Albert Hoskins

Albert Hoskins
Personal information
Full name Albert Herbert Hoskins
Date of birth March 1885
Place of birth Southampton, England
Date of death 19 February 1968(1968-02-19) (aged 82)
Place of death Southampton, England
Height 5 ft 9 in (1.75 m)
Playing position Forward
Youth career
St. Mary's Guild
Senior career*
Years Team Apps (Gls)
Freemantle
1906–1908 Southampton 21 (0)
1908–1910 Wolverhampton Wanderers 14 (2)
Dudley Town
Shrewsbury Town
Teams managed
1924–1926 Wolverhampton Wanderers
1926–1929 Gillingham
1929–1930 Torquay United
* Senior club appearances and goals counted for the domestic league only. † Appearances (Goals).

Albert Herbert Hoskins (March 1885 – 19 February 1968) was an English football forward and football manager, who managed Wolverhampton Wanderers, Gillingham and Torquay United.

Contents

Playing career

Born in Southampton, England, Hoskins first played for Freemantle, where he was noticed by Southampton when playing against them in a reserve fixture in 1904. He joined the Saints shortly after and made his debut on Christmas Day 1906. According to Holley & Chalk's "The Alphabet of the Saints he was "always on the brink of establishing himself in the first eleven".[1] He failed to score in any of his 21 Southern League appearances, but did score in each of his three FA Cup matches.

He moved to Wolverhampton Wanderers in May 1908. He played 14 league games in the 1908–09 and 1909–10 seasons, before playing for Dudley Town and Shrewsbury Town.

Management career

He joined the office staff at Wolves and eventually became the club secretary in 1922. As secretary he also acted as assistant to Wolves' managers Jack Addenbrooke and George Jobey, taking over as manager in May 1924, combining his secretarial duties with those of managing the playing side, as was the norm at the time.

His first season in charge at Molineux saw Wolves finish sixth in Division Two, a vast improvement on the previous post-war seasons. The following season, Wolves continued to challenge at the top of the table; they would eventually finish in 4th place, but Hoskins surprisingly left Molineux to take up the secretary-manager's post at Gillingham in March 1926. He spent almost three seasons at Gillingham, with the side always struggling in the lower reaches of Division Three (South) and left in 1929 to become secretary-manager at Torquay United, taking over from Percy Mackrill. His only full season in charge at Plainmoor saw Torquay finish 19th out of 22 sides, and he left in July 1930. He later worked as a trainer, coach and scout for a number of non-league sides up to the start of the war in 1939, at which point he left football.

External links

References

  1. ^ Duncan Holley & Gary Chalk (1992). The Alphabet of the Saints. ACL & Polar Publishing. ISBN 0-9514862-3-3.