Fred Davies has passed away

[splott parker]

Barrie Jones was a superbly gifted footballer. Unfortunately, he broke his leg away at Blackpool, which ended his football league career.

A game that sticks in my mind was an away defeat at Derby in 1969, the season they gained promotion to the First Division. City got beaten 2-0 but the general consensus was that Barrie Jones was the best player on the pitch that day.

What I didn't realise was that Plymouth broke the British transfer record for a winger when they signed him from the Jacks in 1964 for £45,000.

It was a record fee .... the weather that day when we got beat 2-0 was horrendous, got absolutely soaked queuing to get in although we’d got in the ground a few hours before but got chucked out before we could hide. It was a Biblical storm that day yet turn the clock on years and years later and a few snowflakes get a game called off?

[the other bob wilson]

Bob, I'm surprised that you and and another poster said that Fred was on the small side as that was not a memory I had of him. I therefore checked some of the old team photos online and in one of them he is stood next to Tosh, who was about 6' 2". They appear to be roughly the same height.

The one goalkeeper we had who certainly fitted into the small category was Dilwyn John. I don't think he could have been over
5' 8".

I looked him up in one of my Bluebirds Who's Who book from the 80s and Fred Davies was six foot exactly which is a couple of inches taller than I would have said he was and was around average for a goalkeeper in those days I would say - it looks like my eyes were deceiving me with Davies as he could not be called small in the way that Derby's Colin Boulton and Les Green and Ipswich's Laurie Sivell were back then. Davies was an inch or two smaller than Jim Eadie, Bob Wilson, Frank Parsons and Bill Irwin though, whereas he was an inch taller than Ron Healey. As for Dilwyn John, he was two inches shorter than Davies.