ONE hundred years ago this weekend, one of football’s greatest goalscorers made a remarkable return to first-team action. Doctors feared that Dixie Dean, Everton’s 19-year-old striker, might never play again after a serious motorcycle accident left him with devastating head and facial injuries. But on Saturday, October 23, 1926, just four months after suffering a fractured skull and a broken jaw, Dean returned to the Everton side to face Leeds United in the old First Division. He marked his comeback with a goal in a 3-1 victory at Elland Road, watched by 24,867 spectators.
The accident took place on June 20, 1926, when Dean was involved in a head-on collision near Lloc in North Wales. In an interview recorded in 1977, three years before his death at the age of 73, he recalled the events of that fateful afternoon.
“It was the summer of 1926, and I bought a New Imperial motorbike, one of the latest models. I was taking a young lady to have a run out and went into Wales. We were just going through Holywell when a (motorcycle) combination coming towards us kept cutting in and out of traffic. Then it hit us head on. It was just as well I came off the way I did. If I’d come off on the left I’d have gone down a mountain side.
“I finished up in hospital with a fractured skull. My head was parcelled up in a splint and bandages and God knows what. They put a metal plate in my head which later had to be removed. They also strengthened my jaw, which was left with a hole in it caused by the crash.”
During his recovery, Dean took to playing the mouth organ. His nurses became exasperated with the noise. “It was to get my jaw bones in trim,” he explained to a reporter.
The crash left him unconscious for 36 hours. The other driver, 34-year-old Arthur Armitage of Litherland, Liverpool, also suffered a fractured skull and serious facial injuries. Armitage’s uncle, Sam Asquith, 67, was visiting from Huddersfield and travelling in the sidecar. He suffered a broken leg, as did Dean’s passenger, 21-year-old Evelyn Jones, a draper’s assistant from Birkenhead. One report praised Asquith’s selflessness, noting that the Yorkshireman refused treatment until the other survivors had been attended to.
Dean’s recovery astounded his doctors. Despite the severity of his injuries and the trauma of the accident, he was back playing football again - and heading the ball - almost as soon as the metal plate had been removed from his head. In the years that followed, rumours persisted that Dean’s legendary heading prowess stemmed from the fact that the metal plate was still lodged in his skull, as though he were some sort of footballing Frankenstein.
The story only added to the legend of a man who terrorised defences wherever he went, scoring so many goals that statistical records differ over the precise total. The National Football Museum credits him with 473 goals in 502 career appearances. Which is to say, one heck of a lot however you slice it.
Yorkshire had already played host to the first tentative steps in Dean’s road to recovery. Three weeks earlier, he had turned out for Everton Reserves in a 3-0 defeat at Huddersfield, hitting the bar with a header. One report said that Dean “only touched the ball on about 11 occasions” and was “still rather tender in his work”. Nevertheless, he was still “the most dangerous forward” and his recovery was “nothing short of a miracle”. The Liverpool Echo announced that “the big Everton experiment came off” and described the young man as “a game ‘un”.
A few days later, 30,000 turned out at Goodison Park to watch Dean’s second - and final - reserve-team game before his first-team comeback at Elland Road. He scored twice in a 3-2 win against Birmingham - once with a header, the other a penalty.
So successful was “the big Everton experiment” that Dean was named in the starting line-up to face Newcastle United in the First Division at Goodison Park on Saturday, October 16, 1926. A crowd “fully 40,000 strong” gathered in great anticipation, only to give the Everton players “a cold reception” when it became clear that Dean was not among their number. It turned out that he had picked up a slight ankle injury against Birmingham and he was withdrawn at the 11th hour. Everton lost 3-1, leaving them rooted to the foot of the table.
Without Dean - who had scored 32 goals in 38 league games in his first full season for the Toffees in 1925-26 - Everton had won only one of their opening 13 league matches of the new campaign, and lost eight times. Small wonder that their fans were clamouring for the return of their star striker. “Give it to Dixie!” had been a cry noticeably absent from the terrace’s as the team struggled badly.
Those fans did not have to wait much longer.
After the false start came the triumphant return as Dean was back for the visit to 10th-placed Leeds and, according to one reporter who had caught up with him, feeling “clever” about life once more.
Saturday, October 23, 1926.
“A beautiful afternoon,” said the Liverpool Football Echo, “with just that snap in the air that made the onlooker feel more like participating in the game than watching it.” Leeds made a bright beginning - “as if they expected to be easy conquerors”, said The Yorkshire Post. “They made most of the running for the first twenty minutes and eighteen of those had gone when what proved to be their only goal was scored.”
Willis Edwards teed up Tom Jennings, “who from a position close in sent in a screw shot which found the corner of the net”. Jennings, a 24-year-old Scottish striker, was in the throes of a Dean-like run of form. It was his 14th goal in just five games, a sequence that included three successive hat-tricks, against Arsenal, Liverpool and Blackburn Rovers.
Dean equalised on the half-hour. “Potts came out of goal to stop an attack by Troup,” said The Yorkshire Post. “In doing so he fell, and leaving the goal open, it was a simple matter for Dean to score.” A tap-in for Dixie, it seemed. Not that he - or Everton - cared how the goals came.
Thereafter, the visitors took control. Dean had the ball in the net again early in the second half but was ruled offside. He then sent another effort fizzing narrowly past a post. Finally, Everton pulled clear through late goals from Bobby Irvine and Arthur Dominy. Victory lifted them off the foot of the table, above West Brom, and left Leeds languishing in mid-table.
Dean’s first appearance was, in the opinion of The Liverpool Echo, “very satisfactory from every point of view”. In the words of ‘Stork’, the paper’s correspondent: “In such a triumph it would be unfair to single out any one man, but I know you are anxious to know how Dixie Dean shaped.
"He was grand, if only for one thing - his ability to blend the forward line, but he did more. He gave passes that wing men could not finish, for they were the acme of accuracy. He took things easily (rightly so), but for all that he proved beyond all doubt that he is as good with his head today as he was last October.
“One could see by the way he scorned the vigorous tackle that he had not got all his confidence back - not that he shirked any important issues - but it will not take him long to recover all his old courage, while his head - the grave doubt - was the feature of his game.”
Dean went on to score 21 goals in 27 league matches that season, helping Everton secure their First Division status. Leeds, for their part, sank like a stone and were relegated. The following season, 1927-28, Everton won the First Division title, Dean scoring 60 goals in 39 appearances, a record that still stands.
To get some measure of the man Leeds United faced a century ago we have the testimony, among others, of the legendary Sir Matt Busby. He played against Dean several times before going on to manage Manchester United, and he said this of the Birkenhead-born forward.
“To play against Dixie Dean was at once a delight and a nightmare. He was a perfect specimen of an athlete, beautifully proportioned, with immense strength, adept on the ground but with extraordinary skill in the air. However close you watched him, his timing in the air was such that he was coming down before you got anywhere near him, and he hit that ball with his head as hard and as accurate as most players could kick it.”
No doubt the metal plate still lodged in his skull - ahem - gave him a crucial advantage. Dean could laugh at that story, although towards the end of his life he did say this: “As a matter of fact, I think the skull fracture knitted twice as hard, and it helped me with the old heading trick.”
Perhaps there was some truth to the old myth after all.