Peter the Great
- football's quiet revolutionary
Chapter Six
Peter McWilliam has been called “The Father of Spurs”. Perhaps a better description would be “The Father of the Modern Spurs”. He took on a club that eleven years earlier and nine before Newcastle had already won the FA Cup. It had done so as a Southern League club, the only one outwith the Football League ever to do so. It had done so with fellow Scot, John Cameron, incidentally a man, whose father and step-mother had also come from just a few miles from Inverness, as player-manager. He, by all rights the club's real Father, had seen Tottenham almost to the brink of Football League status. Spurs joined Division Two in 1908. He had stepped away at the end of the 1906-7 season. The club was then managed by a former football referee, Fred Kirkham, was promoted with what was largely still Cameron's team but, when Kirkham was judged to be failing and dismissed, was in the hands only of its directors and somewhat rudderless. It had its effect on the pitch. From the start of the 1912-13 season it had not won a League game in twelve, nine defeats and three draws. Shareholders reacted and the directors listened, at the end of November turning to a man, a Scotsman, another Scotsman, with a huge footballing reputation on the pitch but no obvious experience in either running a club or even a team.
McWilliam's career at Newcastle had come to an end with some bathos and perhaps a little rancour. He had been due to have a benefit match in September 1911. It would have been worth £500 or more to him, £50,000 or so in today's money. However the match was cancelled by the club and on the grounds that his last injury had not been on club service. He could not have been happy, must have been unhappier still when instead he received only an insurance payment of £24, or £2600 nowadays. |He may even have had understandable worries about the future that joining Spurs must have done much to quell. He would start on a salary of £12 a week. It was by no means comparable with modern managerial but at the equivalent today of perhaps a hundred times that weekly figure or £65,000 per year so a good salary .
Yet money is money and the game is the game and there is no doubt that McWilliam came south with Newcastle team that he had been a part of not just fresh in his mind but at the forefront of his thinking and setting the standard. He would later state
"(That team) would give any modern side a two goal start and beat them,"
and clearly had ambitions to create something similar in North London.
As it happened the Tottenham team McWilliam inherited would have almost nothing to do with Cameron's. Five years was and remains a long time in football. Only one of the players from 1907 remained and he played just four games all season. Tottenham would finish in 1913 in seventeenth place of twenty, two above relegation but, despite inheriting a team that performed neither to his standard nor played his style, he had quickly had an impact. Of the twenty-six games that remained to McWilliam in the season he won twelve, nine at home. And the first of those would be against none other than Newcastle, a 1-0 victory over an eleven that had Jimmy Lawrence in goal, Bill McCracken and Wilf Low in defence and Jock Rutherford up front. Colin Veitch and Tony Whitson were still in the squad but not the eleven for what they might have thought would be an easy away-day at White Hart Lane.
It was then that the following season McWilliam began to make a few changes. A number of new players were brought in but for Tottenham the year panned out much the same as the previous one, seventeenth place once more with the bulk of points, twenty-four of seventy-six won at White Hart Lane. It was also a year when he was likely to have returned to Inverness on the death of his father at the age of sixty-one.
And then came the Great War. For a season the League continued and for Spurs it was a disaster. The still largely pre-McWilliam and now ageing team finished in bottom place and, although football was suspended for the rest of the war, Tottenham was the only one relegated when it resumed in 1919, replaced by three teams, the lowest of which should have been Barnsley but was through political machinations Arsenal. A century later it remains for Spurs more than just a sore point but could be said to be the initial cause of the rivalries verging on enmity that exists still between the two clubs.
However, in spite of relegation McWilliam was retained by Spurs as manager, able for the first time to build a team in part from the pre-War players and partly from scratch bringing in a number of new faces. He also adopted his distinctive pitch-side headgear of a trilby hat. He began to take the club's ethos back to the heady days of almost two decades earlier, insisting in his soft-spoken Highland, his Invernesian Scots, on a particular style of play, the then Scottish style done the McWilliam way.
"It's a game of fit'ba no heed ba'"
he would say as,
“he watched contemptuously the teams who played the hump-it-high-and-long game, a crude version of what is known today as Route 1”.
It, Route 1, was a way of playing he wanted out of the game, whilst what he wanted was equally clear. He described the football of the time as having,
“not enough brains in it.”
and,
“Too much stress is laid on pace. Players never seem to anticipate anything or look ahead. Hundreds of men have natural ability, but they do not seem to be able to develop it.”
It must been seen as controversial, it would be today, but such was his authority that he was trusted. And he repaid the that trust and that which the Tottenham directors had shown in him through the War years with immediate promotion to the First Division and by some margin; seventy points of eighty-four possible, six ahead of their nearest rivals, one hundred and two goals scored in total. Spurs lost only four games all season and none were at home, twenty-one played, nineteen wins, two draws, sixty goals scored at the Lane, eleven conceded. Even away they scored two for every one conceded with both a style of play and a tactical approach, about which McWilliam was quite specific.
“At Tottenham we like our players to pass the ball along the ground to the man in the best position, and not indulge in any high or spectacular kicking.”
and,
“..our backs mark the wing-forwards (the wingers) in view of the half (-back) forcing the inside man to pass outwards to a player who is, or will be, a good way down the field. Sometimes, of course, the wing half has to mark the wing forward and then the back naturally tales up an inside position.”
In other words McWilliam's team played the Scottish way, the full-backs marking the wingers, but with a flexibility of positioning and personnel that had been a hallmark of his own game.
And one of the players, of the new faces, brought in was a certain, if little-used, right-winger, Sidney Castle. Born in 1892, he had a playing career half lost to War. He was 22 at the outbreak of hostilities so 27 in 1919, when he was recruited from non-League football and played five times for the first team.
The following season, 1920-21, much of the previous year's team, which had cost virtually nothing in transfer fees, would on the basis of that same home form finish seventh in the First Division, one place below Newcastle and three above Arsenal. It would also for the second time in its history take the FA Cup, in perhaps the wettest ever, 1-0 against Second Division Wolves on a quagmire. At Stamford Bridge Sid Castle didn't play but the team, although largely drawn from the South of England, was reinforced by two Scots, Alex Hunter in goal and at left-back, Bob McDonald, born in McWilliam's native Inverness and a youth player with the team on the other side of town to Thistle, Inverness Caledonian, the pair of clubs that came together to form Caley-Thistle. In addition there was Co. Durham-born Jimmy Seed. Captain that day was Arthur Grimsdell, a centre-half and wing-half, who at eighteen had been one of the first players McWilliam, on his arrival at Spurs in 1912, had promoted into the first team. At inside-left was another brought in by the manager in 1912, Bert Bliss.
It was also in that same period that McWilliam took the first steps in organising something that may also have had its origins in his time at Newcastle United. The system of junior clubs on Tyneside at the time was strong and fed players to St. James's Park but each of the clubs played its own style. A suggestion, with Colin Veitch again a possible source, had been that a single junior club become a feeder to Newcastle United with it being financially helped by the senior club. It was integrated football moved on a stage further that would take the Toon's younger player, playing the same style as the senior club and bringing them through. As an idea it did not come to fruition but may have remained in McWilliam's mind.
Thus it was in 1919 McWilliam approached Charlton, then in the North Kent League, with a proposal that it should become a feeder to Spurs in the same way as had been suggested for McWilliam's former club. Charlton turned down the proposal and took another path, coming to fill a void in South-East London created by the move in 1913 of Woolwich Arsenal to Highbury and become simply Arsenal. In 1920 Charlton, as a consequence, turned professional in the Southern League and in 1921 was elected to the Football League, in Division Three South. And on becoming professional the South London team had hired its first full-time manager. He was Walter Rayner, had been a coach at none other than McWilliam's Tottenham Hotspur and, obviously on good terms, turned immediately to his former employers for players. One, who joined was defender, Albert Purdy. Another was Bert Goodman, who between 1921 and 1925 would play 136 times for the club at centre-forward with another new arrival on the right-wing none other than Sid Castle.
The Charlton team did reasonably, in the 1921-22 season finishing in sixteenth in their division. Spurs, two divisions higher, did still better, still with a largely Southern, low-cost team, runners-up to Liverpool again on the basis of home form. Jimmy Seed, later, from 1933 to 1956 perhaps the most famous of Charlton's manager, was joint Tottenham's top-scorer but with goals spread remarkably through out the team. Yet, when, at the beginning of the season, McWilliam took his team north of the border results had been perhaps surprising in today's terms but not then, with Scottish football immensely strong. A friendly, English Cup-winners hosted by Scottish Cup winners, Partick, at Firhill resulted in a 3-1 for the home side. Partick could call themselves “British Cup Champions”. Then a game against an Inverness Select Eleven in McWilliam's hometown had also meant defeat, 6:3.
The following year, 1922-23, however, things did not go quite so well. The Spurs finished in mid-table, Charlton too. They also matched each other in the Cup, each going out at home in the round of the last eight, 0-1. In the league they were to do much the same in 1923-24 but both stumbled in the Cup, Charlton in Round Two and Spurs in the First Round. However, Charlton had done it without Castle. He, even at the age of thirty-one, was taken from Division Three to Chelsea in the First Division, where he played thirty-two games in a last League season that ended in relegation for the Stamford Bridge team.
And it was in 1923 too that McWilliam finally signed a development agreement with a lower club. It was Northfleet United, another from the North Kent League, and the deal was the Kent club would, firstly, play Spurs' youngsters and, secondly, the Spurs' way. It was the first, known example of such an arrangement; the first embryo “cantera”, “the quarry” in Spanish that would become such a feature not just in Dutch football at Ajax from the 1930s, but also in Spanish football at Barcelona from the 1970s and more generally, at least superficially, in modern football elsewhere.
Why it was Northfleet that finally fulfilled the role McWilliam was looking to develop is difficult to establish. It may have been simply a player connection. In 1914 a goalkeeper in his mid-twenties had joined Tottenham. He had come from three years at Coventry City but been born in Erith in Kent. His name was Bill Jaques and between his arrival at Spurs and his departure in the 1922-23 season he played one hundred and thirty eight games. However, he had started his career between 1909 and 1911 at his home-town club, Northfleet and, although three years after leaving White Hart Lane was dead, might he after the initial attempt with Charlton have been the one to suggest to McWilliam his old club as an alternative, potential nursery and been the initial conduit for talks.
Whatever the source of the introduction, the effect on Northfleet itself was almost instantaneous. In the 1923-24 season it would finish runner-up in its league. At centre-half was Harry Skitt, at centre-forward Tottenham-born Billy Lane. Both would join the Spurs first team squad. A year later Northfleet were champions. In the team again at centre-half, not the defensive centre-half of a decade later but the attacking mid-field one of Newcastle of two decades earlier, would be a young, Tottenham-born, amateur player, who had joined the previous year as a seventeen year old. His name was Arthur Rowe, of whom more later and from whom we have a succinct description of the character of Peter McWilliam as,
‘a thoughtful, inspiring, pleasant-mannered man'.
And from the man himself came an explanation of his thinking behind the new project, the new approach. He said,
“I am a great believer in bringing in young players straight from school and indoctrinating them with the Spurs way of playing football. That way you get continuity running through every team from youth, through the “A” side and reserves and up to the first-team. We train the players to have only good habits. I tell them to treat the ball as their best friend and always to pass it with care and consideration. Belting the ball with an anywhere-will-do mentality has no place in the Tottenham way of doing things.”
It was an attitude to the game that not only wanted kick-and-rush rooted out but and laid the foundations to the Spurs style that became known as push-and-run and by proxy would have in the future and to this day profound influences on football thinking, not so much in Britain beyond Tottenham, but on Continental Europe.
Meanwhile, in 1927 Northfleet was losing finalist in Kent League Cup, reached the second round of the FA Cup, then joined the Southern League-East. And from 1924 to 1928 they took the Kent Senior Cup five times in a row. Spurs, however, did not do quite so well, although well enough. True in the 1926-7 FA Cup they exited in Round Three, the first round they played that season. A year earlier it had been Round Four, in 1925-6 in the second round and in 1924-5 in the First Round. But meantime in the League they remained comfortable, hardly pulling up trees but doing it with an ageing team and without real stars, the money made from the earlier FA Cup win, in what seems to be the Spurs way before and since, having been ploughed into ground improvement and not players.
Then problems arose. At the beginning of 1927 McWilliam was offered a salary of £1,500 per year, now about £80,000, to manage Middlesbrough, newly promoted to the First Division. Spurs did not, perhaps could not, match it and by February he was on his way. In fact McWilliam did not want them to match it. He asked for an extra five pounds on the £15-a-week he was on by then, making £20, or just £1000 a year and still effectively a pay-cut with inflation taken into account in comparison with his 1912 salary, and was refused by Charles Roberts, who would be club chairman from 1899 for forty-five years, and his board. Thus it was that, having five years earlier become the first man ever, I repeat the first man ever,to have won the FA Cup both as a player and a manager, he moved on, at a stroke doubling his salary and becoming the best-paid football manager in the World.
However, there was perhaps other factors than pure money behind this nevertheless apparently somewhat reluctant move. Firstly, in 1905 in Newcastle Peter McWilliam, the player, had re-married, to Florence Woof. His new wife was from Redcar. She had been born there, had lived there all her life the daughter of fishmonger, John Woof, born in Washington, Co. Durham and his wife, Elizabeth, also Redcar-born. A move to Middlesbrough meant that they could return to live in her home-town, not ten miles from Ayresome Park, the club's then ground, which is precisely what they did. It had been there that their four children had been born, Peter Neish in 1906, Elizabeth Jean in 1908 and Florence Margaret in 1912, all three whilst he was still a player, and David John in 1914. It meant that at the time of their fourth child McWilliam's wife and three other children were still living in Redcar, whilst he was as manager at Spurs in London. Secondly his step-mother may well have been ill. She died that same year back in Inverness.
In fact living or rather continuing to live in Redcar would be a feature of McWilliam's career,. Although he and Florence would be recorded in 1926 just before he accepted the position of Middlesbrough manager as living at 13, Pembury Road in Bruce Grove, a small, an unpretentious, terraced house in a now less than salubrious street a ten minute walk from the White Hart Lane ground and they also lived in Edmonton, to the north of the ground, where in 1915 McWilliam seems to have become a Freemason, the reality was that they never really left the small, northern, coastal town. Peter McWilliam would there die at 6, Corporation Road, to which he gave the name Craigneish. To anyone with a knowledge of Highland culture Craigneish is more than significant. It is a combination of Neish, the maiden name of Jane, his mother, who he had lost as a young child of five but was clearly remembered and much-missed and his own name. Peter was the biblical “Rock” and Creag, anglicised as Craig, is the Rock and hence Peter in Scots Gaelic.
Craigneish was and still is a pleasant semi-detached house with a view onto Redcar's Locke Park, in fact onto football pitches there. It had been owned by Peter and Florence for at least twenty-years. The couple are already recorded at the address in 1939, which again meant that it had been kept on whilst McWilliam had already begun his second stint as manager of Spurs. If fact he is recorded that year as Clerk and Manager of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, although the house and the club are separated by several hundred miles.