Thursday 14th April at 1.30pm at 97 Barnsley Road, Wath-upon-Dearne, S63 6DN
A blue plaque is to be unveiled at the former South Yorkshire home of two international footballing brothers from Chile who became record breakers in this country.
George and Ted Robledo, who were the first South Americans to play professional football in Britain, lived at 97, Barnsley Road, Wath-on-Dearne, Rotherham and the blue plaque unveiling will be on what would have been George’s 96th birthday of April 14th.
The brothers, who came to Wath as children from Chile in the early 1930s, were professional footballers at Barnsley FC, and they moved together in 1949 to Newcastle United where George became a prolific goalscorer, setting a record which stood for nearly 50 years.
George’s daughter Elizabeth is flying over from Chile for the event which was postponed two years ago due to the pandemic and a diplomat from the Chilean Embassy in London will be at the unveiling.
Elizabeth is to be a guest of their former club Barnsley at the home game with Peterborough on April 18th and also a guest of Newcastle United at their home game with Liverpool on April 30th.
A second blue plaque is set to be unveiled on their former Newcastle home at 5, Ridgeway, Fenham, on May 3rd.
This is 70 years to the day that George scored the winner in the 1952 FA Cup Final for Newcastle against Arsenal - a goal immortalised by John Lennon.
When he was 11, Lennon drew a sketch of the goal from a photograph and later used it on the cover of his album, Walls and Bridges, in 1974.
Robledo Records
George and Ted were the first South Americans to play professional football in England (for a British team)
George was the first overseas player to win the Golden Boot, awarded to the top scorer in English top-flight football. No overseas player has since matched his 33 League goals which he scored for Newcastle United in that 1951/52 season.
George’s total of 82 League goals for Newcastle was a record for an overseas player in the top-flight and it stood for 46 years from 1953 until 1999 when Dwight Yorke broke it (Sergio Aguero is the current holder).
George was the first South American to play in an FA Cup final, doing so in 1951 for Newcastle United. A year later, both George and Ted were back at Wembley with Newcastle - the first time two overseas players had played in the same team in the FA Cup final.
George played and scored for Chile at the 1950 World Cup in Brazil and was the ONLY player among the 286 from 13 nations who was playing for a club outside his own country - he was at Newcastle United then.
Ted joined George in the Chile national team and they appeared together in the side beaten 1-0 by Argentina in the final of the 1955 South American Championship in front of 65,000 in Santiago.
In the early 1950’s George introduced lightweight football boots to his Newcastle teammates after returning from an international match.
Locally, George played and scored in the Don and Dearne Schools Totty Cup final (1939) and the locally-prestigious Mexborough Montagu Cup final (1944), before doing the same at the World Cup finals (1950) and in the FA Cup Final (1952).
At Brampton Ellis School, Rotherham, in the 1938/9 season, George scored 56 goals on the way to helping the team win 5 trophies.
*overseas – non-British (excluding Ireland)
More details: https://robledobrothers.wordpress.com/blue-plaque-2020/