Herbert Chapman Part Four

Herbert Chapman became become Northampton Town’s secretary-manager in 1907, ending his playing career just as the development of football in Britain took on a second wind. The number of clubs administered by the Football Association went from 50 in 1871 to 10,000 in 1905, and five million fans passed through the nation’s football turnstiles in season 1905-6 (a figure exceeded by the total attendances of the Premiership’s top 6 or 7 clubs in season 2006-7).

Second wind took two forms: new clubs (Chelsea, Leeds City) and bigger grounds, the real emergence of the modern football stadium as it would exist in the UK until the late 1990s. The first of these was probably Everton’s Goodison Park, which was opened in 1892 and which boasted tall covered stands on three sides (the steep banking on the fourth was partially covered in 1895). In 1894, Goodison hosted the FA Cup Final, attracting 37,000 spectators without actually reaching capacity. Notts County beat Bolton Wanderers 4-1.

In the case of grounds, it was most often a case of redevelopment. Blackburn Rovers would spend £26,000 on redevelopment between 1905 and 1908, including a new stand (Nuttall Street) which held almost 14,000 supporters, 4,000 of them seated. Preston’s Town End stand was smaller, holding 6,000. But new stadia - Stamford Bridge being the classic example - were being built, as part of the risky all-or-bust strategy some new clubs engaged in. It was still a time when a top-class club could be built from the ground up, instantly, and, once built, jemmied into the Football League by way of election (and, no doubt, bribes and blackmail: Chelsea played their first ever season in Division Two).

Advertising at grounds was already a big feature - including pitch-side advertising hoardings of the kind players would still be falling over in the 1990s. This meant that there were people present who were worth advertising to: after 1890, Football League clubs enforced a minimum entrance fee of 6d, excluding the poorest members of society in favour of middle and upper-working class spectators. Economic growth after 1900 may have begun to deepen the game’s appeal as a spectacle, but for the first years of Chapman’s career, football was only truly popular as a game to play, not as one to watch.

Early football films aren’t very useful when it comes to assessing what kind of game football was like in 1897-1907. The lighting was bad, the angles wrong, film too short - football wouldn’t look good on film until well after World War II. But there are some features which stand out. There’s the fear of catching the ball on the part of goalkeepers, no doubt because the rules then allowed them to be charged. Other aspects of the game are physical, too, in a way that wouldn’t be driven out until the 1990s - players are kicked, shoved, sometimes gouged. Players appeal to referees and linesmen for decisions, but officials aren’t mobbed (some were attacked by crowds in this period, and rescue from the police force was occasionally necessary). Goal celebrations were muted, as they would remain until the World Cup.

In short, we can see that football was changing and growing quickly during Chapman’s youth, with no indication of how long this would go on for or how far it would go. King George V became the first monarch to attend a Cup Final in 1914 - but after that, the British game freezes in its tracks for fifty years. What unfreezing has happened since has been reluctant, and it’s been Scots, Yorkshiremen or Europeans who’ve held the blowtorch.

There’s one significant development in the game that hasn’t been mentioned thus far, but that’s because it took the form of an idea that occurred to very few at the time, only one of whom stayed in England to put it into practice.

Herbert Chapman Part Three

When the nineteen year old Herbert Chapman signed amateur forms for Stalybridge in 1897, the FA Cup was a quarter of a century old, professional football was twelve years old and the Football League itself nine. Not that Stalybridge had a great deal to do with the likes of Aston Villa, Sunderland or Newcastle. But it’s worth reflecting on those numbers.

Because they make it unlikely that very many men would have had what we now recognise as a football career. The road into and through the game cut into fresh territory. Now, we can look back and say with some certainty that the footballer of the day would play for perhaps ten or fifteen years, then, if amateur, give it up and carry on with their real career, or, if professional, retire to a pub or a shop or penury.

In 1897, this was all still to happen. There were still real questions as to how long football would be around for. In many ways, football at the end of the century resembled a fad, a bubble waiting to burst. New teams were springing up, new leagues being formed and developed, grounds built and expanded, attendances were still climbing. But how long would it all go on for? The initial impetus given the game by the Saturday half-holiday - an empty afternoon for millions that football had been first to fill (most of its rivals in the entertainment stakes were evening fodder - music hall, ballrooms, that sort of thing) - was spent by now, and other rivals were beginning to enter the market.

And what kind of a career would football be anyway? Chapman was a thoroughgoing Methodist, and the question of respectability was real to him. He doesn’t say in any of his remaining writings what kept him amateur for so long, but it doesn’t take much to work it out. He had been an intelligent child - one might even bring in the term intellectual, born at the right time to take advantage of compulsory primary education, and the growth in other educational opportunities at the time. And he was born into a growing industry, coalmining, still to reach its peak in England and with an obvious long term future in front of it. People would always need coal: people would always need colliery engineers, so Chapman’s thinking went, and so he trained.

Chapman was very aware of the different social attitudes towards playing football for fun and exercise (generally approved of, if sometimes regarded as comic) and the professional game itself (regarded as morally suspect, the focal point for anything from minor affray to full-on riot, associated with gin palaces, wasted youth and national decline). In 1897, the long Victorian fight to rescue organized sport from corruption and the bookies was reaching its climax, perhaps best symbolized by the Olympic Games. From some perspectives, professional football was no more than an unfortunate throwback to an unmourned past.

These days, its easy, if lazy, to look on the early days of the professional game with a kindly eye as the weaning of what James Walvin calls “The People’s Game.” Football was the people’s, of course - it could be played anywhere, with minimal equipment, even alone given a suitable brick wall. But the professional game was nothing of the sort. The top clubs were owned by wealthy men, and the “people” had to pay to get in, at prices deliberately chosen to exclude the poorest of society. In 1897, players were yet to be put in their place by maximum wage legislation, but retain-and-transfer had already pulled its deadly collar around their neck. If this was the people’s, then it was a strange ownership indeed, one in which they had no say and no influence other than their presence at the turnstile. For the time being, that presence was all but guaranteed.

It would take something unusual to tempt a man like Chapman, who was determined to educate himself into a position of freedom of choice, to sign his name on a line dotted in such fashion.

Yet he was undecided for years, truly drawn to football, one of the first men whose life could really be said to revolve around the game. He signed for Stalybridge in 1897, and in the next three years played for Rochdale, Grimsby Town, Swindon Town, Sheppey United, and Worksop Town. That’s one club every six months. For the time, it was a staggering peregrination. Chapman would live and play in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Berkshire, Kent and Nottinghamshire. One wonders what a mining engineer found to do in Swindon.

It took him four years to realize the obvious. In 1901, he signed professional forms for Northampton Town of the Southern League. But the travelling didn’t stop just because of that. A year later, he left for Sheffield United, then for Notts County a year after that, then for Northampton again, then Tottenham Hotspur. Whilst in North London, he married a schoolteacher from the village of his birth, and, for him, settled down: he’d remain in London for two entire years.

It’s hard to imagine who, inside or outside of football, would have seen more of the game, in its various stages of development in different parts of the country, than Herbert Chapman in 1897-1905. He’d witnessed what passed for ancient tradition at Sheffield United and Notts County, two of the country’s oldest clubs - which meant that their original players were in early middle age by the time young Herbert swam into view. He’d seen football’s attempts to invade the south, at Northampton, Swindon and Spurs. He’d seen how the game could fail to thrive, even in its red hot youth, at Worksop.

At any rate, only a spell in the armed forces or on the railways would have seen him have a more widely-travelled time of it. Yet, it had not been a success. A qualified engineer, he’d done little of his trade, opting instead for a series of what were effectively footballing Mcjobs. Useful enough as a bustling forward to catch the eye of club scouts, his tendency to put on weight meant that he never remained essential to anyone for long.

Thus it was that when Northampton Town were looking for a new secretary-manager in 1907, Chapman was a long, long way down their list of likely candidates. Northampton, a young and poor club stuck in a strongly rugby town, failed to persuade anyone they might really have wanted to employ. Taking the job would mean yet another move for Chapman, his third to Northampton alone before he turned thirty - and it would mean uprooting his wife from her precariously-maintained teaching job in Edmonton.

It wasn’t a mining job, or a secure job, and Chapman wouldn’t actually be playing. He took up Northampton’s weary, sceptical offer on the basis of something more esoteric than that. He was, as I’ve said, an intelligent, almost intellectual man, and he’d seen something that no one else had noticed, something that made the Northampton post essential to him.

Northampton would quickly discover what that was.

Herbert Chapman Part Two

Football grows in young soil and greenfield sites. England’s ancient cities - Norwich, Bath, Durham, Chester, Canterbury, Westminster, Gloucester, Hereford, Lincoln, Oxford, Cambridge, Lancaster, Salisbury, Chichester, York, Ripon, Shrewsbury and the rest - aren’t football hotbeds and never have been. Football was an emergent phenomenon of industrialization. It still grows in relatively new places today - Yeading, for instance, which barely existed in its own right until after the Second World War.

But it isn’t always the case. Herbert Chapman - elder brother to the unfortunate Harry “Chapman of the Wednesday” - was born in 1878 just outside Sheffield. The Steel City had been known for its cutlery as long ago as Chaucer’s day, and had been sufficiently prominent to suffer a trade recession owing to the Napoleonic Wars. Sheffield was a fully formed entity long before Manchester or Middlesbrough.

By the time Chapman appeared on the scene, football was flourishing in the Sheffield area like nowhere else. Properly established amateur clubs had been in existence for more than twenty years; the Sheffield Football Association had been on the scene for a decade, and as Chapman bawled in his mother’s arms, it was in the process of merging its own football rules with those of the better-known Football Association. Sheffield even boasted professional players - James Lang, dubiously employed by Sheffield Wednesday, came south from Scotland in 1876.

Sheffield football wasn’t the confection of pub, church and factory sides that would get Lancashire’s game going. Instead, it was transplanted onto cricketing rootstock. Bramall Lane, the oldest sporting arena of its kind in the world, started off as a cricket ground. Sheffield Wednesday began as a cricket club. So did Sheffield F.C., and Sheffield United were formed in order to play organised football at Bramall Lane and provide the ground with a winter income.

In the 1870s, Sheffield was the Silicon Valley of the game. It was the place where everything was happening and developing. In 1878, it pioneered floodlit football, almost eighty years before it became routine practice. It was very much a middle class affair (Sheffield’s Clegg brothers, who were the leading lights of local sport at this time, went on to become Mayor of Sheffield and Chairman of the Football Association respectively), a contrast to the working class conservatism that would dominate the game from the 1880s onward. Herbert Chapman educated himself into the middle classes and married a school teacher: he’d be the last Sheffield man to truly shape the game, and the last Englishman to do so until Simon Clifford.

It was in Sheffield, too, that the great schism in Association Football between professional and amateur codes didn’t happen.

Although the Sheffield Football Association was dedicated to the amateur status of the game - still its position today, as the Sheffield and Hallamshire County FA - its decision to permit its clubs to join the Football Association (which permitted professionalism after 1885) was crucial. Had it gone the other way, it still possessed the weight and pull to split football down the middle. A Rugby Union/Rugby League scenario would have been on the cards, but ten years earlier.

Instead the structure and unity of the game survived. Although professionalism took over the major competitions after 1885, amateur clubs and amateur players remained within the same playing structure. Bernard Joy, for example, joined Arsenal as an amateur player a year after Chapman’s eventual death, and played for the full England side a year after that.

It takes twenty years to make a player. A lot can change in twenty years in football, even today, but 1878-1899 takes us from the Royal Engineers to the opening of Ibrox. Street kickabouts hadn’t changed, but everything else had. By the time Chapman was nineteen and training to be a mining engineer (in his late twenties, he still described himself as a “Colliery Manager” by trade), the top clubs were Aston Villa of Birmingham and Sunderland. And Chapman’s first proper club weren’t based in Sheffield, or even in Yorkshire. In 1897, he signed for Stalybridge Rovers, of the Lancashire League.

Herbert Chapman Part One

Queen Victoria died in January 1901. A matter of months later came the first significant footballing appearance of the name Chapman. “Chapman H.”, once of Worksop, had trialled for Grimsby Town in 1898, but it was the inclusion of that name on a list of triallists at Sheffield Wednesday that marked his break into the sporting big-time.

Chapman was a local boy, son to an illiterate coal miner living in a nearby village called Kiveton Park. He was born in 1879, at the height of Sheffield’s period of innovation and influence in football.

Football was to Sheffield what racing was to Newmarket, long before Liverpool or Manchester had any real part in it. In 1878, Bramall Lane, home to both Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United at times, saw the world’s first floodlit match, a game attended by 20,000 spectators. The FA Cup Final in London could only attract 5,000 that year. Sheffield was home to the first cup tournament - the Youdan Cup - and some of England’s oldest sporting clubs were based in the city(Sheffield Wednesday had already been in existence for 47 years when it introduced football to its cricketing members).

Mention of Worksop and Grimsby make it clear that even in the game’s earliest years, it was far from inevitable that talented players would end up playing for their local clubs. Chapman’s own brother would play for Sheffield United, but also Swindon Town, Tottenham, Notts County and Northampton.

Chapman was a dashing, hard-shooting centre-forward. His time at Sheffield Wednesday was to prove the club’s golden age. When the club won the Football League title in 1903, breaking the Sunderland/Aston Villa stranglehold, it wasn’t their first success. They’d won the League in 1892, the FA Cup in 1896, and had the distinction of losing 6-1 in the 1890 Final, still the second worst defeat in a Final. Nor was it Sheffield’s first. Sheffield United had a League title from 1898, and an FA Cup from 1902.

But it did mark the end of the great Villa/Sunderland days, which would never really return for either club. Wednesday won the title again in 1904. The highlight of Chapman’s playing career came in 1907, when he was made man of the match after his superlative performance in the 2-1 FA Cup Final victory over Everton.

Chapman would play on for several more seasons, chalking up about 15 in total, a reasonable number for the time. He wouldn’t have been far from an England call-up at his peak, perhaps only kept out by the likes of Steve Bloomer.

Those Wednesday fans who as adolescents begged Chapman’s cigarette card off their elder brothers would have been remembering him to their infant grandchildren during the Korean War; the oldest of them would have lived to see Maradona’s Hand of God goal in 1986. Any film of Chapman playing will be tucked away unpublicised at the British Film Institute Archive, if it exists.

But the Chapman name isn’t famous for goals and memorable performances. After injury and ill health ended his playing career, “Chapman H.” , by now a father of three, became a manager, of his last playing club, Hull City, in 1913. And it’s for management…

But “Chapman of Wednesday,” as he was described in his pomp, died of tuberculosis in 1916, aged 36. He died at his brother Herbert’s home in Leeds. And this is going to be Herbert’s story.

Herbert Chapman on Football - and on “Clifford Bastin”

Yesterday, I posted three snippets from Herbert Chapman’s Sunday Express columns. (See under “Herbert Chapman” in the category list on the left of the page).

For those of you for whom Chapman isn’t a familiar figure, he was the first “star” football manager in the world, enjoying success at Northampton Town, Leeds City, Huddersfield Town (3 championships in a row and an FA Cup) and Arsenal (where his teams also won an FA Cup and 3 championships in a row). Chapman remains the only English manager to have won the League title 3 times in a row, and the only English manager to have won the league title with two different clubs. He was the first manager to oversee an England match, albeit without picking the team. He is without any doubt the most innovative thinker in football to have been born in England. His early death in 1934 undoubtedly changed the way our game developed, almost certainly very much for the worst.

I posted the excerpts without mentioning that they were Chapman’s or that they dated from seventy-five years ago. I didn’t edit the pieces in any way, so some clues remained - references to a prosperous Newcastle United, for example. In the 1920s and 1930s it was common to think that football had declined since 1914, and common to see the pre-War Newcastle side as the best in history. By stripping the pieces of their context, I wanted to see what power they still had.

I think commenter Dearieme spotted what I was up to…

Chapman was a serial media commentator, both in the newspapers and on radio (all of the latter gone, I fear), and there is much, much more where this comes from. It hasn’t all weathered well, as you might expect. For instance, Chapman gets his rebuttal in first regarding the disgraceful maximum wage set-up, and his articles on that subject remind me all too much of contemporary justifications for sweatshops.

Nonetheless, all of the following points, explicitly raised by Chapman at the start of the 1930s, still struggle for recognition today:

• Calm and intelligence trumps passion and overemotion on the football field as in every other sport.
• There’s a mental, psychological side to performance in football, which can’t be escaped by ignoring it or by appeals to tradition or by hiding behind football’s traditional anti-intellectualism.
• The Golden Age is always 20-30 years ago, and the modern game always favours system over personalities!

There are others which I’ll raise at another time. For now,

Herbert Chapman on Clifford Bastin

Clifford Bastin signed professional forms on his seventeenth birthday, and I had no hesitation in putting him almost at once into the Arsenal side, for he was a most exceptional boy. I have never known a youth with the same stability as Bastin. Temperamentally, so far as football is concerned, he is like a block of ice, untouched by excitement. He has played in two Cup Finals, and on both occasions one might have thought he was about to take part in a match in the London Combination. Always, too, he is calm and collected on the field. Watch him run into the mouth of goal to seize a scoring chance, and you are sure that he will never fail through over-eagerness, which is the besetting fault of so many players.

Cliff Bastin is still third in the Arsenal all-time scoring list behind Thierry Henry and, to the scorn of Bastin’s widow, Ian Wright. (Bastin, 178 goals in 395 games: Wright, 185 goals in 288 games: Henry, 226 goals so far in 364 games so far..).



(Bastin in the middle, between Eddie Hapgood (left) and Alf Kirchen (right).

Herbert Chapman on: Temperamental Players

From Herbert Chapman on Football, a posthumous collection of his Sunday Express articles that was published as a memorial to him in 1934:

What do we mean by temperament? An old Scottish golfer described it as simply common sense, and he was probably correct. But perhaps the term self-control is more expressive and better understood. I often think of the footballer as going out into the middle before a big crowd on an important occasion in much the same way as a man who has to make a speech. The one knows what he hopes to do, and the other what he intends to say, but in each case there is a very real danger of his getting hot and bothered and thrown off his balance. The trouble in regard to both of them is a mental or nervous one, and in the excitement the lose their self-control.

A footballer may be affected by the most trivial incident. He may make a mess of his first pass or shot, he may miss a tackle. Fear seizes him, and he becomes over-anxious. You see a man take the ball down brilliantly, but as soon as he reaches the penalty area, and it is time to make the final effort, he does something foolish. It is, in fact, not unusual for men in these circumstances even to shut their eyes. One moment they are complete masters of themselves, and the next all their self-control has gone. It is all very strange and difficult to understand.

Herbert Chapman on: Brains

From Herbert Chapman on Football, a posthumous compilation of his Sunday Express articles published in memory of him in 1934:

I am always sorry for clubs who have to act hurriedly in seeking a new player, for under the most favourable conditions it is a tricky business and demands the closest consideration. It is not enough that a man should be a good player. There are all sorts of other important factors which have to be taken into account. This takes time. The longer I have been on the managerial side of the game, the more I am convinced that all-round intelligence is one of the highest qualifications of the footballer. I suppose one of the best teams there has ever been was that claimed by Newcastle United for ten years or so before the War and that part which so many of them have since played in the game indicates that they were intellectually above the average.

Herbert Chapman on: The Lack of Personalities

From Herbert Chapman on Football, a posthumous collection of his Sunday Express articles published in his memory in 1934.

Football today lacks the personalities of twenty or thirty years ago. This, I think, is true of all games, and the reason for it is a fine psychological study. The life which we live is so different: the pace, the excitement, and the sensationalism which we crave are new factors which have had a disturbing influence. They have upset the old balance mentally as well as physically, and they have made football different to play as well as to watch. And they have set up new values. The change has, in fact, been so violent that I do not think the past, the players and the game, can fairly be compared with the present.

It is sometimes said that, if the old players were to come back, they would show up the limitations of today. But there is no coming back. I know how boldly and confidently the old-timers speak of their prowess, and how they are inclined to belittle present players. To support their arguments they point to the difficulty of the selectors in trying to build up a stable international side. England teams come and go. From one season to another they can scarcely be recognised. They have, unfortunately, to be altered from match to match. Men good one day fail the next. They do not even play consistently in their club form. This is one tell-tale piece of evidence of how football has changed. In the old days the right of six or seven men to be picked was not questioned, and they never let the side down. Because of this, team selection was a comparatively easy matter.

I am not prepared to depreciate the men of today, being fully conscious of the many matters which have added to their difficulties. Competition has heightened enormously, and it is no longer possible for men or teams to play as they like. Thirty years ago, men went out with the fullest licence to display their arts and crafts. To-day they have to make their contribution to a system. Individuality has had to be subordinated to teamwork. Players have to take part in many more matches and the strain on their physical resources has greatly increased. The strain, too, has been intensified by the demands of the public. This is a point which I am afraid is only slightly appreciated.