Jack Grealish’s 79-Year Family Connection to Everton Football Club
It’s a story that begins not in Birmingham or Manchester, but across the Irish Sea — in post-war Dublin, 1946. A 13-year-old boy named Joe Burke, Jack Grealish’s grandfather, had just left school with little more than a football and a dream. Dublin, at the time, was struggling: the city was scarred by poverty, gripped by a housing crisis, and weighed down by the economic hangover of the war years.
But hardship never dulled Joe’s love for the game. Every scrap of football news that drifted over from England was devoured eagerly — and no team captured his imagination quite like Everton. That season, the Toffees had three Irish players in their ranks — Peter Farrell, Tommy Eglington, and Alex Stevenson — heroes who made the blue of Everton feel like an extension of home. In the early 1950s, the club would even boast as many as seven Irish players across three seasons, further deepening the bond between Dublin and Goodison Park. So strong was young Joe’s devotion and sense of adventure that he and a few friends decided to take a chance few others would dare: they stowed away on a ferry from Dublin to Liverpool, determined to see Everton play in the flesh.
Liverpool in 1946 was a city still bearing the scars of war. Bomb sites littered the landscape, and entire streets stood in ruin. Aerial photographs from that summer show the extent of the devastation — the lingering shadow of the Blitz, which had damaged or destroyed nearly a third of the city’s homes.
Yet amid the rubble stood Goodison Park, a beacon of life and hope. When Joe and his mates finally arrived at the ground, they did what countless youngsters did in those days — they asked kind-hearted Evertonians to lift them over the turnstiles. With no money to pay their way, generosity and community spirit became their ticket inside.
Joe would go on to attend three matches during the 1946–47 season, until reality caught up with him. At just thirteen and a half, he took a job as a messenger boy for a local chemist — the first step in a working life that would take him far from Dublin.
But his affection for Everton never left him. Even years later, after moving to Birmingham, Joe’s heart still carried the blue of Merseyside. Fate, however, had a twist in store. He eventually married the granddaughter of none other than Billy Garraty, the legendary Aston Villa and England striker — and, generations later, the great-great-grandfather of one of English football’s modern icons: Jack Grealish.
Nearly eight decades on, the Jack’s family’s football story still carries the echoes of those early days — a tale of boats, bombsites, and boyhood dreams that began with a young Dublin lad who has always had a deep affection for Everton.