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FAMOUS WIRRAL CHARACTERS:
DIXIE DEAN
BY ASHLEY HYNE
‘Dixie’ Dean was 21, fearless and the most talked about
footballer in England when he nearly killed himself one
summer afternoon in 1926.
The Birkenhead-born star was already being tipped for an
England call-up when he took his girlfriend (‘a Miss Jones’
reported the press, discreetly) to North Wales on his new
motorcycle that Sunday in June.
Desolate though the roads may have been in those days; danger
lay at every turn. As Dean sped up Llywybr-Hir near St Asaph
he hit a careering motorcycle combination head on.
Footballing royalty in the making but Everton’s star forward
and the other injured were all unceremoniously carted into
the back of a passing lorry and dropped off at the Lluesty
Infirmary. The following day Dean had still not regained
consciousness.
We are not to know what senior management at Goodison
Park made of it all when a specialist ‘expressed the opinion that
Dean will not be himself again for six months’. One thing is for
certain, though, Dixie Dean was irreplaceable and went on to
be one of the greatest players in history.
The most famous footballer ever born on the Wirral, Dean
was an old-style centre-forward in an era when football was
a tough, unremittingly physical game. With a character
reflective of a childhood dominated by heavy industry and
ship-building (he was born at 313 Laird Street, Birkenhead),
Dean had little time for affected airs and graces but became
an absolute King in front of the Gwladys Street End, the
greatest header of the football in the history of the game and an
unstoppable goal-scorer, notwithstanding the robust attentions
of defenders.
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He started his professional career at Tranmere’s Prenton Park,
soon earning a reputation for himself as a ‘star’ in the making.
He had copious amounts of self-confidence and a clear sense of
his own worth; he was not to be loved by opponents.
One particular nasty challenge in a 1925 Lancastrian derby
between Tranmere and Rochdale resulted in a life-changing
injury which thankfully did not stop Dean having a long and
successful marriage.
He was soon transferred to Goodison and (within a year of his
near-death experience) had scored 60 League goals for Everton
in one League season; a feat unlikely ever to be bettered. He
considered tactics a distraction; players at his level should
instinctively understand the game and the role they were
paid to undertake. This naïve attitude served no hindrance.
He enjoyed a wonderfully successful, albeit shockingly brief,
international career scoring 18 goals in just 16 appearances for
King and Country.
A star who played in the era before astronomical wages
blighted football, Dean went on to run the Dublin Packet pub
in Chester and worked as a porter at the Walton Hall Avenue
offices of Littlewoods before retiring.
His death in 1980 came at Goodison Park at the conclusion of
the Merseyside derby. It was a fitting end to one of the greatest
footballers and most famous sons of the Wirral.
The Wirral’s own captain, Joe Mercer, once gave a glowing
testimony to Dean ‘He was good with the public and
marvellous with kids, and, on top of all this, a great captain.
No one played it better on or off parade than Dixie’.