On this day in 1946 Dickie Davis played his first game for us – no, not the extravagantly coiffured ITV sports presenter of the 1980s, but the versatile goal-scorer of the forties and fifties.
Born in the shadow of Villa Park, Dickie graduated through local school football and Morris Jacobs FC (the motor company’s works team), winning schoolboy international honours. He signed for Sunderland shortly after his seventeenth birthday in 1939, but at the outbreak of war a few months later he returned home.
His football during World War Two was with Villa as the Football League was suspended and replaced by the War League, but as Sunderland were in the Northern section and Villa the Southern, Dickie never faced the dilemma of facing his “real” club. His Sunderland debut came late in 1946 against Leeds, as Jackie Robinson’s goal earned us a 1-1 draw. Dickie scored four times in thirteen games that season, and was our top scorer with ten the following year - but in the 49-50 campaign managed 25, making him the last Sunderland player to top the Division One scoring chart until Kevin Phillips 50 years later.
The next three seasons saw competition up front from Welshman Trevor Ford, although the pair regularly played together until Ford’s departure in December 53.
At the end of the 53-54 season, after eighty goals in 154 games, Dickie moved down the road to Darlington for a few hundred quid, and played the last three seasons of his career at Feethams. Those three years brought 32 goals in 93 games before he retired, eventually moving to Bishop Stortford in Hertfordshire where he died in 1999.
