Bill Nicholson. Brian Scovell
his arrival: ‘Spurs are giving a month’s trial to an amateur, Wm. E. Nicholson, an inside right of Scarborough Working Men’s Club. He recently celebrated his 17th birthday. His height is 5ft 8ins and weight 10st 12lbs.’
Ron Anderson was secretary of the Young Liberals FC (not the Working Men’s Club FC, as reported) and some time later Spurs sent a donation of £25. It turned out to be the best bargain in the history of the club. Ron said: ‘I remember Bill’s headmaster telling him not to sign for Spurs. “There is no future in playing professional football,” he said.’
Bill was soon kitted out for his first game in a Midweek League match against West Ham, a club to which he would later have a close affinity, and he was delighted to see that the pitch was heavily sanded – it reminded him of Scarborough’s South Beach. Among the West Ham side he met a very chatty, charming East Ender named Dick Walker, later West Ham’s chief scout. They became good friends and years later spent thousands of hours watching talent around the country with a view to signing the best. The club found nearby digs for Bill and after playing in the London Combination reserve side over the Christmas and New Year holiday of 1937–8, he was given a professional contract with their nursery club, Northfleet United. Ron Burgess, Ted Ditchburn and Les Bennett were also loaned out. He was paid £2 a week, the same wage as the Alexandra Laundry. At the end of the season he won a Kent Senior Cup winners’ medal in the final against Dover.
There were 48 professionals on the staff at White Hart Lane, a much higher number than most Premiership clubs today, plus eight ground staff boys. The boys were not permitted to enter the dressing rooms and there was hardly contact with the seniors. Juniors trained only twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, but if their other work was finished, then they kicked a homemade ball – a bundle of old cloth tied into a ball – around under the stands. Much of their time was spent painting the grandstand and pulling the 6ft-wide fly roller in a wooden frame over the playing pitch. Often the mud was so deep that it was almost impossible to move the roller. By the end of the season, there was no grass on the pitch and the boys had to help the groundsman to reseed it.
Bill found painting a chore: ‘I dreaded having to climb up the girders to do it,’ he said, ‘because I had no head for heights.’ At school, he had lessons in carpentry, which came in useful when he was asked to build a shooting box for the players. It was an 8am to 5pm day, with a brief rest for a sandwich and a cup of tea, which is of course in marked contrast to today’s young professionals with their sports cars and designer-clad girlfriends. As Frank Lampard Snr observed 60 years later: ‘They should learn how to clean the senior players’ boots to learn some respect.’
Every summer, Bill went home to Quarry Mount to stay with his mother. Frank White, who lived next door, remembered: ‘They kicked small balls about between the back-to-back houses. People always came in from the back door, not the front, which was the posh end, with its lawn and brick wall.’ The reason for this, apparently, was because Richard III introduced a 4p tax on householders using the front door in the 11th century and they still had the habit of going in the back entrance. When I visited that part of Scarborough, a car repair building opposite the Nicholsons’ house had been replaced by 10 very smart detached houses and a notice on the wall said: ‘Nicholson Estate Agents’ (no relation).
Jack Tresadern, a small, dapper man from Leytonstone, was appointed manager of Tottenham from Crystal Palace and he hardly spoke to Bill in the two-and-a-bit seasons that he was in charge. Tresadern always wore a black Trilby and he didn’t look like a manager. He was famed for being West Ham’s skipper in the 1923 FA Cup Final, known as the ‘White Horse Final’, when he complained of being trapped by spectators – 200,000 got into Wembley, twice the number permitted – following David Jack’s first goal. Tresadern told how he was unable to get back on to the field when the game resumed, but it made little difference to the result. In those days managers had little contact with the players – the trainer was the key man and he did the training, which mainly consisted of running round the track. The heavy leather balls were rarely seen until kick-off. Danny Blanchflower always joked about it when he first joined Barnsley before transferring to Tottenham: ‘They kept the ball away from us because they thought we would be eager to get after it.’
Tresadern was unpopular with the fans and directors alike and left Spurs at the end of the 1937/8 season. The man who took over was Peter McWilliam from Inveravon, Banffshire, who managed the club between 1913 and 1927, and he helped to win the FA Cup Final in 1921 on a rain-soaked Stamford Bridge. For the first time, two kings – George V and his son, George VI – attended. Both were saturated and neither of them really liked football. McWilliam never gave tactical talks, preferring to leave the players to work things out for themselves. Instead, his strength lay in boosting their confidence.
Spurs were always renowned for their meanness and in 1927, Middlesbrough offered McWilliam £1,500 to become their manager. When Spurs refused to give him a rise, off he went. It took 11 years for them to get him back. He wasn’t so successful that time around and retired to live in Redcar in 1942. Soon after Bill arrived in 1936, the new grandstand opened and there were more girders for him to paint. The cost of the stand, mainly of wood, cost £60,000. Financed by Barclays Bank, it equalled the club’s profits since World War I.
Bill’s shyness soon evaporated and he made friends with the other boys. One in particular was W.A.R. Burgess, who joined the club on the same day. Known as Ronnie, he was a thoroughly nice young man and the two became lifelong friends. Born in Cwm, south Wales in 1917, he learned his football by kicking balls on slagheaps above the river Ebbw and had just signed up as a coalminer when Tottenham called him up to White Hart Lane for a year’s trial.
When his trial ended, Tresadern and his trainer thought he wasn’t up to standard and so they gave him his rail fare back to Wales. Before Burgess headed off home, he went to watch the ‘A’ team. Finding they were one short, he volunteered to play and proved himself the most influential player in the team. He was promptly re-signed. In 1939, he was capped by Wales before joining the RAF. After the War, he captained Spurs for eight seasons, leading them to success in the Second Division and in the First in successive seasons, alongside Bill in the midfield. Burgess was one of the chief instigators of Arthur Rowe’s push-and-run style of play, his stamina almost inexhaustible and probably derived from his running up and down on coal deposits as a boy.
When I interviewed Bill for his book in 1983 and 1984, I asked him who was the best player at Tottenham had produced in his time. There were plenty of candidates among those that he had worked with, including Greaves, Blanchflower, Mackay and White, but without hesitation, he told me: ‘Ronnie Burgess. I liked him very much. He was genuine and honest, and although he later became captain, he was never afraid to seek advice. He was too nice a person to order people about and make decisions affecting their livelihoods, which was the main reason he was less successful as a manager than as a player. He was my favourite player. He had everything: good feet, ability in the air, strength in the tackle and was a beautiful passer of the ball. In some ways he resembled Bryan Robson, but I believe he was a better player than Robson.’
Was he better than Dave Mackay, I asked? He laughed. ‘I’m not going into that,’ he told me. ‘I’m sticking with Ronnie!’
In 2004, the same year as Bill died, Burgess passed away at the age of 87. He was two years older. The two pals had testing lives but as a testament to their superb fitness and self-discipline, both lived to a grand age and kept close to their original playing weights throughout their lives.
Bill confessed to me that in his first months in London he wondered whether he might have a future in the professional game. He had no tricks – unlike his manager Peter McWilliam, who brought in the ‘wiggle’ when he played for Newcastle – but he made the best of his considerable assets: strength, stamina, the simplicity of his passing game and determination in the tackle. Some people thought he wasn’t first team quality at the time and he was of the same view.
Bill was 19 and raw when he made his debut in the 1938/9 season: however, the first team left back Billy Whatley was injured and so he was forced to play out of position against Blackburn Rovers at Ewood Park. Rovers won 3-1, during which he strained a thigh muscle and had to play outside right