Like countless other footballers of his generation, Jimmy Seed’s playing career was interrupted by the First World War. During the conflict, he was victim of a gas attack that damaged his lungs and nearly prevented him from resuming his playing career. However, he would go on to make his Football League debut with Spurs in 1920.
In the 1920-21 season, Seed helped his side win the FA Cup; in the final, played at Stamford Bridge on 23rd April 1921, Tottenham fielded four players that would go on to play for the O’s (Bob McDonald, Arthur Grimsdell, Bert Bliss and Jimmy Dimmock). The latter scored the only goal of the game as Tottenham picked up their second ever FA Cup.
Seed would leave the club for Sheffield Wednesday in 1927 and stayed with the Owls until April 1931 when he was appointed as manager at Orient who finished the season just fourth from bottom.
The O’s new manager soon came to terms with just how strenuous his task would be; with severe financial difficulties plaguing the club’s board of directors, it was a weekly struggle to pay the numerous bills addressed to the club, leaving Seed with a minuscule budget. Despite this, he achieved a sixteenth place finish in his first full season in charge, greatly aided by the goalscoring prowess of Charlie Fletcher and Reg Tricker who netted forty-two goals between them.
However, the following campaign saw the O’s avoid the bottom two solely on goal average and Seed departed that summer, joining London neighbours Charlton Athletic. At the Valley, Seed guided his new club from the third tier to the First Division, also winning the FA Cup in 1947. He left the club in 1956 and later had a short spell managing Millwall before passing away in 1966, aged seventy-one.
