Club Historian John Hutchinson's Links With The Past series continues by featuring some of the memorabilia belonging to Jimmy Walsh, who was Leicester City’s captain in the 1960/61 FA Cup campaign.
When City met Tottenham Hotspur in the 1961 FA Cup Final, the City’s captain was Jimmy Walsh, who had initially made his name with Glasgow Celtic.
Jimmy played 199 games for Leicester between 1956 and 1964, scoring 92 goals. He scored the Club’s first-ever goal in the new League Cup. He also scored the Foxes' maiden goal in European Competition.
This telegram (loaned to the Club by John Croft) was sent to Jimmy on the morning of the 1961 cup final. It wishes him and the team good luck and expresses the hope that Leicester do better than Celtic, who despite past and future glories, had not won a trophy since 1958.
The Celtic reference is probably down to the fact that Jimmy had played 145 games for Celtic between 1949 and 1956. Two of his medals from that time (both loaned to the Club by his son Peter) are illustrated here.
Jimmy won one of them as a member of Celtic’s 1954 Scottish title-winning side. The second medal is a Scottish Cup Final runners-up medal from 1955, when Celtic lost to Clyde after a replay.
For the record, Jimmy also scored for Celtic in the 1953 Coronation Cup Final, when the Bhoys defeated Hibernian 2-0 in front of a crowd of 117,000 at Hampden Park. Incidentally, Leicester City’s trainer at the 1961 cup final was the ex-Celtic and Scotland trainer Alex Dowdells.
After 16 years at Parkhead, he came to Filbert Street in 1956, the same year as Jimmy.
