FORMER Bradford (Park Avenue) Avenue and England player, Jeff Hall, was honoured with a blue plaque unveiled at his former home in Wilsden.

The ceremony included relatives from the late star’s family, and representatives from both Avenue and Birmingham City, who he also represented, at Saturday’s event.

Hall was born in Scunthorpe but moved to Wilsden at just three days old, before eventually kick-starting his footballing career as an amateur at Avenue.

He and his family lived at the New Inn pub which is where the plaque was placed.

During his footballing career, Hall most notably featured for Birmingham City, making 227 appearances for the club while also making 17 appearances for England.

Prior to this, Hall also played for the Avenue in the 1940s, featuring in the Yorkshire League team as an amateur, appearing at least four times and scoring twice in the 1948-49 season.

He died from polio in 1959 aged just 29 as a member of Birmingham City, only two weeks after being diagnosed with the illness.

Following his death, he was buried at Wilsden Cemetery in Shay Lane.

However, it was Jeff’s passing that heightened the awareness of polio, and the need to vaccinate against it.

In the days after Hall’s death, public health departments from around the country reported receiving several phone calls from young people enquiring about receiving the polio vaccination, while clinics nationwide started to report about the lengthy queues of people wanting to receive the vaccination.

Since his death, the recorded cases of paralytic poliomyelitis began to decrease year by year, with the last reported case of polio in the UK being in 1984, with the WHO Global Polio Eradication Initiative believing that the whole world is now close to being free from polio.