The son of one of Musselburgh’s most famous sporting heroes, John White, has rekindled his father’s complex legacy through a stage play at the Edinburgh Fringe.
John White played 183 league games for Spurs between 1959 and 1964 and was a standout player in the legendary team that won the double in 1961 and the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1963.
Incredibly, his life was cut short by a lightning strike at the age of 27 at Crews Hill Golf Club.
His son Rob was five months old when he died and did not ever know his father, but has been fascinated by uncovering his father’s legacy through the memories of others ever since.
The play – which stars Cal Newman as 31 distinct characters – concerns the interwoven story of both John and Rob, as the latter searches for clues about his father in match programmes, photographs, and heirlooms.
Rob, 62, said he had a “premonition” at a young age that he would find a box of his father’s things in the attic.
“Finding this stuff was quite magical for me, but actually I couldn’t share it with people because I knew I wasn’t really supposed to know.”
He elaborated: “As far as I was concerned, it was my treasure chest, and I was the only person that would access that.
“I used to actually go there as an eight or nine-year-old kid and actually physically grieve.
“You know, when I was reading through these newspaper cuttings of the day he died, it was national news. It was everywhere.
“As a kid, I would get really sad. It was this place of comfort that I would go to that I knew would upset me. But that was part of the process.”
The stage play, which was based on a 2011 book Rob co-authored with sportswriter Julie Welch, traces the father-son story as part of an unconventional “figure of eight” narrative.
John’s life and Rob’s sometimes heartbreaking quest to put together the fragments are traced. The two threads meet in the middle at Rob’s birth, forming a double ring or figure of eight.
This element of the show, conceived by writer Martin Murphy, mirrors John’s death, where he held his hands together while huddling under a tree during the thunderstorm, fusing rings from his left and right hands together.
Multiple elements of John’s life, such as a seasonal affective disorder, or missing a penalty on purpose for Falkirk, are merely hypotheses, inferred from the evidence that still exists.
Cal Newman, 27, who has been attached from the start, said that channelling multiple, sometimes contradictory perspectives on a character with a different accent to his own has been a struggle.
“I still find it challenging, but I’ve had lots of support with the show – also had people that I could go to for help with the accent.
“It feels, I think it feels connected and it feels honest. Whether it’s accurate, I sort of don’t care anymore. As long as it’s truthful.”
Rob says he still returns frequently to Musselburgh: “It’s a place where I felt comfortable as a kid because my granny White had a little cabinet in the corner of her room, which had all these little trinkets that were to do with my dad.
“It still wasn’t talked about openly, but his presence wasn’t denied up here, if that makes any sense.”
Rob added that his mother, Sandra, found it difficult to discuss his dad’s legacy, and received little support from the football club and the wider community.
The topic of his father was more openly discussed in Musselburgh than in London, but “there were still weird moments of going into a shop with my sister and it being a bit like a pub where everything stops, everyone stops talking, and all these heads turn and look”.
“People must have known, because he was one of the most famous people from Musselburgh”, he added.
Aside from exploring his own relationship with his father’s legacy, Rob was also keen to preserve the legacy of footballers “from the old days”, whom he believes are being overlooked in the glitzy, fast-paced world of modern football.
The show debuted at the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in 2024 and has continued with two successful runs at the Edinburgh Fringe and London venues like Jacksons Lane and Underbelly Soho.
Cal added: “I think it resonates because, especially for a younger generation, who might not have heard this story, you read the scripts or you see the performance, and you think, how can this possibly be a true story?
“Someone who came from very humble beginnings, becoming one of the best players of that generation, and then being struck by lightning. It’s just impossible.”
Cal said he connected to the story as a non-football-fan because of the “framework of a very human story”.
“It’s about male mental health, it’s about celebrating the positive aspects of masculinity,” he explained.
“It’s about grief and how we deal with grief and learning to be a man without that male figure in your life.
“That was the stuff that really resonated with me. And I don’t see a lot of theatre that’s got that in it.”
In the play, John, too, loses his father at a young age, and is forced to live through the loss of every other father figure he’s ever had.
This, coupled with seasonal affective disorder, makes the man known to the Spurs faithful as The Ghost – because of his ability to drift past markers into space – an increasingly troubled figure.
While Rob said that he was hopeful the play continues, and Cal said he’d act in the play “wherever it goes”, they do not wish to continue “for the sake of it”.
Whatever they do, they can be assured that John White’s legacy is set in stone, both in Musselburgh and London.
John White was inducted into the Tottenham Hotspur Hall of Fame in 2004 and the Scottish Football Hall of Fame in 2005.
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