned Tommy Barber to Celtic, and he was touted as ‘the man who scored the winning goal in the 1913 FA Cup Final’! Yes, but wasn't Tommy Barber dead? I mean, how ...? The identity of the players remained controversial until the middle of the century, when an old man wrote a ‘Letter to the Editor’ in the Sunderland Echo. He claimed to have “had the honour” of helping to carry Tommy Barber “legless” from the field of battle. So then I did a liitle ‘poking about’ of my own. In the Celtic records, I found two little tell-tale glitches. The player they signed from Villa spelt his name Barbour (not Barber) and his birth-place is recorded as Derby (not Newcastle). So it looks very much to me like Villa sold Celtic a pup, based simply on the similarity of the names. The record bears that out to a point : Celtic had a good side in 1919 and won the Scottish League flag that year. Barbour managed just four first-team games in the season, and then moved on as a loanee to Partick Thistle, Belfast Celtic, and finally, Linfield (ironically enough, a club which the great Jackie Milburn would later manage). Barbour died in 1925, almost certainly not ‘the man who scored the winning goal in the 1913 FA Cup Final’. What a confidence trick he’d been!
Love owt like this..Remember when we got Milton Nunez. Mind the crowd figures are always hazy from back then.. On the sunderland statcat they have it down as just under 122k.. http://www.thestatcat.co.uk/Match.aspx?MatchID=3876&LU=S&LUID=34
Agreed, some of the stuff Relic and Nostalgic post is right up my street.Love reading about all the old players and events.
