Following on from the previous football post, here is a fascinating article by John Simkin about a Merthyr born footballer Bryn Jones.
Brynmor Jones was born in the mining village of Penyard, Merthyr Tydfil, Wales on 14 February 1912. On leaving school he became a miner.
Jones played football for local side, Plymouth United in the South Wales District League. An impressive inside forward he was told he was good enough to play in the Football League. After an unsuccessful trial with Southend United he joined Glenavon in the Irish League.
Bryn Jones found it difficult to settle in Ireland and in August, 1933, he returned to Wales to play for Aberaman. Reports of his football skills reached England and in December, 1933, Wolverhampton Wanderers agreed to pay £1,500 for his services.
In his first season at Wolves he scored 10 goals in 27 appearances. Although very popular with the fans, Jones was unable to immediately turn Wolves into a successful side. In the 1933-34 season they finished in 15th place in the First Division. They were 17th in 1934-35 and 15th in 1935-36.
Bryn Jones played well-enough at Wolves to win his first international cap for Wales against Northern Ireland in 1935. The following year he was in the Welsh side that defeated England 2-1. Over the next few years Jones played 17 times for his country.
The tide turned in the 1936-37 season when Wolverhampton Wanderers finished 5th in the league. This was followed by an even better performance in the 1937-38 season when Wolves finished second to Arsenal. At the time, Arsenal dominated the First Division championship, having one it four times in six years. Alex James, their creative inside-forward, had recently retired. The club was looking for a replacement and decided to buy Jones for the world record fee of £14,000 (£6.9 million in today’s money). Politicians were outraged by the money spent on Jones and the subject was debated in the House of Commons.
Jones scored on his debut against Portsmouth. He also found the net in two of his next games. However, the goals dried up and he was only to get one more before the end of the season. After Arsenal were beaten at home 2-1 by Derby County, the match reporter from the Derby Evening Telegraph wrote: “Arsenal have a big problem. Spending £14,000 on Bryn Jones has not brought the needed thrust into the attack. The little Welsh inside-left is clearly suffering from too much publicity, and is obviously worried. He is a nippy and quite useful inside-left, but his limitations are marked.”
In his first season Jones scored four goals in 30 league appearances. That year Arsenal finished 5th in the league, eight points behind Wolverhampton Wanderers who appeared to be doing very well without Jones. As Jeff Harris pointed out in Arsenal Who’s Who (1995): “To lay blame on Bryn Jones for the club’s lack of success that season was unfair, for in a nutshell, the quiet, modest, self evasive, lonely figure could not cope with the intense pressure of the media spotlight even though his good positional awareness and splendid ball control were there for everyone to behold.”
His manager, George Allison, claimed that Bryn Jones needed more time to settle into the team. Cliff Bastin disagreed and in his autobiography he commented: “I thought at the time this was a bad transfer, and subsequent events did nothing to alter my views. I had played against Bryn in club and international matches and had ample opportunity to size him up.” However, the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 brought an end to the debate about the value of Jones. Bryn Jones joined the British Army and served with the Royal Artillery in Italy and North Africa during the conflict.
Bernard Joy, who played in the Arsenal team during the 1938-39 season, later wrote: “Do we write Bryn Jones down as a gamble that failed, or would he have been a success eventually? The outbreak of war in September 1939 prevented us from ever finding the complete answer. There were signs before then that, as James had done, he was weathering the bad patch which always seems to follow a change of style from an attacking to a foraging inside-forward… My own view, however, is that Jones’s modesty was the barrier to achieving the key role Arsenal had intended for him. He could not regard the spotlight as a challenge to produce his best; all the time it irked him, making him self-conscious and uneasy.”
When the first post-war Football League season started in 1946 Jones was 34 years old. Although his form was fairly good, Arsenal finished in 13th place. Wolverhampton Wanderers finished in 3rd, 15 points in front of Arsenal. The following season Jones lost his place to Jimmy Logie. Jones only played in seven games for the team that won the First Division title.
In 1949 Arsenal went on a tour of Brazil. In a game against Vasco de Gama spectators invaded the pitch and Jones was accidentally hit on the head by a Brazilian policeman. Jones was so badly injured that on doctor’s advice he decided to retire from playing football. During his time at the club he had scored 7 goals in 74 games, whereas at Wolverhampton Wanderers it had been 52 goals in 163 games.
Jones coached Norwich City for two years (1949-51) before running a newsagents near Arsenal’s Highbury ground.
Brynmor Jones died in October, 1985.
To read more of John Simkin’s excellent essays, please visit:
http://spartacus-educational.com
