Barrie Thomas, born 19 May 1937, Measham, England.
PART ONE
Barrie Thomas started his footballing days as a youth player with local outfit Leicester City in 1952. Thomas developed quickly enough to be picked for England Youth, turning out against Holland in a side captained by none other than Duncan Edwards, the Manchester United prodigy whose own story would end so tragically and so young at Munich six years later. Along the way, the forward also had the satisfaction of scoring a hat-trick against a Bolton Wanderers side featuring Nat Lofthouse, the England centre-forward that he had idolised when growing up, which must have felt like something close to vindication for someone who had once dreamed of exactly that sort of afternoon.
His senior debut duly arrived on Christmas Day 1954, against Sheffield United at Bramall Lane, when he was still only seventeen, and though the occasion had the romance of a boyhood dream fulfilled, the reality of first-team football at Filbert Street proved considerably harder to break into. Over the following three seasons, and with National Service also intervening to interrupt his development, Thomas found himself squeezed out by more experienced forwards on Leicester’s books, men such as Arthur Rowley and Andy Graver who simply would not budge, and he managed only seven league appearances in that time, scoring three goals.
Recognising that his chances of regular football at Leicester were slim, Thomas moved on to Third Division North side Mansfield Town in 1957, and it was there, in the lower reaches of the Football League, that his finishing instincts first found room to breathe. Across two seasons at Field Mill he plundered 48 goals in 72 league appearances, a return that marked him out unmistakably as a goalscorer of real pedigree, and it did not take long for a bigger club to come calling. Scunthorpe United, then plying their trade in the Second Division, moved for him in 1959, and if Mansfield had been the making of him, Scunthorpe was where Barrie Thomas became a genuine phenomenon. By Christmas 1961 he had rattled in 30 league goals from just 22 appearances that season alone, a total that swelled to 31 in 24 games once cup football was included, and suddenly he had the whole of the First Division talking about him.
Manchester United made enquiries, as did Bolton Wanderers and Fulham, while Leeds United had a bid of £30,000 turned down flat by the Scunthorpe board, who evidently knew exactly what they were sitting on. Yet it was Newcastle United, newly relegated and scrambling to arrest a miserable slide down the Second Division table, who eventually landed him in January 1962, doing the deal as a part-exchange that sent John McGuigan back to Scunthorpe in the opposite direction, with a further fee of around £45,000 changing hands on top.
The deal broke Newcastle’s transfer record, and Scunthorpe felt the loss keenly: gates at the Old Show Ground fell by a fifth once Thomas had gone, and the club, previously sitting proudly at the very top of the Second Division table, slid all the way down to fourth by the season’s end. Over his three campaigns on Humberside, Thomas had notched up 67 goals in 91 league appearances, a scoring rate that few strikers outside the top division could ever hope to match.
PART TWO
At St James’ Park, Barrie Thomas inherited the unenviable task of filling the Number 9 shirt so recently vacated by Len White, a bona fide Tyneside idol, and comparisons of that sort are rarely kind to the man walking into them. Nor, in truth, was Thomas quite the same type of player. His touch was never the smoothest, his all-round craft never especially refined, and few would have called him a natural team man in the way that phrase is usually meant. What he possessed instead was an uncanny instinct for finding the right yard of space at precisely the right moment, along with a shot that, when it connected cleanly, could trouble any goalkeeper in the country.
On his very first outing for the club, Thomas demonstrated the other side of that coin, skying an effort clean onto the roof of the Leazes End stand, and wayward finishing would remain something of a companion to his undoubted quality throughout his time on Tyneside. He was not a tall man, but he was thickset and sprang well off the ground, making him a real handful in the air, and he had genuine pace to go with it, though that same pace occasionally ran him offside more often than his manager would have liked. He benefited enormously from Jim Iley’s passing from deep, and whatever his technical shortcomings, nobody who saw him play ever doubted his effort; he chased every ball as though his afternoon depended on it, and centre-halves marking him invariably left the pitch feeling as though they had been in a contest.
That endeavour proved priceless almost immediately, for Newcastle were teetering perilously close to relegation into the Third Division when Thomas arrived, and it was his goals, ten of them in the final ten matches of that 1961–62 campaign, that helped drag the club to safety under caretaker charge. The frontman went on to spend two seasons in black and white altogether, contributing 48 goals in 73 appearances, a record comfortably good enough to have kept most strikers at a club for a good deal longer. Even so, in 1964 Newcastle allowed Thomas to return to Scunthorpe, a decision that puzzled a fair few observers at the time given how prolific he had been, and Thomas duly spent a further two seasons back at the Old Show Ground, adding 26 goals in 52 league matches to his tally there.
Thomas´ final move, in 1966, took him to Barnsley, then also languishing in the lower reaches of the Football League and in some financial difficulty besides. Having joined the Tykes well into that season, he still finished as top scorer during the 1966–67 campaign with ten league goals, and he was on the mark in that season’s FA Cup too, scoring twice in a 3–1 first-round victory over Southport at Oakwell before grabbing the side’s only goal in a 2–1 defeat against Cardiff City in a third-round replay at Ninian Park.
While with Barnsley he also reached his 200th Football League goal, a brilliant free-kick against Halifax Town at Oakwell on Easter Monday 1967, and not long afterwards he brought up his 300th league appearance as well. He was the club’s leading scorer with eight goals when he made what would prove to be his final Football League appearance, against Doncaster Rovers at Belle Vue in December 1967, his 43rd league start for a Barnsley side that went on to win promotion from the basement division as runners-up. But an increasingly troublesome right knee never recovered, and his contract at Oakwell was cancelled the following season by mutual consent.
Over his two seasons at Barnsley he scored 19 goals in 43 league appearances by the club’s own official figures, though the Barnsley Chronicle’s own tribute on his passing put the total nearer 22 goals in 50 games in all competitions, a reminder that even the bare arithmetic of a lower-division forward’s finest years can blur a little with the passing of six decades. A serious cruciate knee injury finally brought his playing days to a close in 1968, and Oakwell marked the occasion in fitting fashion with a testimonial match under the lights that November, Barrie’s own selected side taking on a Newcastle United side in recognition of everything he had given the game. It was, by any measure, a fitting send-off for a player who, whatever his rough edges, had never once given anything less than everything he had. By the time he hung up his boots, Thomas had made 338 appearances across fourteen years with five different clubs, scoring 211 goals along the way, figures that place him firmly among the most prolific marksmen English football produced outside the top flight during that era.