There are few football clubs who have revered centre-forwards throughout the ages as much as Everton.
Dixie Dean will forever be the benchmark by which all are measured, with no-one else for the Toffees or any other team nearly a century later coming close to his astounding feat of 60 (SIXTY) league goals in 1927/28. Lawton, Royle, Latchford, Sharp, Ferguson... the names roll off the tongue for Blues who know their history.
Another forever immortalised in the Goodison pantheon of greatness is a man whose bravery and goalscoring exploits provided a ray of hope during one of Everton’s least distinguished periods and whose legacy managed to survive intact despite making the move across Stanley Park to the Blues’ eternal rivals Liverpool that was as unthinkable in the late 1950s as it is now.
Dave Hickson may have been born in Salford but grew up in Ellesmere Port and - after impressing as a talented forward for his local side where he played alongside one of the finest centre-forwards of the inter-war years in Tom ‘Pongo’ Waring, who was Dixie Dean’s successor as Tranmere Rovers’ centre-forward in the mid-1920s - was signed by manager Cliff Britton for Everton in May 1948; the 18-year-old already displaying the character which would make him adored by the blue half of Merseyside by taking his father’s advice and choosing Goodison over Anfield.
“My career and the face of Merseyside football might have taken a different complexion had Liverpool had their way,” he recalled in James Corbett’s authorised biography, ‘The Cannonball Kid’. “In my heart I knew where I wanted to go but I was still young and I deferred to my dad on all the major decisions in my life. Although he was from Salford and had taken me to see United play, like all the best people I think there was a bit of Evertonian in him and he told me to sign for the Blues.”
The teenager’s hopes of following in the footsteps of former Blues skipper Joe Mercer and Wolves great Stan Cullis, both of whom had emerged from that same Cheshire town to become generational talents, initially had to wait however as he was obliged to fulfil his duty of national service. But remarkably his football development was not too badly affected as he began playing for Cheshire Army Cadets while stationed nearby. The Cadets were coached by none other than Dixie Dean, who Hickson would later credit for helping him become such a strong aerial presence.
That kind of striking prowess was very much needed at Goodison by the time Hickson was ready to make his first-team bow in September 1951 because, for only the second time in their history, Everton had slipped into the Second Division. Despite winning the club’s fifth league championship in the final full season before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1938-39, the Toffees had not fared anything like as well once football resumed in 1946-47 and - having failed to heed the warnings of successive 18th-place finishes in the preceding years - were relegated after finishing bottom of the First Division in 1950-51, losing 6-0 at Sheffield Wednesday on the final day when they only needed a draw to stay up.
Everton’s finances were still a decade or so away from being revitalised by Littlewoods Pools owner Sir John Moores, with the Goodison board paying the price for adopting the austerity principles which characterised much of Britain in the post-war period, and putting their faith in young players along with cheap signings from the lower divisions and Ireland. Just a few weeks into what was only the club's second-ever season of second-tier football, Hickson made his first-team debut over three years after joining the club as two Tommy Eglington goals brought a 2-1 win at Leeds United, the Blues’ last league victory at Elland Road until Wayne Rooney’s famous strike during his own breakthrough season 51 years later.
Hickson got off the mark for Everton in his third game, a 3-3 home draw with Rotherham United, and would finish second-top scorer in his maiden season in the professional game with a respectable 14 goals in 31 league appearances. But the Toffees took some time to come to terms with life in the second tier, finishing seven points adrift of the promotion spots in 1951-52 and early the following campaign sitting bottom of the table, raising the potential spectre of an unprecedented drop into the Third Division North. Britton’s side managed to recover to finish 14th - although only five points ahead of the relegation placings - thanks to the burgeoning partnership between Hickson and inside-forward John Willie Parker, who managed 25 league goals between them with winger Tommy Eglington top-scoring with 16 in all competitions. But one of the bleakest seasons in Everton’s history was salvaged with a stirring run in the FA Cup which firmly established Hickson’s legend.
Having seen off Ipswich Town and Nottingham Forest, the Blues were handed a plum draw in the fifth round at home to reigning First Division champions Manchester United and 77,290 expectant fans packed into Goodison on Valentine's Day to see how the Toffees would fare against talented youngsters such as Roger Byrne, David Pegg, John Aston and Johnny Berry - part of the core of the Busby Babes who would dominate much of the decade before the Munich air tragedy five years later - and who the previous spring had won the first league title of their iconic Scottish manager’s reign.
Jack Rowley gave the visitors the lead shortly before the half-hour mark but Everton - unbeaten since the first week of January - were undeterred and equalised soon afterwards through Eglington who rifled home his fifth goal in as many matches after being set up by a clever Hickson pass. Despite the gap in league placings, the Toffees were more than holding their own against their celebrated opponents and went close to taking the lead shortly before the interval but instead found themselves temporarily a man short. Hickson had already endeared himself to the Goodison faithful in his relatively short time in the royal blue shirt, not just for his eye for goal but the full-blooded, swashbuckling style with which he went about his business, often being prepared to put his head among flying boots to try and gain an advantage for Everton.
So when John Lindsay’s ball into the penalty area fell inviting into the Blues number nine's path, nobody was surprised to see Hickson unhesitatingly throw himself full-length into the fray to try and score, but instead he received an opponent’s outstretched boot to the head and was left with blood pouring from an eyebrow. He was helped from the field by trainer Harry Cooke with a pad of cotton wool held to his face and did not initially appear with his team-mates for the start of the second half, only to emerge from the players tunnel a few minutes after the resumption - clutching a handkerchief to dab at his head wound - to huge roars from the Goodison crowd relieved that, with the advent of substitutes still well over a decade away, their already onerous task would not be made more difficult by playing with a man short.
Within minutes, he had opened up the gash in his eyebrow again when crashing into the goal frame after heading a corner against the post and referee Harry Beacock appeared to ask him to leave the field again only for Hickson to indignantly wave away such suggestions, later recalling: “There was blood and all that everywhere. At this point the referee Mr Beacock of Scunthorpe suggested to our captain Peter Farrell that I should leave the field. ‘He’ll have to go off’, he said. ‘He can’t go on with an eye like that. He’s not normal’.
“There was no way I was going off the pitch, no way at all. ‘I am normal’, I told him. ‘Tell him I’m normal, Peter, tell him!’ ‘Of course you are Dave’, said Peter. ‘There you are, ref’. I said, ‘I’m staying!’"
And the 23-year-old’s raw determination to battle on for the Blues paid off handsomely just after the hour mark when he scored the winning goal. “On 63 minutes came the game’s decisive moment,” Hickson remembered. “I took Tommy Eglington’s pass on my chest, beat one man, sidestepped another and hammered a right-foot shot beyond the reach of Ray Wood and into the net. Goodison erupted in celebration. It was a wonderful moment.”
The Blues withstood United’s increasingly desperate attempts to find an equaliser, with the blood-stained Hickson twice going close to finding a third goal to make the game safe, but referee Beacock’s final whistle sparked huge celebrations across the ground at Everton’s most significant result in years.
“This was Everton’s finest hour and a half,” Leslie Edwards wrote in the Liverpool Daily Post. “When the game ended with Cummins all but getting his side’s third goal, the uproar was such that referee Beacock’s whistle could not be heard. But he made the signal to the players and once it was seen that this really was the end, the Everton roar of relief and realisation must have been heard miles away. Dancing dervishes then appeared from nowhere. Police patrolling the touchlines were powerless to prevent these fanatics from giving homage to Everton heroes. They kissed them, hugged them, slapped them and cut ecstatic capers with them. And not surprisingly, Everton players themselves joined the frenzy. Dave Hickson blood stained from a deep cut over his right eye and the day’s most gallant representative of walking wounded came in for special treatment. He was the man of the match, with his grit and determination carrying him through despite his handicap, and he still chased the ball as though his very life depended on it. These Everton fans who have suffered such disappointment and disillusion went away like men in a trance - one in which they could not keep the corners of their mouths from turning upwards. The team gave their last ounce of effort and then mysteriously found another last ounce, spectators punch-drunk from the bewildering battering of super football and drama and staggered by Everton’s fighting ability, can have been no less exhausted.”
Hickson was the match-winner again in the quarter-final a fortnight later when the Blues knocked out another top-flight side, Aston Villa, on their own ground but he and his team-mates suffered semi-final heartbreak at Maine Road, Manchester against Bolton Wanderers. The Blues found themselves four goals down after 41 minutes and full-back Tommy Clinton’s missed penalty just before the break proved costly when two goals from John Willie Parker and one from Peter Farrell after the interval got the Toffees back to 4-3 but they were unable to find an equaliser and it was the Trotters who went to Wembley, where they were beaten 4-3 by Blackpool in the famous ‘Stanley Mathews final’.
Everton’s cup exploits had proven to the players they were too good for the Second Division and the following season - bolstered by the prolific partnership between Hickson and Parker, who bagged 55 league goals between them - they were in the promotion hunt from the off. The Blues were top of the Second Division as the final month of the campaign approached but a run of only one victory in seven games set nerves jangling before Hickson’s header beat Birmingham City at Goodison on the final Saturday of the season - the same day Liverpool's relegation from the top-flight was confirmed after a 3-0 defeat at Blackpool - and kept the Toffees' fate in their own hands ahead of their final match away to Oldham Athletic the following Thursday evening.
Although sitting outside the top two promotion positions, the sides above them - Leicester City and Blackburn Rovers - had both completed their fixtures meaning any Everton victory at Boundary Park would see them go up, while a 6-0 triumph would see them promoted as champions and thousands of Evertonians travelled down the East Lancs Road to witness what they hoped would be the end of three long years exiled from the First Division.
“Oldham had never seen anything like it,” Tony Onslow of the Everton Heritage Society recalled in Jim Keoghan’s ‘Everton: Number Nine: Nine Player, One Iconic Shirt’. “We were there mob-handed. They tried to stop people bunking into the ground by putting tar on the walls. But it made no difference. The young kids just put newspaper over it and climbed over. The tar still got all over them, though. There was a report in the local paper that referred to the young Blues as the ‘tar babies’ of Everton.”
The mucky youngsters would soon be celebrating as Everton roared into an unassailable lead within the first 35 minutes, Hickson scoring the fourth after two from Parker and one from TE Jones with a glorious solo effort, which saw him dance round three men during a surging run and slam the ball home. There were no more goals which meant the Toffees had to settle for runners-up spot on goal average but it mattered not to the travelling Blues who invaded the pitch on the final whistle and carried captain Peter Farrell back to the dressing rooms.
“It was the highlight of my career,” Hickson later admitted. “There was a real resolve among us to get Everton back where they belonged in the top-flight. We sat down at the start of that 1953-54 season and resolved to do it. I think the spirit was all over the club. Even now when people stop me and say, ‘hi Davey’, I think it’s because they look back at the time when we got them back up to where they are now. I think people remember that time, even if they weren’t around to see or experience it. Evertonians are very good with their history and there’s a sense of recognition that I was part of a side that got them back to where they belong.”
The Blues made a fine start to life back in the big time, winning four of their first five matches, and spent much of the campaign in the top half of the table, moving as high as third in late March after successive victories over Manchester United and Huddersfield Town before a run of only one win in the last 10 games saw them finish 11th. That, coupled with a shocking 4-0 home defeat to Second Division Liverpool in the fourth round of the FA Cup, suggested the continued lack of investment in the team along with some of Britton’s decisions may hold the team back and early the following season matters reached a head.
Following heavy defeats in the opening matches at home to Preston North End and away at West Bromwich Albion, Hickson and Parker - who had still managed 31 league goals between them in their maiden top-flight campaign together - were both dropped from the team and the ‘Cannonball Kid’ - the nickname adopted by Evertonians in thrall at their hero’s combative and fearless manner, coupled with his flamboyant quiff of blonde hair and venomous shooting - put in a transfer request, frustrated at a board and manager he felt were preventing the club from reaching its potential.
It was granted and, to the shock of many barely a fortnight into the season, the 25-year-old - who had scored 69 goals in 151 appearances for Everton - was sold to Aston Villa for £19,500. Hickson - who had also been omitted from the reserve team as Britton felt he needed a rest from football - in a self penned article for the ECHO, wrote: “It was a big blow to know that having had over three months holiday over the summer, Mr Britton felt it was right for me to be rested again so soon. I would have been quite happy to figure in the “A” team last week rather than have the day off. I pointed this out to Mr. Britton but he still said he felt that a rest would be advantageous. Football is not just a means of livelihood to me, it is my hobby as well as my work and I have always been miserable when not playing on a Saturday.
“If anybody had told me a few years ago that the time would come when I should went to leave Goodison Park I should have denied it emphatically. It was the proudest day of my life when I first signed as an amateur for Everton nearly 12 years ago, and I was just as thrilled when I made the grade sufficiently to become a full time professional. I would like to thank all those Everton followers who have been so kind to me over the past four years. Nobody realises more than I do that on occasions I have been a bit of a ‘bad lad’. I have sometimes done things on the field or said things to referees which I have regretted when I have had time to reflect. I do not attempt to justify them. I plead guilty but would like to say in partial extenuation that everything I have done has arisen solely out of my desire for the success and well being of the club which has employed me. I shall always have a soft spot for Everton in my heart, and hope that the future will see them regain all their old glory.”
Hickson failed to settle in the Midlands and, after only playing 12 games, joined Huddersfield Town - managed by Bill Shankly - for £16,000, where he did manage to re-find his scoring touch, netting 28 goals in 54 league appearances briefly alongside the Terriers’ emerging wonder-kid, Denis Law.
But Hickson would confess he was never really happy away from Goodison and when the Blues paid £7,500 to bring him back home in the summer of 1957 he admitted it was ‘one of the happiest moments of his life’. Scottish manager Ian Buchan had replaced Britton the previous year but was unable to prevent Everton continuing to languish in the wrong half of the league table and was replaced by Irishman Johnny Carey in October 1958. Hickson’s second spell with the Blues would not be quite as successful in terms of goals although he still managed 32 in 86 league appearances and continued to thrill Evertonians with his committed and abrasive style which would occasionally get him into bother with referees. “I got into trouble a few times but I never swore,” he told the ECHO years later, seemingly hurt that anyone could even contemplate he would have done such a thing.
Early in the 1958-59 season, with Carey under pressure after successive 16th-place finishes and looking to rejig his struggling squad, Hickson again asked for a transfer after being dropped on three separate occasions and found himself considering the unthinkable - a move across Stanley Park to a Liverpool team still languishing in the Second Division.
“I felt that if I carried on with Everton, being dropped one week and brought back the next, it would kill my enthusiasm and spirit for football and Everton,” he admitted. “I was Everton through and through. I left and came back and did not want to leave again. But they wanted me out so I did not have much choice. I chose Liverpool because people love football around here.”
It was a transfer which initially caused uproar among supporters of both Merseyside clubs. Some Evertonians, so incensed their idol was being sold to their biggest rivals, claimed they would defect and start following Liverpool instead while the Goodison board was inundated with letters of complaint, including one from a 14-year-old Bill Kenwright informing the directors they knew nothing about football, while some Kopites threatened to stop supporting their team in protest at the acquisition of an ageing striker so closely associated with the Toffees. The pages of Liverpool Daily Post and ECHO were also flooded with angry missives from furious fans on both sides who objected to the move.
“If Hickson is allowed to leave Everton, there requires to be a shaking up of the board,” wrote P. Harwood of Boiler Street, Liverpool 6. “If some of the other players put half Hickson’s zest into the game there would be bigger gates. So far as I am concerned should he go, so do we! We are disgusted and ashamed to think that anyone as loyal as Dave could be treated this way. To Hickson we say: Don’t fall out of love with us supporters because if you go across the park you will not go alone.”
“Move over Dave, they have broken my heart too”, lamented W. Riley, of 8 Dorrit Street, Liverpool 8. “Over the years the Directors have demolished, stone by stone, their School of Science and built a flashy portal to hide the debris. Football is now a business, but must we the customers develop consumer resistance to get what we want?”
Some Liverpudlians meanwhile felt their club were only interested in Hickson for commercial reasons. “If Liverpool sign Hickson, it will prove to supporters what they have long suspected, namely that Liverpool directors are more anxious about profits than anything else," decried F. Branberry of Forpar Street, Bebington. "Hickson reckoned as a player could only lead a supreme optimist to believe he is the man to solve Liverpool’s problems. It is just about the straw that breaks a camel’s back. After talking grandly of Clough, Baker, and Holton, Liverpool have come down to this - a player discarded by Everton (twice), Aston Villa, and Huddersfield.”
Despite the furore, the Merseyside clubs continued trying to negotiate the transfer of a player the ECHO’s Leslie Edwards described as the ‘most controversial in Everton and Liverpool history’ and, although Third Division Norwich City submitted a bid equal to the Blues’ £15,000 asking price, a compromise of £12,000 was finally reached on Friday, November 6 1959 with Hickson going straight into the team to face Aston Villa at Anfield the following day.
"I am very pleased indeed that I have signed for Liverpool after a week of uncertainty and I know my wife and family share my feelings,” Hickson said. “It has been an anxious time for me recently, but everything is all right now. I am delighted. I just want the Liverpool fans to know that I will always do my best for them and the club as I have done at Everton."
With almost 50,000 crammed into Anfield (significantly up from their average gates of 35,000), Hickson - welcomed onto the pitch with a big kiss from a Liverpool supporter before the match - made a dream debut scoring both goals in the Reds’ 2-1 win, including a trademark diving header, with the Daily Post reporting afterwards : “How absurd was the fear that Liverpool supporters would not take to an Evertonian! Hickson was as much a hero of Anfield on Saturday as he ever was of Goodison Park. With victory in the air, Anfield erupted. Dave had found a new home, where adulation, spontaneous and overwhelming, promised to outdo anything he had known before. What a day for him to remember! Like a Test match bowler who has routed the opposition, Hickson was pushed to the front of the players as they made their way off the field and, from every corner of the ground, the crowd stood in acclamation.”
“It was a strange feeling running onto the pitch wearing a red shirt,” Hickson recalled, “And I was surprised at the welcome the Kop gave me. Then to get the two goals was a marvellous experience. It gave me a relationship with the Liverpool crowd we maintained the whole time I was there. I never imagined I would play with the legendary Billy Liddell who was as great off the pitch as he was on it. Then I formed a partnership with a young Roger Hunt. He was one of the best I played with because we were on the same wavelength which is very important for a strike partnership. Then a youngster called Ian Callaghan made his debut and it was obvious he and Roger would play for England. I also played in a forward line with Jimmy Melia and Alan A’Court and in my two seasons with the club we finished third. That meant we just missed out on promotion although a few years later that would have been good enough.”
Only a month after Hickson’s arrival at Anfield, Bill Shankly replaced Phil Taylor as manager and by the summer of 1961 the financial landscape of football on Merseyside was changing. With Littlewoods founder John Moores now in charge at Goodison and about to bankroll the success which would lead to the Toffees being labelled the ‘Mersey Millionaires’, the pools company’s managing director Eric Sawyer was installed at Anfield as finance director and helped Shankly loosen the board’s parsimonious purse strings with the transformative signings of centre-back Ron Yeats and forward Ian St John helping the Reds finally secure promotion the following spring, the latter’s arrival and blossoming partnership with Roger Hunt proving to be the writing on the wall for Hickson.
“Mr Shankly wanted his own players and about five of us went,” he said. “I was 31, nearing the end of my career and I’d had 10 years of football, so I could not complain. You could see something was happening at Liverpool.”
Hickson moved on to Bury and then non-league Cambridge City but he wasn’t finished with Merseyside football, becoming one of only a handful of players to represent the region’s three most senior clubs by completing his career at Tranmere, scoring 21 league goals in 45 appearances in the old Fourth Division before retiring in 1964 at the age of 34. He played at Prenton Park - as he did at Goodison - with Johnny King and the man who would go on to become the most successful manager in Rovers’ history, taking them to the brink of the Premier League in the early 1990s, said of his old team-mate : “I can’t speak too highly of Dave Hickson. He was a great target man who could hold the ball up, bring team mates into the game and get on the end of everything in the box. Brave as a lion, great in the air. Money couldn’t buy him today.”
Hickson remained very well-regarded at Anfield as well with former team-mate and Boot Room stalwart Ronnie Moran a big admirer not just of his courage in making the controversial switch from Everton but also his fierce will to win, which remained long after retirement. Moran said: “The rivalry between Anfield and Goodison was much more fierce in those days so everybody, players and supporters, were surprised at Dave’s move across Stanley Park. But no matter where he’s from, if the player gives his lot, the crowd will take to him. And Davey always did that. I found he’s a great bloke and he would certainly be worth a pretty penny in today’s market. I played with him in numerous charity games after we retired and he still got upset when he didn’t score!”
But Hickson was an Evertonian and will always be most associated with the Blues, admitting in Everton’s official video history released in 1988: “I’ve played for some great clubs. And I would have broken every bone in my body for them, but I would have died for Everton.”
He worked for Ellesmere Port Council after the end of his playing days and was brought back into the Toffees fold as a community officer and in a public relations role on match days soon after the angry teenager who had furiously slammed the Everton board for selling his hero to Liverpool took over as Blues chairman, a hugely popular and welcome move which enabled Evertonians to meet a modest hero from the past who remained a man of the people throughout his career and life.
“I have had many idols in my life but only one true hero,” a heartbroken Bill Kenwright said after Hickson’s passing in 2013 at the age of 83. “Dave Hickson made me an Evertonian. More than anyone, or anything, he was responsible week in, week out for me making the journey by bus and tram to Goodison Park. As a somewhat timid seven-year-old he gave me the courage to dare. In the eyes of my generation of Blues, Dave was a colossus. In my seven-year-old eyes he was simply the greatest centre-forward on the planet and many years later I am still of that opinion.”
Hickson’s deeds are forever woven into Everton folklore. “He would finish every match covered in blood. Some of it even his own”, Joe Royle, one of his successors in the famous number nine shirt, once quipped, while Blues historian George Orr described him as ‘Andy Gray on steroids’ - and his image is immortalised alongside other legends in a huge image on Goodison’s Main Stand, his place in the Toffees’ pantheon secure as much for his character as his goalscoring.
Hickson said: “I can remember coming over to Goodison on the ferry, because I lived on the other side of the water and I would get the tram or bus with the supporters to the game. I think that’s what players miss today. Financially they are far better off but they miss the rapport with the fans. They don’t see them as much as we did. We were more intimate with them. We weren’t paid a lot of money but I gained a lot of satisfaction from my career because I played for the two of the biggest and best clubs in the business, Everton and Liverpool. Everton was my football life. When I went out into the middle, I didn’t play for directors, managers, spectators or myself. I played for Everton.”
