The clue here was this player`s surname Gale. And a gale is a strong wind, often reinforced by the fact that it is called a Gale Force Wind.
In technical terms it is a wind that will reach speeds of over thirty miles an hour, and perhaps double. The speed and effects of winds are tabled on the Beaufort Scale, and that was first used on H.M.S. Beagle, captained by our new friend Captain Robert FitzRoy. In that scale, a gale is signified at its lowest level by smaller branches being snapped from trees, and pressure felt on a human body whilst walking into the wind - and at its highest by whole trees being uprooted, damage to buildings, and walking into the wind becoming hard to manage.
This card is from another of those huge sets of Football cards that were so hard to complete! After all, if there are just twenty five different cards in a set it is relatively easy to get most of them within a very short time. But here we have almost four hundred.
Our cards measure 89 x 63 m/m and are untitled, but the cards all say '©1979 Topps Chewing Gum Inc.' on the back, and the text references Season 1978-79. So they were recorded as "Footballers 1979".
These cards only appear in our original British Trade Index part 3, where it also tells us that there are two groups, namely :
1. English Edition. Back in shades of blue. Nd. (396)
2. Scottish Edition. Back in red . Nd. (132)
A curious fact is that if you look online you will see that there is a Topps Football 1979 with five hundred and twenty eight cards in it, and that is just the base set, not the special cards. However this is American football - and it has a certain notoriety because one of the cards shows O.J. Simpson (card 170).
Back to our set and it shows only individual footballers, no team groups, though there are team checklists at the end, starting at card 376. If you want to see a checklist, nip over to Nigel - in Australia - where you will find a player_list and a team_list - and to see the packet, for this set and all the others, go to the main page at Topps1979