Mystery of Wolverhampton footballer dismissed by club after scoring 30 goals in a season
A footballer from Wolverhampton who scored 30 league goals for Brighton & Hove Albion before being mysteriously sacked has been featured in a new book.
Centre-forward Hugh Vallance hit his goal-scoring heights during the 1929-1930 season – but later had his contract terminated for a "serious misdemeanour".
It has never been discovered what caused the footballer, who also played for Kidderminster Harriers and Aston Villa, to disappear at the height of his fame.
Vallance, who died in 1973, scored twice in the first seven games of the 1930-1931 season but was dismissed alongside Ireland international Jack Curran.
It has been suggested the most likely explanation was the pair had been caught drinking while under express orders not to, but nobody knows the truth.
The mystery has been included in Nic Outterside's new book Wet Socks and Dry Bones which unwraps and details the lives of 50 former Brighton players.
Mr Outterside, a life-long supporter of the club who lives in Pennfields, attended his first game at the club in September 1967 and has kept following them.
The 300-page paperback was inspired by WP Kinsella's baseball classic Shoeless Joe – which, in turn, inspired the 1989 Hollywood movie Field of Dreams.
Mr Outterside's book chronological recounts the biographies of players from Arthur Hulme, who played from 1902 to 1909, up to Paul McCarthy who played between 1988 and 1996 – just a year before the Goldstone Ground was demolished.
He said: "It was while finishing that book that the blinding flash of light took place, which led me here. The moment was Monday, April 1, 2019 – the day I heard the news that my boyhood Brighton & Hove Albion hero Kit Napier had died just 12 hours earlier at his home in Durban, South Africa, aged 75.
"I was an impressionable 11-year-old kid in 1967 when I first saw Kit play, and for me, he was everything you wanted from a football hero – and like all childhood heroes, I thought he would live forever.
"Then slowly, I came to realise that several of the stars from my first few seasons at the Goldstone Ground had also passed on, some well before their time.
"They were now all ghosts of the Goldstone’s Field of Dreams and in something akin to Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, I believed this was our moment in time to bring our ghosts home.
"So, with my own personal memories running around my brain, I began the task of researching the lives and deaths of those players before our collective memories were lost forever.
"While researching the book, I was gob-smacked to begin unravelling the story of Hugh Vallance, who was by any standards a 'super striker'. But his life remains a mystery and after leaving Brighton in 1930 the rest of his playing career was in the relative obscurity of the Birmingham League with Worcester City, Evesham and Kidderminster Harriers.”
Hugh Vallance took his secret to the grave in 1973, just four years before England striker Peter Ward eventually broke his club scoring record.
Wet Socks and Dry Bones is available on Amazon.
