On the face of it there was nothing particularly memorable about Birmingham City’s 1-1 draw at relegation-bound Portsmouth in March 1959 but for the sense of disappointment the visitors took from it. “Blues did themselves no credit in this so-casual stroll in the sun,” wrote Dennis Shaw in Birmingham’s Sports Argus. “Portsmouth did all they could to show why they have not won a league game since November. Blues were little better. After shooting into the lead shortly before the interval they just hadn’t the skill, and the drive, nor the determination to run up a hefty total. On a pitch like concrete the ball was ballooned back and forth over the halfway line like a ping-pong game.”

At right-back for City, making his 227th league appearance for the club, was 29-year-old Jeff Hall. Two days later he was diagnosed with polio, and within a fortnight he was dead.

“I’m amazed,” said Ron Newman, Portsmouth’s outside-left, when told of Hall’s illness. “Jeff played well and I didn’t notice anything different about him at all. He was very quiet all through the game but then he usually is. I shook hands with him as we left the field and said: ‘Well done.’ He just said: ‘Hard luck – I guess you needed those points pretty badly.’”

The previous night, while with his team-mates in a Southsea hotel, Hall had complained of having difficulty swallowing, and doctors decided he had a cold. The following day he played as normal. “After the match we were hanging about outside the dressing rooms when Jeff joined us, looking terrible, pale-faced, watery-eyed, exhausted,” wrote Shaw in his autobiography A Game of Three Halves published in 2014. “Having been told we were travelling in a private car he begged a lift with us, because he’d apparently got the flu, and we could get him home quicker than the team coach.”

The following morning Hall went to watch a youth team he and West Brom’s Ray Barlow had been coaching play in a televised five-a-side tournament against a side representing Leeds United and coached by their strikers Don Revie and Wilbur Cush. “I stood next to him, roaring on our team,” recalled Barlow, who had suffered from polio a decade earlier, eventually making a complete recovery. “Jeff had dashed back from Portsmouth so he could be at West Bromwich the next day to watch our team. He seemed quite normal then, yet the next day he was whipped off to hospital.”

A vaccination against polio existed but although strenuous exercise helped spread the disease around the host’s body, making attacks significantly more serious, no club had thought to inoculate their team. This reflected a wider reticence: Jonas Salk’s vaccine, administered in a series of normally three injections, had been introduced to the UK in 1956, initially being offered only to children, but the take-up had been slow. An early scare in America, where the vaccine had been rushed to market so hastily in some cases it still contained enough live virus to cause polio, had not helped build enthusiasm. By 1958 only 53% of children in England and Wales who were eligible for inoculation had received the vaccine. In the middle of that year the vaccine was for the first time offered to those aged between 18 and 26; in the first three months of eligibility, of the 6,250,000 British adults suddenly able to get vaccinated, only 13,324 had received two injections, and 26,947 had received one.

After Hall’s diagnosis the club was immediately locked down. In the hours after he was admitted to hospital the Birmingham trainer, Ken Fish, travelled by taxi round the players’ homes breaking the news and telling them to stay at home and rest. Barlow, Cush and Revie were told to stay away from their clubs, Portsmouth’s players were put into isolation and those of Birmingham’s other recent opponents, Nottingham Forest, Wolves and Leicester, plus staff at the team hotel near Porstmouth, two club directors who had also been in the car back from the south coast, a television outside broadcast unit and the Luton and Norwich teams who had played an FA Cup semi-final replay at St Andrew’s a couple of weeks earlier were all advised to see their doctors.

Meanwhile Hall lay in ward 22 of Little Bromwich hospital, his condition critical. Within 24 hours of his diagnosis he had three operations and was relying on an iron lung to breathe. Newspapers nationwide carried daily updates on the player’s condition on their front pages. 25 March: “There has possibly been some slight improvement though his condition still gives rise to acute anxiety.” 26 March: “He has had a better day and his strength is being maintained.” 27 March: “He is putting up a good fight and appears quite cheerful.” 29 March: “He has had another restful night but his general condition is critical.” 30 March: “The slight improvement in his condition has not been maintained. His temperature has risen again and his general condition is weaker.” 31 March: “He has had a restful day. His condition is unchanged.” 1 April: “He has had a fair day and is maintaining his strength.” And then, they ceased. Hall died at 9.20am on 4 April.

The picture painted in the testimonials that followed was of a humble, likeable man and, despite his lack of height, an extremely able player. Cyril Chapman, his obituarist in the Birmingham Post, described him as “one of Blues’ most skilful and popular players … who harnessed a keen intelligence to natural footballing ability to make a mark of considerable distinction on the game. His style of play, which tried to ensure any defensive move was turned smoothly and quickly to attack, and his demeanour on and off the field were classic examples to young devotees of the game.”

“The Jeff Halls of soccer do not often pass this way,” wrote the Telegraph. “Like his friend, Billy Wright, he met the physical challenge on the field without flinching and with a fair tackle. Few defenders ever mastered the handicap of lack of height so competently.”

Hall had played 17 consecutive games for England after making his debut against Denmark in 1955, on each occasion occupying the right-back berth with Manchester United’s Roger Byrne on the left. Neither player lived to see his 30th birthday, Byrne having died in the Munich air disaster in 1958.

Don Revie (left) and Jeff Hall in the 1956 FA Cup Final between Manchester City and Birmingham. Photograph: Colorsport/REX/Shutterstock

“Not only Birmingham City but the whole of English football will be the poorer now that Jeff has left us,” Wright said. “After playing with him for England on numerous occasions and being associated with him off the field, I know just what a wonderful player and person he was.”

Hall had been born in Scunthorpe but raised in the village of Wilsden, not far from Bradford. He played the euphonium in the village band, and helped his father, a newsagent, with his morning deliveries – a job he continued to perform on his visits home even as an England international. He was spotted by the Birmingham scout Walter Taylor while playing in an army game in 1950. “The player I went to watch didn’t shine but I was taken with the play of the right-half,” Taylor said.

Hall was approached after the match, but informed Taylor that he could not possibly be of professional standard. “At first he didn’t think he was good enough and it took me hours to persuade him to sign amateur forms,” Taylor said.

He made his debut for the club the following year, and established himself in the first team in 1953. Birmingham had been relegated from the top flight in 1950 but with Hall in a defence marshalled by the great goalkeeper Gil Merrick they returned five seasons later and continued to improve. In a report on a 3-1 win over Manchester United in December 1956 the Sunday Times described “a superb defence … Clearly if Merrick is an emperor among goalkeepers, then Hall and Green, Birmingham’s backs, and Linacre, Smith and Warhurst, their half-backs, are very worthy paladins.”

Hall’s death had inevitable sporting consequences. Sixth in the league after the Portsmouth match, one point away from fifth – the squads of the top five teams received reward in the way of “talent money”, ranging from £220 for fifth place to £1,100 for first – Birmingham did not play again for three weeks, had to cope with fixture congestion thereafter and ended up ninth.

“Jeff was one of those likeable types very rare to find,” said Joe Richards, the president of the Football League. “He had been with me on tours abroad a number of times and was one of those professional footballers to whom everyone takes an instant and lasting liking. His death was a tragedy and his place in the game will be difficult to fill.”

Hall was buried in Wilsden on 9 April, while a memorial service was held at St Andrew’s Church, around the corner from Birmingham City’s ground. There, the Rev H B Marlow told a packed congregation of his hope that Hall’s death might raise awareness of the disease. “It may well be that his death will save many other lives,” he said.

And so it proved. The Birmingham Post had been first to report the effect. “Soon after the first reports of Hall’s illness appeared yesterday,” they wrote on 25 March, “an official of the Public Health Department at West Bromwich received telephone calls at his home during the lunch hour from young people enquiring about the facilities for receiving the polio vaccination. ‘The vaccine is here for anyone under 26 years of age. We can only advise those eligible to avail themselves of this precautionary measure as soon as possible,’ the official said.”

And, for the first time, they did so in numbers. In the days after Hall’s death clinics nationwide started to report lengthy queues. Responding to demand, large employers in and around Birmingham offered workers on-site vaccinations, while youth clubs and dance halls were given records containing breaks during which young attendees could receive mid-jive injections. Before play got under way on Saturday 11 April a message from the minister of health, Derek Walker-Smith, was read or played at 400 football clubs around the country. “Hall’s death brings home to us sharply and sadly that polio can strike down even the fittest among us,” he said. “Even when not fatal, it can cripple for life. So I appeal to all under 26, strongly and sincerely, be sure to get your polio vaccination. Don’t delay, do it soon.”

By 16 April local authorities across the country were reporting a shortage of vaccine, with a ministry of health spokesman describing “an unprecedented demand”. On 20 April clinics in Birmingham were closed because they had no vaccinations left and Manchester followed two days later, while emergency supplies were flown in from the US. As the Express put it the following day: “In the past 10 years over 3,000 people have died of polio in England and Wales. But it took the death of one footballer to get the typists and secretaries, clerks, schoolboys and the rock’n’roll generation pouring into the clinics.”

Soon the fight against polio was joined by another willing footsoldier, as Hall’s widow Dawn dedicated herself to increasing awareness of polio vaccinations. “I didn’t want Jeff’s death to be in vain and I certainly didn’t want anyone else to go through the same ordeal,” she said. “I went on television to talk about my experience and to tell everybody in the country how important it was to be immunised. I also made a record which was translated into several different languages and sent all over the world. The response to my appeal was absolutely amazing; I can remember seeing hundreds of people in queues waiting for their vaccination.” Dawn continued to help victims of polio and to prevent others joining their number until her death in May this year at the age of 79, and was posthumously awarded the British Empire Medal.

“It was I think, at the time, actually the deciding factor in Britain’s battle with polio,” says Gareth Williams, emeritus professor of medicine at Bristol University and author of the 2013 book Paralysed with Fear: The Story of Polio. “After Jeff died his widow Dawn did this amazing job. She became a crusader, basically saying she had watched her husband die over a fortnight, losing the power of speech and fading in front of her eyes, and she wouldn’t want this to happen to anyone else, so get your kids vaccinated. I think it was a genuine damascene moment, and public perceptions of the risks and the benefits changed.”

In February 1959 500,000 doses of vaccine were administered and at the month’s end only one in 12 people under 26 had been inoculated. In December 2.5m doses were administered, 50% had taken the vaccine and the queues were still forming. In 1958 5% of people in their 20s and 3% of those in their 30s had been protected; by 1961 those figures were 63% and 53% and when oral vaccination replaced injections in 1962 take-up increased further. In 1955, the worst year on record, there were 3,712 cases of paralytic poliomyelitis in England and Wales, the ninth of 12 successive years in which the number suffering the most acute form of the disease reached four figures. But then, as the effect of vaccinations kicked in, the numbers started to plummet: 257 cases in 1960, 707 in 1961, 212 in 1962, 39 in 1963. Only twice since 1968 have numbers reached double figures, and the last confirmed case of polio contracted in the UK was in 1984. Globally however it is a continuing battle: in 1988 there were an estimated 350,000 cases of polio globally; last year there were 74, this year so far 34 have been confirmed, mostly in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

For most of the last 57 years the Main Stand at St Andrew’s has featured a clock – they are on their third – dedicated to Hall. Elsewhere he is rarely remembered now for anything other than his remarkable if unwitting contribution to the battle against polio in Britain but there at least they have not forgotten his qualities as a footballer. As Harry Morris, their former captain and then chairman, said in the days after his death: “He was one of the adornments of the game, a model player and a grand club man. We have had players as good but never one better.”