Club historian Rob Mason pays tribute to Ivor Broadis...
The death of Ivor Broadis, at the age of 96 years and 115 days, brought to a close the life of Sunderland and England’s oldest living player.
Broadis was one of the finest footballers to wear the red and white stripes. Measure that by the fact that greats including Bill Shankly, Alex Ferguson, Tom Finney, Jackie Milburn, Mike Summerbee and Trevor Ford have been amongst those to praise him to the skies.
Broadis was the first man to score twice in a World Cup game for England. He once netted a hat-trick as Sunderland beat Manchester United 5-3 at Old Trafford and was the youngest ever person to manage in the Football League.
He did the most sensible thing possible as player-manager of Carlisle and transferred himself to ‘Bank of England Club’ Sunderland. There, Broadis scored 27 goals in 84 games and 156 in 505 career league games in England and Scotland.
Born on 18 December 1922 in the Isle of Dogs in London, in 1940 the Broadis’ home was destroyed in a bombing raid. Fortunately, the family survived. Ivor joined the RAF, flying over 500 hours during the war, serving as a flight lieutenant navigator on RAF Wellingtons and Lancaster bombers.
Posted to RAF Crosby-on-Eden after the war, Ivor was offered the player-manager position at Carlisle United. He scored 55 goals in 94 games in two and a half seasons before selling himself to Sunderland in January 1949.
Broadis’ first full season on Wearside saw Sunderland go as close as they have to a post-war league title. Only a late season home loss to relegation bound Manchester City cost a seventh championship. Ivor missed just one match. Injury restricted him to just 20 appearances in 1950-51 but there were 10 goals including two hat-tricks.
Broadis was sold to Manchester City for £7,000, more than the £18,000 that had been paid for him. A month after leaving Sunderland, Ivor made his England debut. He would score eight goals in 14 internationals. The last three of his caps came in the 1954 World Cup during which his brace against Belgium in Switzerland made him the first man to score more than once in a World Cup finals game for England.
After a dozen goals in 79 games for City a return to the north east came in the shape of a move to Newcastle. He would play 51 times for Newcastle, scoring 18 times before returning to Carlisle as player-coach and finally finishing his playing days with Queen of the South.
In a subsequent 45-year career as a journalist he probably made the occasional mistake, as all writers do.
Hopefully none were so bad as the league official who when he was first registered as a young player misread his real name Ivan as Ivor! The name stuck with him for ever. That may have been a terrible mistake, but Ivor’s engine kept running for almost a century.
Made a Freeman of Carlisle last October, Broadis was a giant of the game from a bygone era but one who until just a week ago was here to tell the tale of Sunderland’s 1950 title near miss, the 1954 World Cup and those 500 hours of World War Two flying time.
