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by Simon Lowe (2009) Paperback 240x159mm
224 pages. Illustrated
ISBN: 978-1-905328-72-7
£11.99
The 2004 hardback edition is out of print
INTRODUCTION:
In a world without mobile phones, teletext and the internet, where
newspapers, not television, were the medium of mass communication,
football in the 1940s was unrecognisable to the modern day. From
boots to ball, players’ wages to stadia, nothing remains
the same. In 1939 England had not yet bothered to enter the World
Cup, the First Division was the top flight of English football,
and players were tied to their clubs like low-paid serfs.
In today’s era of highly marketed superstars on film-star
wages, it is notable that Stoke City’s major signing of the
summer of 1939, Pat McMahon, earned £5 per week with a £10
signing on fee, while the manager’s salary was £850
per annum. It was a time when clubs could take care of their supporters’
misfortunes, too, on occasion. Stoke agreed that a Mr Dean, whose
spectacles had been smashed by the ball whilst watching a first-team
game, could have a new pair paid by the club, while Mr S Parry
had his trousers – which he had ripped while leaving the
ground – replaced without charge.
In 1939 Stoke City Football Club had one dominating personality
– its manager, Bob McGrory. The gruff, bluff Scot had made
a club record 511 appearances as a tough-tackling right-back before
becoming manager in 1935. His managerial style was abrasive and
his tenacious personality ensured that Stoke’s players never
rested on their laurels. He was not afraid to axe any player deemed
not to be pulling his weight, or to give youngsters the chance
to pull theirs. He ruled the roost with an iron fist. Amateur
youngster Stan Clewlow remembers that ‘McGrory to me was
an unknown figure, never seen at training times. We called him
Mr McGrory and we had total obedience to seniority.’ The
manager divided fans, too. While many believed him to be a solid
club man, with good managerial nous, others were less convinced.
Fan Rex Audley recalls: ‘McGrory was mean, both in the way
he treated his players and the way he paid them. I didn’t
think he was that good tactically, either.’ But McGrory,
despite being still a fledgling manager, had built a winning team.
Throughout the late 1930s, Stoke City boasted a collection of
top quality players. Goalscoring centre-forward Freddie Steele
had won England caps alongside his Stoke teammates – left-winger
Joe Johnson and right-winger Stanley Matthews. Steele was known
endearingly to fans as ‘Nobby’, due to his powerful
heading ability, honed during countless hours of practice heading
a ball tethered to a stanchion in the bowels of the Boothen End.
City’s half-back line of Arthur Tutin, captain Arthur Turner
and Frank Soo – the first player of Chinese descent to play
League football – remains to this day the club’s finest
ever midfield combination. The side oozed goals. West Brom succumbed
10-3 in February 1937, while Derby suffered an 8-1 thrashing.
Freddie Steele set a new club record for a season by scoring 33
goals in 1936-37, a record which still stands. In the previous
campaign, Stoke had finished fourth with a club record top-flight
points total of 47. The club was enjoying its halcyon era, no
longer the butt of football wags’ humour – its history
littered with wooden spoons, relegations and, in 1908, extinction
due to too few supporters to keep it alive. What the Potteries
prided itself upon now was that most of its stars were home-grown,
nurtured by the club from teenage hopefuls to top-flight professionals.
Stoke had now earned the nickname the ‘Arsenal of the North’.
Given that Herbert Chapman’s Gunners had recently won a hat-trick
of League championships, this was no mean soubriquet.
City played in front of average crowds of 25,000. On Easter Monday
1937, Stoke’s Victoria Ground – which had hosted football
since 1878 – clicked an unprecedented 50,000 through its
turnstiles for the visit of Arsenal. The Vic was a very different
ground to that consigned to history when the club moved to the
new Britannia Stadium in 1997. With barely any of the old stadium
providing cover against the elements, in 1935 the Butler Street
Stand was updated at a cost of £30,000. It boasted a wooden
multi-gabled roof that ran three-quarters of its length. Its seating
was raised behind a paddock, which had steps sunken beneath pitch
level, giving a worm’s eye view of the game. The rebuilding
also saw the construction of an indoor training track under the
corner of Stoke’s ‘Kop’, known as the Boothen End,
and a £1,200 investment in land adjacent to the stadium
to create a sixteen-acre car park.
The Boothen End was a recently concreted bank behind the southerly
goal, under which the covered River Trent flowed at its corner
connection with the Butler Street Stand. The Boothen End had no
cover at this time. Behind the other goal, the Town End was merely
a shale bank, shored up by wooden joists and terraced only halfway
up its 80ft height, which was typical of many such terraces around
the country. The ground’s main stand, the Boothen Stand,
allowed Stoke’s better-off supporters to sit and watch the
action on flip-up wooden seats. At its southern corner, where
it met the Boothen End, stood the club house, in which players
changed before the match before entering the field of play near
the corner flag. The directors box overhung the changing rooms,
and was at that time a wooden, white-painted construction with
a balcony for directors and players’ wives. It served another
purpose for the players – as a stage upon which to showboat
their tricks to impress the directors or, indeed, young ladies.
Supporter Bernard Audley once accused the young Stanley Matthews
of indulging in exactly that kind of behaviour. Matthews, desperate
to win a first-team place, admitted his guilt.
In the summer of 1931, Sir Francis Joseph had become club president
and established Stoke as one of the most hospitable clubs in the
League, priding himself on entertaining visiting club directors.
For that purpose, above the changing rooms perched the white painted
Directors Pavilion, or, as one fan, Owen Bennion, puts it, ‘a
glorified Pigeon-coop’. From here, the players’ wives
and families could oversee the game from the balcony. For opponents,
the Victoria Ground had become an intimidating arena. Its seething
crowds were situated close to the play and were, the Stoke players
believed, worth a goal start. These ground improvements were rewarded
when, on 18th November 1936, Stoke hosted an international fixture
and a crowd of 47,882 cheered England to a 3-1 victory over (Northern)
Ireland.
Although the facilities for spectators had been updated, those
for the players had not. According to Stan Clewlow: ‘Our
changing rooms were a dungeon. In the middle was an anthracite
stove which Freddie Steele had a chair in front of. The kit was
washed and dried in the room, making it dank as well as dark.’
Goalkeeper Dennis Herod remembers the players’ bath in which
they washed every day after training: ‘It was made of tin
and had silted up on the bottom. We used coal-tar soap to scrub
down. Water got everywhere and the place was never dry.’
The pitch, which perpetually suffered from the high water table
caused by the nearby River Trent, wasn’t much better. Stan
Clewlow again: ‘The playing surface was simply awful down
the middle. The bounce of the ball wasn’t true at all. I
never played on a flat pitch or one with grass on after October.
I used to go and look at flat pitches and dream of playing on
them.’
However, all was not harmonious in Stoke’s world. Tensions
surfaced between manager McGrory and his star player, Stanley
Matthews. The right-winger had shot to prominence when he scored
a left-footed hat-trick as England defeated Czechoslovakia 5-4
at White Hart Lane in 1937. Elevated to god-like status amongst
Stoke fans, Matthews developed into a devastating wide-man, capable
of destroying his marker and supplying a stream of crosses. Centre-forward
Freddie Steele relished this service and Matthews became the shining
star of his generation. He boasted his own column in the Sunday
Express and endorsed various consumer desirables, including ‘Craven
A’ cigarettes, despite the fact he did not smoke.
Matthews had earned his stardom by dedication to his craft, which
included a strict personal training regime. He would rise at 6am
for rigorous exercises before travelling to the Vic to train with
all the other players. Bizarrely, the didactic McGrory held a
long-term grudge against his star. As a tyro winger, Matthews
had ousted the manager’s former roommate from his playing
days, inside-right Bobby Liddle, from Stoke’s first team.
It seemed that McGrory was determined to avenge this perceived
injustice. Matthews provided the necessary provocation in the
summer of 1937 by asking for the maximum signing-on fee of £650
– £150 more than was on offer from the board. Matthews
believed a player of his calibre was worth it, but McGrory and
Stoke blocked the rise and Matthews went three weeks unpaid in
protest. Eventually, after much unseemly wrangling, Matthews re-signed
when the directors agreed to increase the offers to senior players
such as Johnson, Tutin, Turner, and himself. Matthews insisted
the increase be back-dated, but it is not clear if he had his
way. The matter was resolved, but the feelings it had aroused
simmered away beneath the surface.
In February 1938 headlines screamed that Matthews wanted to leave
the club. He and McGrory had come to verbal blows once again.
Stoke’s supporters were provoked into uproar. Seven eminent
local industrialists called a protest meeting at the King’s
Hall in Stoke on Monday, 14th February. The packed meeting agreed
unanimously that ‘Matthews Must Not Go’. Claim and counter-claim
flew back and forth in the papers. Matthews cited ‘footballing
reasons’ as the basis for his request to be sold. For his
part, the canny McGrory assured everyone that he worked harmoniously
with Matthews and that he treated him the same as everyone else.
But that was the problem. Matthews was an enigmatic genius who
felt he should be treated differently and rewarded for his ability.
Despite a belated offer from Stoke’s Chairman, Alderman Harry
Booth, Matthews reiterated his demand to leave. Clearly there
was more friction between the manager and his brightest star than
met the eye. The board convened on 15th February and spent two
hours discussing the situation. They decided to block Matthews’
transfer request, which was a blow to the litany of clubs queuing
up to whisk Stan away from the Victoria Ground – among them
Everton, Derby, Leicester, Newcastle and Wolves. Matthews wrote
to the local paper to express his thanks to those who were supporting
him and an uneasy truce was forged. With no possibility of breaking
the contract which bound him in chains to the club, Stan pledged
to stay and do his best for Stoke City. There was no doubt though,
that the undercurrent of discontent lingered.
The Matthews wrangle left its mark on Stoke’s players, who
began the 1938-39 season poorly, spending most of the autumn in
the bottom four. City also had to contend with the loss of goalscorer
Steele with a cruciate injury, caused by a collision with Charlton
goalkeeper Sam Bartram. This caused Steele to miss almost half
of Stoke’s games. Manager McGrory wheedled out those whose
performances had deteriorated. Full-back Charlie Scrimshaw, previously
on the edge of England selection, moved to Middlesbrough for £3,000.
Deposed captain Turner, now 29, was despatched to Birmingham,
and Tim Ward returned to Port Vale.
In September 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stepped
off a plane at Heston Aerodrome waving the new Anglo-German peace
accord, which decreed that Germany, and its leader Adolf Hitler,
had no more territorial claims in Europe. ‘I believe it is
peace for our time,’ Chamberlain declared. The next day Germany,
as agreed in the accord, annexed the Sudetenland, which had been
granted to Czechoslovakia by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
On the pitch, Stoke’s players rallied, producing a run of
form which brought five successive wins in January, with Freddie
Steele bagging nine goals. He finished the season with 26, while
Tommy Sale scored eighteen and left-winger Frank Baker ten, as
Stoke continued their improved form to finish seventh. Stan Matthews
was voted one of the four Footballers of the Year by Charlie Buchan’s
News Chronicle Football Annual.
As with most clubs of the era, Stoke played a rigid WM formation,
whereby the inside-forwards hung back to act as attacking midfielders
behind the centre-forward, whose job it was to score goals. The
two wingers, whose task was simply to feed the centre-forward,
formed the outer points of the W. The centre-half, since the change
to the offside law in the 1920s, dropped deep into the back line
to form a defence of three. Two defensive half-backs prowled the
midfield, winning the ball and distributing it.
For Stoke, Syd Peppitt and George Antonio vied for the forward
position inside Stan Matthews. On the other wing, Joe Johnson
had been sold to West Brom and youngsters Alec Ormston and Frank
Baker competed for his place. Inside them, 22-year-old Scot Jim
Westland, a former Scottish schoolboy international, added some
cultured passing to the general hurly-burly of Stoke’s powerful
forward line at inside-left. Considered by many fans to be one
for the future, Westland was in line for a full Scottish cap,
after being called up as a twelfth man (that is, reserve) by the
Scottish selectors. Westland had persuaded a fellow Scottish schoolboy
cap, left-half Jock Kirton, to come down from Aberdeen to join
Stoke. Kirton had ousted the ageing Arthur Tutin from the half-back
line, while Arthur Turner’s replacement at centre-half was
another youngster, Billy Mould. Behind the full-backs, Harry Brigham
and Jack Tennant, Stoke’s last line of defence was North-Easterner
Norman Wilkinson, dependable if unspectacular. Squad players included
veteran forwards Patsy Gallacher, Bobby Liddle and Tommy Sale,
reserve right-winger George Mountford, half-back Clem Smith, and
the elder brother of Jim Westland – Doug, the reserve goalkeeper.
Even in 1939, there were those who believed that football inhabited
some parallel universe, but sometimes it had to live in the real
world too. Hitler’s troops swallowed up the rump of Czechoslovakia
in March, whereupon Chamberlain pledged that Britain would defend
Poland, Hitler’s next likely target. Stoke City had intended
to spend the summer touring Poland and Germany, although the board
had informed one host club, SV Hamburg, that ‘we will receive
consideration guided by the international situation.’ Now,
Stoke had little option but to cancel the proposed tour as the
Continent slid to wards war.
The future of organised football in Britain was even called into
question. As happened at many other clubs, numerous Stoke players
joined the Territorial Army and other national service organisations,
such as the War Reserve Police, throughout the course of the 1938-39
season. Despite the determination of some to believe otherwise,
war was now inevitable.
The war would disrupt the routines of players and spectators.
For several years past, after every Stoke home game, Stan Matthews
would spend the evening in his father-in-law’s pub, the Jolly
Potters in Hartshill, reliving the match during a few rounds of
his favourite card game, Solo. No longer would City’s pre-match
entertainment be provided by the ‘S Heath and Son’ works
band. And the practice of the Evening Sentinel’s sports reporter
of dispatching a pigeon – with a note of the half-time score
affixed to a ring around its leg – to the paper’s offices
in Hanley was terminated by the installation of telephones in
the press area in the main stand. When football emerged from the
war in 1945 it would be unrecognisable from its pre-war state.
What would the effect of the conflict be on Stoke City FC?
Stoke
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