MIDDLESBROUGH FC are celebrating a notable anniversary. They are in the second tier of English football, dreaming of winning promotion to the top flight to make their jubilee year truly memorable. And, almost from nowhere, they unearth a gem of a goalscorer, a player who cannot stop finding the back of the net, and he fires them to glory in their season of history.
Perhaps Middlesbrough’s 150th anniversary season can be crowned with promotion to the Premier League with goals from Will Lankshear, spotted at Oxford United and who has so far scored seven in nine league appearances.
Perhaps he can help them emulate their 50th anniversary season when promotion to the First Division was secured by George Camsell, found underground in a Durham mine who scored an astonishing 59 goals in 37 league matches.
George Camsell: The Man Who Broke All the Records and Shook the World of Football, by Paul Menzies (DestinWorld, £19.99). (Image: Paul Menzies)
A new book by renowned Teesside historian Paul Menzies, which uses vivid new colourisation techniques to bring those days of black and white brilliantly to life, charts Camsell’s staggering season, with each page bringing a new match, a new image and yet another great goalscoring feat.
But it is about more than just football: it is about the history of the club, of the town and of the tough pit community where George learned his football.
And it was tough. He was born in 1902 in Framwellgate Moor and grew up in Pump Row, the ninth of 10 children, four of whom died young. His father, Isaac, a miner, died when he was only 12, and as the family were officially deemed a “hardship case”, George was released early from school to go down the pit and earn his mother a wage.
It was a brutal introduction to the world of work, physically punishing and mentally frightening.
“A deep, resonant roar, subterranean thunder, signalled a major fall,” writes Menzies. “George ran, later describing it as if he was ‘escaping a centre half’, sprinting through darkness as the earth collapsed behind him. When the dust settled, the devastation was so absolute that the section was abandoned. Survival, in such an environment, was a mixture of instinct and chance.”
He worked throughout the war but as peace enveloped the rest of the world, life only got tougher for him. The husband of his sister, Rebecca, who lived in Darlington, died in the Army in Salonika of influenza. Then their mother, Mary, died, and the family unravelled – Rebecca and another sister, Isabel, ended up in Crossgate Workhouse while George found lodgings in Halliday’s Terrace.
But there was hope on the horizon. He’d met Isabella Hall, of Smokey Row, and had begun attending Methodist chapel with her.
George Camsell in his Durham City shirt (Image: Paul Menzies)
And there was football – playing for Framwellgate Moor in the rough Durham Central League (they were “pelted with clods of earth and worse” after a fractious match by Cornsay Colliery) and, when money allowed, travelling to St James’s Park to see Stan Seymour banging in the goals.
In 1922, he married Bella, 19, and soon their son, William, came along followed, in December 1924, by Robert.
By then, George was on the dole. Framwellgate Colliery shut on November 7, 1924, throwing 181 men out of work and undermining the whole community.
With Durham slipping into the Great Depression, now football was the only hope.
George played for expenses for Esh Winning in the Northern League and then for Durham City in the Third Division (North). He had such a surefire eye for goal that First Division Bury wanted to buy him but not for the price Durham wanted. To keep him happy, Durham gave him a £3 10s-a-week contract as a player and groundsman.
And he carried on banging in the goals: 12 in the first 10 matches of the 1925-26, followed by a hat-trick against Rotherham. He was so prolific that “scouts almost wore out the doorstep at Durham” in their desperation to see the “goal-scoring machine”.
Herbert Bamlett, the new manager at Middlesbrough who was charged with taking the club back into the First Division, came with an offer. George turned him down. He said he didn’t know where Middlesbrough was and he would rather sign for Newcastle and play alongside Seymour.
Bamlett was persistent. In heavy rain, he visited George in his home in Framwellgate Moor. With Bella listening in, he offered George £8-a-week. Then Bamlett took two crisp £5 notes out of his pocket and placed them on the family table. The deal was done.
Durham received £810 compensation and Camsell went to Teesside – a moment marked by Paul Menzies with the evocative image that graces today’s front cover.
Paul Menzies' graphic celebrating George Camsell's move from Durham City to Middlesbrough in October 1925 (Image: Paul Menzies)
Yet Boro already had a first team centre forward, Jimmy McClelland, highly respective and himself prolific. George had to bide his time in the reserves, training with a plimsoll on his favoured right foot and a boot on his left to train up the weaker foot and turn himself into the complete player.
But there was no way past McClelland, even when George scored six in one match for the reserves against Bedlington. High flying First Division Burnley noticed and tabled a £500 bid for him, but Boro refused to let him go, so the 1926-27 season – the club’s 50th anniversary season – began with George languishing in the reserves.
The first team started poorly, just a point from their first four matches, and then McClelland went down with an ankle injury.
George Camsell in his Middlesbrough shirt (Image: Paul Menzies)
Bamlett gave George the No 9 shirt, and once he had it, he refused to let it go.
He scored two goals in his second match and in his fifth, with McClelland recovered from injury and vying for selection, he netted his first hat-trick as Boro’s form turned around – they stormed up the table from bottom place to seventh in three Camsell-fired weeks.
The club was officially formed on October 20, 1876 when a meeting was held in the Albert Park Hotel, so in 2026, last week’s home match against Wolves was designated the 150th anniversary celebration and Boro won 1-0 with a goal from Lankshear.
In 1926, the home fixture on October 23 against Barnsley was officially the 50th anniversary and they won 5-1. George scored one and made one, and the Athletic News purred: “The Middlesbrough forwards are playing some wonderful football…but never during this season have they reached the pitch of perfection which enabled them to so utterly rout Barnsley.”
33,354 fans at Ayresome Park watch Middlesbrough defeat Nottingham Forest 1-0 on March 5, 1927, to move four points clear at the top of the table. George didn't score that day (Image: Paul Menzies)
In the book, the pages now start turning to reveal remarkable feat followed by an even more remarkable feat: four goals against Portsmouth on November 6 as Boro won 7-3, four more on November 20 as Boro beat Fulham 6-1.
This was the first season that the offside rule was introduced causing the game to evolve. Bamlett set Middlesbrough up to benefit with two fast, accurate wingers in Billy Pease and Owen Williams feeding Camsell’s powerful head – supporters christened them “the terrible three” – and also two midfielders, Jackie Carr and captain Billy Birrell, playing him in on the ground for his instinctive strikes. It feels very like Manchester City today, where Erling Harland is the goalscoring focal point, in the air and on the ground.
Indeed, on Christmas Day 1926 at Maine Road, George scored all Boro’s goals as they won 5-3.
Menzies even has George’s own words to describe his fifth. “The ball came to me near the centre line. The pitch was heavy with mud and I was tiring, but I summoned every ounce of energy. I beat two opponents before driving a fierce left-foot shot beyond the helpless goalkeeper. I had scored five goals!
“As I turned away in celebration, one excited supporter jumped the rails. He rushed over, wished me a Happy Christmas and, with a broad smile, offered me a drink from his flask!”
This is one of the great strengths of the book: it tells George’s story through his own eyes and, amid all the modern computerised effects, there are amazing original documents, none more so than George’s own fixture card in which, in blotchy black ink, he has filled in the score and the number of goals he netted.
George Camsell's own fixture card in which he has written the result and the number of goals he scored (Image: Paul Menzies)
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Triumphantly at the bottom, he writes 37, for his number of games, and underlines twice his number of goals: 59. It would have been more if he had started the season and not missed matches like Darlington at Ayresome Park when he had a thumb injury.
George Camsell, second from right, and Billy Pease, second from left, were injured on March 19, 1927, and so watched the match against Darlington from the Ayresome Park touchline in their very smart suits. Boro won 4-1 (Image: Paul Menzies)
Plus Middlesbrough were promoted as champions, their title sealed in the penultimate fixture at Blackpool, a 2-2 draw in which George scored only one.
MIddlesbrough, the 1927 champions of the Second Division. George Camsell is seated to the left of the shield (Image: Paul Menzies)
A reporter from the Sports Gazette was on the team charabanc as it came home that night in great jollity. He wrote: “Sleepy villagers awoke to the strains of The More We Are Together. Middlesbrough Football Club players were letting of a little more of that championship steam which we have sampled on the field and off this glorious jubilee season.”
The Middlesbrough players and directors leave Middlesbrough station at the end of the 1926-27 season to start their victorious tour of Denmark (Image: Paul Menzies)
- George Camsell: The Man Who Broke All the Records and Shook the World of Football, by Paul Menzies (DestinWorld, £19.99). It is available from the Middlesbrough club shop, Guisborough Bookshop, Book Corner in Saltburn, Amazon and Waterstones, plus from the website of Stockton publishers, destinworld.com
George Camsell: The Man Who Broke All the Records and Shook the World of Football, by Paul Menzies (DestinWorld, £19.99). (Image: Paul Menzies)