There are two ways to make a mark, quietly and flamboyantly. And these two, these two Alexes, Massie and Jackson, two footballers, one at right-half and the second on the right-wing, at club level and for Scotland epitomise the contrast. Yet even then they have parallels. The pair were born ten months apart and fifteen miles apart. They both would make their reputations not in Scotland, nor England but in America. They each would play well over three hundred league games in playing careers that lasted the best part of fifteen years or more. They should perhaps have had concurrent careers, they might even have formed a famous right-sided partnership, but as fate would have it their paths actually would never cross either at club or national level. Had they, what might have happened? Perhaps Alex Jackson might have had a longer career, first as a wing-partnership with Allan Morton in the 1920s and then in the 1930s with Dally Duncan. But it was not to be. By then Jackson's footballing career was to all intents and purposes over as Massie's had hardly begun. And maybe too the Scotland teams that Massie played in, might have been a little more successful. Whereas Alex Jackson played seventeen times for his country, lost only once and drew not at all, Alex Massie would be on the winning side just ten times of eighteen.
So let us look at the flamboyant first. Alex Skinner Jackson, known in his heyday and when words had other connotations, as The Gay Chevalier was born on 12th May 1905 at 16, Hall Street, Renton in the
Leven Vale, two hundred yards from the village's ground, Tontine Park. No doubt he started to play there or thereabouts before the Great War but by the time he was his mid-teens as the war ended the local team had gone from "World Champions" in 1888 to dissolution in 1922. He therefore had that same year and aged just seventeen the choice of Vale of Leven from Alexandria up the road and in the Second Division, perhaps in the First Division Kilmarnock, which his elder brother, Walter, Wattie, a centre-forward, had joined in 1920 or Dumbarton down the Vale but just relegated. He went to Dumbarton.
There on the right-wing he would make twenty-nine appearances officially in two seasons, actually in one, scoring just twice. It seems a poor return but he was still a teenager, a young one at that. Then in the summer of 1923 he travelled with Wattie to Canada and crossed to America, to Detroit where John, his eldest brother, had moved. Neither returned, at least not as expected.
How exactly it happened is unclear even if the why is. One of the country's best and certainly richest clubs,
Bethlehem Steel from the town in Pennsylvania of the same name, had become embroiled in a series of unusual events involving infidelity and bigamy that had caused the loss of its centre-forward. The manager's wife had run off with him, married him and then fled back to Scotland leaving him to face the ensuing court-case alone. Nor is it certain that when an offer was that it really was for Alex at all. Wattie Jackson was the ideal replacement for the striker, who was detained elsewhere with a new season imminent.
Whatever the truth both Jacksons stayed, both would be signed and both play. Wattie in the 1923-4 season would score thirteen goals in twenty-three games. Alex would go one better with fourteen in twenty-eight. Bethlehem Steel would finish second in the American Soccer League at which point arrangements appear publicly to have been in place that the Jackson brothers would remain at least for the next season. Privately they clearly had other ideas. Before that had even left for a summer trip home it was announced by Aberdeen that they were expecting to sign two new, headline players. No names were given and Bethlehem clearly did not suspect. However, the other important fact in the matter is that the Aberdeen manager was Paddy Travers and he had been recruited in 1922 after two years at none other than Dumbarton. It was Travers, who may not have actually signed Alec Jackson but he had been there when he had been scouted. And said Travers clearly had not forgotten what he knew.
Wattie Jackson would stay at Aberdeen for two years then move on to Preston North End. He would then return to America, back to Bethlehem Steel in 1927-28 where there was again a striking shortage. Archie Stark, brought in as a winger to cover Alex but converted to a remarkable centre-forward, was injured. Meanwhile brother Alex too had already moved on. After a single season in the Granite City, eight goals in thirty-four games and a first Scottish cap against Wales in February Huddersfield Town, the English league champions, came in for him.
It turned out to be a slightly bizarre situation. Jackson had clearly been identified by the manager,
Herbert Chapman, as a replacement probably for George Richardson, who had left the previous season. Chapman, ever since his days at Northampton, had played his variation of what he himself had been a part of at Spurs under John Cameron, the
Scottish Cross system with a drop-off , fetch-and-carry inside forward, to start with Cameron himself and later Chapman. At Huddersfield it consisted of two wingers, he had Billy Smith on the left, a big centre-forward, George Brown, rather than the traditional, mobile but small Scottish take, a defensive centre-half, Tom Wilson, and a dropped-off, fetch-and-pass inside-forward, Clem Stephenson. Alex Jackson must have been the missing part yet, once recruited, Chapman left immediately for Arsenal and future glory.
By this time Alex Massie was also about to make a move. From junior football in and around Possilpark in Glasgow, where he had been born, and Ayr United he would in late 1926 or early 1927 aged twenty-one or twenty-two be recruited by Bury in the English First Division. The club in 1927-28 would climb from nineteen place to fifth but he after just seventeen appearances and four goals from right-half would leave. Alex Massie of Possilpark and John Delaney, professional footballers both, departed from Greenock for Montreal on 11th August 1928. Massie crossed the border into the United States ten days later and travelled on-wards. And again he went to Bethlehem Steel.
Short-term it was not a good decision. He stayed only two years, at which point the club folded as the American Soccer League collapsed about it, and Massie was on the way home via Dolphin in the League of Ireland. However, long-term perhaps it was his saving. From Dolphin he was recruited by Hearts, joining a little into the season on 10th October and would stay almost five years. They would be five years of improvement. In 1931 the Tynecastle team would finish fifth. In 1932 it was eighth and then not just third, sixth and third again but in two Scottish Cup semi-finals, in 1933 and 1935.
By then Massie was twenty-nine and known as The Ace of Hearts. Jackson, on the other hand and at the same age, had left football altogether, not necessarily because he could no longer play, there is no proof that he could or couldn't, but because after difficulties, over which he had little or no control, he seems simply to have fallen out of love with the game. In 1930 after a league championship and one hundred and seventy-nine league games and seventy goals at Huddersfield he had been bought by Chelsea as David Calderhead gathered a group of individually outstanding Scottish internationals around him. The blend did not work or perhaps indirectly was not allowed to. In 1928 Arsenal made the suggestion that all international games be played mid-week. It was knocked back, did not disappear but escalated. In 1931 the Football League, the English Football League, decided that none of its players would be released for international duty. For England players with intervention from the FA this was soon reversed but not for the other Home Nations. It had three effects, internationally, at club level and individually. The first in the case of Scotland was that from September 1931 until October 1932 no player based outside Scotland could be selected and Scotland began to lose games it might otherwise have won. Secondly, English-based, Scottish players that had been playing internationally were denied a source of income, for which the clubs, with a maximum wage applicable to all, could not and would not provide compensation. As a result discontentment set in amongst non-English players and the clubs reacted. At Chelsea, where discontentment was perhaps at its greatest just because of the number of players at the club affected Alex Jackson found himself not just one of those players but as team captain the person the other players required to represent their case with the hierarchy. He clearly did not duck the issue and within months went from being popular with both fans and directors to being a pariah. He asked for a transfer but was instead effectively forced into a state of limbo. The club had declined to transfer him, yet sacked him but also refused to terminate his registration. He was not being allowed to leave, he could not independently sign for any other league club and he was not being paid.
Perhaps at this point Herbert Chapman understood what on an individual level his club had initiated. It was in the process of destroying the career of player he had clearly regarded highly, had once coveted, who was in the second half of the 1920 he was arguably the best footballer in the World and certainly the most innovative winger, was just twenty-seven years old and theoretically in his prime. He may even have tried to buy Jackson for a second time but to have been knocked back by Chelsea's board. He almost certainly helped Jackson to find legitimate work outwith the league. In 1932-33 Jackson turned out for Ashton National in Aston-under-Lyne. At the beginning of his career Chapman had played in Ashton for Aston North End and no doubt still had connections. Whilst in 1933-34 Jackson played for Margate, the team that Arsenal just a few years earlier had been going to buy as a nursery club until told by the FA that it was not allowed and with which it would conclude without purchase an agreement with much the same aims just a couple of years later.
However, Jackson's arrangements with both clubs proved financially unfeasible long-term and he eventually left to play in France for three seasons. It was almost a replay of his year in America. Since England and Scotland were not members of FIFA there was no mutuality of contract. In France Jackson could simply ignore Chelsea and sign what he like with whatever team he wished. Which leaves the third effect. In the first game under the newly imposed ruling on Anglo-Scots Alex Massie was selected for the first time for his country, when he might otherwise not have been. In a match against Northern Ireland he was right-half alongside experienced David Meiklejohn of Rangers with George Brown also of Rangers winning just a second cap on the other flank and, coincidentally, he was effectively replacing Aston Villa's Jimmy Gibson,
The impasse with the English clubs lasted a year but when an exit was negotiated in late 1932 Massie retained his place, only to lose it in 1933 but be restored in 1934, even captaining. And he continued to play for Scotland through 1935 and 1936, by which time, even at the age of thirty, he had been bought by Aston Villa, moving to Birmingham after seventeen games of the Edinburgh season now as Jimmy Gibson's Villa Park replacement. He had been brought in because Villa was on the slide, one which he would not be able to halt. The club would be relegated from the First Division at the end of the 1935-6 season, its first relegation ever, at which point the manager, fellow Scot, the captain of the
Wembley Wizards in 1927, Jimmy McMullan, would be dismissed. His replacement would be
Jimmy Hogan, and he would come in not just with his coaching skills and a radical approach to the game but with quite a broom. In that first season eleven players would leave and eleven come in. Massie would stay. In fact he would be a mainstay of new team, which would stabilise at ninth place in the Second Division in 1936-7, then, with its defence reorganised, achieve promotion back into the top flight in 1937-38. And there, Massie now aged thirty-four but very much still part of that new defensive configuration and the forwards being worked on by Hogan The Villa would in 1938-9 finish a creditable twelfth.
The combination of Hogan and Massie at Aston Villa was clearly successful but also something still of a work-in-progress when interrupted by the Second World War. And in a sense it would be continued after the war. Jimmy Hogan himself would not return. He would in 1948 join Brentford purely as a coach, from where he would also go on to coach Celtic briefly. However, Massie would take up the baton. He in theory managed Villa from 1945 to 1950, although it is said he did not have complete control even of matters on the pitch. In the period he kept the team comfortably in mid-table but no better. As for Alex Jackson after France he would nothing more to do with football. Before the war he had runs pubs in London. During the war he fought with the Eighth Army in North Africa and on peace he remained there, having risen to the rank of Major and posted to the Suez Zone. It was there in November 1946 that he was driving a lorry near his base when he lost control. The vehicle overturned and having received serious head injuries was died before reaching hospital.
Alex Jackson was just forty-two when he was laid to rest three thousand miles from Renton in an Egyptian cemetery. His death had been in a sense as flamboyant as his football. Alex Massie on the other hand died some thirty years later quietly in the English new town. It was where I in part grew up. He was seventy-one, having in his last years managed the town team, one which I would occasionally go to watch without ever having any idea of just who might have been on the touchline or perhaps with me a rare Scots voice in the crowd and, as one does, "ya ken, just looken on, like".