Newcastle United , livre ebook

Pitch Publishing Ltd - David Potter

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128 pages

English

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Newcastle United are a team that really should do better. They have a football-mad city all to themselves and fans as numerous and passionate as you will find anywhere. Yet their recent record is mediocre at best and poor at worst, with every fan painfully aware that 1955 was the last time they won a major English trophy. But it wasn't always like that. In the Magpies' glory days of well over 100 years ago, they were considered the best team in the world. They won the English league three times in five years, the English cup once and had several near misses, while supplying many players for the England and Scotland national teams. In this fascinating book, David Potter recreates the atmosphere of 'the Toon' in those distant days when men like McWilliam, Veitch, Higgins and Shepherd walked tall. Above all, that great era is a potent reminder to the current generation of Newcastle fans that 'it doesn't need to be like this'.

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Publié par	Pitch Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	11 avril 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781801502467
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2022
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
David Potter, 2022
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright.
Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781801500821
eBook ISBN 9781801502467
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. An Honour at Last!
2. So Near And Yet So Far
3. Another Championship
4. More Frustration
5. Champions Again, But
6. The FA Cup - At Last!
7. Decline But Not Fall
Postlude
Appendix 1: The Other Great Days
Appendix 2: Fixtures And Results
Bibliography
Photos
Acknowledgements
IT WOULD be remiss of me not to mention the help given in the shape of photographs and extensive writings of that doyen on football historians Paul Joannou. I am also grateful to John McCue, Bryan Carney, Philip Hulme-Jones, Richard Grant, Peter Harrison and a few others for their help and encouragement. There is also that fantastic shop The Back Page in St Andrew s Street, Newcastle not all that far away from St James Park.
I would also like to acknowledge the courteous service of Newcastle Public Library in the days when it was possible to go there and the digital British Newspaper Archive when it wasn t.
Introduction
NO ONE could say in 2022 that success and Newcastle United have exactly gone hand in hand in recent years. Indeed, 1969 was the last year that Newcastle won anything - and that was the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, the ancestor, as it were, of today s Europa League. In England, the FA Cup has failed to grace the sideboard of St James Park since 1955 when Jackie Milburn, Bobby Mitchell and Ronnie Simpson were all around, and the league championship has not been in the Toon since, incredibly, Hughie Gallacher s heyday of 1927. An indication that this was a totally different era of history is found when one considers the champions in the previous three years - Huddersfield Town.
Those of an otiose disposition may count how many prime ministers, sovereigns and popes have come and gone since those days, but before anyone begins that depressing exercise, they might care to reflect that there was a greater era than even those of Milburn and Gallacher - and that was now more than 110 years ago when King Edward VII was on the throne, the kaiser was an amiable if precocious fool with a withered arm, and someone called Louis Bl riot flew an aeroplane (whatever that was!) across the English Channel. Words like computer, television, radio, cinema would have meant nothing, although a motor car was now more than a vague rumour. I am talking about the Great Days when Newcastle won three league championships and one FA Cup with a fair amount of close-run events, and were generally looked upon as being the best team in England.
It is annoying to hear the songs of the Middlesbrough and Sunderland supporters of, Have you ever seen a Geordie with a cup? It is, of course, easily answered in that there haven t been too many sightings of major silverware in their neck of the woods either, but that is hardly the point. Newcastle is a huge, football-mad metropolis, the stadium symbolically dominating the centre of the city. Frankly, the fans deserve a great deal more than what they have got over the past half-century or so. This book is an attempt to show that there was a time when things were different, and that it doesn t really need to be anything like as bad as what it has been in the living memories of almost all supporters.
I can t remember what happened to my parents old radio. Winston Churchill had used it to encourage my family to fight them on the beaches in 1940 and to tell them that a bright gleam has lit up the helmets of our soldiers in 1942. I recall, as a very young child, Raymond Glendinning telling me that Jackie Milburn had scored in the first few minutes against Manchester City in the 1955 FA Cup Final. I hate the idea that I might one day be the only Newcastle supporter left who remembers them winning a trophy. I used to say that as a joke; it is sadly slowly becoming true.
I recall in the 1970s standing on several occasions at East Boldon station awaiting my train to take me to a game. Even in the 70s East Boldon was not one of England s natural beauty spots, and there was daubed on a wall NUFC . The wall was half demolished, the air of neglect was around, and it seemed to symbolise the decline of a great football club. Yet the decline wasn t as yet all that pronounced. The late 1960s had seen European success and domestic respectability. A few false dawns had been seen. The football club had seen Supermac , an egregious example of how the media could create a player, and how that same player could press the self-destruct button and turn his back on those who adored him. On a broader more political level there had been T. Dan Smith who similarly flew high and then fell like a stone. The city had been left behind by Liverpool and Manchester, let alone the teeming super-rich metropolis of London, yet there was still the love of football and the club.
No television or radio had as yet been invented, although radio was only 15 years away and was fast approaching, in the era of the 1900s that I am talking about. The characters are long dead. Today, if you walked into a Newcastle pub and started talking about Milburn, Mitchell, Stokoe and Scoular, there would be a flicker of grateful recollection and nostalgia in a few of the older faces. You might even get away with talking about Hughie Gallacher or Frank Hudspeth; but if you began to talk about McWilliam, Veitch, Shepherd, McCracken, Aitken, Howie and Higgins then only a very few - fanatics and geeks mostly - would know what you were talking about. This book will try to make these people better known.
So why do I, a Scotsman and unashamed lover of Glasgow Celtic, support Newcastle United? The reason is family, and I think must go back to my grandfather. He was a young man in the 1900s and, like everyone else at the time, mad keen on football. The two best teams in the world at that point were Celtic and Newcastle United. He loved good football, so without ever having been to Newcastle in his life he started to support the Magpies. Loving the Toon is therefore well entrenched and embedded in my DNA.
But to begin at the beginning, Newcastle United are indeed one of the very few genuine Uniteds in the game. The Manchester version emerged from Newton Heath, the Dundee one because they got fed up of being called Dundee Hibs and being confused with the Edinburgh outfit, but Newcastle United were indeed an amalgamation of East End and West End in 1892, and unlike some amalgamations this one, like that of Ayr and Ayr Parkhouse in 1910 and of Inverness Caledonian and Inverness Thistle in 1994, worked very well. Newcastle United had played in the Football League since 1893, and were uncomfortably aware in 1904 that, although they had never won the competition or the FA Cup, their rivals Sunderland were by 1902 four-time league champions. That hurt in the 1900s every bit as much as it would now.
But there was a quiet determination to do something about it. A great deal fell on the shoulders of a man called Frank Watt, a quiet, almost shy and certainly unassuming Scotsman from Edinburgh who had played a great deal of football and cricket and had been a referee before he was appointed secretary of Newcastle United in 1895. As to what the job encompassed, we can answer almost anything from cleaning the offices to feeding the cat. Technically Watt did not hire or fire players or pick the team - that was the job of a selecting committee of directors but in practice he did, creating the best team that the north of England ever saw.
He had a huge handlebar moustache and appears dutifully in team photographs but he never pushed himself forward, preferring to stay in the background and let others appear to do the job for him. In this respect he was totally unlike Willie Maley of Celtic, for example, who took over the reins of that great club at about the same time and who was permanently in the limelight, always genial and cheerful and giving stories to newspapers. Watt was totally methodical and efficient and managed to be almost a father figure to so many of his players, smoking his cigars and listening patiently to what they had to say, particularly the difficult moments when he had to tell a player that his services were no longer required or that an injury had curtailed his career or even that he was not playing on Saturday.
Using the now well-developed and efficient railway system (far more comprehensive and efficient than it is today and which put Newcastle within easy reach of most cities in Great Britain), Watt was a frequent visitor to all football functions, and at internationals and cup finals in both England and Scotland. Being Scottish, he also knew a great deal about the country s scene and quickly realised that there might be a ready source of good Scottish players for the club that was, after all, less than an hour from the border. Scotland produced loads of players - but there was a lack of strong clubs. Queen s Park were rigidly amateur, not all Scottish boys could readily fit i