Professional Football in Barnsley between 1939 and 1963: Essential Work, the Front Line and National Service

08/03/2018  -  1.12

Ian Alister and Andrew Ward

Introduction

Tommy Lumley left school at fourteen in December 1938. He expected to become a coalminer but his life took a few twists. He worked Saturdays at a grocery in Leadgate, County Durham, aged fourteen to sixteen, and played football for Cook Hall Juniors. As an eighteen-year-old he joined the Royal Navy in December 1942 and saw action while dealing with electrics as a wireman. In 1944 he travelled back and forth across the English Channel during D Day manoeuvres, and he played hardly any football until he was nearly twenty-four. Then, in December 1948, he signed for Charlton Athletic.

Anton Rippon, in his book Gas Masks for Goalposts, tells the story of football’s uncertainty during World War Two. Football bladders were difficult to find, kit was not always available, badly maintained goal-nets had holes big enough for a football to squeeze through, and some players bluffed their way into teams by saying ‘I’ve played for Aldershot’. Strange wartime score-lines included Portsmouth’s 16-1 win against Clapton Orient, Norwich City’s 18-0 thrashing of Brighton and Aston Villa’s 19-2 victory against RAF (Lichfield).

This story calls on a case study of Barnsley footballers and staff, identifying broad categories of professional players who adapted to the war effort. Those born in the years between 1914 and 1928 were likely to become (i) essential workers (e.g. coalminers, steelworkers, etc), or (ii) active servicemen in combat. And those born between 1928 and 1942, were faced with a choice of (i) two or three years of National Service or (ii) continuing essential work at coalmines, steelworks, shipyards, electricity generators, farms, etc.

In the early 1950s some servicemen faced military activity on a sloping battleground in Korea. The football pitch at Rawmarsh, near Rotherham, was nicknamed ‘Hill 60’ in honour of the Korean hill.

Essential Wartime Work

Syd Storey, born in 1919, was nineteen when World War Two broke out. During the war he was an essential worker in the coal mines for six days a week. Storey did early shifts at Wombwell Main Colliery, usually between 2 a.m. and 11 a.m., and crawled around on his hands and knees to work a low seam. Depending on available light, football matches kicked off between 2.15 p.m. and 3.15 p.m. in those days before floodlights.
After the war Storey switched to Houghton Main Colliery but the Essential Work Order was kept in place until 1948. He didn’t play full-time professional football until he was twenty-seven years old. Amazingly, from that point he went on to make 389 Football League appearances, and he played for York City in their famous 1954-55 run to the FA Cup semi-final. The colliery management was very good to him during the Cup run, which amounted to eight matches. He didn’t leave the pit until 1960, when he became the York City trainer at the age of forty.

Many men worked in the pits during the war because they preferred coalmining to fighting. In 1939 Norman Rimmington went straight into the North Gawber coal-mine when he left school at fourteen. Rimmington later became the Barnsley goalkeeper. When he was injured the pit manager, a football fanatic, let him off work.

Another Barnsley goalkeeper, Harry Hough, born in 1924, joined the Air Training Corps (ATC) just before war broke out in 1939; Hough was old enough to work in the coalmining business and he took up a reserved occupation at Newton Chambers pit. ‘You had to stay at the pit till you were twenty-four or twenty-five against two years in the Forces,’ said one retired player, ‘but you were automatically settled into a job when you finished.’ By December 1943 one in ten men had chosen to work in coalmines rather than other jobs. Men were exempt of the army, navy or air force if they did essential work for eight years.

During the war Gavin Smith, a speedy Barnsley winger, did essential work as a fitter and turner at a local glassworks. Smith, a Scotsman, was signed by Barnsley from Dumbarton in February 1939. During the next seven seasons he scored 104 goals in 233 wartime matches, placing him tenth in the overall list of wartime appearances. In peacetime football he scored thirty-six times in 257 matches.

Johnny Kelly, born in February 1921, was a Scotland international footballer who made a bleach product called Kelzone and sold it at the Co-op. When he was fifteen Kelly lost a thumb and two fingers from his right hand. He’d been making tea and keeping fires alight on a construction site when he fiddled with a detonator in a tin and it exploded. Throughout World War Two Kelly drove a lorry because he was not eligible for military service after his detonator accident. He played for the Scotland international team in the 1941-42 season, when they lost 4-0 to the RAF and 6-1 to an England team. After the war, in November 1948, Kelly made two goals in Scotland’s 3-1 win against Wales. In 1952 he applied for industrial injury benefit because of the state of his right knee.

In 1941, Henry Walters was a sixteen-year-old when he started playing for Wolves first team. In one match, against Leicester City, Wolves fielded a team with an average age of seventeen and a half. Walters was sent down to London to deal with bomb damage while he was still a teenager. It was his first experience of staying away from home. He worked Saturday mornings on the derelict buildings and carried a Gladstone Bag with his boots and shin-pads ready to play in a match for the likes of Clapton Orient . . . or ‘Clapton Ornaments’, as Walters fondly called them. After the war he played part-time football for Walsall (May 1946 to July 1953) and Barnsley (July 1953 to May 1959). He was a joiner at Cortonwood Colliery, near Wombwell, until the pit was closed in October 1985.

Roy Mason was the MP for Barnsley (1953 to 1983) and Barnsley Central (1983-87). He was fourteen when he started at the pit in essential work but he soon became the youngest-ever local councillor. His biggest disappointment in life was not getting into the RAF during World War Two. He’d been very active in the boy scouts, and a flight sergeant in the air cadets, but he was in a reserved occupation at the coalmine and was too well known in Barnsley and Sheffield to be enlisted. In due course Mason came out of the pit to become general secretary of Yorkshire miners and vice-president of the National Union of Miners. One day at Barnsley bus station Mason met the Northern Ireland international footballer Danny Blanchflower, who chalked on a wall how he’d make his Barnsley colleague Dave Lindsay play for Scotland.

In Action

Relatively few Barnsley men saw action in the services because the town had such a coalmining tradition. Tommy Lumley, mentioned earlier, was one of the few Barnsley players from the 1950s who had seen combat in World War Two. Another was Norman Smith, who’d grown up in Darwen, Lancashire, before joining the RAF in 1943 at the age of eighteen. Smith was an air-gunner who did a tour of operations on Lancaster bombers when the survival risk of bomber crews was less than fifty per cent. He was eventually grounded and given nine months off flying before being posted to Northern Ireland. He was demobbed at the end of the war.
World War Two took the heart out of Johnny Steele’s football career. A Scotsman, Steele signed for Barnsley from Ayr United in June 1938, when he was twenty-one, and became a prolific goalscorer. By the time he’d retired from being a Barnsley footballer, over ten years later, he had played fewer than a hundred peacetime League games. In his late twenties Steele had spent three years in exceptionally difficult conditions in Burma.
George Spruce, born in 1923, was enlisted in the Royal Navy until the summer of 1946, and spent time in the Mediterranean as a rear gunner protecting merchant shipping. And Tim Ward, Barnsley’s manager between 1953 and 1960, joined the D-Day landings while serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) during World War Two. Ward was a nursing orderly attached to the 15th Scottish Division and, in April 1945, was one of the first soldiers to visit the horrendous Belsen camp in northern Germany.

Another Barnsley footballer, Bernard Harper, collected a number of representative honours during World War II and went on to become player-manager of Scunthorpe United. Harper played for a Football League team (26 December 1939 and 18 January 1941), an England XI (20 January1940), a British XI (2 November 1940), a Yorkshire XI (25 March 1940), and a Football Association XI (17 May 1941). Later in the war, in February 1945, he played for an England team versus Scotland at the Calcutta Ground, India.

The club’s directors were generally older men, but there was one clear exception. Ralph Potter, born in 1920, joined the local Territorials pre-war and was called up early in the war for the Royal Army Ordnance Corp (RAOC), a local unit dealing with technical issues. Then Potter served in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) for three years and the Royal Engineers (RE) for three and a half years. He spent time on garrison duty in Iceland, where Germany had a diplomatic presence. Potter played some army football during the war. He became a Barnsley FC director in the early 1950s.

National Service

Richard Vinen, in National Service: A Generation in Uniform, 1945-1963, explains that National Service was introduced in 1939 for single men aged twenty to twenty-two. Within a few months the age range was extended to all men aged eighteen to forty-one. After the National Service Act 1948 was introduced, men between seventeen and twenty-one had to spend eighteen months in the armed forces and could be called up if needed in the following four years. Call-ups ended on 31 December 1960 and the last National Servicemen left the armed forces in May 1963. Nearly two million went through National Service. Some learned useful skills but others didn’t.

In Colin Schindler’s book, From Aldershot to Aden: Tales from the Conscripts, 1946-62, one interviewee claimed that those good at sport had a better deal in the services: ‘There was one guy who played for Barnsley, and in those days Barnsley were a decent team. He never did any duties. He was spotted when we were at Watchfield, near Swindon, and all he did after that was play football, like Bobby Charlton.’
A few Barnsley players, such as Phil Roscoe and Billy Anderson, did their National service in the RAF. After Barrie Betts signed up at Uxbridge in 1950 as an eighteen-year-old he learnt a lot about social mixing, and sport was well thought of in the services.

Tommy Holmes was an apprentice bricklayer when he left school. He went into the RAF in 1952 and had ‘ten months holiday’ attached to the Royal Artillery in Newcastle. Then he got posted to Anglesey where he just prayed for the day to come out. It was a secret missile testing establishment, and there were days when the klaxons sounded, the ground trembled and everybody disappeared. By the time he came out of the RAF, on St Patrick’s Day 1955, he’d forgotten he was a professional footballer.

Ray John, born in Swansea, joined Tottenham Hotspur in 1950. He worked as a moulder at Richard Thomas & Baldwin cast iron works, Swansea, and he should have had his National Service deferred. Instead he was sent to the RAF at High Wycombe before being moved to RAF St Athan, near Cardiff, where he met his future wife Myra, who had been a bus conductress in Barnsley.

Geoff Lees, born in 1933, went for National Service in 1950 and joined a 55th regiment. Lees was stationed at Oswestry, where there were more than twenty professional footballers, including future internationals such as Tommy Taylor and Ronnie Clayton. ‘It was a nonsense place,’ Lees recalled. ‘I was first a radar operator and then a PT instructor. I got a stripe straightaway, which was ridiculous, but you couldn’t be an instructor without one.’ Lees had two weeks in the Army PT school, Aldershot, and that stimulated his thoughts about teaching as a career. He played for Bradford City for two years and then went to training college. He worked at Rawmarsh School as a Physical Education teacher in the late 1950s and later became head of the upper school. He scouted for a number of football clubs, including Leeds United.

National Service for Ron Riches was deferred until twenty-one because of his apprenticeship as a joiner. On the day he got married, the fourteenth of November 1955, he should have joined the RAF but he was deferred for three days so he could have a honeymoon. Stationed at Hednesford, near Wolverhampton, he got home every Saturday and was the only professional player at that base. There was no square bashing and he was the camp postman. But Riches was released from the RAF after ten months after breaking his ankle in a football match. He went down the pit, became an electrical engineer, and worked his way up.

John Stainsby was the last Barnsley footballer to be called up. He’d had enough of the pit after six months, so he opted for two years in the army (from 1956 to 1958). Stainsby’s time was spent in Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire.

Biographies

Ian Alister and Andrew Ward are the authors of Barnsley: A Study in Football, 1953 to 1959 (Crowberry, 1981, republished in 1997). Between 1979 and 1982 Alister and Andrew interviewed ninety-three people connected to Barnsley Football Club. A copy of The Datasport Book of Wartime Football, 1939-46 by Gordon Andrews was very helpful.

Ian Alister

Ian Alister met Andrew Ward in a second-hand bookshop in Cambridge in April 1978, and they worked together on Barnsley: A Study in Football, 1953 to 1959 (Crowberry, 1981, second edition 1997). Alister is the co-editor of Contemporary Jungian Analysis (with Christopher Hauke, 1998) and co-editor of Jung and Film (again with Christopher Hauke, 2001). For some years he ran a book stall on Cambridge Market.

Andrew Ward

Andrew Ward is a freelance writer with over thirty books to his name. His work on football includes Football Nation (with John Williams, 2009), The Day of the Hillsborough Disaster (with Rogan Taylor and Tim Newburn, 1995) and Football’s Strangest Matches (1989). Ward’s most recent book is No Milk Today: The Vanishing World of the Milkman (Robinson, 2017).