ABSTRACT
Born Ephraim Dodds on 7 September 1915, in Grangemouth, Fifeshire, Dodds soon moved to Kuilhill, near Glasgow, where, at the age of 9, he made a hat-trick-scoring debut for his school team. Trials for Lanarkshire Schoolboys followed, but at the age of 12 he moved with his family to Leadgate in County Durham. His successful playing career continued at his new school, which he helped to win both league and cup in his first season. Recognition quickly followed and he became captain of Durham Schoolboys, playing in a variety of positions from full-back to centre-forward. He left school at 14, like all but a very small minority of his contemporaries in Britain, and took a job in a local foundry. Finding the heat and the dust from the ovens too much to bear, he moved to a job with Shell-Mex, helping to deliver fuel to farms in the area. He also started to play for the company’s football team. Again his skills were quickly spotted and a local team, Medomsley Juniors, offered him a trial when he was still just 14. Medomsley had a track record of grooming youngsters for League clubs and at the age of 16 Dodds was taken onto the ground staff at Huddersfield and started to play in that club’s Central League team. His arrival at Huddersfield also saw him being given the lasting if not very imaginative
nickname ‘Jock’. Having scored four goals in just three games, he was offered a professional contract by the First Division club when he turned 17. He was now a fully fledged professional footballer and on the first rung of the ladder to stardom – or so he thought. In a newspaper article published later he described how his life had been then: ‘I used to walk four miles to the ground every day and then four miles back home for my lunch, and return in the afternoon to cut the grass and undertake other tasks that the ground staff were expected to do in those days.’3
