Bill Nicholson. Brian Scovell
jotting them in his little pad. I’m for it if I don’t get refills in time. It’s his job to watch for mistakes and he doesn’t enjoy it.’
Frank McLintock, Arsenal’s driving captain in their 1971 Double, told a wonderful story about Darkie. ‘She was an amazing lady, so highly regarded by everyone she met, and I often went to watch Tottenham’s matches. One day I said to her: “It’s a terrible job to park around White Hart Lane. You haven’t got any ideas about it?” She said: “You know where I live, come and park at the back. Bill’s got a couple of spaces. You can use one.” So Arsenal’s former captain, the hated figure, parked at the house of Tottenham’s manager!’
Linda remembered: ‘When Dad left the house he always had to look immaculate. Darkie made sure his shirts were nicely ironed, but he always shined his shoes every morning; he loved shining all of our shoes. She did all the cooking and always had a cooked lunch ready for him because he was not often there for dinner. But he was always the one who had to time his boiled egg to perfection. Mum definitely played a big part in his success and I told her on many occasions how proud I was for her and Dad as well, keeping the household going and making sure the right things happened at the right time. When things went wrong, she generally had to fix them. I learned at a very early age how to put a plug on a new appliance and things like that!’
Darkie would stay up at night, waiting for Bill to return home from one of his scouting trips, and he would sound the horn of his car to let her know when he had arrived.
Joe Hulme, the famed England and Arsenal right-winger and Middlesex cricketer, was manager of Tottenham when Bill was demobbed in 1946. Joe was renowned for being one of the fastest wingers in the history of the game and in the 1932/3 season he scored 33 goals for Arsenal, a record for a winger in one season, and over his career he played in five FA Cup finals. Cristiano Ronaldo, who may be a shade quicker, has upped that scoring record considerably.
Joe was born in Stafford and starred with Blackburn, Arsenal and Huddersfield; he also scored 8,013 runs with 12 centuries for Middlesex (1929–39). He was appointed Tottenham’s assistant secretary in 1944 and two years later took over from manager Arthur Turner, the accountant who became secretary and worked at White Hart Lane for more than 40 years. I knew Joe well – he worked for the People for many years and was very popular, always joking with the players.
When Bill reported back, Joe asked him: ‘Do you fancy playing against Chelsea on Saturday?’ He was enthusiastic and Joe said: ‘You’ll be up against Tommy Lawton.’ He might have thought it was one of Joe’s jokes: though Lawton was only 5ft 10in tall, he was the finest header of the ball in the game at that time, possibly ever. A year or two before, the two faced each other in an Army game and Bill, who was 5ft 9in, thought he had a good game against him. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Lawton this time, ‘you’ll be okay.’ Again, Bill used his expertise to nullify Lawton’s powerful headers.
During the 1945/6 season, he played 11 League matches and joined a summer coaching course organised by Walter Winterbottom in Birmingham. Sir Stanley Rous, the 6ft 4in tall FA secretary who had been headmaster of Watford Grammar School and refereed the 1934 FA Cup Final, was the first person to think of starting coaching courses in the late thirties. Born in Oldham in 1913, Winterbottom played several matches as an amateur for Manchester United before a back injury ended his brief career. During World War II, he was head of PT at the Air Ministry and reached the rank of Wing Commander. After leaving the RAF, he was about to apply for the post of principal at Carnegie College (where he had worked earlier) when Rous offered him the job of England manager in 1946. Members of the FA Council knew little of Rous’s surprise plan and shared the view of most managers and players that coaching was unnecessary. But Rous was a dominant figure and talked his colleagues round: eventually Winterbottom became the national manager and also, the national director of coaching. He held his jobs for 16 years, the same term as Bill’s managerial career.
Bill soon signed up for the course and passed his Full Badge at the first attempt alongside Joe Mercer, Alan Brown, George Smith and George Ainsley. He recalled: ‘Walter was an exceptional man. He had more influence over the game in England than anyone and he worked prodigiously hard. He travelled the country on his own, lecturing non-stop. He persuaded dozens and dozens of players to take up coaching and he was like a Messiah, spreading the word.’
Winterbottom observed: ‘There were managers who didn’t manage, they just signed cheques. It was player power, with the older players deciding the tactics. The game was nearly all long balls and there was a loosely created midfield. Nobody worked out even simple things.’
Winterbottom and his disciples, Bill among them, met considerable opposition. Because of his lack of top-class experience as a player, Winterbottom was branded a man who didn’t understand the game. Journalists mocked him, but those who believed in him knew that he expanded their knowledge and made them better players and managers. Each year they would gather at their summer coaching conference to discuss the game and learn from each other. They didn’t claim expenses for travelling: they paid their own.
In the next three seasons under Hulme, Tottenham finished sixth, eighth and fifth in the Second Division and Bill Nicholson missed just five matches out of 126. He was possibly the most consistent player of that time. Although he rarely made the headlines, his teammates realised he wouldn’t let them down. Mostly he played on the right as a defensive wing half, but his supreme fitness enabled him to do plenty of attacking as well. It was a happy time and his daughters were born at home: Linda on 26 February 1947 and Jean on 1 October 1948.
‘I was born in the middle of the Deep Freeze in 1947,’ remembered Linda, who has now lived in the USA for more than 30 years. ‘The country was covered with ice and snow for three months and there weren’t many matches played. There was a snowstorm on the day and the midwife had problems getting to us. I’m certain that Dad wasn’t present at both births – men didn’t do that in those days. And I’m not sure he changed a nappy!’
There were some influential players under Joe Hulme and one of them, Vic Buckingham, who graduated from Northfleet in Kent – the same nursery club as Bill – had many interesting, educational talks with his teammate. He was a humorous, debonair man, who had also obtained his FA Badge at a young age and was always available to pass on his knowledge. Four years older, he went on to become an innovative coach with a worldwide reputation. He started out by coaching Oxford University and the amateur side Pegasus, who won the FA Amateur Cup under his direction (Pegasus was run by Professor Sir Harold Thompson, a powerful and destructive influence at the FA). Buckingham shared similarities with Danny Blanchflower – a wing half who created good things. He went on to manage Bradford, WBA, Ajax, Sheffield Wednesday, Fulham, Ethnikos, Barcelona and Seville. It was an impressive CV.
But another pioneering coach was about to enter Bill’s life – Arthur Sydney Rowe was born in Tottenham, a 10-minute walk from White Hart Lane. He had a season with Northfleet before signing as a professional with Tottenham; between 1929 and 1939, he made 182 appearances when he retired because of a knee injury. Not many footballers of that time went through their careers without having a cartilage or two removed, leaving them with permanent limps. Thirty-three, he was a qualified coach and coached the Army team. He was successful with non-League Chelmsford City and they won both the Southern League and the Southern Cup in the same season. Six months before World War II broke out, he coached in Budapest and soon won the respect of board officials and players alike: ‘I was enjoying it, but I was lucky to have got back to England before someone blew the whistle on me.’
Jimmy Hogan, a tiny winger from Burnley, was one of the earliest coaching pioneers when he coached the Dutch side in 1912, moved on to train the Austrian side two years later and coached the Hungarian and German sides in the 1930s. They liked his unorthodox style of coaching and he was revered in Hungary. His work contributed to the emergence of the Hungarian players after World War II, who went on to become the first country to beat England, 6-3 at Wembley, in 1953 and forced English football to look outwards, inside of inwards, finally ending their decades of insularity.
Arthur Rowe was offered a three-year contract from the Hungarian FA in late 1939, probably inspired by Hogan’s reputation, but it was too late: the war had begun. With