Newcastle United: The Great Days 1904 to 1911

By David Potter

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'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Apr 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781801502467

David Potter

David Potter is Francis W Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History, and Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. He is author of many scholarly articles, and the books Constantine the Emperorand The Victor's Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium.

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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 Blériot 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 in with the unashamedly Catholic and Irish atmosphere at Celtic, Rangers were showing clear signs of going to the other extreme and bringing an unpleasant and unwelcome atmosphere of religious intolerance into the game, and the two Edinburgh teams (who similarly did little to discourage a flavour of sectarianism) suffered from the fact that Edinburgh simply was not a football-minded or certainly not a football-obsessed city in the sense that both Glasgow and Newcastle were, or would soon become.

And in addition to the rich potential harvest of football players from his own land, Watt also realised that Tyneside itself could produce loads of good players from the coal mines and the shipyards that abounded in the area at this time of late Victorian and early Edwardian industry. The fact that Sunderland had done so well with their excellent team of not so many years previously was deplored in Newcastle, but it was also a stimulus and Watt did little to discourage any feelings of jealousy. Jealousy was a good thing, as long as it was constructive envy rather than negative and self-defeating hatred.

But the building of a great football side does not happen overnight. In 1898, Newcastle entered the First Division. Promotion was decided by a series of ‘play-offs’ (called Test Matches) played by the top three teams, but Newcastle finished third to Blackburn Rovers and Stoke. Suspecting collusion or corruption – something that was scarcely denied by the other two – when they appeared to agree a draw, Newcastle complained bitterly and loudly, until the Football League, making out that it was intending to create a bigger First Division anyway, allowed them in. Those who suspected that all this had something to do with Newcastle’s crowd-pulling potential (on several occasions St James’ Park had hosted attendances of well in excess of 15,000) possibly had a point.

From then on there was no holding them back. The First Division position was consolidated, then improved upon with the last game of the 1902/03 season causing particular, if slightly perverted, pleasure. Some 26,562 were at St James’ Park to see R.S. McColl, the famous Glasgow confectioner whose shops can still be seen on high streets, score the goal that beat Sunderland 1-0, and thus deprive the Mackems of winning another championship. Noisy neighbours are all very well, but there are times when they have to be quietened.

The 1903/04 season was even better, but although Newcastle were just a little short of the championship, won by ‘The Wednesday’ of Sheffield for the second year in a row, it was clear to discerning pundits that a good team was assembling at Gallowgate (as St James’ Park was sometimes known) with Andy Aitken, Jimmy Howie, Colin Veitch, Bob Appleyard and Jackie Rutherford all in position. And although he had a few problems with injury that season, perhaps the best of them all, Peter McWilliam, had now made an appearance.

Few could predict just how much success the next few years were to bring. There was little doubt, however, that although some pious middle-class people could wring their hands in horror about professional football and the large crowds that were enticed to come and watch, it was indeed very much an ‘opium of the masses’. Karl Marx had used that phrase to describe religion. He was probably wrong about that, but certainly as far as the working classes were concerned, football was giving them something to help them forget the horrendous social conditions of poverty, ill health and shocking housing that were more or less universal in working-class Newcastle, and indeed everywhere else in industrial Britain.

The Labour Party had only been in existence since the turn of the century, and the Liberals, a curious mixture of radicals and church-going Christians with a conscience, had been out of office almost continuously since the decline of Gladstone as a major power in the land. The Conservatives with their protectionist policies actually made food more expensive and the replacement of Lord Robert Salisbury by his nephew Arthur Balfour (a shocking piece of nepotism and corruption which gave to the English language the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’) in 1902 had not really helped matters. The job of prime minister was clearly too much for the dour and austere Scotsman.

Old Queen Victoria (not always as well loved as the propagandists made out) had died in January 1901 and she had been replaced by her son, Edward VII. He was, at least, an interesting character, surviving a very serious attack of appendicitis on the eve of his coronation in 1902 and generally regarded as one of the playboys of the western world even though now he was in his 60s. He loved things like horse racing and yachting, and surrounded himself with an attractive harem of ladies like the actress Lily Langtree (‘Jersey Lill’, as she was called), Daisy Warwick and Alice Keppel as well as his wife Queen Alexandra. The press tried to describe such ladies coyly as ‘companions’ in the sense of Ancient Greek ‘hetairai’ whereas everyone knew that their function was a slightly more basic and rudimentary one. A speedy winger, for example, on the football field would be described as going up and down the wing ‘faster than Jersey Lill’s combinations’ – combinations being in Edwardian English a polite and genteel word for ladies’ undergarments.

But all this salacious, albeit vicarious and voyeuristic, gossip about the private life of King Edward VII at Sandringham and the Bohemian spa of Marienbad could not solve the major social problems of the day with the uncomfortable and shocking fact that a working-class man or woman in his or her 50s had survived many, possibly most, of his or her peers, and that child mortality (usually from preventable illnesses) was a cause for grief, certainly, but by no means an uncommon one.

The working classes had traditionally turned to drink to help them forget. This allowed churches and others to identify alcohol as the cause of all the misery whereas in fact it was merely a symptom. It was to the eternal credit of Frank Watt’s Newcastle United that, albeit for only a few years, they gave the good people of Tyneside and beyond another way, other than by drink, of forgetting the horrible surroundings in which they were compelled by the strongest power in the world to eke out their existence.

Yet 100 years and more down the line, it has often been a matter of some amazement to me that Newcastle do not do better. The reason may be that their support is far too compliant. Newcastle have a huge fan base, as is obvious every matchday. A train from Edinburgh will pick up a few fans in Edinburgh itself then at Dunbar and Berwick the black and white scarves will become even more prevalent. If one arrives in town even as early as 11am, it will be obvious that there is a game on with the amount of colours around, and the things that are being sold – souvenirs, newspapers, silly things like badges and hats. The support is massive.

The atmosphere in Newcastle on a matchday is in total contrast to that in other cities, like for example Bristol. I found myself there one day and decided to go and see Bristol City play Norwich City. Not having done my homework in advance to find out where Ashton Gate was, I didn’t think it was a problem because I ‘could ask someone’. I asked about ten people before I found someone who, very confidently and articulately, directed me – to Bristol Rovers!

And yet why do Newcastle United supporters put up with it? Why do they meekly accept mediocrity? I was at the game in 1992 when a late goal saved them from the Third, yes the Third, Division. The place exploded with everyone jumping all over each other, loads of noise and singing and dancing. I could not help thinking, just what would they be like if they ever did have a team? Yes, I know they came close in 1996 and 1997 before these catastrophic FA Cup finals of 1998 and 1999 when the supporters turned up but the team didn’t, and the trophy cabinet still did not need the attentions of Mr Sheen.

This book is dedicated to the many thousands of Geordie fans. There is an undeniable Scottish emphasis, and I, of course, am Scottish, but I am also trying to tell you something about the Scottish influence which has been disregarded in recent years. I almost called the book It Does Not Need To Be Like This! It is an attempt to show that there were times when Newcastle were a force in the land. Let’s not forget this. I repeat, it does not need to be the way it is!

1

An Honour At Last!

1904/05

THE 21,897 who made their way to St James’ Park on 3 September 1904 could hardly have imagined just what they were at the start of. They saw a fine game, as it turned out, when the home team beat Woolwich Arsenal (as they were then called) 3-0, two of the goals scored by Scotland international Ronnie Orr, and the other by local boy Jackie Rutherford. Making his debut at full-back that day was an Ulsterman from Belfast called Bill McCracken, his broad Irish accent being heard all over the ground as he barked instructions to his other defenders.

It was a satisfactory start to the season, and results continued to be good with home form particularly impressive. Everton, Manchester City, Middlesbrough, Bury, Blackburn and The Wednesday all fell before the new year, and poor results were few, although there were three narrow and possibly unlucky away defeats to Small Heath (now better known as Birmingham City), Stoke and Preston North End all by the odd goal. There were many pleasing aspects to the play. One was the plethora of goals and indeed scorers for there was no over-dependence on the one striker. Big Bill Appleyard, a burly character who excelled in the then legal act of ‘charging’ the goalkeeper (trying to bundle him over the line with a shoulder charge – a shameful piece of thuggery which was still allowed and even encouraged and loved by fans until well into the 1950s), was the main scorer but Jimmy Howie, Ronnie Orr and Jackie Rutherford were all regular ‘netters’ as the local press put it.

On the left wing Bobby Templeton had played a few games but had now left because of temperamental problems. He had been called the ‘Blue Streak’ when he played for Scotland because of his speed, and he was always popular with spectators because of his daredevil approach to the game and to life, his character being exemplified by his willingness, for a bet, to enter a lion’s cage at a circus menagerie when he had returned to Scotland, long after his Newcastle days were over.

He was a man, however, who never really settled anywhere he went, but he left a huge amount of fans on Tyneside, and indeed in Glasgow where he won the Scottish league and cup double with Celtic in 1907. He survived his contact with the lion but died suddenly of the after-effects of the 1919 flu epidemic when he was in partnership in a hotel with his Celtic colleague ‘Sunny’ Jim Young. Like so many great players, he died young, only 39.

Templeton dropped out of the Newcastle side in the autumn of 1904 and was transferred to Woolwich Arsenal in December. His replacement Albert Gosnell could never understand why, no matter how well he played, he was never loved by the Geordies. There were probably two reasons for this. One was that he was a southerner from Essex. This was, of course, no handicap to other great Newcastle players both before and since, but southerners were often perceived as effeminate and soft. There was never any problem with Scotsmen, Yorkshiremen or even Sunderland Mackems, but southerners had to work hard to be accepted by the locals. The other reason, of course, was that Gosnell simply was not Bobby Templeton.

Templeton had been flamboyant, extroverted and ever in the news. Gosnell on the other hand was a more thoughtful kind of player. He may not have been the most popular man on the terraces but he would have been far