For now, at least, the yellow Deadline Day tie autographed by the excitable Sky Sports anchorman Jim White is not the most incongruous item of clothing on display at the National Football Museum in Manchester. Further up the stairs sit a couple of Brodie helmets, the iconic steel hats worn by English soldiers in the trenches in the first world war. Similar in design to the Chapeau de Fer worn by longbowmen at Agincourt, the Brodie was styled specifically to avoid paying any kind of homage to the more effective German Pickelhaube or Stahlhelm, which offered far more protection. The Royal Field Artillery gunner and professional footballer Wilf Bartrop was wearing just such a lid when he was killed while part of a Trench Mortar Battery in France just four days before the Armistice was signed and hostilities suspended.

The Amazing Truce: Christmas in the trenches in 1914 Read more

“It will be sad news to Liverpool and Barnsley football enthusiasts that Bartrop has been killed in action,” reported the Liverpool Echo on 19 November 1918, in its homage to an outside forward who had won the FA Cup with second division Barnsley six years previously, before signing for Liverpool in 1914. One of hundreds, if not thousands, of thought-provoking exhibits in the museum’s The Greater Game: Football & The First World War exhibition, Bartrop’s FA Cup winner’s medal was acquired against West Bromwich Albion in the 1912 final replay played at Bramall Lane.

Harry Tufnell scored the only goal of the game late in extra time, having received a pass from Bob Glendenning. Any afternoon at the National Football Museum is one very well spent, but one which yields the gem that a namesake provided the assist in the 1912 FA Cup final is particularly satisfying. It’s a long shot, but only time and further investigation will tell if old Bob was any relation.

But back to Bartrop, who with his piercing stare, solid jaw and sensible short back and sides, bore a weirdly striking resemblance to James Milner. Born and reared in Worksop, coincidentally just 25 miles from his future lookalike’s birthplace of Wortley, he was “exceedingly well known in Worksop and Barnsley as a clever and most capable footballer”, said his local paper, which added in his obituary that “he was a well built young man and was well liked by his associates and all who knew him”.

A strong and fast winger, he was renowned for the accuracy of his crosses, a particularly precise skill that perhaps goes some way towards explaining how he ended his days engaged in the futile and ultimately doomed pursuit of sending shells arcing across no man’s land towards the Germans.

“I sincerely regret to have to inform you that your husband, who served in my battery, was killed on 7th November,” wrote the footballer’s commanding officer Captain JE Benningfield, to Bartrop’s wife, Ruby. “He was proceeding up the line with a gun and a shell burst quite close to him, the splinters hitting him in the thigh and breast. I was not on the spot at the time, but one of my men who was, informs me that he only said ‘I am hit in the leg’ and the next was, he was dead. I am having a cross put on his grave. Please accept my deepest sympathy in your great loss. Gunner Bartrop was a sterling fellow and did very good work with me.”

Donald Bell’s is another of the fascinating tales chronicled in The Greater Game exhibition. A second lieutenant in the Green Howards, the Bradford Park Avenue player was the first footballer to enlist and won the ultimate award for gallantry, the Victoria Cross, for sprinting across no man’s land under heavy fire to take out a German machine gun nest with the delicate lob of a Mills bomb hand grenade from 20 yards. “I must confess that it was the biggest fluke alive and I did nothing,” he wrote in a letter to his parents soon after. “I only chucked one bomb, but it did the trick.” Five days later Bell was killed at the Somme, with his own Brodie helmet proving depressingly useless when it came to withstanding a well-aimed bullet.

Others were luckier. Having returned home after volunteering, a patently unfit Tom Wilson was given a free transfer by Sunderland’s blazers after just one game, before going on to win three league titles with Huddersfield. “I was completely out of training,” he wrote. “It was my first appearance for Sunderland – and my last.” In a state of affairs that suggests the Wearside club’s player recruitment policy was as harebrained a century ago as it is today, Jimmy Seed was also released, having been deemed too ill for football after being badly gassed in the trenches.

“The directors had decided that my war experience had finished me as a footballer,” he said, some 40 years later. “I was 23, suspect in health and worst of all, unwanted at Sunderland.” He went on to win the FA Cup with Tottenham Hotspur, before captaining Sheffield Wednesday to back-to-back league titles and making five appearances for England. The keen eye for talent of Sunderland’s directors would suggest those bullets fizzing around his ears in France weren’t the last he dodged. With so many fascinating stories, it seems a shame The Greater Game exhibition will leave the National Football Museum this month. On the plus side, we can at least be grateful Jim White’s yellow Deadline Day tie will remain.