The Toon E-Book

Roger Hutchinson

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 539

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This is the full, unofficial and uncensored story of one of the greatest football clubs in the world. It brings to life the sensational early successes of the great Anglo-Scottish team before the First World War and follows the club's successes as Cup giants in the 1950s and European conquerors in the 60s, to the Macdonald and Keegan squads of the 1970s and '80s, to its rebirth in the 1990s and through its trials and tribulations of the first decade of the 21st century. Exploring and explaining the lean years as well as the successful decades, Roger Hutchinson brilliantly portrays the managers and players throughout the club's long history and brings the story right up to date as, after the relegation traumas of 2008/09, Newcastle United looks forward to a resurgence in their fortunes as they return to the Premiership in 2010.

Leseprobe

The Toon

Roger Hutchinson was born to a Tyneside family in 1949. He is a former British Weekly Newspaper Sportswriter of the year.

The Toon

Roger Hutchinson

This eBook edition published in 2013 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

This edition first published in 2010 by Birlinn Limited

Copyright © Roger Hutchinson, 2010

The moral right of Roger Hutchinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-674-8

ISBN: 978-1-84158-915-2

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore

To Rosie and Ben

Contents

Preface to the 2010 Edition

Preface to the 1997 Edition

1 Almost the Double: Fourteen Days in April 1905

2 The Birth of a Giant: 1893–1904

3 Kings of England: 1905–14

4 A Cup, a League … and Hughie: 1915–30

5 Almost the Depression Years: 1930–45

6 Shack, Storms and Goodbye to the Second: 1945–48

7 Wembley Masters: 1948–55

8 Sword-Dancing with Charlie: 1956–61

9 Return to Pride and Glory: 1961–75

10 The Managerial Merry-go-round and the First Coming of Kevin: 1975–92

11 The Second Coming: 1992–97

12 Bringing Bobby Back Home: 1998–2002

13 Bobby In Doubt: 2002–04

14 Triumph and Disaster

List of Illustrations

All images courtesy of Getty Images Sport

A group of fans arrive in London for the 1924 Cup Final.

Complete with mascot their descendants turn up for another final in the 1950s.

A group of bell-bottomed youngsters in Trafalgar Square before a match in the 1970s.

The first cup final team.

Newcastle’s bogey ground.

The team of all the talents.

Newcastle United won their first FA Cup Final in 1910.

There were more ways than one of getting to Wembley.

Stan Seymour buries Newcastle’s second goal in a 2-0 win over Aston Villa in the 1924 final.

The Maradona of his day, Hughie Gallacher

Getting back to normal after the war.

Captain Joe Harvey is held aloft by his teammates after the 2-0 victory over Blackpool in 1951.

Jackie Milburn watches as George Robledo’s header bounces into the net for the only goal of the game against ‘unlucky’ Arsenal in 1952.

Milburn scores what was then – and would remain for a further 42 years – the fastest FA Cup final goal, after 45 seconds in a 3-1 win over Manchester City.

The last major trophy of the 20th century.

The stalwarts of the early 1970s.

A youthful Keegan celebrates after scoring the winning goal on his debut for Newcastle United.

A slightly more senior Kevin.

After his ‘constructive dismissal’ a cardboard cutout of the great man is carried in front of protesters before the Hull City Premier League game on 13th September 2008.

That trademark celebration. Newcastle United’s record goalscorer Alan Shearer salutes the air after scoring against Middlesbrough in 2004.

‘A truly warm and passionate human being.’

Alan Shearer and Terry McDermott join other luminaries of European football at Sir Bobby Robson’s memorial service.

Shay Given saving from Manchester United’s Paul Scholes in 2008.

Steve Harper making a save against Watford in February 2010.

St James’s Park in the past.

The present all-seater stadium.

Redemption song ... manager Chris Hughton takes the Championship trophy from Nicky Butt after the Ipswich Town match.

Preface to the 2010 Edition

This history has been written and published independently of the proprietors of its subject matter, Newcastle United Football Club. Indeed, past and present owners of the club would certainly prefer that The Toon had never been produced at all, not only for the criticisms of them contained within, but also because they consider that every one of its modest sales – the few pounds that you the reader may have paid to hold it in your hands right now – nibbles at their profit margins.

Rather than being a defect, that independence is one of this book’s greatest strengths. There is very little to be said in favour of ‘authorised’ biographies of either people or institutions. Authorisation always comes at a price, and that price is the denial of independence and the blunting of authorial judgement by whoever is doing the authorising – which will be whoever ‘owns’ the institution at the time of writing.

This book, The Toon, is written in the understanding that nobody owns Newcastle United. Millionaires will come and go, and their time in charge of the operation at St James’s Park will be marked by success or mediocrity or – more commonly in recent years – by disaster. They will make money from the institution, or they will lose money.

But whatever their dreams, profits and pretensions, they will never hold personal copyright of the immense historical creation of Newcastle United Football Club. The hopes and prayers and embedded memories of millions of people have created that club, and will sustain it in the future, and those people’s intense emotions are beyond ownership or copyright.

So this book is not for the temporary owners and their even more temporary placemen. It is not for the millionaires, but for the millions who always have been and always will be there, in person and in spirit.

Roger Hutchinson

June 2010

Preface to the 1997 Edition

It is impossible to spend any time researching the history of Newcastle United Football Club without coming to realise that, all about you, thousands of others are engaged in the same pursuit. These are the Geordie fans. Very few of them are doing it for publication. But they are all, in one way or another, experts.

One afternoon in the late 1990s I was huddled by the microfiche printer in Newcastle City Library, running through the press coverage of (I think) the 1924 cup campaign, when I became aware of a kindred spirit. Behind me a man was laying open, page by careful page, the bound volumes of the Evening Chronicle from the 1880s – the editions which are too old to be put on microfilm and must be treated with immense care.

He was searching, he told me, among the late-Victorian advertisements and share prices (there were no sports pages back then), for accounts of Newcastle East End and Newcastle West End, the two clubs which eventually amalgamated to form Newcastle United. He was engaged in this labour of love to a specific end. He was interested not only in the workaday results of their matches, their goalscorers and such commonplace detail. He wanted to record what the weather had been like during every football match ever played at the Gallowgate. Often a careful study of the press could offer him this information. Where it was not available in print, he told me with proper satisfaction, he had discovered an alternative. A man at the local weather centre was able to give him meteorological print-outs. With these he was able not only to pin down the state of the climate on any given afternoon – if it was wet or dry, cloudy or sunny, that sort of thing – but also what time a shower fell on St James’s Park on any Saturday since the 1880s.

That is dedicated history. There was not much room for weather in the following pages: Newcastle United’s turbulent life took care of that. But every time I have stumbled upon an item of choice material from the past, my acquaintance from last winter has sprung to mind, and I have felt suitably humble. When the likes of Harvey, Milburn, Keegan and a score of others stated to the world that these fans deserve the best, they spoke from the heart. They were thinking not only of the match-winning roar of the people of one of the world’s great football cities. They were thinking, although they did not know it, of the man researching the weather.

Roger Hutchinson

1997

Chapter One

Almost the Double: Fourteen Days in April 1905

Such an extraordinary seesaw of a fortnight, such a bittersweet 14 days: it might have been an omen of the century which lay ahead.

It began at the low ebb. At 3.25 p.m. on 15 April 1905, 11 footballers of Newcastle United FC walked out into the great open shallow bowl of Crystal Palace stadium in Sydenham to the rumbling roar of 101,117 spectators. It was the second-biggest FA Cup final attendance to date (it would eventually prove to be the fourth-biggest in history). It was comfortably the largest crowd that any of those 11 footballers – who were representing Newcastle in the club’s first attempt at winning a major honour – would ever perform before. And it turned out to be the biggest gate ever attracted to watch Newcastle United Football Club in the whole of its long and distinguished life.

The 11 footballers posed awkwardly for a photograph: arms crossed over their black-and-white chests, an inch of knee-flesh showing between the hem of their shorts and the white band at the top of their bulging padded stockings, their Manfield Hotspur boots carefully laced from ankle to instep, goalkeeper Jimmy Lawrence also in black and white stripes and distinguishable from his colleagues only by his gloves and flat cap.

At 3.29 p.m. their opponents, three-time cup-winners Aston Villa, having lost the toss, kicked off with the sun in their faces.

At 3.31 p.m. Newcastle were a goal behind. Harry Hampton, Villa’s centre-forward, collected a rebound to hit the ball low and hard to Lawrence’s left from six yards out.

The Tynesiders fought back, of course – every side has its chances in an FA Cup final. But they failed to take them. Shortly before half-time United’s centre-forward Bill Appleyard, the scorer so far that season of a respectable 13 league and cup goals, collected the ball from a free-kick and unleashed a typically fierce shot. Villa’s keeper George was beaten, but it slammed against the square wooden post, leaving the upright – and 5,000 travelling Geordie fans – quivering.

‘That, in retrospect, was that. Newcastle’s half-backs continued to play well but their cautious balls upfield were met by a forward line which leaked confidence by the minute. Villa, on the other hand, could feel the cup in their grasp. Their defenders were hard and uncompromising and their forwards were fast and carefree, and with just eight minutes left Harry Hampton poached his and his side’s second goal.

There was no return, and they knew it. Newcastle had lost their first cup final by 2-0.

But they had discovered a ravenous appetite for the big event – which was as well, because 15 April 1905 would be by no means their last taste of sorrow in Sydenham. For days previous to the final, Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross stations had disgorged hordes of laughing, singing men wearing black-and-white hats, umbrellas and rosettes (scarves were to be a later development).

On the Friday evening before the final Newcastle Central Station played host to 4,240 travelling fans. A song had been composed for the occasion. (It was prophetic. ‘Wi’ colours wavin’, black and white, Thor gannin’ up to London strite, To gie th’ Cockney folks a fright,’ was the chorus, and the lines ‘When Appleyard bangs in the baall, He myeks th’ goalposts shivver’ featured in one of the verses.) The trains south were bedecked with black and white. At York the bar was beseiged, and Geordie fans staged races and wrestling matches on the platform.

They decamped in London between four and half nine in the morning. Some headed off to see Buckingham Palace, some went straight to Crystal Palace, and others wandered about the ‘arid wastes’ of Grays Inn Road and Euston Road exchanging banter with the greater number of Villa supporters … ‘Aston Villa for a thousand’, challenged one Brummie.

The Geordie stopped and gazed at him. ‘What d’ye say?’

‘Aston Villa for a thousand.’

‘Wey, aa hev nay mair a thousand than ye hev yersel. But aa’ll tell ye what aa’ll dee. Aa’ll lay six pounds t’ fower on Newcassel.’

There were no takers. United had already that season done the double over Villa, and on the morning of the final Newcastle were placed second in the league, five places and six points above Aston Villa, having scored seven more league goals and conceded 11 less. Newcastle United were the hot favourites. Six to four against Villa were, in fact, generous odds. The Brummie, in hindsight, should have taken them.

Back in Newcastle, in those days before popular radio or television, the streets were unusually busy that Saturday afternoon. ‘A spirit of agitation’ was in the air, and crowds of men, boys and even women wearing black-and-white neckties gathered outside the offices of the Evening Chronicle. Rosemary Lane and St John’s Street filled with a small army of expectant souls as half past three approached. Minutes after Hampton’s first goal an edition of the Evening Chronicle bearing the dismal news issued from the office. ‘If it took,’ the paper reported later, ‘as much out of the team as it took out of those who watched its progress in the north it did more than can be expressed in a sentence.’

Rumours swept the streets of Newcastle as the afternoon wore on. United were pressing … Jim Howie had scored an equaliser … it seemed, said one observer, as if everybody had a telephone receiver at their ear, connected to a wild variety of different sources of information. People stood about town ignoring the Saturday afternoon shops, unfolding the latest editions of the evening press and frantically inquiring of all who passed for the latest news from the Crystal Palace.

‘In the last quarter,’ read the evening final, ‘the Villa scored another goal.’

On Wearside the newsboys bawled with evident joy: ‘Terrible defeat of Newcastle!’ On Tyneside, they pulled themselves together and prepared for the team’s Monday morning homecoming. It was naturally raucous: the players had to fight their way off the train, and wondered aloud what their reception would have been if they had won.

They had not played well, the North-east’s first representatives at an FA Cup final. ‘The United men were disappointing in every department,’ said one commentator. ‘Whatever the reason, whether it was staleness as some say, or nervousness as others contend, not one man came up to expectation, and the side as a whole was slow and listless.

‘I am inclined to the theory of nervousness, because when they found the game going so much against them they persisted blindly in sticking to the ball and playing the short passing game without variation until the end of the match. Had they only given us a glimpse of their form in league matches the result might have been different … Having once found their way to the Crystal Palace, however, Newcastle United may be expected when next they get there to do themselves credit.’

That last comment would turn out to be a hostage to cruel fortune. But Newcastle’s ‘form in league matches’ was something else, as the remaining 13 days of that see-saw fortnight would prove.

The season of 1904–05 was Newcastle United’s 12th in the Football League, and their seventh in the First Division. They had never finished higher than third in the league, but had developed a comfortable habit of winding up in the top quarter of their division – and St James’s Park had already achieved the reputation of a formidable ground to visit.

The 1904–05 season had begun much like any other. It kicked off at home with a nice 3-0 win – Jackie Rutherford and Ronald Orr (2) – over newly promoted Woolwich Arsenal (who had entered the league with Newcastle 12 years before) in front of 21,897 fans.

By 3 December, following straight away wins at Wolverhampton and Birmingham, and a home win over Blackburn Rovers, Newcastle were top of the First Division. Jackie Rutherford had scored six in 14 games, Colin Veitch five, and Orr, Howie and Appleyard four apiece.

Newcastle United, the world agreed, had got there by playing ‘scientific’ football. This was nothing more or less than the possession and short-ball game to which they so stubbornly adhered throughout the losing cup final. It came from Scotland. It was in fact the basis of the Scottish national squad’s series of demolitions of their English opponents throughout the early years of that home international fixture.

This system arrived at St James’s Park with a Scottish boss, Frank Watt; a Scottish trainer, James McPherson; and with a large sackful of extremely influential Scottish players. Throughout the late-Victorian and Edwardian period it seemed at times almost as though Newcastle United were a Scottish team playing in the English league.

Out of the 11 cup finalists in 1905, six were Scots. Four of those were already internationals: the full-back Andrew McCombie, captain and centre-half Andy Aitken, left-half Peter McWilliam, and inside-right James Howie. Of the other two, Glaswegian goalkeeper Jimmy Lawrence (who set an all-time United appearance record of 496 games) would gain his Scottish caps at a later date, and right-half Alec Gardner would serve the club for no fewer than 313 matches. The number of Scots in the team would have been seven if the free-scoring Ronald Orr – another international – had not been out through injury. (Of the minority Englishmen, incidentally, three were Geordies.)

So, the goalkeeper, one full-back, the trainer, the captain, the entire half-back line and half of the goalscoring forward line was Scottish. They played the thoughtful, steady, short passing game of their country; they rarely embarked on mazy individual runs; they kept their pattern through thick and thin … they were, in short, a side which was always likely to be rattled out of a helter-skelter cup-tie, but which was admirably equipped to withstand a long and rigorous league campaign.

And in the December of 1904 they sat, for the first time in Newcastle United’s history, on top of the English league. They were, after 14 of the 34 matches, one point clear of Small Heath (who would become Birmingham FC at the end of that season, and Birmingham City in 1945), Sunderland and Preston North End.

By the end of the month, despite three good wins and just one defeat, they were third. Sheffield United and Everton stormed through a series of games in hand to leapfrog from halfway down the table to first and second respectively, while Newcastle travelled to Sunderland on Christmas Eve (taking with them 7,000 supporters) and lost 3-1.

And then came the cup. In the first round Newcastle were drawn at home to non-league Plymouth Argyle. They drew 1-1, and had to replay in Plymouth. Forty years later a stalwart of southern football, Alec Whitcher, would write a vivid account from personal memory of just such a cup-tie on the south coast against a big team from the north in 1905. Whitcher could have been summoning from his childhood this very game; it certainly provides a view of the sight and smells and sounds which would have greeted the travelling Geordie support in January 1905 …

‘The great day dawns at last,’ he recalled, ‘and the weather glass is consulted for perhaps the first time in your young life … The whole timetable has been planned, and having quite a distance to travel, an early start is essential. Seldom are provincial grounds readily accessible [it should be stressed that, at St James’s Park as well as on the south coast, football grounds which would soon find themselves surrounded by the burgeoning estates of expanding English towns, were originally built in green fields on their outskirts], and this is no exception, for we have to travel to the centre of the city and thence to the Ground, either by train, packed like sardines, by brakes or cabs.

‘Tramcars do not go as far as the Ground, and there are dozens of every conceivable type of horse-drawn vehicle plying for hire, all marked ‘‘Football Ground’’.

‘The cup-tie enthusiasm is at fever pitch, and after jostling, squeezing and the like we eventually get to the Ground’s entrance by way of a road totally inadequate for the traffic … If it’s wet, well, you get pretty muddy, and also enjoy showers of slush from passing vehicles. But who worries? We are going to the blankety cup-tie whatever happens. En route, hawkers are doing a brisk trade, especially with the favours. We notice that the visitors want to display to all and sundry that they have travelled probably through the night to support their favourites …

‘In one corner we easily recognise the visitors’ supporters, all bursting with enthusiasm and decked in their team’s colours. Our attention while waiting is attracted by a supporter’s performing dog, which causes great amusement as it runs round the pitch with a ball at its nose, and if the football was made to bounce the dog would jump in the air, heading the ball in the most acknowledged style. When the dog succeeds in running the ball into the goal there is a great shout of joy.’

And so, after a rural brass band had attempted a haphazard version of ‘A Farmer’s Boy’; after the crowd had been ordered by a man with a megaphone to ‘pack up in front and allow others to see the match’; after the chocolate men and programme sellers had been round; the teams came out to ‘the ringing of bells, the noise of rattles, and the waving of coloured umbrellas and top hats’, and the game got under way.

When a goal was scored ‘we invariably see carrier pigeons released to take home the good tidings, or otherwise, of the visiting side’. After the game the winning team’s favours were sold outside, along with ‘memorial cards, one penny each, the death of poor oldöö’ (insert the losing team).

The carrier pigeons would twice have been released during Newcastle’s cup-tie at Plymouth, to record a 1-1 draw. United won the second replay 2-0, and went on to beat Spurs in a second-round replay by 4-0.

As the New Year matured, United’s successful cup run ensured that they always had games in hand over the league leaders, but they failed to top the table. By early March, after goals from Rutherford, Appleyard and McWilliam had sent the Wolves home from Tyneside with their tails between their legs, Newcastle sat two points behind the joint leaders – Everton and Manchester City – with a game in hand over each of them, and eight to play.

By the end of March they had reached the cup semi-final and dragged themselves up to second spot in the league. ‘How happy I shall be,’ the local paper’s Magpie cartoon character said, addressing the league and cup trophies, ‘with either.’

Then, on All Fool’s Day, 1 April 1905, disaster struck. Newcastle, having qualified for the FA Cup final for the first time, visited lowly Blackburn in a run-of-the-mill league game. The Tynesiders had released five key players to an England v Scotland international (chiefly the Scots McCombie, Aitken, Howie and McWilliam) – and they lost 2-0. Leaders Everton had the Saturday off, and so the substance of United’s failure was that they had used up their one game in hand, but were still two points adrift, with just six games left. And Manchester City had sneaked back into second place.

The week before the final Everton dropped a point at Stoke, and Newcastle hammered Nottingham Forest 5-1. One point in it, Manchester City out of the race once more, four games to play.

And then the débâcle at Crystal Palace. The question was not, after that stunning cup final dismissal of Newcastle United’s scientific game, were they good enough, but did they have the nerve?

Oddly, it was Everton who cracked. Searching their second league title, and already locked in mortal local combat with Liverpool FC, they played three league games between 8 April and 22 April, and lost two of them. Newcastle entertained Sunderland at St James’s Park on 22 April knowing that victory would achieve two things: it would kill the cup final ghost, and it would put them at least one point clear at the top of the league with two games left to play – and a game in hand.

Thirty thousand packed into the stadium, and fully 90 minutes before kick-off the gates were closed on thousands more. But there could not have been a less sympathetic visiting team to the beaten cup finalists. Two years earlier, at the end of the 1902–03 season, Sunderland had visited Newcastle needing two points to win their second successive league title. United had won that day, and the league trophy had gone to Sheffield Wednesday by just one point.

Sunderland were out for revenge, and they got it. Holley and Buckle put them two up before Bill Appleyard tried to swing the game back single-handedly. He found the net from a Gosnell cross, but was declared offside. Undeterred, the centreforward immediately homed in on the Sunderland goal once more. Rhodes chopped him down, and Veitch converted the penalty.

After 25 minutes Newcastle, 2-1 down, were reduced to ten men when Alec Gardner was carried off with a small bone broken in his left leg. There were no substitutes and, with the home players and support baying for offside, Holley ran through the reduced United defence to make it 3-1.

It could have been worse, much, much worse. The fans trickling out of St James’s Park picked up their evening sporting pink to discover that Everton had lost 2-1 at Woolwich Arsenal.

United had two games left to play. With a superior goal difference to both Everton and Manchester City, winning both matches would almost certainly mean winning the league title. On the following Wednesday afternoon they travelled to Yorkshire and beat Sheffield Wednesday 3-1, despite being nervous and outplayed for 75 of the 90 minutes.

And so that extraordinary fortnight, that extraordinary season, came to an end on 29 April 1905 with a game just down the road, at Ayresome Park, Middlesbrough. The home side had not beaten Newcastle since February 1903, and they sat fifth from the bottom of the First Division. They were, in short, no Sunderland. And it showed.

Before just 12,000 people on a warm and hazy afternoon, United went 1-0 up after six minutes. Howie hurtled down the right and whipped in a cross which Appleyard missed, but Orr did not. The team settled. They knew about being in the lead. Eight minutes after half-time Jackie Rutherford from Percy Main took the ball for a walk from the halfway line and beat Williamson gloriously. Sixty seconds later Appleyard made it 3-0, and that was the way it stayed.

United’s players walked off Ayresome Park to the news that Aston Villa had repaid a favour by beating Manchester City 3-2. (City were famously later accused of offering huge inducements to the players of both sides to get the desired result in this game. If so, it was an extraordinarily stupid thing to do – if Newcastle won at Middlesbrough, as they were always likely to, a six-goal difference in goal average needed to be overturned by City before any bribe could be repaid.) The United players caught a special train out of Middlesbrough at 7 p.m., and arrived back in Newcastle Central Station 80 minutes later as champions of the Football League. They took an open-topped omnibus via Clayton Street to receive their fans at the Palace Theatre, Haymarket.

Newcastle United had come, just 12 seasons after joining the Football League, to within a couple of goals of winning the double. Preston had won both trophies in 1889, the first season of the Football League, and Villa had done it in 1897. But the 20th-century game was to be a different animal. Nobody did the 20th-century double until Tottenham in 1961. Until then, nobody had come as close as Newcastle United had in 1905.

Curiously, few people at the time paid much attention to the achievement. The celebrations of the league win were, after the cup final, strangely subdued. There was a reason for this, and it was not that people’s energies had all been expended a fortnight earlier. It was, simply, that most would have traded the league title for the cup. For many decades the FA Cup remained the main trophy in England. It was the oldest by far, dating back to 1871, a full 17 years before the league kicked off, and comfortably the most prestigious. When, in the 1950s, Stanley Matthews was approaching the end of his playing career, it didn’t much bother the best winger in the world that he had never played in a championship-winning team. But it tore at his heart that he had never won the cup – it burned away so fiercely inside him that eventually, in 1953, he just picked himself up off the Wembley turf and won the damned thing single-handedly.

As it was for Matthews in the 1950s, so it was for Newcastle United in the 1900s. The league was nice, but they lusted after the cup. It would be, had they only known, a painful infatuation.

The close of that fortnight in April 1905 marked two things of immense significance. It indicated the arrival of a great football team, probably one of the greatest club sides that Europe has seen, a team so good that it would dominate the remainder of the Edwardian era, and would only finally be killed by the outbreak of the First World War … and it posted notice of the presence in Britain of a magnificent football club. A club which, despite buffets and setbacks, lousy managers and worse directors, bad players and shoddy teams, would never for one moment after 1905 look like being killed off by anything – a club which, time and again, would rise triumphantly from the ashes of its past and stir the whole of Tyneside into song.

Chapter Two

The Birth of a Giant: 1893–1904

April 1905, was not, of course, the month of the actual birth of Newcastle United Football Club. The club had been born 12 years earlier, when Newcastle East End and Newcastle West End FCs amalgamated.

It was something of a shotgun wedding. Essentially, West End had the ground (the ‘Gallowgate enclosure’, so called because it had been the site outside the old city walls of public hangings, which would be better known before long as St James’s Park) and the support, but East End had the players and the organisation.

Professional football was legalised in England in 1885 (although with the proviso – which lasted a further four years – that that the FA Cup was open only to professionals who had been born within six miles of the club, or who had lived for two years within six miles of the club). Professionalism would not become legitimate in Scotland until 1893, and so most English clubs, Newcastle as much as any, attracted an early influx of Caledonian footballers. As one writer would put it, ‘the sight of ten golden sovereigns for signing was not easily ignored’.

But East End and West End, despite entering the Northern League upon its inauguration in 1889, could not draw sufficient crowds to pay their wages. Gates were frequently less than a thousand, and rarely more than 1,500. Committee members were obliged to pay wages and subsidise travelling expenses from their own pockets. It was fairly assumed that the city of Newcastle could not support two football teams.

East End temporarily solved their problems by putting out a share issue in 1890. But within two years matters had come to a head. East End were easily the more successful team on the field, and they applied for membership of the Football League – which up until that summer had consisted of only one division.

The League’s AGM was held that year in the Queen’s Hotel, Fawcett Street, Sunderland, in recognition of the Wearsiders having won their first championship in 1892. The League considered East End’s application, but understandably insisted upon them entering the newly created Second Division (there had been, between 1888 and 1892, just one division, and there would be, between 1892 and 1919, just two divisions). According to the recollections of an official of the time, ‘through the delegates of the club not carrying out their instructions’ the League was told that Newcastle East End insisted upon immediate access to the First Division – or nothing.

They got nothing. The League had formed a Second Division for the very purpose of blooding new sides in its ranks, and they were not about to make exceptions for stroppy North-easterners. The mule-headed delegates returned to Newcastle having condemned the city to at least another season of provincial football and friendly matches with the major clubs.

Over at the Gallowgate, meanwhile, things had become desperate. West End lacked money and success, and in May 1892 their executive decided to give up the unequal struggle and fold the club. In the course of doing so, they offered to Newcastle East End the remainder of the lease on St James’s Park, and this was gratefully accepted. The ground itself was far from perfect. It had been grazing land owned on a 14-year lease by a West End stalwart, William Neasham, and the pitch had a drop of no less than 18 feet to the Gallowgate end goal. The ‘Gallowgate enclosure’ consisted of little more than a fence and a wooden cabin for changing-rooms (although the players usually preferred to change in the Lord Hill public house on Barrack Road). But it was a comparatively permanent football pitch – the lease was renewable – and its location was good.

East End’s problems were far from over. The Northern League programme offered just 16 matches, and not with the most glamorous opposition. In order to attract big sides such as Glasgow Celtic to St James’s Park for friendlies, East End had to foreswear them large sums of money before they would travel to Newcastle, and ‘the first season at St James’s, owing to the heavy guarantees agreed to be paid to the visiting clubs, and the lukewarm support of the public, nearly landed the club into the Bankruptcy Court’, according to one official.

It was decided that something must be done about that ‘lukewarm support’. Newcastle East End, it was considered, was probably too parochial a name to attract the whole of Tyneside, and so on 9 December 1892 ‘a meeting of persons interested in Association football in Newcastle and district was held in the Bath Lane Hall, Newcastle, for the purpose of considering the advisability of changing the name of the East End Football Club’.

Professional soccer clubs in the 1890s had inherited a host of – to modern ears – weird and wonderful titles. Leicester City was still Leicester Fosse (nickname: the Fossils); Burton Swifts were still in the league, as were Walsall Town Swifts. Others, such as Small Heath (later Birmingham City), Newton Heath (Manchester United) and Ardwick (Manchester City) still betrayed their localised origins. Some of those distinctive Victorian names, such as Plymouth Argyle, Brighton and Hove Albion, and Sheffield Wednesday survive to this day.

But the more prosaic Newcastle East End would not survive. Three new names were proposed to that meeting in 1892: Newcastle, Newcastle City and Newcastle United. Perhaps mindful of the words of Councillor Henderson that ‘The supporters of the East End and the old West End would have to sink any little jealousies they had, and be united’, the latter won a decisive majority of the votes. Newcastle United FC was born on 9 December 1892 (although the FA would not formally ratify the change until 1895, which caused some small book-keeping confusions).

The effect was far from dramatic. East End’s old supporters in Byker and Heaton – many of whom had underpinned the 1890 share issue – felt geographically and terminologically deserted, and most of them refused to take the trip over to the Gallowgate, where West End’s former supporters were equally apathetic about paying to see their old team’s usurpers.

So the second part of the plan was put into action. In the close season of 1893 – when Sunderland were once more runaway champions, having scored a record 100 goals in their 30-game programme – Newcastle United applied to join the Second Division of the Football League. This time their delegates quelled their unease about entering a lower division with such luminaries as Bootle and Burslem Port Vale, and Newcastle United’s application was accepted – along, coincidentally, with those of Liverpool, Rotherham Town, Woolwich Arsenal (the league’s first London club), and Middlesbrough Ironopolis.

The final card had been played. It is too much to say that if this plan had failed, if the single professional team left on Tyneside had not achieved solvency within the Football League, then league football in Newcastle would have died. Somebody else would have sprung up eventually to meet the demand, some other club would have risen – but that club would not, in name, in character, and possibly in situation, have been Newcastle United.

And it was a close-run thing. On the field, Newcastle were successful enough. Their first game was also the first league game to be played in the capital: at the Plumstead ground of Woolwich Arsenal. It was an expensive trip, which was once again subsidised from a director’s pocket, but he may have considered the outlay worthwhile – Newcastle drew 2-2, and won their next game, at home to Arsenal, 6-0. The entire midfield, or half-back line, and two of the forward line were Scots. Newcastle’s first league goal, scored in the second half at Plumstead, was credited to a local boy, inside-right Tom Crate.

Newcastle United urgently needed promotion. Their circumstances were similar to those which would be faced by the club 100 years later, in the early 1990s, when it was realised that the future of top-flight football lay in the newly formed Premiership.

Only First Division matches with Sunderland, Bolton, Villa and Everton would bring the gates to assure the future of the club. Access from the Second Division to the First was relatively straightforward. There was no automatic relegation or promotion – that was not introduced until 1899. Instead the Football League operated a play-off system. This at first involved the bottom three from Division One and the top three from Division Two, and in 1896 was reduced to the bottom two and top two. They were known as ‘test matches’, and were played immediately after the end of the league programme. Two seasons later, in 1896, they would take the form of a small league, but at the end of Newcastle United’s first league season of 1893–94 just three test matches were played: the third team in Division Two played the third-from-bottom in Division One; the second in Two played the second-from-bottom in One; and the Division Two champions played the bottom club in Division One.

Newcastle finished fourth in the Second Division. They missed a play-off with Preston North End by two points. (Notts County had that third place, and were drubbed 4-0 by Preston. Liverpool and Small Heath beat their First Division opponents, however, and went up.)

It could have been disastrous. Newcastle United had hobbled through their first league season, asking visiting clubs to take IOUs instead of immediate payment, and on one occasion telling Liverpool that they would probably not be able to afford the trip to Merseyside, although eventually they did travel. Sunderland helped out in a comradely fashion, visiting St James’s Park four times to play friendlies, as did Sheffield United, who sportingly travelled for a minimal fee.

But at the end of the 1893–94 season Newcastle owed other league clubs the colossal sum of £600. A foreclosure by any one of them would have been fatal. The largest sum, £50, was due to First Division Stoke, in return for a friendly. United’s secretary James Neylon approached his opposite number at Stoke and explained the dire situation. Stoke not only agreed to sit quietly on their part of the debt, but also to approach the other clubs and persuade them to do likewise. This was accomplished, and Newcastle United’s committee breathed again.

In the close season of 1894 the club changed its playing colours from red shirts and white shorts to ‘black-and-white shirts (two-inch stripe) and dark knickers’. If they thought this might encourage a change of fortune they were sadly mistaken. The 1894–95 season proved to be the new club’s lowest point.

On the field they were simply dreadful. Suddenly their defence leaked goals – during the first league season, 39 had been conceded in 28 games; in that second season 84 went past an inadequate back line. Newcastle finished the season in the bottom half of the Second Division, 11 points away from a play-off position. They had been knocked out of the cup 7-1 by league champions Aston Villa, and finished their league programme by being hammered 9-0 by Burton Wanderers. That remains Newcastle United’s heaviest defeat ever, and it was suffered at the hands of a club which two years later would drop out of the Football League – and out of football history – for good.

Home gates were averaging less than 4,000, and the club was haemorrhaging both goals and money. In 1895 only a superman, it seemed, could save Newcastle United. Luckily, there was one waiting.

Frank Watt arrived in Newcastle from Dundee on 28 December 1895. A Scot, he had first played football for his Edinburgh cadet corps at the age of 18 back in 1872. He fell instantly in love with the young sport and became firstly a referee and then, in 1876, the first honorary secretary of the Edinburgh Football Association. In 1878 Watt helped to establish one of the oldest Scottish clubs, St Bernard’s FC of Powderhall in Edinburgh. After a spell working as a joiner in England he was enticed back to his native Edinburgh when the local FA became the East of Scotland Football Association. Watt was offered £80 a year to be its actual, rather than honorary, secretary.

Early in 1895 Frank Watt moved north to become the first secretary of the two-year-old Dundee Football Club. Simultaneously, another Scot, J.S. Ferguson of the Lanarkshire FA, was appointed to replace James Neylon at St James’s Park. But Ferguson resigned within a few months and Newcastle re-advertised. A notice in the Scottish Referee attracted more Scottish applicants, and Newcastle’s directors – who were familiar with both Dundee FC (having poached a player from the club 12 months earlier) and Frank Watt – asked Watt for guidance.

Watt duly recommended Willie Waugh, the secretary of his old club St Bernard’s FC, who had just won the Scottish Cup, and who a year before had celebrated their first season in the Scottish First Division by finishing third behind Celtic and Hearts. The Newcastle board responded to this considered advice with a note reading: ‘Why not take the job yourself, Frank?’; followed that up by travelling to Edinburgh for meetings with him and Mrs Watt; offered them a house and £140 a year; persuaded Dundee to release him … and the deed was done.

It was certainly among the most inspired two or three managerial appointments ever made, before or since, by directors of Newcastle United. In those early decades the secretary of a football club was not merely a book-keeper: although the term did not yet exist, he was effectively the team manager. The secretary signed new players and released unwanted athletes. He recommended team selection to the directors, and frequently (as Watt was to do) came to monopolise that duty himself. The secretary appointed and instructed the trainer, whose job was not the implementation of tactics (what were tactics?) but the maintenance of fitness. The club secretary was the director of football.

Frank George Watt became to Newcastle United what Matt Busby would be to Manchester United, but with far less historical acclaim. He inherited a disconsolate club, a negligible support, and a hopelessly apathetic team. When he retired 34 years later, he left behind him one of the three best supported clubs in the land, and the most successful English soccer outfit of the early 20th century. Frank Watt worked steadily. It took him fully ten years to prepare Newcastle United for greatness. ‘He never advocated any revolutionary measures,’ judged a colleague in 1898, ‘having to combine improvement with economy. His policy of gradually patching up the weak spots in the team has proved a great success.’

Perhaps time did move more slowly at the turn of the 19th century. There was certainly more patience to be found. Frank Watt had not finished ‘gradually patching’ until 1905. And then, in the 25 years between 1905 and his retirement in 1930, his Newcastle United won the league championship four times, a 20th-century achievement which was equalled only by Sheffield Wednesday and approached only by Huddersfield Town’s three titles.

But Wednesday had won the FA Cup only once in that period, and Huddersfield not at all. Frank Watt’s Newcastle United rounded off their four league titles with six FA Cup final appearances, two of which were successful. When he died in February 1932, the team which was still substantially his own were on their way to their seventh cup final appearance in less than 30 years, and their third cup final victory.

No football manager of his time was the equal of Frank George Watt. No manager of Newcastle United has since come close to matching his achievements; and only Busby at Manchester United, Herbert Chapman at Huddersfield Town and Arsenal between 1923 and 1934, Bob Paisley at Liverpool between 1975 and 1984, and Alex Ferguson at Manchester United at the ent of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries would eventually achieve his stature elsewhere. And it is arguable whether any of those three started from so low and hopeless a base. Manchester United, Huddersfield, Arsenal and Liverpool at least had stadiums and money to spend. Frank Watt had a sloping field, a cabin, a terrifying accounts ledger, and a defence which was letting in three goals a game.

He was a striking figure, the 41-year-old Edinburgh man who walked into his new clubhouse by St James’s Park in December 1895. His trademark handlebar moustachios, which he retained throughout his life, would have done credit to a water-buffalo, and his large dark eyes were unblinking and self-assured. There was humour in his face, and he had an easy laugh and a ready quip. He was a man at ease with himself and with his place in the world: the place of a man who helped to invent association football.

Frank Watt found some things to his liking at St James’s Park. In the close season a public meeting had been called to address the emergency, and this had resulted both in a vote of confidence in Newcastle United as the town’s sole representatives in the new world of professional football, and also (the two were not disconnected) in further financial contributions.

Armed with money and a modicum of confidence the directors had made several signings, mostly from north of the border. They had paid Edinburgh St Bernard’s £100 for the Scottish international full-back Bob Foyers, and they bought a new goalkeeper, John Henderson, from Clyde. And they had taken on a skilled and highly popular 18-year-old inside-forward from Ayr known as Andy ‘Daddler’ Aitken.

When Watt arrived in December, the influence of Foyers and Henderson had helped to stem the flow of goals conceded. Newcastle had lost just two league games, had let in a respectable 25 goals in 16 matches, and were sitting comfortably in fifth place in the Second Division.

But the old frailties had not entirely gone. Just six days after Watt’s arrival he was given a clear indication of this when United travelled to play promotion-chasing Manchester City (whose team included on the right wing the great Welsh international Billy Meredith), and returned home on the wrong end of a 5-2 thumping. Meredith had murdered the Newcastle defence, and young Aitken was conspicuous chiefly for missing a sitter late on, before City scored their last two conclusive goals.

Worse was to come. Seven days later Grimsby Town – like Newcastle, a middle-of-the-table Second Division side – visited St James’s Park. The home support turned out in comparative force on a bright and crisp winter’s day: 5,000 fans ‘filled the stands, crowded the embankments round the barriers, and perched themselves in apparent contentment on the razor-edge of the park palisading, kicking their heels together for some minutes before the time set for the kick-off’.

They saw Grimsby inflict a 5-1 defeat on Newcastle United. An off-form Foyers had been dropped, and the midfield so reshuffled that they hardly knew one another, and the whole Newcastle performance, wrote one journalist, was ‘sadly off-colour, owing largely no doubt to their unwonted arrangement’.

Slowly, however, Frank Watt’s team took shape. The rush of blood which led to his hasty rearrangement of the side against Grimsby was not repeated. Foyers and the half-back Billy Miller, signed from Kilmarnock in the summer, were reinstated to the delight of the faithful, and Woolwich Arsenal were duly dismissed 3-1.

There was a typically minor flurry in the FA Cup, which began with a 4-0 first-round away win over non-league Chesterfield, and ended a week later when First Division Bury – who had stormed out of the Second Division as champions in their first season just 12 months earlier – visited Newcastle for the second round. United’s fans were allowed a moment of hope when centre-forward Billy Thompson (not just another Scot but also a former soldier in the Black Watch) pounced upon a fisted save from the Bury keeper and scored. Those fans could hang onto their hopes until the second half, when Newcastle collapsed under a spell of Bury pressure that yielded the visitors three goals in ten minutes. Bury sat out their 3-1 victory comfortably, in a slowly thickening north-eastern fog …

But the trauma of the early New Year had truly passed. Comprehensive home wins over Manchester City (an extremely satisfactory revenge scoreline of 4-1 – and Meredith was playing) and Burton Swifts (5-0) saw Newcastle regain fifth position by the end of the season. They were fully 12 points shy of the play-off zone, but they were proud once more.

Perhaps most significantly, they had won 14 of their 15 home league games, and scored 57 goals at St James’s Park. This may offer some explanation for the remarkable series of fundraising friendlies with which they closed the season. Firstly Clyde FC, who had finished ninth in a ten-team Scottish Division One, arrived and drew 0-0.

They were followed by two English First Division sides. Sheffield United, a lower-table outfit, were beaten 3-1. And on 25 April Derby County, who had finished as runners-up to league champions Aston Villa, arrived on a hot Saturday afternoon, to be dismissed 4-2. St James’s Park was clearly no venue for the faint-hearted. It was not, as yet, so much the size or the passion of the crowd. In the 1890s professional soccer was quickly establishing itself as the recreational spectator sport of the British working man, but some areas were quicker to adopt the sport than others. As we have seen, London did not have a professional league side until 1893. In the north-east Sunderland had already established themselves as the premier club with three league championships in the seven seasons up to 1895. Newcastle, in this period, lagged behind. Their average Second Division attendance was 8,000, but it was too frequently lower. Their home gate against Manchester City was, for example, just 5,000, while the earlier match in Manchester had attracted 12,000. This difficulty with inferior attendances would correct itself in the most dramatic fashion over the next ten years, but in 1896 the question of whether or not the city of Newcastle was willing to support or capable of sustaining a professional football club was still troubling the directors. Still, they won an inordinate number of home fixtures … It must have been the travelling – or that infamous slope!

United also finished the 1896–97 season in fifth place in Division Two, although this time they were just four points off the play-off zone. And Frank Watt’s excursions to Scotland were continuing to pay dividends. He went up there like a reiver, travelling light and returning always with fresh stock in tow.

The team which kicked off the 1897–98 season contained no fewer than seven Scots. There were the two full-backs, Tom Stewart from Motherwell and James Jackson from Rangers. There were half-backs Tommy Ghee from St Mirren, who was signed on while working part-time in a Paisley bar, and Jack Ostler from Motherwell. There was right-winger Malcolm Lennox from Glasgow Perthshire, there was the 21-year-old wonderboy Andy Aitken at inside-left, and the free-scoring Willie Wardrope of Wishaw out wide on the left. It is a curious indication of the strength of the game north of the border that out of this array of Scottish talent (and there were more waiting in the ‘A’ team) only one – Aitken – would win an international cap.

But they were more than good enough for the English Second Division. This auspicious season kicked off at home against the old sacrificial lambs, Woolwich Arsenal. Sensing the potential, 10,000 paid to get into St James’s Park. They were well rewarded. After 23 minutes the former Sunderland stalwart, centre-forward Johnny Campbell, who had been picked up in the close season for £40, a tenner in his hand and £3 a week, took a ball from Ghee and whipped it past Ord in the Arsenal goal. It was the first of his 11 goals in 26 games, before Newcastle dismissed him for allegedly breaching his contract by running a hotel in his spare time.

The second came shortly afterwards, in a style which would have outraged the supporters of a century later. Campbell laid the ball off for Wardrope, who shot first time. Ord seemed to be in a position to save it, but Lennox, ‘by means of a well-judged charge’, knocked him clean out of the ball’s path. Wardrope then headed home an Ostler free-kick to send the crowd into an exultant half-time break. Arsenal pulled one back when new goalkeeper Charlie Watts completely misjudged a clearance, but another Wardrope header completed the winger’s hat-trick and the scoring at 4-1.

Not everybody was happy. The forward line, it was suggested, contained too many old, slow men (such as Campbell and his fellow former Wearsider John Harvey) who were no longer capable of taking chances, and who would certainly never make the grade in Division One. But Frank Watt was not thinking of Division One. Frank had his eye on the route out of Division Two. Division One could, in God’s good time, take care of itself.

Another Scot, John White from Clyde, was instantly slotted into the left-back position. Jim Jackson moved into the half-back line, and the number of Scots in the 11 was thereby increased to eight.

And throughout that glorious, Indian-summer September of 1897, they went through their Second Division opponents like a knife. Walsall were beaten 3-2 in the Midlands (Ronnie Allan from Dundee making his début); 12,000 turned up at St James’s to see Burton Swifts put to the sword by 3-1 (Stott, Allan, Wardrope) … although it was beginning to be noticed that upon winning the toss at home captain Tommy Ghee invariably chose to play down the slope, and that this tactic more often than not resulted in a handsome half-time lead for United …

They could also win away, however. The team which had previously won virtually all its home games and lost almost all away, now seemed capable, with that rugged Scottish half-back line, of scrapping out a result on foreign soil. Lincoln City were next, falling 3-2 in Lincoln to goals from Campbell and Wardrope (2).

After the first four matches of the season, Newcastle United were on maximum points. Unfortunately, so were Manchester City, Burnley and Small Heath, all of whom had either played more games or had a superior goal average – and so for all their efforts, United still languished in that familiar fourth position.

Worse was to follow. On 2 October they visited Burnley, in a first real test of their newfound fighting qualities against another promotion contender. Newcastle were thoroughly outplayed. By half-time they were 3-0 down, and Watts had saved a penalty. There was no further scoring in the second half.

But something was stirring on Tyneside. When Newton Heath (who would not become Manchester United until 1902) visited Newcastle seven days later, 14,000 people flocked to St James’s Park. ‘The crowd,’ reported the Evening Chronicle, ‘was a tremendous one a crowd that was more than suggestive of the gates that Sunderland used to draw in their palmiest days. Those present, too, seemed full of excitement. Hardly had the players got to business before there was evidence of it. Every movement of the men was followed with the closest attention, and breakaways and shots were either followed with a deathly silence [if they were the breakaways and shots of Newton Heath] or with a roar that was sufficient to break the clouds overhead.’

Frank Watt’s gnarled Scottish professionals responded. Kicking uphill, Campbell put them ahead after just five minutes. Ten minutes later he, the experienced inside-forward John Harvey, Aitken and Wardrope moved forward in a phalanx, leaving Andy Aitken to smack home the second. Two-nil was enough. Newcastle were back in the hunt.

By early December United had clawed their way into second place in Division Two, five points behind Burnley but with two games in hand. Their most significant victory had arrived the previous week, when the (then) second-placed Small Heath arrived in Newcastle, and were destroyed 4-0 in front of 12,000 baying Geordies courtesy of two goals from Campbell, one from Wardrope, and a fourth headed home by new centre-forward Jock Peddie, whom Watt had picked up for £135 from Third Lanark.

It was the first of the 78 goals which this outstanding Victorian centre-forward – arguably the man who launched the cult of the Newcastle United number 9 shirt, although the versatile Jock was occasionally picked at outside-right – would score in 135 games in black and white. He may have scored that first goal with his head, but Peddie would become best known on Tyneside, and feared elsewhere, for the extraordinary power of his right-foot shot. On one occasion he hit the net so viciously that the pegs holding it to the ground were ripped out and sent flying. It was a minor miracle of the time that Jock Peddie was never selected for his country: he was surely denied a cap only by the Scottish selectors’ stubborn refusal to give fair consideration to Scots who were based in England. The selectors’ amateur pedigree led them for too long to regard men like Jock Peddie as carpet-bagging mercenaries. It was a problem faced by more than one of Newcastle’s Scots.

It is possible to reconstruct, as through a glass darkly, the way that Newcastle may have played in such matches. It was very far from Total Football. Apart from one dramatic change in the mid-1920s (a change which was, as we shall see, forced upon the whole of the football world by United themselves), it would remain roughly the same for half a century.