Final Part of Chapter 1

We all have pivotal moments in our lives. Sometimes they are the result of our own decisions; sometimes they are the consequences of other peoples’ actions. When Bob Lord sent a director to see Adamson on a cold, bleak, Monday morning in January 1976 to ask if he would resign in exchange for a generous settlement (dismissed and sweetened in the same sentence) his life was changed forever. What he had once thought, in fact had been told was a job for life, was finished. He poured out his feelings about Bob Lord in an unpublished article that must have been written sometime in 1976. It was amongst his possessions and collection of old paperwork found by his grandchildren:

   ‘I lasted for six years under Lord after expecting to be Burnley manager for a lifetime. To be fair Lord treated me well until I started disagreeing with him. Then our relationship went sour. We lived almost in each other’s pockets. I planned Burnley’s future on the playing side and Lord did the rest. At one time I thought we were a great team. We both made mistakes but I thought our future was healthy until the day Lord retired from his butchery business and took up football as a full-time job.

   ‘Then things started to go wrong. I spent more of my time filling in forms and listening to Lord rather than concentrating solely on the job I was paid for. Not that I’m blaming Lord entirely for the lowly position the club were in when I left last January. But his interference didn’t help. I expect any chairman to be fully informed but I don’t think it’s right to devote the majority of the working day to the chairman’s whims.

     ‘And he had many of those. He ruled the club with an iron fist demanding attention most of the time. My wife used to dread weekends especially when we were playing at home. Sometimes she just didn’t feel like going to the game but it wasn’t just a case of opting out. She had to ring the chairman’s wife and report the fact that she wouldn’t be there. Too many excuses were frowned upon.

     ‘Even after a game, Lord needed his men around him - to play snooker.

     ‘We’d troop down to the local Conservative Club, discuss the game, while Lord popped in the colours and got results that world snooker champion Ray Reardon would have been proud of. Most of us were reasonable players but somehow we always seemed to miss a crucial pot.

     ‘That was only the start of the weekend activities. Most Sundays we were summoned to the Lord household for lunch and hours of chatter. I didn’t mind the ritual but my wife hated it. But we kept going, kept eating the roast beef and Yorkshire Pud, and swallowed the rest just to keep Lord happy.

     ‘There’s nothing worse than when Lord when he’s upset or angry. Conversation is restricted to a grunt or a sharp blast and he seems to surround everything with a deep, dark, depressive cloud. The consequences can be disastrous as I know to my cost. He starts with what I term his ‘pressure’ system forcing people to the limit until he gets the results he wants.

   ‘He started with me by picking up every point, scrutinising, and then trying to provoke an argument. This went on for months until our FA Cup defeat at Blackpool. Obviously this was the last straw in a disappointing season for Lord. Nobody likes going out of the Cup at the first attempt especially to a Second Division side. Burnley were no exception.

     ‘Whilst I was out of the dressing room there were heated exchanges which finally exploded between skipper Colin Waldron and my chief coach Joe Brown. I eventually got into the dressing room and sorted out the row. It was just one of those instant flare-ups and I knew there would be no recriminations. Lord missed the Saturday snooker match for the first time in 10 years and I spent the whole of Sunday in bed. I was shattered from working a 12-hour day and suffering from an overdose of Bob Lord. I was no better on the Monday morning and I decided to take the morning off – my first in 12 years.

     ‘But I didn’t get the sleep I needed. A director called, examined the facts and then said, “Would you be willing to resign if Mr Lord paid up your contract?” Lord had the final word of course. The following day he sent for me to sack me for not reporting the Blackpool incident and not turning up for work.

     ‘The pay-off of £25,000 softened the blow somewhat as I became another of Lord’s victims.

   ‘I’d almost walked out on him 12 months earlier after an explosive bust-up at London Airport. The club’s tour of Madeira had started off badly for him. Somebody had forgotten to pick up his luggage and he had to carry it to the taxi himself. The strain must have been too much. He was grumpy for the whole train journey down to London and didn’t improve when another taxi spilled his luggage into a London street.

     ‘I’d arranged to meet the party at London Airport and Lord was in vintage form even for him. The red cheeks had exploded into a deep crimson. The chest was heaving and the hat was tilted. Then old war-horse was ready for battle and London Airport suddenly inherited a new tannoy system.

     “It’s your bloody fault that my luggage was forgotten. You ought to arrange things properly,” he bellowed.

     ‘I just turned and headed back for Burnley. I didn’t get far. Another director stepped in and calmed me down. It took hours for Lord to regain his composure and grunt his apologies.

   ‘Many troubles with Lord seemed to come from tours or holidays. A couple of years ago I was lying in the sun enjoying Majorca when I got a phone call from our groundsman. He was upset and complaining bitterly that Lord had ordered him to work from 8am until 6.30pm with only an hour for lunch and no tea breaks. I didn’t want to lose a highly qualified groundsman and asked him to hold on until I got back from holiday. I found that the groundsman had apparently upset the Lord family over the growing of tomatoes. In his spare time the groundsman was paid for looking after Lord’s garden. On one of his weekly visits he found that two tomato plants had died through lack of water. The following day Lord informed the groundsman that he didn’t want him at his home again.

   ‘Whatever I said didn’t matter. The groundsman eventually left and we had a real problem. It ended with me and my family manning the mowers at Turf Moor and the club’s training ground at Gawthorpe. But we didn’t mind; we thought Burnley was a family club, a place of spirit and warmth.

     ‘It was until Bob Lord blew through and froze me out.’

     Here was the man who had fashioned such a beautiful passing team in those golden seasons of the seventies. The man who had been so elegant as a player, the captain of the title team, the 1962 Footballer of the Year, and the man who was even offered the England job and so much admired by Bobby Charlton. Yet here he was being spoken to and used as if he were some kind of lackey and lowly worker at Lord’s meat factory.

     There is so much angst and torment in that article. When I read it for the first time all I could think was, if only I’d been able to make those extra visits and spend long hours talking to him. But it was not to be.

     One thing Adamson did do was to pen a few thoughts for a small booklet produced in the late 80s to raise money for a by then financially stricken Burnley. When it was written Bob Lord had been dead for some years and the club was in an appalling state. A report in 1981 by Derek Gill into the financial and administrative state of the club was damning. In 1987 Burnley saved its league status only in the very last game of the season with a win and even then it was only preserved because Lincoln City lost. Jimmy Adamson watched all this happening and must have wondered just how the club had declined to such a desperate position, penniless and floundering in the depths of the Fourth Division. His finger pointed at Bob Lord.

     ‘When I joined Burnley in the late 40s I had no idea I would be spending 27 years with the club; those years contained incredible happiness but also periods of great sadness, both as a player and manager. The downfall of this great club began with whoever made the decision to sell Jimmy McIlroy. There is no doubt in my mind that the disastrous decision was made by Chairman Bob Lord, the clubs megalomaniac dictator of the day. I do not want to say anything that sounds like sour grapes because the club has given me too much pleasure for that. But I think it is fair to say that Bob Lord helped to build up one of the finest club set-ups in British football; and then destroyed it.

   ‘I joined the club before the Lord era just after the war when I was signed by Cliff Britton. He got the club on the road to success and was followed by the best manager the club has ever had in Alan Brown. He did more for the club as both a player and a manager than any other individual. He was the instigator of the Gawthorpe Hall training centre and was the inventive mind behind all the early coaching techniques which encouraged players to exploit their individual skills instead of stifling them.

     ‘And then came Jimmy McIlroy. He was the finest player I have ever seen wearing a Burnley shirt. The whole club in those days was geared for success which eventually led us into the European Cup. The commercial side was under the guidance of Jack Butterfield with the scouting system under the eagle-eye of Dave Blakey. Young players started to come through the reserve side like Andy Lochhead and Willie Irvine.

     ‘Whilst I was manager we had success in the early 70s getting promotion to the First Division in 1973 built on a team of both ability and team spirit. A tragic injury to Frank Casper against Leeds United only a week before the FA Cup semi-final against Newcastle United could have been the reason why we didn’t get all the way to Wembley. But the game itself was when we thrashed Leeds United 4-1 at Elland Road whilst they were well clear at the top of Division One and I remember it as a great victory with Collins, Nulty, Waldron and Captain Martin Dobson all outstanding.

     ‘I have had many wonderful experiences with Burnley Football Club. Looking back along the road I may have done a few things differently… but the trip itself… I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’

     You wonder what he might have done differently. Hindsight is such a wonderful thing but you wonder if he ever regretted that ‘Team of the Seventies’ claim he made. Might he have regretted the sales of Brian O’ Neil, Dave Thomas and Steve Kindon? Might he have handled Bob Lord differently? He must surely have rued the sale of Ralph Coates and was certainly distraught at the sale of Martin Dobson. Should he have opposed them more vigorously? Did he come to regret his eventual aloofness and indifference towards Harry Potts in the two years leading up to Harry’s departure?

     But the absence of any mention of Harry Potts in the article maybe answers that query. There is not one mention of him, the man acknowledged to have taken the club to the First Division title, to Wembley and into Europe – the latter not once but twice. The omission of his name and the praise heaped on Alan Brown is significant. Journalist Brian Glanville who had almost unlimited access to the team whenever they were in London is adamant that the success of Burnley Football Club was less to do with Potts, and much more to do with the foundations laid by Alan Brown, and then the outstanding presence of two players in particular – Jimmy McIlroy and Jimmy Adamson. Glanville in fact once wrote sketches for that early 60s satire show, That Was the Week That Was, hosted by David Frost late on Saturday nights on BBC TV. The sketch he wrote about the tyrannical Bob Lord and the cap-doffing, subservient Harry Potts was never shown.

     Twelve years after Lord had got rid of him, Adamson’s bitterness was unabated. His reference to him as, the megalomaniac dictator that destroyed the club is a testimony to that. It became a mutual dislike. Lord admitted to Margaret Potts whilst she was out walking one day, and he was driving by in his car, that he had made wrong choices. He stopped beside her and she always felt that he was about to say more, but then he stopped, bade her farewell and drove away. He commented to former player Les Latcham, when they met several years later, that Adamson was ‘his problem.’

     In 1963 Adamson still respected and admired his boss Potts, and even wrote that he did. He made it clear in a newspaper piece. He suggested that the new England manager, Alf Ramsey, needed regional advisers to assist him (Ramsey probably thought that’s the last thing I need). He proposed Bill Nicholson in the south, Stan Cullis in the midlands, Alan Brown in the north-east, and Harry Potts in the north-west. ‘Potts, Burnley’s ex-player manages the club so well. To run a First Division club on a tight purse is a task in itself, but to do it and keep the club among the best in the land says a lot for his shrewdness and judgement.’

     But as the years went by Adamson changed his opinions and had little time for Harry Potts. Whilst Potts was manager with Adamson his chief coach, and presumably in Bob Lord’s head manager-in-waiting, there was certainly an undercurrent that some players noticed. The more time that passed by, the more Adamson wanted full control. Potts was from the old era, tactically limited, and Adamson was from the new with a visionary mind. Potts was a manager who simply put out his best players week after week with never a thought of a change. If they could walk, they played. That was the game in the 50s and even into the early 60s. Adamson however, was from the new era, with an imaginative mind brimming with ideas and thoughts, many of them based on the Alan Brown training sessions and others on coaching courses at Lilleshall. Once Adamson became manager and Harry was pushed ‘upstairs’ into a vague general manager role, the rift was unconcealed.

     If Jimmy Adamson was the subject of a four-part drama, you might have the playing career as part one, then the coaching career, part three the managerial time at Burnley, and the then the final act of broken dreams and the sadness of failure at Leeds United. The drama of the final years at Leeds is clear. The personal and family heartbreaks border on tragedy.

   Or, you could simplify his life into two distinct eras: pre January 1976 and post January 1976 for this was date that was a real and life-changing watershed.

     But, whichever way you look at it, one question dominates; just how did it all go wrong for Jimmy Adamson? One character undoubtedly involved in the answer is Bob Lord. There are always two sides to everything and although this book looks at Jimmy Adamson’s story, the problem is that there was no-one to turn to in order to investigate how Lord himself felt about Adamson and how he viewed the change in their relationship. I met with his daughter Barbara many times in connection with other books and it was whenever Adamson’s name was mentioned she bridled and it became evident that her opinions of him were none too complimentary. I do remember her saying of her father one day, ‘He did so much for that man.’ It was clear from the way she emphasised and pronounced ‘that man’ that she had a poor opinion of Adamson. Barbara died some time ago. His daughter Margaret when I telephoned and who still lives in the Burnley area, straightaway answered she had no wish to talk about him. That is not a criticism of her in any way and I immediately respected her response and pursued it no further. But, what it meant was that there was no-one to speak on her father’s behalf and maybe her response illustrated the depth of feeling that remains regarding these old wounds. From previous conversations with her I do know that as Bob lay desperately ill in the final week of his life, Margaret spent a great deal of time by his bedside talking about the past and the club that meant so much to him. They talked about good times, great games, great players, celebrations and banquets, and tellingly ‘the people who had stabbed him in the back.’ Did he feel that Adamson was one of them?

     Maybe Bob Lord’s side of things lay in the letters and documents that he had kept at his home, but Barbara told me that on his instructions she spent a week burning them all. Despite his wonderful achievements at Burnley Football Club, in the final years things fell apart, so that it is now all too easy to be critical of him and the general perception of Bob Lord is that yes he was forthright, hard-working, visionary and proud, but he was also irascible, belligerent, cantankerous, bloody-minded, ill-mannered, dismissive and despotic. What tends to be remembered is his legendary rudeness along with the chaos and near bankruptcy at the club in the final years of his chairmanship. All of that is unfortunate for he was the man who created the greatness in the first place.

     There is all of that, plus the question of interpretation and how easy it is to see Lord as the villain. Paul Fletcher told me a lovely story about him. Prior to one game Lord left gifts for one of his favourite referees in his changing room – various cuts of meat and succulent sausages. The referee however had a stinker of a game with a number of decisions going against Burnley leaving Lord none too pleased. When the referee returned to his changing room at half-time the meats and sausages had been removed. Perception: was this Bob Lord being vindictive, or was it Bob Lord displaying a sense of humour? Or was it even his wife Hilda?

     If there was a frustration in the writing of this book it therefore came from the lack of first-hand source material showing Bob Lord’s ‘other side.’ At the end of Chapter Eight, however, is one of his letters to Jimmy Adamson, the only one that surfaced, and from this a different picture emerges; a man of kindness, thoughtfulness and compassion, not to mention intense loyalty. One or two more that I was told existed, couldn’t be found including the key letter from Lord to Adamson about the money Lord had borrowed. I knew the whereabouts of another cache of Bob Lord documents. Again the person in whose house it lay, someone who knew him well, wanted nothing to do with this book, save for the comment: ‘Jimmy Adamson – not my favourite person.’ Again, there is no criticism on my part, only disappointment; that Lord’s perspective would remain untold.

     Nevertheless, this is primarily a Jimmy Adamson book and if things began to go wrong at Burnley for him in the year leading up to his dismissal, his decline accelerated after he left Sunderland and joined Leeds United. By October 1980, he had simply had enough of the whole football business; of malicious fans, working under the shadow of Don Revie, unsupportive directors, and the sheer, never-ending, day-to-day demands of running a football club. It all ended with the ignominy and stress of a libel action he took against Leeds, a number of newspapers and the man who replaced him, Allan Clarke. He was only 51. He retreated into the shell of his family and the love of his wife May. The man who could have been England manager in 1962 reached a point in the mid-70s when his reputation was still immense; he had the football world at his fingertips and might have become one of the most influential football thinkers and managers of the age. At the end of the decade he turned his back on all of that and retreated into privacy.

     This book attempts to chart the ultimately unhappy story, one of failed hopes and broken dreams.