Ralph Shields was a Geordie, a miner born in County Durham said to have scored over a hundred goals during the 1912-3 season in a local Durham league while still a teenager. Almost inevitably he was signed by Newcastle United but unlike later local heroes such as Alan Shearer and Paul Gascoigne he never got a first team start, instead he only played for the reserves despite scoring 14 times in a dozen games in the North-Eastern League.
Lots of other clubs wanted him and he was signed by second division Huddersfield Town who reportedly “paid a substantial fee”, believed to be £100.
Ralph was top scorer for Huddersfield in the 1914-5 season but his career was put on hold when normal football was suspended for the duration of the First World War when he served as a bombardier in the Royal Field Artillery.
After the war he was in the Huddersfield side which won promotion to the First Division but in 1920 he dropped down a few leagues to Exeter City. After a disappointing season he was on the move again the next summer, this time to Brentford.
Shields is in the centre row, third from the left.
Ralph Shields had eight appearances for the Bees and scored one goal. He then dropped down the leagues again to join Sittingbourne.
In 1927 he emigrated to Australia where he went back to life as a miner. When the Second World War broke out war Ralph, who was now 48, enlisted with the Australian Army Service Corps. The cutoff age for joining up was 40 so he gave a fake date of birth to qualify.
When Japanese forces overran Singapore he was captured and sent to the infamous Sandakan Prisoner of War Camp in northern Borneo. The camp was later described as ‘hell on earth’. It received about 1,500 Australians, most of them captured in Singapore and they were brought there with British prisoners to build a military airfield for the Japanese. The airfield came under constant heavy bombing by Allied forces in October 1944 and the next month Ralph died there of malnutrition and beriberi aged 52. He was buried at Labuan War Cemetery in Malaysia. The inscription on his gravestone is ‘Abide With Me’ .
