Armistice Day Killing

Colin Brown

Description

This is the dramatic story of the death of the only English professional footballer deemed by law to have been murdered. A key member of Aston Villa's 1923 all-star team, Tommy Ball rose from the obscurity of Durham pit village football to play a starring role in the world's most famous team and was considered a likely future England international. His killer, Somerset man George Stagg, was a former soldier and policeman who became his landlord and neighbour. A difficult relationship culminated in their fateful meeting on the evening of Armistice Day in 1923. Sentenced to death in controversial circumstances, Stagg escaped the noose by the intervention of the country's first Labour Home Secretary. The exact circumstances of the shooting were never legally established and, for almost a century, have been the subject of considerable speculation. After diligent research, Colin Brown believes he may have the answers.

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 30 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781801502719
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2022
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Colin Brown, 2022
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Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
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A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781801501071
eBook ISBN 9781801502719
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part 1: Tommy Ball - From Coal Dust to Stardust
Part 2: George Stagg - From Bristol to Brum
Part 3: Why?
Part 4: The Killing
Part 5: After the Event
Part 6: Following Up
Part 7: Three Weeks in November
Part 8: Feloniously, Wilfully and with Malice Aforethought
Part 9: What Really Happened?
Part 10: Fate Intervenes
Part 11: When Life Meant Life
Part 12: Moving On
Postscript 1: Roy Jenkins
Postscript 2: Dalian Atkinson
Appendices
References
Photos
In memory of my late father Bert Brown, a Nechells lad from Cook Street, who attended his first match at Villa Park as a tenth birthday present in December 1922 and who passed away in 2017 at the age of 104. Up to the time of his death, he was probably the last surviving person to have seen Tommy Ball play.
Acknowledgements
I AM grateful for the text and narrative vetting voluntarily undertaken by personal contacts.
My friend and neighbour, long-serving CID officer Steve Jones, was able to offer appropriate guidance and correction on policing procedures. On the legal side, my fellow tai chi camp follower, criminal barrister Matthew Dunford, gave clarity on several matters of fact, while family solicitor Graham Ettinger offered wise counsel on aspects relating to libel.
The football angles were checked by my close friend of over 50 years, former work colleague, flat-mate and next-door neighbour in the Doug Ellis Lower, Christopher Turner. My son-in-law, Damian Barrett, who has on several occasions seen forward action under the flag with the Royal Marines in Central Asia and the Middle East, offered well-informed opinion on ballistics.
I am similarly indebted to the several professionals and volunteers who willingly undertook specialist research at my request, and their names are recorded at the conclusion of the book.
The not insignificant task of checking my grammar and formatting was undertaken by good friends Andy and Liz Morton. Any errors will have been inserted by me during final text revisions.
It is important to record the encouragement given at the outset by my Heroes and Villains editor Dave Woodhall, and that consistently given by Perry Barr resident Dot Ryan, with whom Dave unknowingly put me in touch. Dot has subsequently spent many hours keeping Tommy Ball s grave in good order.
I was lucky to have a publisher in Jane Camillin who kept faith in me over an extended run-in period and offered necessary patience to a rookie publishing for the first time, and I thank Duncan Olner whose cover design was a formidable reading of my mind.
Several persons kindly granted permission for the publication of photographs, and I am grateful to Christopher Turner, Nick Brown, Kat Barrett, Dot Ryan, members of the extended Stagg family and to Vanessa Smith of the Strategic Property Unit at Staffordshire County Council.
Vintage Aston Villa photographs were acquired from the Albert Wilkes Archive at Colorsport, which was highly appropriate as 1920s sports photographer Wilkes was a former Villa and England centre-half. My thanks to Andy Cowie who painstakingly searched the company archives, and to Simon Inglis for kindly pointing me in the right direction.
Heartfelt thanks are due to my late wife Christine, who encouraged me to become involved with this work and who enthusiastically joined me on my initial research-led trip to County Durham. Appreciation is also due to fourth-generation Aston Villa enthusiasts Nick Brown and Kat Barrett who have given unstinting support through often difficult times.
Finally, I have never had any intention of benefitting financially from this venture and am more than happy to ensure any author royalties forthcoming are directed towards the charity Acorns Children s Hospice. Acorns has a long history of partnership with the Aston Villa club, and I am delighted to receive their endorsement and thank their supporter services officer Andrea Murphy for her good offices in expediting the present arrangement. I would encourage everyone turning up to watch matches at Villa Park to give generously to the charity s regular street collectors.
Introduction
MOST SERIOUS football enthusiasts, whether Aston Villa fans or not, are broadly aware of the story of Thomas Edger Tommy Ball, a former coal miner, born in 1900 and signed from colliery football by Aston Villa in February 1920.
Ball holds the dubious distinction of being, in November 1923, the only active British professional football player deemed in law to have been murdered. Many will have visited his grave in St John s churchyard in Perry Barr on Birmingham s northern edge and many more will have read internet accounts of the killing or come across it as a footnote within various books covering Villa s history.
Few will know much, let alone care, about Ball s convicted killer, a middle-aged former soldier and policeman named George Stagg. Fewer still will have an awareness of the controversies that surrounded Stagg s conviction and imprisonment.
The known factual outline is straightforward enough. On the evening of Armistice Day, 11 November 1923, Ball went out from his rented home in Perry Barr, then a largely rural area to the immediate north of Aston, for an evening drink with his wife Beatrice. Sometime after his return, and in circumstances and for reasons never fully established, he was shot dead by Stagg who was his next-door neighbour and landlord.
Though it was never in doubt that Stagg fired the fatal shot, no one knows for certain what happened, or why it happened. Apart from Stagg himself, the only other person who may have witnessed the shooting was his wife Mary. As was her legal right as spouse of an accused person, Mary, for reasons that were unclear at the time, declined to appear in court.
In February 1924, following no fewer than five legal hearings in little over three months, Stagg was convicted of murder at the Stafford Winter Assize. Despite a plea for mercy from the jury, he was sentenced to be hanged.
A month later, the sentence was sensationally commuted by the country s first Labour Party home secretary to life imprisonment. Following a few years in Parkhurst Prison, Stagg was committed to Broadmoor Hospital as insane and died in 1966 in Highcroft Hospital, a mental institution in Erdington, which stood barely a 15-minute drive from the Aston Villa club s stadium.
The combination of professional sport, death by shooting, courtroom drama and high politics has in recent years re-emerged as attractive to feature writers, essayists and football historians discovering the story. There is no shortage of internet leads to follow up, though most new accounts, many doubtless subject to editorial word-count limitations, have not been investigative but have drawn heavily on what has been written before. This has inevitably meant that in places historical fact and long-established folk speculation have become entwined.
Initially, my sole aim in taking an investigative approach was to present as accurate a picture of the affair as the surviving evidence allowed: I had no greater ambition than to feature it as a one-off essay within my then regular submissions to the Heroes and Villains street-sale fanzine. It soon outgrew that aim, and, as I became drawn into the personalities within the drama, I decided to take a fresh interpretative look at the case in its entirety and to correct the narrative wherever I felt it had been previously misrepresented or misunderstood.
The sharp end of this aim has been to use the evidence with which I have worked to offer an informed personal interpretation of the events of 11 November 1923.
As I began to sift the evidence, a secondary aim presented itself. Rather than following the traditional pattern of concentrating on the loss to Aston Villa of a good player who might have gone on to represent England, I decided to look more closely at the many other persons involved. Within this aim, I thought it worth making a more searching appraisal of Ball s killer, about whom a surprising amount of contemporary material survives. Consequently, the enlarged scope of my work took the book from being simply the death of Tommy Ball to a hopefully more rounded and balanced view of the tragedy.
My third aim has been to take a critically enquiring look at the legalities surrounding the case history and at the interlocking contemporary political situation that determined Stagg s fate. Given the natural sympathies for Ball and his widow that the story presents, and which all readers will certainly share, most people at the time, and perhaps to the present day, would probably have considered Stagg s 1924 death sentence to have been only right and proper. My research, however, has thrown up concerns as to whether the judicial process was handled with the even-handedness that any accused person, in any age, has the right to expect.
I have been m