John Edward Thompson Milburn (1924–1988)

by unknown photographer, 1955

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Milburn, John Edward Thompson [Jackie] (1924–1988), footballer, was born on 11 May 1924 at 14 Sixth Row, Ashington, Northumberland, the eldest of three children of Alexander (Alec) Milburn and his wife, Annie (Nance) Thompson (c.1900–c.1982). His father was a coalminer from a family with a strong footballing tradition. Jackie's great-grandfather ‘Warhorse’ Milburn had played in goal for Northumberland in the 1880s, and several uncles were professional footballers. In their turn the sons of his cousin Cissie, Jack and Bobby Charlton, grew up nearby and idolized Jackie.

Milburn followed a well-trodden path to professionalism from kicking a ball around the back lanes to playing for his elementary school, Hirst East, in Ashington, where his natural athleticism stood out. His father even beat him for getting too big-headed after winning all his events at the school sports day—an incident, recalled in his autobiography, to which he attributed a subsequent lack of confidence which others took for modesty. At fourteen the depression drove him south to work as a kitchen boy in a country house near Dorking, but seeing a nearby football match made him homesick. He ran away, straight back to Ashington and a job filling bags of sugar in a grocer's shop. With the approach of war in 1939, the mines took on more labour and at fifteen and a half he became an apprentice fitter, which he remained throughout the war.

Jackie continued playing football with local sides before getting a trial for Newcastle on the basis of a letter written by a friend. The game went down in Geordie folklore as the young Milburn arrived early and sat on the steps of St James's Park with 'a pie and a bottle of pop' before scoring six goals in the second half in a pair of borrowed boots. He was immediately signed by Stan Seymour, the Newcastle manager, and scored with his first kick in his first home game in 1943. Seventy or so of the Milburn clan and friends crammed into the little terrace house in Ashington for a party to celebrate. He was not officially released from mining duties until 1948, by which time he had moved from playing as a winger and inside forward to wearing the famous number 9 shirt. He scored a hat-trick in his first game at centre-forward in October 1947 and finished as top goalscorer in the season when Newcastle won back their place in the first division, watched by an average crowd of over 56,000—a record for the Football League.

Always known as Wor Jackie, Milburn became the best known Geordie of his day. He got his first England cap in 1948 and went on to play thirteen times for his country, scoring ten goals. While training with England he met Laura Easton Blackwood, a Scottish girl, the daughter of John Blackwood, hairdresser's assistant. They were married on 16 February 1948 and he remained devoted to her for the rest of his life. Milburn was tall and lean, a handsome man and a spectacular player who could shoot with either foot and had a flair for the big occasion. JET, an alternative nickname taken from his initials, would suddenly sprint at terrific speed from deep positions, leaving defenders yards behind and occasionally ending up in the crowd. His first goal in the 1951 cup final against Blackpool was a solo break of 50 yards. His shooting power brought him the second, winning goal, a fierce shot from long range from a clever back-heel by Ernie Taylor, a goal which Stanley Matthews later called 'the finest ever scored at Wembley' (Kirkup, 69). The team returned to extraordinary public rejoicing as tens of thousands lined streets bedecked in black and white to welcome home a team still largely composed of local players. These scenes were repeated the following year when Milburn played in the side which defeated Arsenal at Wembley—the first consecutive cup final victories for sixty years. Wor Jackie slipped from favour as England centre-forward but was confirmed as a Tyneside hero with a third cup final victory in 1955, when he scored an outstanding headed goal after only 45 seconds, the fastest Wembley goal until 1997 and from a player who hated heading the ball.

Milburn began to lose some of his exceptional speed and retired from Newcastle in 1957, at the age of thirty-three, having made 492 appearances for the club, and having scored 238 goals. He became player–manager of Linfield in Northern Ireland, then moved briefly to the English southern league, before becoming manager of Ipswich in 1963, when Alf Ramsey took over the England team. Jackie was too nice to take hard decisions over players and lacked the funds to maintain the club's success. He resigned the following year and returned to Tyneside, where his local fame got him a job as a football reporter, and he settled down to write a weekly column for the News of the World for over twenty years. This kept him intimately involved in football, identified with the club and in the public eye without having to bear the responsibility for Newcastle's failures. On the tenth anniversary of his retirement a crowd of 44,000 saw a testimonial in which Milburn's pals from the famous cup final teams played alongside the Charlton brothers and the great Hungarian Puskas.

The Milburn legend began to take on a new significance in popular memory. As football on Tyneside was beset by hooligan problems on the terraces and vastly increased wage demands from players who performed poorly, the character and achievements of Wor Jackie stood out as a reminder of better times. Tyneside itself went into a downward spiral of unemployment and despair with the closure of the shipyards and the pits. Milburn's strong roots in the mining community, his modesty and decency, his friendliness and devotion to the area, combined to turn him into a much loved and honoured local figure. In 1981 he became the first footballer to be made a freeman of the city, an honour he shared with one of his fans, Cardinal Hume, who observed 'a quality of goodness about him which inspired others' (Kirkup, 172). He was the subject of several feature articles, radio programmes, and in 1981 of This is Your Life on television. In 1987 he received an award from the Sports Council for his lifelong work for sport in the region. But he was never the kind of man to seek a place for himself on the honours list and died just as this kind of recognition began to become more commonplace among footballers.

Jackie was always a heavy smoker—he was even known to light up at half-time—and he developed lung cancer in 1988. His death from the disease, at his home, 2 Bothal Terrace, Ashington, on 9 October 1988, which took the public by surprise, revealed the full extent of popular adulation. Thousands lined the streets for his funeral four days later, which was reported in the national press and on television, as it moved from the simple house in Ashington where he had lived to a packed Newcastle Cathedral. His ashes were scattered on St James's Park. A public subscription for a statue launched by the local paper was soon fully subscribed. A bronze of him, running with the ball at his feet, now stands outside Newcastle's ground while Ashington, not to be outdone, unveiled an 8 foot likeness of their unassuming hero in the town centre in 1995, amid choruses of the 'Blaydon Races' from his surviving team-mates, friends, and family. Buses, trains, and council estates along with a new stand in St James's Park were named after him; and in 1991 the Jackie Milburn Memorial Trust was set up to help the young disabled in the region. There was a musical about his life and an award-winning television documentary. Over the years his achievements as a player were embellished by his qualities as a man, especially as a devoted husband, father of three, and grandfather. His long and happy marriage—the family caravan on the coast, playing golf together at Morpeth, Laura's home cooking—was a great source of strength and stability to him, especially in later life, and was turned into a symbol of vanishing family values as divorce rates shot up and a more permissive culture took hold. Media nostalgia was kind to Milburn—he became one of their own—but he earned his fame both as Newcastle's most successful modern player and as an antidote to the Andy Capp image of northern masculinity.