City paid £6000 for his services; two other teams had offered eight. One was Oldham, a division below us in the Northern Section, but the other was First Division Huddersfield Town. However, we had something they did not – Bill Anderson. Dodds knew Anderson from his time at Sheffield United, and their shared North East roots having played for Medomsley Juniors. Other Imps, including Jimmy Hutchinson, had also played with Dodds during his time at Sheffield United, and so he chose us over Oldham and Huddersfield.
It was huge news around the country; the world might not have been quite as celerity-focused as it is now, but the nationals carried details of the transfer. Dodds might have missed his prime years due to the war, but he had still be the leading scorer for a top-flight team two years in a row. The Imps were rock bottom of the Second Division, having only been promoted the season before. Dodds’ capture was massive news. Indeed, the Echo called him one of the top five strikers in the country, and he arrived in time for a vital relegation four-pointer against Grimsby Town.
He arrived on October 7th, with City due to travel to Grimsby Town on the 9th. A bumper crowd packed into Blundell Park for Dodds’ debut, with 7,000 from Lincoln, and they weren’t disappointed – he bagged twice as City earned a 2-2 draw. A week later, 19980 supporters turned up for our game against Forest – the biggest home crowd of the season and 4,000 more than the previous home game. Dodds scored again; City lost 3-1.
The Imps certainly struggled, but their new-found hero did not. He scored three as West Ham were beaten 4-3, scoring each past a different goalkeeper, and as we covered recently, a brace as we shocked the division by beating high-flying Spurs. They were small victories in amongst some heavy defeats, 7-1 at Blackburn the hardest to take, and whilst Dodds did get among the goals, it wasn’t plain-sailing in a woefully under-resourced Imps team.
Dodds took up what was an unusual position during his time as a centre forward, as he explained. “My method has often been questioned, but I find it profitable. I hang back,more or less lying at the bottom point of a V, with the two wingers making he topmost extremities. This enables me to pick up loose balls which a full-back may mis-kick, and to draw the opposing centre-half and allow my inside partners to get through.” It’s almost as though he was playing as a ten long before it was a thing.
He was a trendsetter away from football as well, forging a career for himself as a businessman with plenty of enterprises in Blackpool. He owned a wholesale nut factory with his brother (yep, you heard that correctly) and reports from the time suggest he was involved in the manufacture of rock (the chewy, wish you were here kind). He’d invested in a hotel in his late twenties, then three nightclubs in the area, as far afield as Fleetwood. Indeed, he claimed to have been the first person to bring fruit machines to Blackpool, something now synonymous with the arcades of the modern day. Despite his foray into greyhound racing, he was also allowed to oversee bookmakers in the area. Ironically, he named the most famous of his nightclubs The Horseshoe Club, with more than a wry nod to his favourite hobby. The Horseshoe Bar still exists today.
City were relegated, with Dodds missing six crucial matches. The gap between Forest and us was seven points, but in Dodds’s absence we scored just four goals, three in a single game. It’s unlikely we’d have stayed up even if he had been fit – the Imps weren’t good enough, and in May 1949 one of the finest strikers in England dropped into the Third Division (North), where his first game was at home against Oldham, his former suitors. Naturally, he scored and somewhat naturally to the Imps, we lost 2-1. Four days later just 11881 watched us beat York 1-0; you don’t need to guess who got the goal.
City flew, but never truly troubled the top of the table. Dodds hit 21 in 36 matches, including a brace at Oldham securing us a 2-0 win, and doubles as we thrashed Hartlepool 6-0 and Doncaster 4-1. He missed five matches that season, City failed to win four of them and when the final game had been played, we were two wins from the top of the table. His brace against Doncaster in our final away match of the season didn’t just secure us a 4-1 win, it came against the champions-elect. That season, had Dodds been fit for 42 matches, City might just have gone back up. As it stood, we needed two more years, but Jock Dodds would play no further part.
On June 13th, Football League secretary Fred Howarth explained that Dodds could be expelled from football. He had been acting as an agent for Millionarios Club of Bogota in Colombia, a nation outside of FIFA jurisdiction at the time. Using his contacts in the game, Dodds had arranged for three British players to move to Colombia, namely Roy Paul, a Welsh international with Swansea, former Everton teammate Jack Headley and Hearts player Bobby Flavell. England hopeful Neil Franklin had already gone to Bogota, and the Colombian FA were keen to recruit more players to the league. “A representative from Millonarios of Colombia rang me,” said Dodds of the affair. “He said, “You could make a lot of money if you could get us some players.” Part of every fee was promised to me. It caused a huge furore”. Indeed it did.
The suggestion he could be banned was controversial – the Echo journalist of the time stated there was no FA rule that had been broken, nor was there a suggestion he would go to Colombia himself. However, Swansea put in a complaint to the FA, which allowed them to levy a charge against Dodds. Paul and Headly didn’t do Dodds any favours either – they came back from Colombia after ten days, unimpressed with the conditions. Dodds was reported to have called Colombia and asked ‘what’s all this then’ in relation to the players returning – after all he had a stake in their future. He met his lawyers for clarification over the issue, but manager Bill Anderson was still in the dark. “We can do absolutely nothing until we know what Dodds’s position is as far as the Football League and the Football Association are concerned.,” he said. Anderson and a club official visited Dodds on June 27th, but to no avail; he was expelled from the Football League and from Lincoln City.
In October, Neil Franklin was told he could return to football. He had been one of the original players to move to Colombia but had returned as the country had a 6:30pm curfew. Pitches were surrounded with barbed wire, and the dream of ending their civil unrest with football had fallen apart. Like Paul, Franklin resumed playing, but Dodds had no desire to. When told Franklin could play again, Dodds said, “I am glad. He wants to play, so good luck to him. I am through with football, I definitely do not intend to apply for reinstatement”. He stayed true to his word, turning down chances to manage Stoke and Port Vale.
What did the enigma, the one-time darling of top-flight football, do? In addition to his multiple business interests, he spent some time in prison for a deal gone badly wrong. It was the early sixties, and as part of his Blackpool rock business, he bought a consignment of unlabelled powdered milk to use in the factory. He did not know that it had previously been labelled as unfit for human consumption, and he was promptly arrested along with his business partner. On a solicitor’s advice, he pleaded guilty to the charges, expecting a £100 fine – instead, he was jailed for nine months. “We went guilty, and I got nine months,” he said afterwards. “It was bloody powdered milk – how can that go off?”
Into his sixties, he became ahead of his time once again. He is said to have become a ‘hot gospeller of natural health foods’ and was a distributor for a national health foods company. He lived his own advice, becoming a non-smoking vegetarian, running 5km before his breakfast every day and playing in charity football matches. The focus on health certainly served him well – he went on to live to the age of 91 and was the last pre-war FA Cup finalist alive.
Sometimes, players and teams get lost in the sands of time, but stories like this make me glad I have a passion for the past. Jock Dodds sounds like an amazing character, and this is just the headline-grabbing bits I churned up during a morning’s research.
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