It was 23rd April 1923. Wembley Stadium, the first one, was ready, if not completely finished, and about to host its first game. It was the Cup Final, immortalised as the White Horse Final. Officially 126,000 were there to see Second Division West Ham play First Division Bolton. Unofficially many more were shoe-horned into the ground with the police including one on that famous, white horse struggling to keep the crowd under control as it burst onto the pitch. On it as players were two Scots, one and a half for Bolton, Glasgow-born, ex-Rangers Jack Smith at centre-forward and at inside-right, David Jack, and for West Ham Syd Macdonald Bishop, with his mother, Marie, born in Lonmay, Aberdeenshire.
The match kicked off. Both teams were theoretically playing 2.3.5, West Ham with two out-and-out wingers and the more attacking style. Bolton, however, would at times effectively play five half-backs in a 2.5.3, with the inside-forwards dropping back into what we now call mid-field. It was Cameron-style fetch-and-carry but doubled-up, two years before the change in the off-side rule and beginning of today's era of the centre-back and two decades after the Cameron player/managerial successes across North London at Spurs with him as a dropped-back inside-right. Then within two minutes of the start the West Ham left-half, whilst taking a throw-in, became entangled with over-spilling spectators. The ball fell to Jack, who shot and scored what was the first-ever Wembley goal.
At the time David Bone Nightingale Jack had just turned twenty-five. His birthday had been three weeks earlier. But by then he was already a seasoned professional and he would go on to have a fifteen year playing career that had begun in 1919 at Plymouth Argyle. Then, like his father before him, he moved into management. From 1934 to 1940 it would be with Southend, then from 1944 to 1952 at Middlesbrough before two years at Shelbourne in the League of Ireland. In the meantime he would play 295 times for Bolton at a goal every other game and even at the age of 29 become the World's most expensive footballer. In 1928 Herbert Chapman and Arsenal would pay £10,890 for him, two thirds more than the previous record, as the replacement for Charlie Buchan and for the Highbury club over the next five seasons he would have a better ratio still than at Burnden Park, almost two goals every three games.
David Jack would win 3 League titles, with the Bolton success in 1923 and again in 1926 three FA Cup medal, the first player to do so with more than one club, and eight, some say nine, caps, scoring thrice. Those caps, under today's rules might, in extremis, have been for France. His mother was Jersey-born, They were actually for England because Jack Jnr was born in Bolton as his mother and father happened to be there at the time. It was not quite as bad as the
Charlie Buchan
situation. He would win six caps again for England in spite of both his parents being born in Aberdeenshire. It is even rumoured that he was approached by the SFA to play for Scotland, a move that would have driven coach and horses through the birth rule that, for example, would see the exclusion of a line of top players from
John Goodall, like Buchan London-born, via
Patsy Gallacher to
Joe Baker. But it was bad enough because the caps could today also been for Scotland as David Jack's father was Bob Jack, journeyman, Scottish professional footballer, born in Alloa with his football learned there and employed by the Wanderers from 1895 to 1901.
And that is why the Jacks, father, David and two more sons are interesting. They are typical firstly of the drift that has seen millions of Scots leave their homeland for other countries, in Britain and abroad, live for a generation in a Diaspora, integrate and then be absorbed by the melting pot. It is as true in England today as, in the era of the Jacks, it also was in America with the Starks and McGhees and had earlier been with the Browns and Watson Huttons in Argentina and the Donohoes and Scotts in Brazil. The only difference is now that an international footballer gets to choose, for which country he, or indeed, she plays. Then, like David Jack and because of the 1887 IFAB ruling, he, and it was only he, could not.
David's father Robert Jack was born in 1876 just as football took a real hold in Scotland. In 1891, as a boy with promise that, as a player was never quite fulfilled, he made his début, aged 15 and amateur, for his home town club, Alloa Athletic. It had been founded thirteen years earlier in 1878. Two years later he turned professional and two years later still transferred to Bolton in the English First Division, where in 1896 from inside-right he was the club's leading scorer. He looked to be on the verge of a promising career but it was not to be. From Bolton in 1901, after a serious ankle injury and the birth of David in 1898 he spent a year at Preston North End, just relegated to the Second Division, and another in the same division at the Chelsea of the times, big-spending Glossop, before dropping out of the Football League for three years and four years respectively in the Western and Southern Leagues at Plymouth Argyle and then Southend.
Plymouth is a club with a curious name. Argyle has nothing to do with Devon or Cornwall. Founded in 1886 various explanations are given of the origins. None are satisfactory. I will only add that its original name, Argyle F.C., is exactly the same as Glasgow Rangers were first known. Perhaps a wandering Ger with a sense of history was involved. If so on arrival in 1903 Bob Jack created his own little piece of history. He became the club's first professional, joined by a number of Scots, including for a short time one
Archie Goodall.
And it is with Plymouth and then Southend that the Diasporan Jack family story really begins. Still in Devon in 1905 Jack Snr. was made player-coach. A year later in 1906 he was clearly made a better offer, still as player-manager, by Southend then in the Southern League Division Two. He arrived at a time when the Southern League had no wage cap and was matching league clubs in terms of pay. That same year would see the arrival of
R.C. Hamilton at Fulham no doubt for precisely the same reason.
There was clearly work to be done at Southend. It took a year but in 1908 Jack Snr and his Essex team were promoted to Division One. Fulham meantime had as a result of R.C., aided and abetted by another
Hamilton, Jock, and a certain
Jimmy Hogan, joined the Football League. However, Jack throughout must have remained on good terms with Plymouth as, in 1910, the year he finally retired from playing at the age of 34 he also returned to become their full-time manager. And there he would remain for twenty-eight years and one thousand and ninety-three matches, also taking the club into the Football League and winning two titles, retiring at the age of 62, a retirement until his death in 1943 spent back in Southend , occasionally scouting for his son, David, who by then was the Southend manager. And during his second spell in Devon Jack Snr also found time to indulge his later sporting passion. In 1926 a certain Robert Jack of Plymouth became English Bowls' Singles Champion, having already represented his adopted country the previous year and in 1922 and 1923, as he would again between 1927 and 1930 and, by then in his late fifties, once more in 1933. He would win the caps he never achieved in football as a bowler but like those of his son, David, they would for England.
In fact not just David but all three of Bob Jack's sons were footballers. David was the eldest but there was also Robert Jnr, known by his middle name, Rollo, and Donald. All three were at one time on Bolton's books. All of them, of course, today would also have qualified for Scotland. Donald was the least successful, only turning out for Torquay and Bradford City before leaving the profession to become an accountant and in London playing the amateur game for Finchley. Rollo's playing career was more like his father's, a journeyman inside-right, although, like his elder brother he started at Plymouth and moved to Bolton. However, there he was a reserve, making only twenty-nine appearances in six season before moving down two divisions and south in 1929 to Clapton Orient for three seasons, then dropping out of the Football League into the Southern at Yeovil with a final season back in the League's Third Division South at Swindon in 1934-5.
However, back to David, as the son of Scot but born in England not elsewhere in the Empire he did not qualify for country of his father's birth. Whether he did for that of his mother is a moot point. That he was an exceptional club player there is no doubt. In his career he made 521 appearances, one hundred and eighty-one over five seasons for The Gunners, where he obviously matched Herbert Chapman's requirements to a tee, comfortably playing the more advanced of the inside-forwards to a series of centre-forwards and Alex James as the play-making inside-left. With the arrival of James the season after his the two developed an important understanding, perhaps the result of their backgrounds, different as they were, in Scots football. James had learnt in the raw at Raith Jack learnt it literally from the nursery. He had first come to prominence at Southend with his father the coach and then at Plymouth with his father there again and guiding him. Although he would come to play Chapman New-Style, he would have been taught a Scottish Old-Style from before the change in the off-side law and even the confinement of the 'keeper to the penalty area.
Nevertheless, as good a club player Jack Jnr was, at international level he was less successful. True, he would go on several tours, be captain on three occasions and his last game was the win against Austria in 1932, Hogan's Austria. Yet he also played in a number of poor, English sides and was selected only once against Scotland, in 1924, a 1:1 draw at Wembley, so none of his goals would have made a difference to a Scotland-England result. In fact, given the strength of the Scottish team at the time he might not have got into it. Nevertheless he might have represented a good replacement for an injured Jimmy Dunn or even Alex Jackson and at almost 12 stones and 5ft 10 ½ inches might have offered a robust alternative to either. Moreover his managerial career was equally underwhelming, far poorer than his father's and something of a seemingly aimless meander. Having gone straight to Southend after finishing as a player at Arsenal just months after Chapman's death, Jack Jnr learned his trade with the Essex club until the Second World War brought the leagues to an end. After the War during six years at Middlesbrough his record was average, worse than his predecessor and better than his successor. Then it seemed to peter away before his death in 1958 in London at the comparatively young age of 60, just three years after leaving his final club, Dublin's Shelbourne.