Peter the Great- football's quiet revolutionary
Chapter Eleven
Why Peter McWilliam left Arsenal in 1938 is unclear. It is unlikely to have been either because of recruitment or results. In the four years he had been Chief Scout the club had just won the League in 1937, as it had in 1934-5, and the Cup in 1936. The year he left Arsenal would finish a credible fifth. In fact the trio of him, Whittaker/Shaw and Allison was exactly as successful as Herbert Chapman had been at his time at the club. Chapman had rebuilt the club over the four years to 1930 and then won four trophies over the next four. McWilliam, Allison and Whittaker and Shaw would from 1934 to 1938 win exactly the same trophies and to do so also see the clearly successful rebuilding of a team that under Chapman had frankly been ageing. 1934 alone saw the introduction of eight players, most importantly Wilf Copping and Jack Crayston both from Northern football, of which McWilliam had deep knowledge and where he was very much at home in both senses of the word. The two were to take the field a total of three hundred and fifty-seven games for the Gunners over fourteen playing-years. McWilliam had also that same year on arrival been given charge of allocating players to Margate for Jack Ramsay to bring on. Then in 1935-36 two players more would be brought in from outside, two were brought up into the top squad now of twenty-nine or through into the first team group, the latter Leslie Compton. One indeed went straight into the first team. None left. In 1936-37 two of the senior players had been transferred out, one had retired and five came in, three from other clubs, one recruited directly from Scotland plus local boy, Dennis Compton, Leslie's brother and later better known as an England cricketer. Three took their place in the First team, three out, three in. In 1937-38 one retired, the enormously important Alex James. Rebuilding again seemed to be the order of the day. Seven new players came in, three from outside, none locally, four recruited directly country-wide, all of the latter once straight in at top, playing 72 games between them.
Clearly McWilliam had been picking and choosing talent, a small number from the Arsenal juniors and most again from clubs across the country from Scotland to Wales, Bradford to Norwich to Bath, either placing them with Margate to develop or bringing them directly into the First team squad, and with a degree of astuteness and success that matched Chapman's tenure in every way. On that basis alone his decision to leave is, shall we say, intriguing with two possible scenarios. The first is disagreement in the club's upper echelons, i.e. with Whittaker, Shaw or most likely, Allison, since he not only had his Board directorship and therefore power-base and was also the club's PR face and therefore could arrange that McWilliam and the role he undoubtedly played in the post-Chapman successes at Highbury be subsequently almost entirely been written out of Arsenal's official history. The second and most likely is a combination of one and three. And three is that urge in McWilliam himself to return to full managerial control was too great and an approach from Tottenham could not be ignored. It was, after all, his former club but one that after brief success without him, was in comparison to former times struggling. It had in 1935, the year Arsenal had topped the First Division, been once more relegated to the Second. There the following season it finished 5th under new manager, Jack Tresadern, then 10th in 1937 and in 1938 5th, a not unreasonable position but one Tresadern was said to have regarded as failure. He is portrayed as falling on his own sword, resigning, but the fact is that he moved immediately on to manage in the same Division at Plymouth Argyle. Perhaps with the name Tresadern he simply could not resist the call of the West Country but then he had actually been born in Leytonstone in London. More realistically it suggests unhappiness on his part with something else at the London club, and not on the field.
Thus it was, in truth, that McWilliam on re-arriving at White Hart Lane inherited not a bad squad. It included two names of immediate note; Arthur Rowe, now close to retirement, and Vic Buckingham, and to which McWilliam during the course of the 1938-39 season added just two more, twenty-one year-old Welshman, Ron Burgess, from Ebbw Vale via Northfleet and and also from Northfleet, Bill Nicholson. And it is from Ron Burgess that we have the best description of what playing for Northfleet was like.
“Each Saturday those members of the ground-staff who were registered playing members of the Northfleet club, would meet at the Tottenham ground to board a coach for London Bridge. There we caught a train for Northfleet, or wherever we were playing in Kent, for we were members of the Kent Senior League. ... We were a young side at Northfleet, for the average age of the lads, with the exception of our skipper and centre-half, Jack Coxford, could not have been more than 19 years. Jack was the “old head” amongst that bunch of sprightly youth, and what he didn’t know about the game wasn’t worth knowing! He did his best to impart some of his knowledge and experience to us by his grand example and influence. ... The football played in the Kent Senior League was far better than anything I had encountered up to that time. It was hard and the opposition was robust, but it did us no harm, for it taught us the value of all-out effort for the whole of the ninety minutes of each game.”
In fact where changes were made was in the backroom. McWilliam brought in Harry Lowe as a coach and the reserve team manager. The two were hardly unknown to each other. Horace "Harry" Lowe was Cheshire-born, adopted and brought-up in Halesowen and a late starter. Born in 1886 in 1913, so already at the age of twenty-six he had joined Brighton and Hove Albion as a forward, found himself converted to a centre-half, old-style centre-half, played just two games for the club but had clearly been spotted. In 1914 and already aged twenty-seven Spurs, i.e. McWilliam, paid £75 for his services and there, around service in the Tank Corps in the war, he was to make sixty-five appearances but over twelve years. It meant he was forty when in 1927, the year McWilliam did too, he finally moved on to Fulham before in January 1930 joining to Beckenham Town.
And that might have been it, a forty-three year of veteran turning out for a team that would finish bottom of the Premier Division of the London League. However, there must have been irons in the fire as that same season he left England and travelled to the beautiful city of San Sebastian in the Basque County of Northern Spain to coach Real Sociedad. What took him there is unknown. Possibly it was the success that the Anglo-Irish Fred Pentland had had over the previous decade in Spain with his Scots-based style of play. He was then at neighbouring Athletic Bilbao. Equally Robert Firth was the trainer at Racing Santander but there was no obvious connection between them except nationality. Perhaps it was just Real Sociedad trying to replicate Pentland's success.
In fact Lowe had something of a sticky start at Real but was able to pull things round. At the end of his first season the club finished on equal points with both Athletic and Racing with the former champion on goal difference only and Lowe seemed to have settled in. He was stay five seasons only leaving when the club was relegated and then to Barcelona to be trainer of Espanyol. And there he might have stayed but for the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in 1936 at which point he returned home eventually to join forces with his former manager. After a dozen years under his tutelage he clearly knew and understood the McWilliam philosophy and would as soon as appointed begun the moulding of the new Spurs team they would have built accordingly. He was obviously trusted by McWilliam. There is the story in 1939 of when Arsenal playing Spurs in a friendly outwith the league with the former represented by George Allison, Peter McWilliam unable to attend because of illness, feigned or otherwise given the relationship that must have existed between the two men, and Lowe stepping to give the necessary speech etc. .
And it was with McWilliam and Lowe at the helm that Spurs in 1939 finished a little down from the previous year with Tresadern but still 8th with home form twice as good as away. A year later it was 7th after three games, two away, one at home and then the Second World War broke out. Unlike in the Great War League football was suspended immediately. Friendlies replaced League games with Peter McWilliam remaining in place until 1942, when at the age of sixty-two he stepped down, in part because of the War, in part due to his age but also because his wife, Florence, still living in Redcar two hundred and fifty miles and a five hour train journey away, was unwell.