100 Years of Chapman. 15: The making of Huddersfield Town

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04 Jan 2025 09:34

100 Years since Herbert Chapman Joined the Arsenal

We left Chapman at the end of the last episode, out of work and banished from football for life for being manager of Leeds City at the time when they refused to hand over financial documents to the League, (on the grounds that the documents were confidential). The fact that Chapman knew nothing of the issues at hand seemed to count for nothing. He was manager at the time, so he had to be banned.

From such evidence as can be found via newspapers of the time, being banned from football was not in itself seen as much more than “one of those things” – professional football having created the image of being a law unto itself. Obviously, the decision meant that Chapman could not move on to manage another club, but just as obviously, as a father of four children, two of whom were at private schools, Chapman needed a job.

He had shown himself to be adept at handling whatever situation was thrown at him in the world of football, and being banished from the game was seemingly something that those not involved in what was seen as the crazy world of football, accepted as something that happened. After all, the pre-war era was a time when there was a strict limit on how much players could be paid, and in which most players seemed to manage no more than one season at each club they played for. The game, it seems, was very much treated as a law unto itself.

And so with a shortage of men everywhere as a result of four years of warfare, and a coke works nearby needing someone to oversee the workforce, Chapman found himself work very quickly – undoubtedly aided by the notion that a man who could manage a football club would find managing a coke works a doddle.

Thus we enter the post-war era, a period in which industry has to reorientate itself toward a peacetime economy, and an era in which the Football League decided to expand itself.

Indeed, quite why the League wanted to expand each division from a 38 match season to a 42-match season through the simple expedient of adding two clubs to each division is not hard to see. The clubs obviously wanted more money, and four extra fixtures a year would of course give that, without the clubs having to pay the players extra.

What’s more, the Football League had concerns about the Southern League and the way it too was attempting to grow its own importance. Offering places to one or two of their clubs would be beneficial to the Football League and would show which League was the most powerful. Third, there was a feeling that attendance levels at games could fall, given the number of men who had died in the war. Since gate money was the key source of income at that time more games were needed.

And so the meetings took place to decide how the expansion of the Leagues should be organised. Although at the time the election of Arsenal to the First Divisioin caused no controversy at all, subsequent re-writing of history has allowed conspiracy theorists to suggest that Arsenal were involved in skulduggery of some sort in getting elected to the First Division. We have covered this in considerable detail in the series The 1919 Affair: How Arsenal were promoted to the first division, which is available on this site.

As for football in Herbert Chapman’s part of the world, that was in even more turmoil than in the rest of the country. Leeds City had been ejected from the League as we noted in earlier episodes of this series, and this was the reason Chapman was now out of football and banned from the game for life.

Huddersfield Town’s directors, 20 miles down the road from Leeds, noted developments at Leeds with interest, being fully aware that they themselves could not continue with attendances at matches which were on occasion dippling as low as 5000 to a game.

As a result Huddersfield’s directors were considering to move their club to Leeds, given that Leeds City was no more, and create an amalgamated Huddersfield & Leeds club. But those associated with the now outlawed Leeds City quickly showed that they had no interest in immediately joining with Huddersfield. For they were perfectly aware that before the fall of Leeds City, that club was regularly attracting far bigger crowds than Huddersfield Town.

But what totally scuppered any further talk of a Leeds / Huddersfield merger was that in 1919/20, Huddersfield Town had a remarkable season, and after going on a 14-match unbeaten run in the latter part of the campaign, (including winning all of the last eight matches in a row) the club finished second in the league thus gaining promotion. With Huddersfield taking its eye off the concept of a rapid merger, Leeds City reformed themselves and as Leeds United, applied for a place back in the expanded League Division 2. This was granted and so all thought of a merger with Huddersfield was abandoned by both parties.

Indeed for Huddersfield, this must have seemed like the start of a new age, as crowds had risen greatly. However such dreams can of course be short lived, as in the first half of the 1920/21 season the club suffered a very poor run of form and by the new year found themselves 18th out of 22 clubs. They were five points clear of relegation, but recent results made the future look decidedly dodgy.

Meanwhile, Herbert Chpaman had found himself out of work again, following the sale of the company for which he was working. Huddersfield, recognising that recent form had made them vulnerable felt they needed a new manager, and so applied to the League to set aside Chapman’s banishment from football on the rather obvious grounds that Chapman had had no idea what the directors of Leeds City were up to as he was not on the board. Chapman then, with the offer of a new job in football, duly applied to the League for an overturn of his ban, which was immediately granted and he became Huddersfield’s assistant manager – although it very quickly became clear that he was the man the board were listening to, not the man actually designated “secretary-manager” as was often the style of the day.

By the end of the season, seeing which way the wind had blown the nominal manager asked to be relieved of his duties. He was duly paid off, and left football, apparently to run a pub, and Chapman became manager of Huddersfield Town in name as well as in fact. Huddersfield had ended the season 1920/21 season in 17th, 13 points above the first relegation spot and with only two defeats in the last 11 games. Chapman had clearly made his mark.

So it was, that by the start of the 1921/2 season, Herbert Chapman was manager of first division Huddersfield Town, and he immediately set about devising a team that could play according to his favoured counter-attacking tactics. This of course cost money, and this does take us back to the issue of Henry Norris’ later advert which so riled Leslie Knighton – the advert noting that managers whose prime way of improving the team was simply to spend a lot of money should not apply for the managerial post at Arsenal.

Knighton’s (perhaps deliberate) misunderstanding of this point was to interpret it as meaning that Norris did not want to spend money on players. But this is what Chapman did at Huddersfield and subsequently did with Arsenal. The point was however, that Chapman bought players in order to make his preferred tactics work, rather than simply carrying on with the same tactical approach as every other club. Chapman wanted to take Huddersfield forward by making them a counter-attacking team – and for that he needed a certain type of player.

The case of Chapman’s first purchase for Leeds City had been a case in point for there he had started matters rolling by going to see not the player but the player’s brother. Quite how much of a sounding out the brother undertook in relation to Clem Stephenson’s ultimate transfer is not known, but Aston Villa quoted a high price for the player and Chapman had persuaded the board to pay.

Elsewhere however Chapman enhanced his reputation by also bringing in Sam Wadsworth on a free transfer, the player seemingly having suffered mental health injuries during the war. The manager also demanded better changing facilities, improvements to the pitch and the agreement to take the team to play in an international tournament in Paris during the summer. Chapman also set up a youth team and a reserve team, and found leagues for them to play in. He was in short, revolutionising Huddersfield Town and turning them into a modern, forward looking club, having previously been little more than a footballing backwater..

But despite this revolution in the club and the improvements in the club’s fortunes on the pitch, crowds stayed modest, which of course meant that Chapman’s forays into the transfer market needed to be limited. But then in the season 19211/2 with the club having sunk back to 14th in the league (a three place improvement on the 17th place the season before) the club won its first-ever trophy: The FA Cup.

This was a period in which all league clubs entered the competition together in the first round in January, with drawn matches being replayed three or four days later. Curiously, in all of their fist three rounds, replays were exactly what Huddersfield needed, after drawing away to Burnley, Brighton and Hove Albion and Blackburn and then beating each in the replay.

It was only in the final three games did Huddersfield discover the method of winning at the first occasion, beating Millwall and Notts County before defeating Preston North End in the final on 29 April 1922.

Seemingly out of nothing, Huddersfield Town, having only just joined the top division had won their first trophy one year later – and for good measure took the Charity Shield (for their one and only time) as well, beating champions Liverpool 1-0. They had also finished 14th in the league with no worries about relegation. The club that had only been in the top division for two seasons had won the FA Cup and the Charity Shield. Whatever would they do next?

Chapman as we shall see, was ready to show them.

100 Years of Chapman. 15: The making of Huddersfield Town

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