by Rob Bagchi
The forty years since the establishment of the club in 1919 was one long false start, a kind of ‘phoney war’. If its one-year apprenticeship in non-league football had come in the mid-1950s rather than in 1919, it is debatable whether it would have made any significant difference to the club’s future success. While it is ironic that John Charles, still United’s most celebrated player, was the star of this pre-Revie respite, those first forty years have had no impact on the club nor its sense of itself. It was Revie and Revie alone who made the club, its profile and, most importantly, the self-image that continues to predominate to this day.
But Don Revie was also a remarkably idiosyncratic individual. That he should appeal to the gods for succour when Tinkler sabotaged his season was entirely in character. Deeply superstitious, he wore a ‘lucky blue suit’ for important matches and carried a rabbit’s foot with him into the dugout. On home match days he would stroll to a particular set of traffic lights near the ground and then exactly retrace his steps, convinced that this odd ritual would swing the game his way. In the early 1960s Revie arranged for the exorcism of a mythical ‘gipsy’s curse’ from Elland Road, apparently imposed when a Romany community were evicted from the South Leeds scrubland where the stadium would stand. Later he would betray his fear of all feathered creatures by banishing the club’s emblem, a peacock, from shirt badges.
By the po-faced 1990s eccentricities of this nature could get you the sack, at least if you were the England manager. However, this was a more colourful era, when English football was still primarily a sport arousing animal passions and not a conduit for flogging overpriced nylon to south-east Asia. Everyone thinks fondly of Bill Shankly and his gnomic philosophizing, or Malcolm Allison – an acquaintance of the Kray twins – and his Cup-tie fedoras. Yet to characterize Revie as a fanciful man would be spectacularly inaccurate. He was, in fact, an arch-pragmatist, for whom devoted acolytes would compose extensive ‘dossiers’ on the club’s opponents ahead of match day. Whether that pragmatism was, in truth, cynicism in another guise is partly what this book is about.
As far as his players were concerned, Revie was deeply conventional, searching out men with stable family lives who wouldn’t give him trouble. His nickname, ‘The Don’, was entirely appropriate, as he set to create a clannish, collegiate atmosphere within the club itself. Pre-match stresses were eased by sessions of bingo and carpet bowls, among men who would play and socialize alongside each other year after year. None of Revie’s protégés, one could safely say – unlike the sainted Becks and his fragrant wife – would have considered receiving guests on a gold throne after taking their marriage vows.
When Revie arrived, Leeds were unfashionable and provincial in outlook, and had spent forty years skipping between the top two divisions to little effect. The club was to provide the perfect environment for Revie’s brand of bellicose introversion. On the wall in the Home dressing room he hung up a sign that read: ‘Keep Fighting’. The club’s directors, meanwhile, persisted in playing the part of rag-and-bone men who’d been made a free gift of a thoroughbred. Their gaucheness was to cost Leeds dear once the talisman had gone.
Eight years ago, on the death of the legendary Manchester United manager Matt Busby, a minute’s silence was held, and impeccably observed, at league grounds across the country. But not at Ewood Park, Blackburn. There, hundreds of away supporters from Leeds disrupted the tribute by chanting ‘There’s only one Don Revie’ throughout. Only four years had passed since Italia ‘90, when Gazza and Pavarotti made watching football a respectable leisure activity. No one wanted to be reminded of the tribal loathing that had turned watching the game in the 1980s into a form of social leprosy.
A leader in the Independent summed up the national mood: ‘The failure of Leeds fans to honour football’s dead properly should be seen for what it symbolises: a nastiness that has in the past besmirched football’s reputation and remains latent.’ The club was hugely embarrassed. Manager Howard Wilkinson declared himself ‘numb’; the perpetrators were ‘out of touch with the rest of football’. Chairman Leslie Silver vowed to ban them for life. And Revie’s widow, Elsie, said Don would have been ‘horrified’ by the fans’ behaviour had he still been alive.
Those supporters deserved their comeuppance, and not only for their lack of respect for Busby. Revie’s name was dragged through the mud, along with that of Leeds United. But much of the criticism was disingenuous. No one who truly understands what it has meant to be a Leeds supporter over the age of thirty should have been remotely surprised by the episode.
Ask the supporters of other clubs to name the great British managers of the game’s ‘golden age’ and they recite a familiar list: Busby, Shankly, Stein, Clough, Nicholson, Catterick. Revie’s name will be mentioned grudgingly, if at all. So why did those ‘morons’ (Joe Lovejoy) step so far beyond the pale? Because Leeds fans loath Manchester United? Not really. They did it because outside West Yorkshire, Revie’s own achievements, though they stand comparison with those of any English manager, have been largely forgotten. Only Brian Clough can also claim to have turned an unfashionable, provincial club into a European colossus. But Revie and Leeds United just weren’t liked. They may have been gifted, but they were also rough, cynical and utilitarian; even today they remain unforgiven.
It is a truism among journalists softened by the passage of years that Don Revie’s team did not gain the plaudits it deserved. The same, it is more rarely acknowledged, is true of the man himself. Revie’s abandonment of the England job in 1977 sharpened the pen of scribes already ill-disposed towards him, and many remain unsympathetic even now. One renowned football writer, in a recent encomium to Bill Shankly, added as an aside that his principal adversary Don Revie was ‘forgotten everywhere outside Leeds’. Paeans to late 1960s and early 70s football in the lads’ magazines routinely talk of Clough, Busby, Stein and Shankly, with barely a nod to Leeds. Yet to talk about this era without devoting a large chunk of the narrative to Don Revie is like trying to talk about the Bodyline series without mentioning Douglas Jardine. For such observers the mantra that must be repeated, with scant consideration of the era in which the team played, is still ‘dirty Leeds’. Yes, Leeds had Norman ‘Bite yer Legs’ Hunter; but Chelsea had Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris, and Liverpool had Tommy Smith. You didn’t get sent off for kicking the ball away back then and Leeds weren’t the only team who took note. As Barry Davies recognized, there was cruelty, but there was much beauty, too.
As this book recounts, Revie’s achievements were phenomenal, even though his team so often stumbled at the final hurdle. Ironically, perhaps only Brian Clough, Revie’s successor and his most outspoken detractor, can be said to have surpassed them. While at Nottingham Forest, he too turned a formerly insignificant club into a European powerhouse, winning the European Cup that Revie had craved. Revie’s team did make it to the final of that competition when their mentor had gone, but again they were to be unjustly denied by eccentric refereeing.
Since Revie left Leeds almost thirty-five years ago, the club has almost bankrupted itself trying to emulate his success. Fourteen managers have come and gone, ex-players among them, but the club has managed only one major honour, the 1992 Division One title. It is not a coincidence that the man who broke the cycle of failure, Howard Wilkinson, made it a priority to banish all pictures of cup-toting players from the Revie era. He recognized a club living on past glories, and for that every Leeds supporter should be grateful.
Even now, Leeds United remains a modern enigma: there is still something manufactured about them – the club from nowhere. How a team from this rugby league city, deep in the heart of a cricket-mad county with no discernible football tradition, managed to propel itself to the very pinnacle of the European game is not simply the story of one man and his peculiar obsessions.
Revie, as ‘Svengali’, was intrinsic to Leeds’ emergence, but like Sir Alex Ferguson after him, he was fortunate to prosper from an extraordinary crop of young talent at his disposal. Yet
the virtuosity of these players tends to be neglected. Even Leeds fans tend to focus on the retro-kitsch of the Revie era – the Scratching Shed, the Kids’ Pen, the sock tags and the ‘smiley’ badge – rather than the men behind it. Others focus on less benign images: the popular perception of Leeds in the 1960s and 70s has been formed not least by one single game, the 1970 FA Cup Final Replay against Chelsea, probably the most notoriously violent game in English football history, in which for two hours a recklessly indulgent referee permitted foul after foul to go unpunished and long-standing personal vendettas to be fought out. Though both sides were equally culpable, Leeds were to elicit little sympathy after their extra-time defeat. Here was proof of the rumours that had circulated for years: that they were a particularly cynical and lawless team. It would take three more years, with a team in its dotage playing fluent attacking football, for them finally to be appreciated.
The Cup Final song has become a tawdry annual custom but Leeds’ 1972 version, ‘Leeds United’, at least attempted to publicize the remarkable skill and character of Revie’s players. Set to a bizarre brass and piccolo accompaniment, the Leeds squad overcame their initial embarrassment to belt out this eulogy to themselves.
Each player is spotlighted for at least a line, most notably Billy Bremner, who is characterized as a ‘red-headed tiger … who goes like a human dynamo’, and Paul Madeley, famous for his versatility, who is portrayed as ‘the eleven Pauls’. Although the other side of this single, ‘Leeds, Leeds, Leeds’, has long been adopted by Leeds fans as their official anthem, it is this obscure composition that first promoted the players as individuals and not as Revie’s well drilled, efficient and merciless machine.
It is true, on the whole, that they were like-minded souls, and with one or two exceptions their camaraderie has endured. But first and foremost they were a group of individuals with diverse temperaments, opinions and ambitions. There was Jack Charlton, the garrulous senior pro with his fabled ‘black book’, supposedly for recording the names of those players who merited physical retribution. Formerly an ill-disciplined journeyman stopper, both irascible and argumentative, he flourished under Revie’s coaxing to become the defensive lynchpin of England’s 1966 World Cup triumph. However, his fundamental nature hardly changed. He remains the same engaging, implacably single-minded soul he was in the 1950s.
His conspicuous self-confidence is in marked contrast with Gary Sprake, the mythically error-prone goalkeeper. Only months before his death, Revie was to concede that Leeds would undoubtedly have won more if he had replaced the insouciant Welshman earlier. This is harsh. While Sprake lacked confidence and had made several blatantly ghastly mistakes, his agility and ability were never in question. Indeed, he played over 500 games for the club, picking up five medals along the way. Not a bad return for the man who was habitually taunted by the Liverpool Kop with their rendition of ‘Careless Hands’.
The emotional fulcrum of the team was its midfield pairing of Billy Bremner and Johnny Giles. The late Billy Bremner was seen to personify Revie’s Leeds, yet his aggression and pronounced unwillingness to admit defeat masked a fine football brain and a prodigious array of skills. Though quick in the tackle, he was so much more than a spoiler. Bremner could dictate the game with his sophisticated and accurate passing, and, with his seemingly boundless energy, he often linked up with the attack to score spectacular and crucial goals. As Revie’s captain, he was thought to enjoy a ‘father and son’ relationship with his manager, but he, too, remained his own man. A heavy smoker, he often went boozing with Jack Charlton contrary to Revie’s wishes, and thought little of rowing with his boss over discipline and tactics.
Johnny Giles was more worldly and, having been brought up at Old Trafford, less susceptible to Revie’s paternalistic methods. Yet it was to prove the ideal match as he channelled his grievances with Manchester United, where he felt under-utilized and mistrusted, into becoming a formidable, if sometimes ruthless, professional. His ingenious style and lithe grace helped him become a world-class player, while his current status as one of the most respected journalists in Britain and Ireland confirms his articulate savvy. In Hilton’s homage he was simply ‘The Brains’. But he also had a sly and malicious side. When a young Frank Worthington, playing for Leicester City in the early 1970s, attempted to nutmeg Giles, he was assailed with, ‘Take the piss out of me or Leeds United ever again and I’ll break your fucking leg for you!’ Worthington later claimed that this was the most disgraceful thing ever to have been said to him on a football field.
Others, too, could show this malevolent streak. Paul Reaney is often cited by George Best as the toughest and dirtiest opponent he ever faced. On the television footage of Leeds’ 1972 FA Cup Final victory, as Arsenal line up a free kick, Allan Clarke’s hand disappears behind Charlie George’s back and delivers a ferocious tug to his flowing locks. Was this a blow on behalf of short-back-and-sides Yorkshire anti-fashion, or just another spot of gamesmanship?
All this has been dwelt upon at tiresome length by Leeds’ numerous detractors. The plain truth has to be faced: if the opposition wanted to fight, Leeds would fight. If they wanted to play, then Leeds would play. To say they were simply too gifted to have to resort to such tactics disregards the prevailing football climate and Leeds’ vehement will to win.
What this book attempts to do is to redress the balance: to acknowledge Leeds’ faults and examine them in the light of 1970s football, as well as from the rosy perspective of thirty-five years’ hind-sight. But we will also bring the individual players themselves out of the hoary hinterland to which they have been condemned for their supposed villainy, while footballers of the so-called ‘maverick’ era who could execute pointless trick after pointless trick but never won anything are hailed as lost English heroes. So ‘Here we go with Leeds United’, as Les Reed put it, to reassess ‘Top Cat’ Cooper, ‘Lasher’ Lorimer, Eddie ‘The Last Waltz’ Gray et al, and see what made them tick and what made their turbulent journey so memorable.
ONE
YORKSHIRE’S REPUBLICAN ARMY
No English provincial city has changed in recent years as much as Leeds. In the years following the millennium the self-styled ‘fastest growing city in the UK’ became a financial services powerhouse second only to London. Smart, premium-priced loft apartments replaced the derelict mills that once overlooked the Leeds-Liverpool canal. Chic restaurants and expensive themed bars supplanted the down-at-heel boozers where it was frowned upon to ask for lager on draught.
Alan Bennett’s bittersweet tableaux of Leeds life in the 1940s – where tight-knit communities lived in back-to-back streets with identikit names – now seem like curious museum pieces. Poverty remains, of course, as, in some places, do the back-to-backs. But to the city’s burghers they are redolent of the past and no longer central to the city’s perception of itself. This groundshift in the structure of the local economy has only recently reached its apogee in the last few years, with the high-profile opening of Harvey Nichols’ department store – the first outside London – the success of hip hotels like Hotel 24 and the White Rose rail service to London with its sleek Eurostar trains. Yet the process actually began before World War II. The share of the local labour force employed by the three largest industries in 1911 – tailoring, engineering and textiles – had fallen from 45 per cent to 30 per cent by 1951, and although half the workforce remained in manufacturing, over two-fifths were by then in service jobs.
Manufacturing continued to decline rapidly, slowing growth in total employment. However, the city was remarkably prosperous before the recession of the mid-1970s. Unemployment stood at less than 1 per cent in the boom years of 1955, 1961 and 1965, and job vacancies exceeded numbers employed. This relative affluence greatly increased leisure opportunities, but the fact that these were increasingly home-centred had its downside. By the year of Revie’s appointment as manager, over three-quarters of Leeds households had television sets. But TV rang the death knell for the Theatre Royal (which closed
in 1957) and the Leeds Empire (shut down in 1961). Cinema after cinema also gave up the ghost, though many of these arresting buildings remain, housing carpet warehouses and bingo halls.
Eating out, too, had become more diverse, with more exotic fare to be found alongside that great Leeds institution, Nash’s Elizabethan Fish and Chip Restaurant. One guide to the city published in 1961 noted that the best cuisine in town was to be found at the Queen’s, Metropole and Parkway hotels. (This advice was not lost on Don Revie, who was once spied by Alan Bennett waiting by the door to the Queen’s’ kitchens. ‘He uses the Queen’s Hotel as a takeaway,’ the dramatist breathlessly noted in his diary.) Though the city was thriving economically, architecturally it was at its nadir. Many of the great Victorian and Edwardian buildings were being torn up along with the tramlines as the vulgarians in the city’s Planning Department knelt down before the god of poured concrete.
The journalist Don Watson grew up in Leeds during the 1960s and 70s and sees the changing urban landscape of his home town as the quintessential city of the era. ‘Leeds was the apotheosis of the seventies,’ he wrote in My Favourite Year. ‘After all it was here that the outdoor scenes of A Clockwork Orange, the film whose aesthetic defined the decade, were shot. The concrete stanchions and flyovers of the self-styled Motorway City of the seventies were breaking through the shell of the Victorian textile city like the skeleton of some grotesquely beautiful insect in a futuristic horror movie.’ Much had been achieved in the name of progress. The startling Quarry Hill Flats, housing 3000 people on a 23-acre site only ten minutes walk from Leeds’ most fashionable streets, dominated the city skyline. When completed in 1938, they had taken hundreds of families out of the squalid tenements that bordered the city centre. By 1961 they were already obsolete, the Council having to fork out £500,000 to bolster the corroded steel infrastructure in the hope of eking out just another ten years’ life. The lesson of this doomed project did not stop the philistinism flourishing for the next two decades, with the planners’ beloved boxy, concrete structures completely overshadowing the sorry, soot-encrusted Victorian monuments that, once saved from the demolition derby and sandblasted clean, would form the heart of the city’s shopping theme park thirty years later.