Two of a Kind - Dublin Fusiliers Football Pool Winners

Conor & Liam Dodd 

The military careers of John Coffey and John Willis shared little in common other than their regiment. Both men were known as Jack and both served in the same regiment, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, but their paths never crossed. Coffey spent his short war on the Western Front with the 9th Battalion and Willis was with the 7th Battalion in Gallipoli, Salonika and later France. However, a moment of luck in the 1950s drew both together into an unusual and small grouping. They both became individual winners of the maximum prize in the football pools, receiving £75,000. An equivalent value today of approximately £2 million sterling each.

John Robert Willis was born in Dublin in June 1898. From Glengarriff Parade, he was the son of Robert Willis and Mary Agnes Barry. Born into a middle-class family he was the second eldest of five brothers and his mother and siblings were essentially deserted by their father who had many personal issues. The situation left the family in a precarious financial position and, like his elder brother Philip, John left school early and became a clerk. In their spare time, both John and Philip Willis were members of the 1^st Battalion City of Dublin Cadets, a War Office recognised quasi-military organisation. On the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 a significant number of the Dublin Cadets answered a call to them and enlisted for service. They joined the 7^th Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers which had platoons reserved within it for these Cadets. In these platoons, the enlistees were kept together and trained under their own officers in a ‘Pals’ type unit and amongst the new recruits in September 1914 were both the Willis brothers. John, who had only turned 16 that summer, gave the fake age of 19 and became a member of what was known as ‘the Pals’, or D Company, 7^th Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers. On his enlistment, he was given his regimental number, 13839, one in a sequence that day issued to members of the 1^st Battalion Dublin Cadets. The teenage John Willis could hardly have imagined it but the random assignment of his regimental number was to have a significant impact on his life many years later. 

Following training Willis, serving as a signaller, and his battalion, part of the 10^th (Irish) Division, were sent to take part in the Gallipoli campaign. Here they landed at Suvla Bay in August 1915 as part of the new effort to break the stalemate that had developed on the peninsula. Ultimately the new British assault petered out against a determined Turkish defence. John Willis survived unscathed, however, his battalion suffered heavy casualties. They were withdrawn from Gallipoli with their division the following month and Willis was noted as one of 79 original survivors of D Company that participated in the August landing and left the peninsula on 29 September 1915. After Gallipoli, his battalion was sent to Salonika. Here Willis took part in an infamous and often overlooked campaign in terrible conditions. The 10^th (Irish) Division was part of an Allied force taking part in a campaign against the Bulgarian Army and its allies. From the sweltering summer in Gallipoli, the men of the Dublins and the 10^th (Irish) Division faced a winter in the mountains of the Balkans without the correct equipment or clothing. In December 1915 he took part in the Battle of Kosturino defending positions against a Bulgarian advance. His time in Salonika came to an end in June 1916 when he began suffering from sickness and dysentery and was returned to England via a hospital ship.

After recuperating, Willis was sent to 4^th Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers at Mullingar where he was a member of C Company. Willis did not feel happy at Mullingar and requested that he might be able to move to the newly formed 11^th Battalion of the regiment. In December 1916 Brigadier General Hammond wrote to the commanding officer of the 4^th Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Meldon, requesting that Willis move as ‘...he is evidently one of the original members of the “football’ company of the 7^th Battalion and therefore probably has friends of his own class in 11^th Batt.’ Willis was sent to the 11^th, however, the battalion never made it to a theatre of war as a unit and he was sent as a reinforcement to the 8^th Battalion in France in April 1917 and one month later was posted to the 10^th Battalion. The 10^th, a commercial battalion, was something akin to the 11^th. It had been raised in a similar spirit to the 7^th Battalion but in very different circumstances in 1915 as the reality of the war began to become apparent to the public at home. They were ultimately to be the last battalion of the regiment to be raised and to be deployed on active service. The Battalion suffered heavily during its time at the front and was eventually dismantled and disbanded in February 1918. A large portion of the battalion, including John Willis, was transferred to the 1^st Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Following severe losses as a result of the German Spring Offensive in March 1918 this battalion was posted further north in France. Here, in early May 1918, Willis and his battalion were holding positions in the British reserve lines near two areas known as Papote and le Tir Anglais, a short distance north of the village of la Motte-au-Bois and south of the town of Hazebrouck. The Dublins had returned to these positions after they had been relieved from holding outposts on the eastern edge of a nearby wood known as Bois d’Aval. Although the men were not in the front line they continued carrying out working parties and guard duty as part of the reserve. Although they did have the relative safety and comfort of billets they were also not immune from danger. At midnight on 11 May 1918, the area in which the 1^st Dublin Fusiliers were stationed came under intense bombardment. An estimated 4,000 mustard gas shells were fired towards their positions exploding in the dark of the night. The mustard gas did not kill immediately but blistered the lungs of those who inhaled it. For those who wore their protective masks in time, it still caused terrible blistering to the body. Its purpose was to maim and incapacitate as many as possible. A number of the gas shells made direct hits on the billets of the Dublin Fusiliers where the men slept in the dark and panic ensued. The battalion war diary noted that ‘...many men were severely blistered and burnt about the body, of course owing to direct hits on billets where men were crowded together and asleep a certain amount of unavoidable confusion in the dark of the billets was responsible for a number of the casualties’. The initial casualty numbers for the battalion were noted as 6 men killed and 342 wounded and gassed. The dead were buried in Cinq Rues British Cemetery and the wounded were evacuated. One of the wounded was John Willis. Initially sent the 89^th Field Ambulance he was evacuated to a Casualty Clearing Station and finally to the 25^th General Hospital from where he was evacuated to England suffering badly from mustard gas poisoning. He was sent to Netley Hospital where he was described as having issues with his throat, vomiting and coughing. He was later transferred to the Mater Hospital in Dublin before being sent to the Military Convalescent Hospital in Holywood, Co. Down. He finally left treatment in August 1918, however, he never returned to the front. By the time of his discharge he was twenty years old, had spent four years in the army and was a veteran of Gallipoli, Salonika and the Western Front. 

After the end of the war, Willis used the skills he acquired as a signaller in the Dublin Fusiliers to become a marine operator in the Merchant Navy and later qualified as a radio engineer. This led him to work with the Marconi Company and as a communications engineer in the Cable and Wireless Company. During the Second World War, he joined the Royal Air Force and carried out radar work in England and also spent time in West Africa, for which he was awarded the Defence Medal and War Medal. While stationed in Africa he was the officer in charge of all West African coast installations for eighteen months. After the Second World War, he returned to his job with Cable and Wireless, moving between Malta, Jerusalem and Kenya. Finally worked in Bermuda from 1954, where he planned to retire.

th (Irish) Division took part in the Battle of Kosturino in December 1915 another of the newly raised Irish Divisions, the 16^th (Irish) Division, landed in France for service on the Western Front. With them was John Coffey, a member of the 9^th Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers who was from Saint Helens in Merseyside, England. Coffey, like Willis, was a new recruit who had volunteered on the outbreak of war and enlisted at the beginning of October 1914. Following training, his battalion arrived in France and was sent to the front line near Noeux-les-Mines, north of Loos. They remained here for several months being acclimatised to trench life and duties at the front. On 30 March 1916, they took up positions in trenches, southwest of the village of Hulluch, relieving the 8^th Battalion of their regiment. Their area of responsibility consisted of a stretch of front line trenches with its border marked by two communication trenches, Holly Lane, to the north, and Posen Alley, to the south. They stayed here until 3 April and the battalion war diary describes this period as ‘normal’ and unremarkable as they were not engaged in any major attacks, raids or other engagements. However, its annotations record that they had 3 men killed and 14 wounded in these five days as part of the general attrition of trench warfare. Amongst the wounded was John Coffey. He had been shot in the face and badly wounded with terrible injuries to his left lower jaw while his eyesight was also impacted. He was evacuated to a hospital in England, his time at war had lasted just over three months. As part of his treatment, he was transferred to the famous Queen’s Hospital in Sidcup, England. Under the guidance of Sir Harold Gillies the hospital was Britain’s centre of maxillo-facial and plastic surgery and amongst its pioneering patients was John Coffey. The work at Queen’s Hospital attracted worldwide recognition and laid the foundations of modern plastic surgery in the United Kingdom. For Coffey, his surgeries and treatments consisted of utilising a new technique of skin grafting to repair his facial features and using two of his ribs to rebuild his shattered jaw. He was discharged from the British Army in June 1917 and returned home to St. Helens. Like many others patients at Queen’s Hospital, the treatments had a positive impact on his life, however, he could still not return to his pre-war job as a fireman in a local coal pit. It was 1925 before he found permanent employment. His job, as a night watchman with Sutton Oak Chemical Defence Research Establishment, an organisation that produced chemical weapons during the First and Second World Wars, would last until 1951. It also resulted in the award of the Imperial Service Medal. By that time his health was failing and he was blind in one eye. He spent his retirement living on Grimshaw Street in Sutton Leach, St. Helens. He would regularly enter the football pools, a large scale betting pool based on predicting the correct outcomes of football matches. The two largest pools at the time were Vernons and Littlewoods, John Coffey liked to enter the latter. The pools provided entertainment and the opportunity to win a small amount of money but the chances of winning a top prize were minuscule. The probability varied depending on results and winning entries but in real terms, even at the more generous odds of winning, a person would be thirty times more likely to be hit by lightning than win the top prize in the pools. 

However, in November 1952, that remarkable thing happened to John Coffey and he won £75,000, the maximum allowable prize in the Littlewoods Football Pools. Due to his health, he was unable to travel to London to collect his prize from the famous actress, Gracie Fields. However, he put his money to good use, building homes for his family and a car. He also put together plans to pay for the building of a bungalow for himself and his wife in the countryside. This house was finally completed on 10 April 1954. John Coffey died the following day. 

At the time of John Coffey’s death, John Willis was working as the engineer in charge of the St. George’s Cable & Wireless station in Bermuda. Like Coffey, he also had an interest in the football pools and entered the Vernons pool every week. Willis had no system or way of trying to predict the outcomes of the matches; instead, he simply used his old service number in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, 13839, to try and predict twelve matches that would end in a draw. He would make his entry predicting that the first, third and eighth matches listed in the first division would be a draw, followed by the third and ninth matches in the second division, 13839. He would do the same in two blocks of third division matches and finally pick the first and third matches in the listed Scottish games. In 1955 the draws matched his service number and like John Coffey, he won the rare top prize of £75,000 for his sixpence stake. John Willis would have longer to enjoy his prize than John Coffey. He returned to live in Ireland, residing in Kildare and Greystones, Co. Wicklow before relocating to England. He died in 1969, the same year as his wife, and is buried in Eltham Cemetery, London.

The wins of John Coffey and John Willis leaves an interesting, but perhaps unanswerable, question. If the mathematical probability of one person winning the top prize in the football pools is similar to being killed by a falling meteorite, what is the probability of two First World War veterans of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers winning it within three years of one another?

Sources:

1^st Battalion & 9^th Battalion RDF war diaries

Medal Index Cards

Medal Rolls

WO 363 Service Papers

Gillies Archive

Evening Herald

Irish Examiner

Irish Independent

Irish Times

Chance Rules: An Informal Guide to Probability, Risk and Statistics

The Pals at Suvla Bay