“The real England is not the England of the guide books. Blackpool is more typical than Ascot.” – George Orwell (1943).
“It is a strange commentary on our modern way of life that a football club like the Wanderers may do more to foster the sense of community in Bolton than does a governing body like the Town Council.” – Bolton Journal (1949).
FOREVER CONJOINED by the 1953 FA Cup Final, Blackpool and Bolton’s historical connectivity in football continued when the clubs’ match at Bloomfield Road in 1961 was selected as the first League game to be broadcast live as part of a short-lived experiment of televised Friday night matches. A more sombre association was forged when their 1974 game produced the first death attributed to football hooliganism; the fatal stabbing of a Blackpool fan.
The links between the two towns, however, date back further and extend beyond the sporting context. In the first half of the 20th century, when the people of Lancashire escaped the dirty and stifling environment of the cotton mills for their summer breaks they mostly went to Blackpool. So intriguing was this considered that in 1937 and 1938 researchers from the Mass-Observation organisation went along to view the people of Bolton at play at the seaside, stating that they expected “to see copulation everywhere”.
Somewhat regretfully, they ended up reporting that Blackpool offered no “special outlet for sex”, certainly no more than they could find in Bolton on any Saturday night. The saucy postcards, jokes about lusty landladies and the ‘What The Butler Saw’ machines on the piers added up to no more than an orgy of innuendo. To experience the real thing required the finances to secure a hotel room away from the prying eyes and curfews of the average boarding house; something beyond the means of most Bolton workers.
Sex might not have been easily acquired, then, but what Blackpool prided itself on offering above any other commodity was fun, and had done so since it first began advertising itself as a holiday destination in mill-town newspapers in 1876. Having developed more slowly than southern resorts such as Margate and Brighton, Blackpool was determined to make up for lost time when a period of deflation helped to create more spending power and leisure time among the working classes. It was the first English resort to levy a local rate on its residents to fund tourism promotion and by the turn of the century a high-brow location previously known for genteel promenade walks and the quality of its bathing had taken a profitable turn down-market.
Over a period of two months in the summer the whole of the Lancashire cotton industry would, town by town, close down for a two-week period – known as wakes – and Blackpool subsequently became the host to phased holidays known as Bolton Wakes, Oldham Wakes and so forth. Even for those left at home, these periods of rest provided some kind of respite from the daily dourness of industrial urban life.
Recalling his post-war childhood on the Bolton Revisited website, town native Brian Farris recalled that “clothes hung out on the back street washing lines… often were dirtier from the chimney smuts than they were when they went out”. He explained: “The June holidays when the town closed down were by repute the only time you could see across town. I know it as a fact from the 1950s looking out across Bolton from the lofty Scout Road at the top of Smithills. All those mill chimneys quiescent.”
Meanwhile, excited families of all ages would pile onto trains taking almost entire towns to the coast. Passengers would hang precariously out of windows once they got past Preston, looking for their first glimpse of Blackpool Tower – the symbol of the town, opened in 1894 and modelled, as any attentive schoolchild knew, on Paris’s Eiffel Tower.
They came from across the Pennines, too. Yorkshire-born Jimmy Greenhoff, who would be involved in FA Cup semi-finals with Leeds and Stoke and win the trophy at Manchester United, was a regular visitor in the post-war years. “A fleet of coaches would leave Barnsley at the same time – it was known as Barnsley week in Blackpool. Everyone I knew went, including the three children in our family. We thought Blackpool was the bright lights, a really special place.”
As architectural writer Sir Nikolaus Pevsner would comment: “English social history of the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century could not be written without Blackpool.”
The town’s famous Golden Mile evolved after opportunistic traders were banned by the town council from selling their wares – everything from foot ointment to novelty hats – on the packed beaches. They headed instead to the forecourts of the cottage owners along the sea front, paying them rent for use of their land and creating the name by which this bustling stretch of Blackpool would forever be identified. Even in winter, the town discovered ways to maximise revenues, with the theatres that kept the thrill-seekers entertained on summer evenings being used to stage conferences.
Blackpool in the middle of the 20th century was a popular venue for the newsreel cameras. Many such clips still exist, specialising in somewhat patronising pieces where the message was: “Look at the common people at play.” It was a similar tone to that projected annually when Lancashire towns sent their fans down to London for the FA Cup Final. The working classes, especially those from the north, still clearly had a quaintness in the eyes of those controlling the media.
Looking past such superficiality, the BBC’s 1954 programme, The Blackpool Story, scripted by future Z-Cars writer Allan Prior, suggested: “Blackpool is built on an idea: people like people. If you don’t like people at close quarters then you could never like this. Blackpool is built on an idea: give people what they want. For that you need imagination. You need to guess what they want, before they want it.”
While the town was making its name by welcoming the outside world within its boundaries, it was taking much longer for its football team to become known to the wider public in the manner of the Pleasure Beach and the piers.
Blackpool Football Club was founded in a meeting at the Stanley Arms Hotel on 26th July 1887, when members of St John’s FC decided to form a club that featured the town’s name. After becoming one of the founder members of the Lancashire League, Blackpool played their first Football League game in 1896, following a successful third application for election. They slipped out of the League in 1899, but were back to stay a year later, resisting the temptation to drop back into minor football during the decades of hardship that followed. At times it was only the benevolence of club directors that kept them afloat, dipping into their own pockets to ensure that players were paid.
By 1930, Blackpool had achieved greater financial security. Winning the Second Division title saw them begin a three-year run in the top flight, the first coastal club to feature in the First Division. But it was the arrival during the 1935/36 season of a new manager, ironically a man who had been a symbol of success at Bolton Wanderers, that heralded the start of a new chapter for the team from the seaside.
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FOOTBALL IN Lancashire had developed in geographical concert with rugby league throughout the latter years of the 19th century. Rugby had become the preferred sport throughout the textile towns of the east, from Salford to Rochdale, and in the west, from St Helens to Warrington. The towns of Darwen, Blackburn and Bolton formed a triangle of football country in the middle, with all 28 founder members of the Lancashire Football Association in 1878 emanating from that small region.
The area was also in the vanguard of the spread of professionalism, with players – many of them brought down from Scotland – offered dubious testimonial matches or secret payments to work in local firms. Bolton were rumoured to be at the forefront of such practices.
In his history of Bolton Wanderers, Percy Young referred to the town in terms of its “strong traditions of community and independence; the religious fervour and cognate political loyalties that were there engendered from at least the time of the Reformation; the influential country gentlemen who, from their sturdy and often beautiful manor houses in the moors, dominated the surrounding peasantry; and the Industrial Revolution, which made Lancashire the centre of the commercial world in the nineteenth century, and also the focal point of world football”.
Gentry and religion had, indeed, played a significant role in the formation of the club, which had its roots in the setting up of Turton Football Club by the Kay family, prominent figures in local agriculture for two centuries who had seen two of their number introduced to football while at Harrow School. Thomas Ogden, a local schoolmaster at Christ Church, studied the Turton club with a view to introducing the sport to his pupils. In 1874, he raised enough money from prospective players to buy a five shilling football and Christ Church FC was formed.
Conflict ensued when the Vicar of Christ Church, JF Wright, who was club president, refused to allow the team officers to make any decisions without him being present at meetings. In frustration the officers walked out of the Christ Church school, where they usually held meetings, and met instead at the Gladstone Hotel, near Pikes Lane. On 28th August 1877, they became Bolton Wanderers FC. After a few nomadic years, the club settled at Pikes Lane in 1881, but despite having their first permanent home, they resisted the efforts by town leaders to make them drop the Wanderers from the club name.
The identity of the town that the club represented had its foundations in the 15th century arrival of Flemish settlers, bringing their wool and cotton weaving traditions with them. It survived the Bolton Massacre of 1644, when 1,600 townspeople were killed by Royalist troops during the English Civil War, to become one of the most important mill towns in the world. Textile manufacturing – which was accelerated by the spinning machines created by local inventors Richard Arkwright and Samuel Crompton – brought about the urbanisation of Bolton and, at its peak in 1929, boasted 216 cotton mills and 26 bleaching and dying works in the north-west of England.
Most children growing up in Bolton who escaped the prospect of a working life spent in the mills believed they had experienced a lucky escape. Brian Farris explained:
We were taught the fundamentals of the town’s main trade at school but I consider myself fortunate not to have been forced to follow my mother and her family into the mill… I remember taking a message to her in the mill at the bottom of the street. The atmosphere was hot, dry and dusty. I couldn’t hear myself speak but my mother, having worked from 13 years old in that environment, had no problem and was amused to see me in her work place.
She said later that I looked as if I had stumbled on to another planet. I had often been near the entrances when the buzzer had sounded for the end of the working day and the mill workers had poured out like ants from a disturbed nest. They were covered in fluff and dust from the cotton and there was the all pervading smell of the cotton and the hot oil of the machines.
Yet even as early as the 1930s, the British cotton industry had been seeing the first signs of decline, with theories on its cause ranging from the lack of building materials for more modern mills to the greed and bad management of the owners, who remained stubbornly blind to the prospect of foreign competition. The formation in 1929 of the Lancashire Cotton Corporation by the Bank of England was an attempt to rationalise the industry, merging many companies. By 1935, the LCC had closed almost half of the 140 mills it had taken over. In 1950, its portfolio of mills stretched to only 53. During the latter stages of Bolton’s Cup run of 1953, cloth output in the Lancashire mills did at least reach its highest level for 11 months, while manpower stood at 275,000, up 13,000 from a year earlier. Still, it was no wonder that Bolton Mayor Jim Entwhistle had made his New Year appeal on behalf of an industry that was historically so integral to the fortunes of his town.
It had been some time after their formation that Wanderers could claim to be adding much to the prestige bestowed upon Bolton by its industrial prominence. They lost their first-ever FA Cup match against Blackburn during the 1881/82 season and, a year later, were threatened with expulsion from the Lancashire FA when referee Sam Ormerod was booed off the field and assaulted at the local railway station after a game at Pikes Lane. The club’s first trophy did arrive, however, in 1886 when they beat Blackburn to win the Lancashire Cup; and in 1888/89 they lined up as one of the 12 founder members of the Football League.
Their first FA Cup Final was reached in 1894, a 4-1 loss to Notts County at Goodison Park, where their only goal was a late consolation. One year later, Wanderers moved to Burnden Park, their home for the next century, which had first been used for the local athletics festival and attracted 35,000 spectators. Approximately 20,000 fewer saw Bolton’s first League game there against Everton.
Between 1899 and 1911, Bolton were relegated and promoted four times, the final of those campaigns seeing the establishment of a partnership between Joe Smith and Ted Vizard that was to grace the club for 16 years. Outside-left Vizard, a Welshman who had played rugby for Penarth and Barry before settling on a career in football, was well-served by the man immediately next to him in the forward line. Smith, who hailed from the West Midlands, had begun his playing career at Crewe Alexandra, but it was at Bolton that he made his name as a dynamic on-field force and prolific scorer, either from inside-forward or playing more centrally.
It is Smith who links the football histories of Bolton and Blackpool prior to the final of 1953. He won the first of five England caps in 1913, two years after Vizard played the first of his 22 games for Wales, and the pair were strongly rumoured to be on their way to Chelsea late in 1918 after turning out for the London club during the First World War. Yet both remained and Vizard was even placed in temporary charge of the team for the second half of the 1918/19 season, before Charles Foweraker took over and named Smith as his captain. Thriving on the responsibility, Smith equalled the league record of 38 goals in 1920/21, including three in five minutes during a four-goal performance at home to Sunderland on Christmas Day. After scoring his final goal with his head he had to be taken off the field in a state of near unconsciousness, so heavy had the ball become on a wet surface.
By the beginning of the 1922/23 season, Bolton had proved themselves effective cup competitors by winning both the Lancashire and Manchester Senior Cups – then prestigious and sought-after prizes – in the previous campaign. They transferred that form to the national stage by qualifying for the first FA Cup Final to be played at the newly-built Empire Stadium, Wembley, beating holders Huddersfield along the way. Smith became the first Cup-winning captain at the new home of English football when his team defeated Second Division West Ham 2-0.
Anything between 125,000 and 150,000 were estimated to have forced their way inside “incontestably the finest sports ground in the world”, as the match programme described it, and a white police horse called Billy went down in football folklore for his role in controlling the crowds. During the first half, after several stoppages to force the spectators back behind the touchlines, Smith reportedly declined the offer of West Ham captain George Kay, a former Bolton player, to abandon the game, insisting that he was happy to play until it was dark if necessary.
Three years later, Smith’s goal in a second replay against Nottingham Forest put Bolton one game from Wembley again; then he scored two in a 3-0 win against Swansea in the semi-final. In the final, David Jack – scorer of the first Wembley goal three years earlier – was on target again inside the final 15 minutes to secure a 1-0 win against Manchester City.
The following season was Smith’s last at the club, his colleagues expressing their appreciation of his service by presenting him with a canteen of cutlery. Two decades later, Charles Buchan, the former Sunderland and Arsenal great, would write of his on-field contemporary: “Joe Smith, with his all-out methods and forceful language, was the driving force behind the Wanderers’ success.” Smith had ended his Bolton career with 277 goals and continued to score freely for Stockport. In 1929, though, he transferred the leadership qualities of which Buchan would speak to a new role, becoming player-manager of Lancashire Combination side Darwen. After two years in which his club carried all before them, Smith retired from playing to become manager of Third Division South team Reading. During four seasons at Elm Park, he achieved two runners-up placings, plus a third and fourth.
By the time Bolton were back at Wembley in 1929, coming from behind to beat Huddersfield in the semi-finals, Jack had also left Burnden Park, becoming the country’s first £10,000 footballer when he transferred to Arsenal earlier in the season. Having prepared for the final by staying just outside Blackpool, in Cleveleys, Bolton beat Portsmouth with two late goals. They had now won three finals in a seven-season span without conceding a single Wembley goal, keeper Richard Pym, a former fisherman from Exeter, having preserved an empty net on each occasion.
By the summer of 1935, Bolton had been relegated and promoted once more – reaching the FA Cup semi-finals and finishing as runners-up in the Second Division in the same season – while Blackpool were looking for a new manager following the departure of Sandy MacFarlane. The former Scottish international had set about rebuilding the team after their relegation from the First Division in 1933 and had signed the young Northern Ireland inside-forward Peter Doherty,9 but missed out on promotion when finishing fourth in 1934/35.
Blackpool’s approach to Smith succeeded mainly on the back of his professed enjoyment of the seaside. In fact, he loved it so much he remained as the club’s boss for 23 years. “It was a very healthy place, Blackpool,” he would tell local author Robin Daniels. “I fancied coming here. I never fancied one or two of the southern crowds, somehow. They would saunter about, even if it was two or three minutes before the start of the match. They would walk along as if next week would do. Whereas in the north they’d run to the ground, frightened of missing the match.”
After his second season in charge, Blackpool were back in the top flight as runners-up in the Second Division. By the time they were next relegated, in 1966/67, they would rank behind only Arsenal as the First Division’s longest-serving club.
The success that Blackpool went on to enjoy throughout and beyond the war years was an accurate reflection of the fortunes of the town itself. When war broke out in 1939, Blackpool was benefiting through its innovation, introducing entertainment centres, modern cinemas and new public houses – although John K Walton’s history of the town also points out: “Not far behind the facade, however, could be found the crumbling slums of the earliest uncontrolled development,” and adds that there was “no shortage of poverty.”
The war years were prosperous ones for Blackpool – as they had been between 1914 and 1918 – with local aircraft production and the heavy military presence bringing important revenue into the area. Landladies crammed as many RAF personnel as they could behind the lace curtains of the town’s 5,000 guest houses. By 1940, 1,700 civil servants had arrived from London, with the town’s population up from 128,000 before the outbreak of hostilities to 143,000 in 1945. On the last Saturday of July in that year, it was estimated that 103,000 visitors arrived at Blackpool’s train stations. Around 1,200 coaches turned up in an average week, carrying about 25 passengers each – most of them day-trippers.
Many wartime visitors returned for holidays and honeymoons, others to work or retire. Around the country, seaside resorts and sports events attracted huge crowds, and Blackpool was in a position to benefit from both. Even as some of the middle classes drifted away in favour of package holidays overseas, the slack was taken up by more working-class people being given paid holidays and being able to afford weeks at the coast.10
The parents of long-time Blackpool fan Mel McCarthy owned the Ribblesdale Hotel in Hesketh Avenue, by the north shore. “Christ, it was doing well,” he recalled. “We came here in 1945 and Blackpool was booming. The hotel was always busy. Britain’s holidays resorts were booming because nobody went abroad. There were deckchairs on every inch of sand.”
Future England captain Jimmy Armfield, who forced his way into the Blackpool team in the season after their FA Cup triumph, helped his mother run a boarding house in the town and recalled: “Blackpool during the war and immediately afterwards attracted a lot of people of all types and it was tough at times… the years from 1945 to 1950 were a boom time for Blackpool’s boarding houses.”
Ken Britton, a schoolboy Tangerines fan at that time, added: “If you went on the beach on a sunny day you simply wouldn’t be able to move. You would be threading your way through all the people and there was no space to play. I can remember people coming to Blackpool on their holidays from as close as Preston.”
More people were settling permanently in the town, a shift in population that by early 1953 was causing concern within the Town Hall about the slow pace of house building. The council’s 1952 target of 800 new homes had been missed by more than 400. Councillor H Henson, the chairman of the housing committee, said: “If the builders build as they should, we should get 1,000 houses this year.”
Many of those, it was hoped, would accommodate employees arriving to build jet planes for Hawker Aircraft Ltd, itself a new arrival in the town. Alderman Rhodes W Marshall warned: “Without key workers the factory cannot build up. They are already five months behind with their own building-up programme. In the national interests it is absolutely essential that new aircraft should come from the factory as soon as possible.” Meanwhile, work opportunities continued to be plentiful, with Blackpool’s unemployment figures for January 1953 standing at 4,229, despite a small monthly rise.
The resumption of Blackpool’s famous seafront illuminations in 1949 had been a symbol of recovery from wartime hardship. Ceremonially switched on by Stanley Matthews in 1951 – and George Formby and Hollywood star Jayne Mansfield in later years – they extended the summer season by a further six weeks into the autumn, bringing in an estimated additional three million visitors. Their reappearance marked the beginning of a successful decade for the town’s entertainment industry. Even deckchair rental revenue was 20 per cent higher in 1955 than in 1950 as visitors headed for the Fylde Coast from points as distant as Dundee and Devon.
Walton explains: “The town and its amusements brought people together from a variety of provincial cultures in a way that nowhere else could.” There were endless shops selling nothing but items intended for fun, the store fronts providing the backdrop for joyful flirting as men and women walked along the promenade.11
Blackpool considered itself the centre of the entertainment world, with attractions such as Reginald Dixon and his Mighty Wurlitzer at the Tower Ballroom and clown prince Charlie Caroli in the Tower Circus. Of course, much of what it offered was parochial, earthy Lancashire humour as performed by the crude, belching character of Frank Randle, who regularly filled the town’s theatres. The brand of escapism he offered to local audiences never translated outside the area in the way that the exploits of the football club developed an appeal stretching well beyond the county boundaries. “In sport, as in entertainment, the 1950s had given Blackpool a primacy it was never to reclaim,” Walton writes.
In the early spring of 1953, towns such as Bolton were warned that there was a danger of paying through the nose for the attractions of Blackpool because of the established schedule of ‘wakes’ weeks. A survey of 100 north-west textile towns found that all were taking their annual holidays between 20th June and 22nd August. Vain attempts had been made to get them to extend that vacation period and the message reaching them from the landladies was summarised as: “Don’t blame us if your holiday is a crowded one and costs more.”
Harry Cunningham, general secretary of the British Federation of Hotel and Boarding House Associations, explained: “There appears to have been no careful study in the choosing of holiday dates. If prices for holiday are not to be put out of the reach of the average working man and his family – which would be disastrous to the hotel and boarding house trade – there must be a wider spread-over. Since all the cotton workers cannot agree to these proposals it is hoped that the hotel industry will not be blamed for taking advantage of the present situation when the holidaymakers find that the terms quoted for accommodation have been increased for the 1953 season.”
Meanwhile, professional footballers, as well as tourists, had long since felt the allure of Blackpool as a town. Scot Hugh Kelly, who signed for the club in 1943 as a 19-year-old, remembered that “everybody I knew had been there on holiday”. He told Mike Prestage, author of Blackpool: The Glory Years Remembered: “Everything about the place pleased me so much. As I took my first tram ride along the front I thought it was the loveliest town I had ever been in. Playing for Blackpool and living in the town fulfilled my ambition.”
Winger Bill Perry arrived from South Africa in 1949 to find: “Blackpool was packed during the summer season. The town was buzzing.” And being local celebrities meant that Blackpool players had easy access to the biggest shows at a time when venues such as the Winter Gardens could attract international stars as big as Bob Hope, as well as the best of British.
Stan Mortensen explained that there was “plenty to entertain us in the evenings” and even admitted: “From the point of view of club officials there may be too many distractions in Blackpool. Luckily I found the right companions at once and I had no temptation to go off the rails. Twice a week a bunch of the younger professionals would take a long walk, and there were plenty of cinemas – if we could afford them.”
In the early years of the 1950s, four out of ten adults went to the cinema at least once every week, while the second largest entertainment sector was dancing, with 200 million admissions to the country’s dance halls annually. In the days before rock and roll and the burgeoning youth culture, that still meant predominantly ballroom dancing, mostly polite teetotal occasions.
Among the rules that Blackpool’s footballers were obliged to follow was that they were not allowed to dance from Wednesday onwards. Additionally, they were expected home each night by 11.30pm (or 10.30pm on the night before a match) and they were not allowed to ride motor-cycles. “Once a week or so we might go to a dance,” said Mortensen. “One could dance on Saturday after the match, and on Monday. For the rest of the week the dance floor was out of bounds.” Yet Wednesday remained a popular night out among the team and, according to Mortensen, “Around nine o’clock it was no uncommon sight for anything up to a dozen Blackpool players to be footing the light fantastic to the strains of a famous band!”
If the party wasn’t broken up by the arrival of one of the club trainers sending the players scurrying for the doors, then landladies could be relied upon to pass on tidbits of information. “Everything we did was known, sooner or later, to the officials at Bloomfield Road,” said Mortensen, who stopped short of accusing the landladies of being paid spies but said these “good-hearted women” might think they were “doing the right thing” for the players’ welfare by keeping the club informed.
Cyril Robinson came from Bulwell, just outside Nottingham, but was one of many Seasiders players of the era who ended up settling in the town. “Blackpool wasn’t a place you went to on your holidays if you were from Nottingham,” he said, “but I liked it very quickly. We used to go to the pictures quite a lot, which a lot of people did, and we spent a long time along the prom. I was away for about eight weeks in the summer but I liked coming back and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.”
Robinson’s explanation of his living arrangements when he first arrived in Blackpool was a common one for young footballers, right up until the more modern phenomenon of academies stocked by overseas signings. “To leave home was very unusual in those days and I was in digs. That could be a very different experience, depending on what digs you are getting. I thought they should have had a hostel thing so the lads were together. The first digs I had was run by an old couple and at four o’clock the radio used to come on for Mrs Dale’s Diary and as soon as that had finished they turned it off. I turned it on one night and there was music on. The landlady came in and said: ‘What are you doing with this noise on?’ She switched it off. I thought: ‘Bloody hell.’
“Saturdays we used to go to the Winter Gardens, which was where I met Kath, my wife. If we were coming back from a reserve game we knew the driver so we would say ‘put your foot down’ because they used to finish at 11. We went dancing, walked home, got back about 11 and I would get ‘where have you been until this time?’ I just left in the end. A lad I knew had recommended somewhere else. It is amazing how many young boys finished with football through being homesick. But I don’t think the club took an interest particularly. That was because of Joe Smith. You could have had a flat on your own and he wouldn’t have known, although he wouldn’t have liked that. He didn’t take a lot of notice of the young lads.”
As Smith led his team to the 1948 and 1951 FA Cup Finals and watched Stanley Matthews filling the terraces at Bloomfield Road, it was clear that the success of Blackpool FC both reflected and added to the town’s growing profile and lustre. The club fell neatly into the category of “artificial attractions” that, Walton notes, held the key to the town’s fortune at that time.
Bolton Wanderers, of course, had less ability to sell the attractions of their town when looking to attract new players. John Higgins, a Derbyshire-born defender who arrived at the club in 1952, recalled being singularly unimpressed by his new environment. “I trained the first Tuesday night I came here and there were a lot of little lads with dark eyes and they had been in the pit all day and the muck was that bad that night I couldn’t believe it. The bath was that thick with scum. When I got home I said: ‘I’m not going back any more, Dad.’ Anyway, I went back the following week and they were the best set of lads I’ve ever known in my life.”
The close bond among the Wanderers players had been emphasised at the outbreak of war in 1939. Several months earlier, 15 players had enlisted with the army and 13 were called up immediately hostilities began, the other two still being too young to fight. Those off to join the 53rd Regiment Royal Artillery included Stan Hanson, goalkeeper in the 1953 final, and club captain Harry Goslin, who was to be killed late in 1943 while seeing action with the 8th Army Mediterranean Forces. Another player, Walter Sidebottom, died when his ship was torpedoed.
Having won the War Cup North in 1945, thanks to two goals by Malcolm Barrass in the second leg against Manchester United, Bolton then came from behind to beat Chelsea in the national final. But there were only a few highlights in the first years of official post-war football. These included Willie Moir’s feat of leading the First Division with 25 goals in 1948/49; the club-record signing of winger Bobby Langton for £20,000 from Preston; and the representative honours and international accolades earned by centre-forward Nat Lofthouse.
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NOW BOLTON have another Wembley final to add to their club history. Still 1-0 up after 17 minutes, they threaten briefly through a good interchange between Moir and Bell but Robinson intervenes to guide the ball back to Farm. Then, a further two minutes on, comes one of the pivotal moments of the game. When Robinson is halted from taking a throw, Kenneth Wolstenholme brings viewers’ attention to the fact that someone is injured, identifying him as Bolton left-half Eric Bell. For the second year running, the course of the Cup Final will be partly determined by injury, Arsenal having lost full-back Walley Barnes to a damaged knee inside half an hour of their defeat to Newcastle a season earlier. Bolton trainer Bert Sproston can do no more than escort Bell to the touchline, strap his left thigh and send him back out to hobble along the wing. Outside-left Langton moves inside and Harold Hassall drops back from inside-left to left-half.
Interestingly, Barrass will venture decades later: “It was an advantage because Ding-Dong [Bell] got out of the way and we had to convert other positions. Harold was a good wing-half.”
But Barrass’s view remains a minority one, and Bolton manager Bill Ridding seems to be guilty of failing to consider the implications of weakening that side of his team in the face of the greatest right-winger in the game. Although it will take until the later stages of the game for Matthews to completely hit his stride, there is no doubt that left-back Ralph Banks is eventually left exposed without a more experienced defensive-minded player close by to offer assistance. According to Doug Holden: “There was no help for Ralph Banks. We had Bell hobbling on the wing and Harold Hassall had to fill in at left-half, but that’s the way it was in those days.”
Even before the game, Lofthouse stressed the importance of Bell’s role by saying: “We all hope Bell will be able to lend the support necessary to help Ralph Banks at left-back to keep the great Stanley in check.”
Additionally, without a left-winger able to tackle or cover, it means that Bolton will find it harder to prevent the ball being fed to Matthews in the first place. Stan Mortensen will describe the Bolton reshuffle as “the biggest blunder of all time”. Talking to Matthews’s biographer, David Miller, he explains: “If there was one thing Matthews hated it was the opposing winger on his flank tackling back. I’ve even heard him tell wingers to go away and get on with their own job.”
Banks will become a vocal critic of Bolton’s failure to properly compensate for Bell’s injury, feeling that a makeshift left-half and the support offered to Matthews by Taylor effectively left him outnumbered two to one on far too many occasions. But perhaps Ridding should not be held too culpable for acting on auto-pilot and adhering to the formational rigidity of English football. In these days before substitutes, outside-left is traditionally the position to which crocked players are posted. And this is hardly a period in the game known for managers going against the grain and introducing innovative tactical thinking.