Personal information | |||
---|---|---|---|
Full name | Jeffrey James Hall[1] | ||
Date of birth | [1] | 7 September 1929||
Place of birth | Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, England | ||
Date of death | 4 April 1959[1] | (aged 29)||
Place of death | Birmingham, Warwickshire, England | ||
Position(s) | Right back | ||
Youth career | |||
Bradford Park Avenue | |||
Senior career* | |||
Years | Team | Apps | (Gls) |
REME | |||
1950–1959 | Birmingham City | 227 | (1) |
International career | |||
1955 | England B | 1 | (0) |
1955–1957 | England | 17 | (0) |
*Club domestic league appearances and goals |
Jeffrey James Hall (7 September 1929 – 4 April 1959) was an English footballer who played as a right back for Birmingham City and England.
It was the death of Hall – a young, fit, international footballer – from polio which helped to kick-start widespread public acceptance in Britain of the need for vaccination. Though the disease was generally feared and the Salk vaccine was available, takeup had been slow. In the weeks following Hall's death, and after his widow, Dawn, spoke on television about her loss, demand for immunisation rocketed. Emergency vaccination clinics had to be set up and supplies of the vaccine flown in from the United States to cope with demand.[2][3][4]
In the same month and year that I contracted the disease in Hong Kong, the international footballer Jeff Hall died of it in England. Before the end of the Second World War polio had been a comparatively rare disease in Britain. But the late Forties and early Fifties were the polio years here as elsewhere, the time when parents grew anxious as the summer approached and kept their children away from swimming pools where the disease was thought to spread. Though polio was never a killer on the scale of cancer and heart disease, it was feared because of its capacity to maim young and healthy bodies. Despite this universal fear, take-up of the Salk vaccine when it became available in this country in the mid-Fifties was sluggish. Jeff Hall's death changed that. The message finally got through to teenagers on the terraces at football matches and in the Mecca dance-halls. Emergency clinics were set up, and there was such a run on the vaccine that further supplies had to be flown in from the United States.
There has been a sharp rise in the demand for the vaccine following the death from the disease of Birmingham City full back Jeff Hall last month. Local health departments have been overwhelmed with applicants and have ordered an extra million doses. On 22 April daily inoculations at Manchester Town Hall were suspended because of a shortage of the vaccine.
Joan
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).