The Unforgiven: The Story of Don Revie's Leeds United

by Rob Bagchi

  By 1961 Bremner was a first team regular, albeit in the unfamiliar role of outside-right, but being only eighteen he had not yet conquered the abiding homesickness for Stirling and his girlfriend Vicky. Willing to give everything for Revie until the end of the season, he still wanted to leave the club in the summer, preferably for Celtic, who had already expressed their tentative interest. It took countless discussions over the next two years, and even a summit meeting between the manager and the future Mrs Bremner, to persuade Billy that his future lay in Leeds.

  It is hardly surprising that with nine games of the season left and just these players to choose from, there was no miraculous upsurge in form. In fact it was an extreme disappointment, as Leeds won just one game, drew four and lost four of the remaining fixtures. Neither were they recognizably Leeds United, playing out their last games in their traditional blue and gold kit. Though the training sessions had now become shorter, with the coaches paying more attention to detail than the monotonous physical jerks the players had grown used to, there weren’t many signs that the ailing company was under new management.

  The Revie epoch commenced at Fratton Park with a pitiful 3–1 defeat to Portsmouth and limped on through April without ever really capturing the imagination of the Leeds public. The one high spot was a 7–0 thrashing of soon to be relegated Lincoln City, but it was played out in front of a paltry crowd of 8,342. The four draws may have secured their survival but there was very little enthusiasm in the city, as Leeds recorded their lowest league attendance since 1934 in their last home game, another workmanlike draw against Scunthorpe.

  The one trick Revie pulled in these first games, however, was straight out of the Leeds history books. Back in 1951 Major Buckley, on a whim, had decided to try John Charles at centre-forward after an outstanding season at centre-half. Over the next few years Nat Lofthouse acclaimed him as the best defender he had ever played against; simultaneously, Billy Wright hailed him as the finest centre-forward he had ever seen. For several seasons after Charles’s transfer to Italy, Juventus exploited his versatility by playing him up front until he had scored before withdrawing him to shore up their defence to ensure maximum points.

  Could lightning strike twice? For the remaining games of the season Revie tried to do the same with Jack Charlton. It was a plausible gamble, one that the bare statistics deem a success. Twelve goals for Charlton in twenty games as a striker would suggest that Revie was on to something. But all the same, by Christmas 1961 Charlton had failed to emulate the multifaceted Charles. He didn’t really know what he was doing, and though the goals came, they came mainly from set pieces. Revie’s first foray into alchemy was abandoned within the year.

  It wasn’t much of a honeymoon period for the rookie manager. He later conceded that he had half expected to be sacked at the season’s end. At least, he felt, it could not get much worse. Yet rather as a quack’s radical cure makes the patient deteriorate further before he revives, so the next few months would see Leeds plunge even lower, and Revie’s capability would be open to question.

  THREE

  HIGH HOPES

  The summer of 1961 saw Yorkshire seeking a hat-trick of County Championships and England attempting to regain the Ashes from Richie Benaud’s formidable Australian tourists. The Eichmann trial dominated the front pages of even the provincial press, and on the back pages Leeds United were marginalized within their own city, as the Yorkshire public’s abiding love of cricket was well served with the sort of in-depth news, reports and analysis that football in the city had never attracted. United were almost invisible against the backdrop of Brian Close’s benefit season and Fred Trueman’s match-winning performance in the second innings of the Headingley Test, which squared the Ashes series.

  Unhappily, the high hopes of mid-July had subsided by the summer’s end. At Old Trafford, Benaud bowled Australia to an impregnable lead, Close’s test recall ended in ignominy as he was scapegoated for England’s defeat, and Yorkshire grudgingly conceded the Championship to the blue bloods of Hampshire. A prevailing sense of optimism dashed was to prove an apposite augury for Revie’s first full season in charge.

  Not that there was much hype to begin with. The remarkably prescient pseudonymous fan ‘Still Hopeful’ captured the mood in a letter to the Yorkshire Evening Post: ‘If progress is to be made in the coming season, far better judgement will have to be displayed in the choice of players. Falling gates will not be arrested if we are to suffer a repetition of the mediocrity served up last season. Expecting a lukewarm public to roll up at increased prices is a ticklish business. Progress can only be made by judicious purchasing of the right kind of player.’

  Without the wherewithal for a spot of immediate ‘judicious purchasing’, Revie had to resort to other means to engineer a more positive team spirit. Always thought of as a ‘player’s manager’, in that he was always perceived to back his players in their wage claims, his first move was to recommend the abolition of differentials among his first-team squad. For a club in Leeds’ predicament the package of up to £43 10s per player per week was enormous, but the fine print, as so often, revealed that the Board retained the upper hand.

  The basic wage was increased to £20 per week, to be supplemented by a £5 appearance fee, a £4 win bonus and a complex sliding scale of incentives aligned to attendances above 20,000. To qualify for the full bonus of £14 10s, Leeds would have to draw a crowd of more than 31,000 – a gate of 18,000 above the previous year’s average. It’s hardly surprising that it was the ever obstreperous Charlton who saw through this scheme and asked to be transfer listed. Convinced that senior players naturally deserved a greater salary than the juniors, he was only persuaded to sign the new contract (which ensured him £14 in the close season) in early July on the proviso that Leeds would release him if an acceptable bid was received.

  Having refused Revie’s offer of the captaincy because of his wage dilemma, Charlton arrived for pre-season training still bearing a grudge, telling reporters, ‘I still want to get to a club where I can get more money.’ If that seems a little mercenary, he was obviously well aware that several clubs, including Manchester United and promotion favourites Liverpool, were considering strengthening their defensive options for the new season, even though neither Busby nor Shankly was subsequently to become famous for their largesse during contractual negotiations. Revie’s ‘subversive’ notion of equality seemed disrespectful to someone as touchy as Charlton, and could be pejoratively and hilariously portrayed as smacking of highly dubious communist practices. Typically, no one else bothered to complain.

  Revie’s other noticeable pre-season innovation was the abandonment of the club’s traditional blue and gold strip. Though the decision effectively jettisoned forty years of United’s history, astonishingly little was made of it at the time. The replacement colours were to be all white, in quite deliberate imitation of the famous all white of the finest team in the world, Real Madrid. To re-profile a club so efficiently on such a whim demonstrated the man’s flair and vision, drawing a line under the failures of the past. That nobody remonstrated with him for it – there was none of the usual campaigns or petitions to save Leeds’ heritage – is an early sign of the Board’s growing willingness to indulge him and of the interminable apathy of the majority of Leeds fans.

  Such a flagrant psychological gimmick – in the hope that some part of Real’s aura of invincibility would rub off on his own players – was risky. If he pulled it off, it would be interpreted as a masterstroke. If ‘New Leeds’ continued to founder, however, it could look like hubris and finish his career. To invite comparisons with Gento, Di Stefano and Puskas when all he had was McConnell, Peyton and Cameron … one has to admire Revie’s nerve.

  Motivational stunts aside, Revie knew that the talent at his disposal needed organization and technical improvement if Leeds were to perform with more consistency in the coming season. First he scrapped the unpopular ‘Rule Book’ which dictated what a player could and could not get up to in hi
s personal life in favour of a more common-sense approach. Then he returned from a short break having devised a training programme to keep the players stimulated during all the necessary but laborious fitness work. It was a sort of team version of ‘Superstars’, dividing the first-team squad into four groups of six to compete against each other for prizes in everything from cross-country running and sprint sequences to physical jerks and five-aside, not to mention rounders, cricket and golf.

  As Cocker and Owen kicked off the programme in Farnley Park in mid-July, Revie told the press: ‘My one aim is to make them Leeds United-minded. Get that, and much else falls into place.’ A fortnight of intense competition ensued, with a gratifyingly high level of enthusiasm evident from even the most lacklustre team members. Given something interesting to do instead of the usual treadmill approach, the revival of morale was palpable. Many photographs of Revie that summer show him constantly smiling, glowing even, as he leaves another session. Perhaps he felt that he’d cracked it. After years of stagnation, this more sophisticated strategy, it appeared, was convincing even the sceptical journeymen that Leeds were finally beginning to take positive strides forward. Few were more impressed than Charlton, who withdrew his transfer request in early August and let it be known that he was a candidate for the captaincy once more. Revie was not slow to claim this as a ringing endorsement of himself and his new methods: ‘Both he and I are very happy at his change of mind. He has been enjoying the training – indeed his team won my training competition. He thinks, like I do, that United are going places and he will be very happy with us.’ Not for the first time with Big Jack and Leeds United, it was to be a false dawn.

  The culmination of Revie’s scheme to foster team spirit was a party in ‘Ringways’, the mid-market, city-centre restaurant. For the first time directors, staff, players and their wives were brought together to commemorate the success of pre-season training. His belief that a club should act more like a family than a community of individuals was prominent from this point onwards. Reflecting on his own feelings of isolation whenever he joined a new club, and drawing on the experience of his wife Elsie who had dutifully followed him from city to city, he understood the importance of domestic harmony to a footballer’s form. He resolved never to leave anything to chance with his boys. His welcoming address set out to convince the wives that they, too, had a critical role to play in his long-term plan. In later years this would extend to visits, cards, flowers and presents for all the wives and children as he positioned himself as not only a father figure to his players, but also as head of the whole Leeds United community. For the time being the families were grateful to be treated as part of the club and relieved that someone had recognized their significance. Their growing devotion to him should not be underestimated.

  After a spirited evening full of conviviality, awards and speeches, Revie issued a plea to the fans asking for tolerance and encouragement. All very well: actually getting them to turn up in unprecedented numbers to stave off the threat of bankruptcy was going to be harder.

  It is a maxim of the football manager’s fevered code that Boards inevitably only release resources when it’s almost too late. Such brinkmanship then allows them to don the mantle of the ‘saviour’, which is why most provincial bigwigs get involved in football in the first place. With wholesale changes impossible, Revie purchased just one player, the less than legendary Derek Mayers, a winger from Preston North End. Though by Christmas this policy appeared to have undermined Leeds’ ability to compete with Liverpool, Sunderland and the season’s improbable dark horses Leyton Orient, Revie later maintained that it was only fair to give his squad the opportunity to impress him.

  Leeds’ alarming lack of credit was to be Revie’s undoing that season, but in early August he vehemently refused to ameliorate the situation by selling Billy Bremner to Arsenal.

  After such a restorative pre-season, the season began just as promisingly, with victories over Charlton and Brighton, featuring two goals from Bremner and a debut strike from the new boy Derek Mayers. The public, however, remained unconvinced. The opening-day attendance of 12,916 was less than half the breakeven point for the club, notwithstanding the increased price structure. A slump in attendance was probably caused, the club tried to argue, by ‘nagging wives’. Sympathetic journalists, happy to portray the typical Leeds male as some sort of browbeaten Andy Capp caricature, warmed to the theme. Struggling to come to terms with a more liberal notion of working-class Leeds womenfolk than the strident harridan it had relied on in the past, the Yorkshire Evening Post commissioned a poll.

  The survey, however, revealed that it was the supporters themselves who chose to stay away. They claimed that tickets were ‘too dear’, there was ‘poor accommodation for spectators’ and Leeds were a team of ‘no stars’. In a local economy where a Saturday morning shift was still commonplace, the rival attraction of Saturday afternoon television persuaded many to stay at home. It was depressing reading for the Board.

  Beating two such perennial makeweights as Brighton and Charlton showed signs of form, but to prove that it wasn’t just an early season spurt, Leeds’ next game against Liverpool, who had finished third in the two preceding seasons, offered a more realistic trial. Liverpool had been relegated in 1954 and had struggled for years, but after two years of careful nurturing by Bill Shankly, this was their breakthrough season. In front of a massive 42,000 Anfield crowd they duly handed out a comprehensive 5–0 drubbing. The gulf in class between the two sides was never more marked; lightweight and far too slow, Leeds never really got into the game as the clever movement of Ian St John pulled their defence to pieces.

  With their confidence shattered and clearly rattled, they could pick up only one point from the next four games. In the midst of this dismal run it seems that Revie had a flash of inspiration. Suddenly he remembered he had one hitherto overlooked player on his books, the Footballer of the Year for 1955, no less: reluctantly he picked himself. At the age of thirty-four, playing in an even more withdrawn position than the one that had made him famous, he was unable to compensate for the general paucity of talent around him. If truth were told, injuries and age had eroded his ability to make much of a difference. Revie’s bold but futile gesture couldn’t arrest Leeds’ slide.

  The team lacked bustle, drive and punch. One disgruntled fan was provoked to write a comical lament: ‘What about the poor nippers? For goodness sake, United, give them something to cheer! Wake up!’ Failing to attract the ‘nippers’ and playing a brand of wishy-washy football without the rugged passion that would have compensated for their dire results, Leeds now saw their attendances drop below 10,000.

  In mid-September, Revie sold John McCole to Bradford City. This at least bought the club some time with the bank, but by sacrificing the team’s most prolific goalscorer he left himself open to the charge of accelerating the downward spiral, as poor results bred poor attendances which bled United dry. In fact, though, in these early years this man, whose powers of motivation and tactical wizardry would later make him famous, had far more impact as a true manager than as a coach. He took responsibility for everyone, from the youngest apprentice to the tea ladies. He, not the Board, made the crucial decisions, constantly cajoling and persuading them, fretting his way through the gate receipts, allocating his meagre resources, tirelessly scouting for new talent, nervously plotting for the big breakthrough. It was this energy that saved him.

  At the end of September, with only 7 points from ten games and panic spreading, Revie and the Board faced the AGM of the Supporters’ Club. Anywhere else it would have been a pretty explosive occasion. Here, the fans, perhaps still drowsy from their steaming pie and pea suppers, remained as phlegmatic as ever. Maybe they were mollified by director Sam Bolton’s revelation that he and four others had each made interest-free loans of £3,500 to the club over the summer simply to keep United afloat. The Board, he admitted, had presumed on good attendances in the autumn to sustain the club through the winter weather that habituall
y decimated their revenue – a clear illustration of how marginal football clubs muddled through in the early 1960s.

  But Bolton’s gloomy tone soon turned apocalyptic: ‘I know you are doing well, but you must do better if we want to keep soccer in Leeds.’ His concluding vote of confidence in Revie’s team was hardly a ringing endorsement: ‘We shall back Mr Revie to the fullest extent, and his team, which is better than a lot of people think.’

  The Supporter’s Club Chairman, Mr Dixon, thanked Bolton for his candour and sought to sum up the feelings of his members. Mr Revie, he opined, ‘had a terrible and Herculean task. We know his plans but a youth policy takes time and, looking at the league table, that is something that we haven’t got. It is up to us as supporters to rally people through the turnstiles.’ But apart from a tokenistic pledge to redouble fundraising efforts (even more ‘beetle drives’), no one present had any idea how to save the club. With some cash flow to postpone the Board’s concerns about insolvency, Leeds hobbled on into winter.

  Yorkshire society was not particularly impressed by the ostentatious display of wealth. Those at the top tended to be self-made men, unashamedly proud of it and conspicuous only by their willingness to accept the kudos of civic responsibility. Leeds United would not be saved, therefore, by the generosity of a single benefactor. Salvation would lie, if at all, with the milieu in which the Board already felt most comfortable: with those who had ‘got on’ – businessmen, aldermen, magistrates and their ilk.

  After years of fatalistic inertia, one week of belated action at the end of November 1961 can still be described as the defining week in United’s history. Without it, it’s arguable whether there would be a professional football club in the city today. With no further borrowing facilities on offer from the bank, Sam Bolton’s strategy had been two pronged: vigorous appeals to the business community’s sense of duty and vanity, combined with a touch of self-sacrifice – half Lord McAlpine, half Captain Oates.