My grandfather was Cardiff's tragic Cup Final hero

At dawn today, his grandson set off on the long trek from Edinburgh to join the Welsh cavalcade up the M4 from every nook and cranny of the Rhondda and beyond.

While they descend on Wembley in their replica shirts, Ferguson had planned to be wearing the real thing — the laced-up royal blue No 9 jersey worn by his grandfather on Cardiff's last big day out in the smoke.

"I got talked out of the idea because it's getting quite delicate in its old age," he said.

"It would have been quite something to have worn the same shirt at two Wembley Cup Finals 81 years apart but the family felt it was safer left with my uncle in St Andrews.

"I'd have walked over broken glass all the way to London because of what this means to the family.

"I never thought I'd see the day Cardiff City played in the final of the FA Cup. People have asked how I'd feel about my grandfather losing his record as the only man to take the Cup out of England, but nothing would please me more.

"It's going to be a very emotional day. I think I'll be OK but my father Tom, who's 82, might have a problem holding it all together, especially when the Welsh guys start singing.

"That's when there'll be a tear in his eye, thinking about his brother and what it meant to all those Cardiff fans all those years ago."

Eighteen months earlier, in November 1925, the Welsh club had paid Motherwell £4,000, then a record transfer fee, for Ferguson at the zenith of a career which put him among the precious few British players to have scored more than 350 goals.

Two years later, Cardiff sold him for £500 to Dundee where, plagued by back trouble and barracked by the fans when the goals dried up, he sank into deep depression.

He was last seen alive on January 7, 1930, after a training session at Dens Park. They found him there the next morning, slumped over a gas cooker with a cap pulled over his head.

The family believe that ill health, rather than any on-field crisis, drove him to suicide.

"My grandfather suffered from insomnia and at the time he kept losing his balance," said Ferguson junior, a 52-year-old company director.

"My grandmother, who lived to be 98, was pregnant with my uncle Jack at the time. A number of people who knew my grandfather well thought that the imbalance was caused by the onset of a brain tumour and that was one of the reasons for what happened."

In a previous life, I spent eight years reporting Cardiff for the South Wales Echo. Cardiff's monopoly of the Welsh Cup guaranteed an annual passport into Europe.

Once in Moscow, players, directors and five supporters were offered the choice of a night out — the Russian State Circus or the Bolshoi Ballet.

Everyone opted for the circus save for one fan, who returned to his hotel behind the Kremlin in his Bluebirds bobble hat.

Asked how he had found the Bolshoi, he replied: "All right, like. But too much dancing."

Then there was the night in Vienna when one of the directors, an Arthur Daley type who could have come straight out of Minder, removed his glass eye in a restaurant after one stein too many and rolled it across the table.

"There you go son," he said. "That'll see you through the trip."

Goodness only knows where he will be rolling it tonight because it is a fact of FA Cup life that the Bluebirds never lose at Wembley when Hugh Ferguson is there . . .