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

by Rob Bagchi

  In the 1970s Leeds United’s slump on the football field was mirrored in a decline in the quality of the city’s nightlife. Leeds acquired a reputation as a late-night haunt of tramps and alcoholics as the dance halls and all-night coffee bars faded away. Until the late 1980s it was common for coach-loads of revellers to travel to nearby Wakefield, which at that time had a far more vibrant pub-and-club scene. In 1961, though, Leeds was already the ‘24-hour city’ that the City Council has bragged about so much in recent years. Jimmy Savile cut his teeth as one of the country’s first disc jockeys at the Mecca Ballroom in the County Arcade in the late 1950s and early 60s. The doormen back then were just as belligerent, the only difference being that ‘no fucking trainers’ seems to have replaced ‘Piss off, Elvis’ as their war cry. Even Teddy Boys shrank before them. They used to pay 6d to have their sideburns shaved to the regulation length lest they breached the Mecca’s strict sartorial code.

  If anyone had said in 1961 that the city’s football club would soon become the most famous thing about Leeds, they would surely have left themselves open to ridicule. With three Rugby League clubs – Bramley, Leeds and Hunslet – and the domineering presence of Yorkshire County Cricket Club at Headingley, Leeds United had never managed to make inroads into the fan base of the two traditionally popular sports, thought to be more ‘Yorkshire’ in spirit than namby-pamby ‘soccer’. Football in Leeds was regarded as a bit of a joke, a handful of decent players here – Willis Edwards, Bert Sproston, Wilbur Cush – the odd famous manager there – Dick Ray, Major Frank Buckley, Raich Carter – but absolutely bugger-all to show for it. The archetypal yo-yo club, Leeds United had lurched from promotion material to relegation fodder throughout their forty-year history.

  Things might have been different if their precursors, Leeds City, had not been thrown out of the League in 1919, having been singled out for making payments to players during World War I, a practice so widespread it’s hard not to think that as relative newcomers, they were the easiest target for the Football Association to victimize. Leeds City’s manager Herbert Chapman, ‘Football’s Emperor’, went on to become the architect of Huddersfield Town’s Championships in the 1920s before making an even bigger contribution to Arsenal’s dominance of the game in the 1930s. It’s difficult to speculate what might have occurred had he stayed, but there can be little doubt that the club itself, tied to the ambitions and fortunes of football’s first great innovator, would at least have had a higher profile than the one it enjoyed in the dismal forty years since his departure. If anyone could ever have built a nothing club into something, that person was Herbert Chapman. Doubtless he would have been lured away long before he had time to erect his marble halls at Elland Road, but Leeds City were deprived the dividends of their foresight in appointing such a remarkably talented manager.

  There is evidence that United’s transformation from Second Division also-rans to European giants was achieved in spite of the Elland Road Board. Much of the credit for Revie’s appointment must go instead to Ronald Crowther, the sports editor of the long defunct Yorkshire Evening News. Leeds had continued to cultivate their pre-war mediocrity in the late 1940s and 50s. Revie’s predecessor, Jack Taylor, poached from Queens Park Rangers in May 1959, was the club’s sixth manager since 1945. He took the club down in his first full season.

  Exhibiting rather more ambition than his fellow fans, Crowther was irked by the club’s underachievement. Even before joining the Daily Mail in the 1960s, he had acquired a national reputation as a crusader for truth and justice in the murky environment of post-war football. At the News he repeatedly challenged the Leeds directors, outraged that the club seemed to be dying of neglect. Like a character from a bad kitchen-sink novel of the early 1960s, the tenacious reporter kitted out in full porkpie hat garb, he was not a man to be intimidated. ‘Banned from the ground, he paid at the turnstile, balanced his type-writer on a crash barrier and carried on attacking, until revolution and Don Revie arrived,’ his obituary recalled. ‘Having stood on an invasion beach, firing his captain’s revolver at German dive-bombers – “it was supposed to inspire the men,” he chuckled – he was hardly likely to be bullied.’

  Don Revie was born into a working-class family in Middlesborough in 1927. His mother died while he was still an infant – an early bereave ment from which the amateur psychologists among his critics inferred a quest for security inspiring all his subsequent actions.

  He certainly found some security at Leicester City, his first of five professional clubs. There he married the Leicester manager’s niece, Elsie Duncan. Clocking up four different clubs in seven years gave him the title for his autobiography, Soccer’s Happy Wanderer, the major part of which is devoted to his spell at Manchester City from 1952–1956. It was at Maine Road that he enjoyed his greatest success, picking up six England caps and a reputation as an incisive and intelligent player.

  The game that made him famous, the 1956 FA Cup Final, was an early indication of his tactical ingenuity when, together with the Manchester City coaching staff and senior players, he adapted the deep-lying centre-forward’s role played by Nandor Hidegkuti to devastating effect in Hungary’s 6–3 and 7–1 thrashings of England in 1953 and 1954. His stormy relationship with the City manager, Les McDowall, meant that he did not hang around for long after his celebrated performance in the Final, moving on to Sunderland in 1956 and, his career winding down even though he was still only twenty-nine, Leeds two years later.

  The prospect of Revie quitting Leeds United in the early months of 1961 was not a matter of great concern to the club. At thirty-one the former England international was past his best when he joined from Sunderland in November 1958, though he did not retire from playing for another five years. Anxious to secure a player-manager’s job as his on-field career drew to a close, it was cursorily reported that he had applied for just such a post at Bournemouth in February 1961. But Revie’s reputation as one of the game’s more cerebral individuals had spread much further afield. Chester City and Tranmere Rovers also entered the running for Revie’s services. Then, three weeks before he took over at Elland Road, Revie was invited to become player-coach of the semi-professional Australian club Adamanstown, near Sydney, on a five-year contract. The New South Wales club offered to fly Revie, Elsie and their two children out to Australia, provide them with a house and find Revie work outside football. He would also receive a salary as part-time coach. The offer was declined, however. A more unlikely ‘cobber’ could not be imagined. Barbecues and Bondi Beach would never have appealed to the home- and hearth-loving Don.

  Revealing that streak of insecurity that was a key facet of his character, Revie asked Crowther to draft his letter of application for the Bournemouth post. But on 13 March, Jack Taylor quit the Leeds job with twelve months remaining on his three-year contract. A Barnsley man who made his name as a full-back at Wolves, he had been a disastrous appointment; but the Board preferred to keep him on rather than pay out the £2,500 due to him if they took the initiative and terminated his contract. Fortunately, Taylor eventually solved their dilemma for them. The United Board’s fiercest critic, Ronald Crowther, told his disciple Don Revie to pitch for the Leeds job instead of Bournemouth.

  As Jack Taylor left to clear his desk, with the players’ farewell gift of a ‘fitted dressing case’ clamped under his arm, the Leeds directors faced a pretty bleak outlook. In 1959, even though they were then at least in the First Division, they had found it almost impossible to attract a manager. Indeed, Taylor had been their sixth choice. It seems astonishing, if not ludicrous, that before Taylor had finally conquered his misgivings and agreed to move from Queens Park Rangers, Sam Bolton, Leeds’ haulage contractor chairman, had offered the job to Charlie Mitten of Newcastle United, Archie Macauley of Norwich City, Bob Brocklebank of Hull City, Willie Thornton of Dundee and, most astoundingly, to Arthur Turner of non-league Headington. If Mitten’s rejection was understandable, the next four degenerated from the embarrassing to the humiliating.
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br />   In the aftermath of Taylor’s departure, speculation over his successor conspicuously failed to rage. This reflected the city’s limited expectations of the football club. No talk then of a ‘sleeping giant’, a description that would be over-employed when United re-entered Second Division purdah two decades later. The following day’s headlines were dominated instead by Floyd Patterson’s sixth-round knockout of the Swede Ingemar Johansson in Miami. The News was no exception, with United travails relegated to a downpage item reporting that club secretary Cyril Williamson would assume managerial responsibilities pending the appointment of a successor. Sam Bolton admitted to being preoccupied with arrangements for that week’s FA Cup Semi-Final between Leicester City and Sheffield United, to be staged at Elland Road. Given their indebtedness, cash came first, the appointment could wait. ‘We have not yet had time to consider an official appointment,’ a stressed Bolton said. ‘We shall give the matter plenty of thought in the near future.’

  ‘It will not surprise me,’ wrote Ronald Crowther, ever the pessimist, ‘if United carry on with a secretary-manager – Mr Williamson – at the helm, with chief coach Syd Owen responsible to him for team affairs.’ Williamson’s qualifications for this early forerunner of the ‘director of football’ position were less than compelling. A former Grade One referee, he was the archetypal ‘blazer’. Former roles included a stint as Chairman of the FA Youth International selection committee and Secretary of the Leicestershire and Rutland FA. His reluctance to take on the responsibility probably saved the club from the inevitable consequences of its suicidal incompetence.

  It has become part of Leeds’ folklore that Harry Reynolds, soon to succeed Bolton as chairman but then still only a junior director, was moved to consider Revie only while writing him a reference to support his application to become player-manager of AFC Bournemouth. It has been interpreted as the moment the club’s destiny changed, while emphasizing how close United were to losing their own particular ‘messiah’. For once, however, the legendary parsimony of the Leeds directors – and particularly Reynolds, an eccentric self-made millionaire who continued to live in a two-up, two-down terraced house – served them well. When Bournemouth asked Leeds to name a fee for Revie, their chairman baulked at the £6,000 quoted.

  In reality, therefore, the Leeds Board had little choice but to take the radical option and appoint Revie. Mired in the lower half of the Second Division, they were palpably less marketable to the ambitious or established manager than they had been two years previously. After such a variety of managers and methods since the war, it was little wonder that Eric Stanger in the Yorkshire Evening Post concluded: ‘Nothing would benefit Leeds Utd more than a long stable period of sound management. In fact, in their financial position, it is their only hope for the future.’

  Not only was Revie available, affordable and impressively full of ideas, he was also, ideally, aware of the staff’s shortcomings and the precariousness of the club’s standing at the bank. Crucially, he was far more likely to accept the offer than any other candidate suited to the job.

  Three days after Crowther’s erroneous prediction, the die was cast. The thirty-three-year-old Revie was appointed on a three-year contract – on terms markedly inferior to those that Taylor had enjoyed. His pay was pegged at the £20 maximum, which had until recently been the maximum wage. The contractual dispute between Chelsea’s then chairman Ken Bates and the flamboyant Ruud Gullit in the late 1990s reportedly hinged on the player-manager’s insistence on keeping the ‘playing’ part of his salary long after he ceased to play an effective on-field role. In contrast here, the Leeds Board were insistent that Revie should keep his ‘playing’ contract for as long as possible. It was far cheaper that way. Desperate to stay in football and singularly unsuited for the stock career route of the ex-professional running a pub, Revie knew he had little option but to agree. He never forgot their initial caution, hardly a brilliant tactic to adopt with one so temperamentally vulnerable. In future, even if their compromised position at the bank had given them little choice, they would pay a heavy price for their attempt to screw him.

  TWO

  WHEN YOU’RE YOUNG

  Revie described his new job as a ‘real challenge’. ‘I am very pleased with my contract,’ he went on, confirming it gave him ‘full power on selection, transfers in and out, training – all aspects of the work necessary to get a good playing staff. Cyril Williamson was left to handle purely administrative matters. And the new manager also offered an immediate insight into his philosophy: the attention to detail for which he was to become notorious. The team would build up a series of ‘set moves’, he announced, from goal-kicks, thrown-ins, free-kicks and corners. ‘I shall try to get defensive systems and attacking systems that will operate throughout all our teams,’ he told the Yorkshire Evening Press on the eve of his first game in charge. ‘Any players moving up from one team to another will know just what is wanted.’

  And from the outset Revie also set out to foster the esprit de corps that would later be interpreted as bloody-minded insularity. ‘If everybody pulls together, from the directors right down to the women who do the cleaning and the washing, and is Leeds United-minded, then we shall get somewhere,’ he added. This was no idle word. The referee, Jack Taylor, who would later take charge of the 1974 World Cup Final, recalled turning up at Elland Road in the 1960s to witness Revie giving the cleaning staff cash to put on the horses. ‘If they won, they were twice as happy; if they lost, they were still happy,’ Taylor remembered. The Elland Road washerwomen were similarly indulged. Lugubrious Tykes to a woman, it is fitting that they should feature on the BBC’s video tribute to the Revie era at Leeds, The Glory Years, pulling the team’s shirts out of the wash.

  Revie took as his inspiration the achievements of Manchester United under Matt Busby, though his team would never be granted the same unquestioning media adulation. A week after his appointment he took himself to Old Trafford to learn from the master. Great minds clearly thought alike, as Busby endorsed the young pretender’s determination to establish a consistent coaching pattern throughout the club, so that junior players promoted to the first team would be familiar with the style of play.

  Revie’s inheritance, however, was meagre. The players were largely mediocre, with one or two exceptions journeymen pros or poorly motivated tyros with genuine potential but desperate to leave the resolutely retrograde environment. The ‘relegation hangover’, which frequently infiltrates the minds of players, has been seen to affect numerous clubs in the first season following the trauma of demotion. One way of relieving its symptoms is through major surgery. Yet since their relegation the previous summer, Leeds’ average attendance had slumped from the barely respectable 22,000 to the positively spartan figure of 13,500. Limited funds had been released in the spring of 1960 to enable Taylor to buy Freddie Goodwin from Manchester United in an attempt to shore up a defence that had leaked 78 goals in 32 games in the slide to the bottom of the First Division. There had been some improvement after his arrival: Leeds won four of their remaining ten fixtures – but it was far too late to stave off the inevitable.

  By the beginning of the 1960/61 season, the bank’s apprehension had become palpable, and Taylor’s request to recruit a few reliable, experienced professionals had understandably been rejected by the Board. After protracted negotiations he had been allowed to buy Eric Smith from Celtic, but that hardly amounted to the root and branch modification that was necessary after such a feeble season.

  The other alternative, to generate funds by selling one or two players, was also denied him. Of the relegated squad, only three players had any significant monetary value: Billy Bremner, who was just seventeen and had only recently broken into the first team; John McCole, scorer of 22 goals that season but widely perceived as a functional penalty-box predator and little else, and who, anyway, would be vital to Leeds’ attempt to achieve promotion; and Jack Charlton, whose inconsistency on the park and militancy off it put off a whole host of s
uitors. There was to be no quick fix.

  With cash and confidence ebbing away after every setback, Leeds’ 1960/61 campaign lurched towards disaster. It was this same inadequate squad, drained of all purpose and with no set game plan, that would assemble before Revie on a fateful March morning for his first training session. With no prospect of funds becoming available until the summer, if at all, he was stuck with them.

  Nonetheless, Revie was fortunate to benefit from Jack Taylor’s only notable legacy: two innovative if irascible coaches – Les Cocker and Syd Owen.

  Today there is no real distinction between the terms ‘trainer’ and ‘coach’. In those days they were two separate trades. Les Cocker, the former Stockport County and Accrington Stanley forward, had learnt, like so many of his contemporaries, the fundamentals of fitness in his wartime service with the Reconnaissance Regiment in France after D-Day. He was temperamentally and professionally qualified for the position of ‘trainer’.

  One of the first generation to take the FA Coaching Certificate, he supplemented his tactical acumen with exploratory studies in physiology and, more unusually, also dabbled in the avant-garde sports sciences of kinesiology and biomechanics. He had a stormy start with his new charges, who were contemptuous of his dedication to their development, and had many a run-in with that self-styled ‘one man awkward squad’, Jack Charlton. Yet barely a year after joining Leeds, he was summoned to Lancaster Gate and offered the prestigious job of putting England squads through his revolutionary sequence of sadistic drills, a position he was to occupy from 1966 right through to 1977.