Money Can’t Buy Us Love
Everton in the 1960s
Money Can’t Buy Us Love
Everton in the 1960s
Gavin Buckland
First published as a hardback by deCoubertin Books Ltd in 2019.
First Edition
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Copyright © Gavin Buckland, 2019.
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For my wife, Joan,
and children Faye and Andrew
Contents
www.decoubertin.co.uk
THE PARABLE OF THE MERSEY MILLIONAIRES IS REALLY A TWENTY first century football story that took place more than fifty years ago. The arrival of a rich and powerful benefactor from the business world, who uses their wealth to reinvigorate the fortunes of a club, is a scenario that has been played out regularly over the past decade or more. In contrast, the arrival of John Moores at Everton in 1960 was taking English football into unchartered territory at the time.
Oligarchs and sheiks may now be the benefactors of choice in a globalised game, but in the early 1960s it was the local businessman made good. But Moores, as head of the powerful Littlewoods organisation, had far greater means than the local butcher or car dealer, and in many ways he – and his story at Everton – is the first link in a chain that runs from the insular world of English football of the 1950s to the multi-billion pound global money-making machine it has become today.
There was literally a price to pay though. A ruthless and ambitious chairman with designs on buying and being the best may have delighted Evertonians, but it instilled a degree of mistrust and animosity within the footballing community and elements of the press. Not only that, but the story begins at a time when the country was on the cusp of enormous cultural and economic change. Civil unrest and youthful rebellion bred football hooliganism, whilst the growth in tabloid journalism led to newspaper revelations about the rich and powerful. Everton, with big support and even bigger ambitions, were to become the victims of both. To add another dimension, the media saw the rise of Bill Shankly’s Liverpool – with their loveable and witty Kop and charismatic manager, plus a close association to the feel-good factor in the city at the time – as a welcome antidote to Big Brother at Goodison Park. If Liverpool were the clean-cut Beatles, then Everton played the part of the early Rolling Stones to perfection, although the truth as ever lies somewhere in-between, as the book shows.
But every ruthless leader needs a hatchet man, and in Harry Catterick, Moores recruited for many the perfect A-lister for the role. In his review of Rob Sawyer’s autobiography of the Everton manager in 2014, the Guardian’s Daniel Taylor wrote that ‘Catterick was difficult, impenetrable, deceitful, frequently unpleasant and pulled some fairly despicable stunts. He was also brilliant, a football visionary,’ which is a fair summation. Catterick’s mistrust of virtually everybody did not exactly help the club’s popularity, but that should not disguise his wide range of talents as a football manager – he could win ugly or with beauty, was a strategist with an attention to detail and could handle both big stars and turn promising youngsters into international players. Most importantly of all, in his two decades and more as a manager, Catterick showed the ability to operate successfully with either a shoestring budget or blank chequebook, whilst under extreme pressure to succeed. At the time, that was pretty unique.
Money Can’t Buy Us Love therefore attempts to make sense of all of this, telling the story of the Mersey Millionaires from Moores’ arrival to Catterick’s departure 13 years later. Amongst the main cast are Johnny Carey, Alex Young, Roy Vernon, Gordon West, Derek Temple, Colin Harvey, Howard Kendall, Joe Royle and Alan Ball. There are walk on parts for Shankly, Matt Busby, Don Revie, Bill Nicholson and Brian Clough – plus Dennis Skinner, the legendary MP. Alex Ferguson’s first public ‘hairdryer’ – with Catterick only feet away – gets an unexpected outing. The script takes the story from London’s Café Royal to Goodison via Anfield, Wembley, Blackpool’s Bloomfield Road and Athens. The main part of the plot both starts and ends in farce, beginning with a famous sacking in a taxi and finishing with a horse biting a spectator outside the Baseball Ground, Derby. Thankfully, the tales that filled the interim depict one of the most fascinating and revolutionary passages of English football history.
THE HOTEL CAFÉ ROYAL IN LONDON HOLDS A UNIQUE PLACE IN THE history of Everton Football Club. When the Everton chairman John Moores and his manager Johnny Carey left the Grade II listed building just after 4 p.m. on 14 April 1961, it set off a chain of events that set the agenda for domestic football in the rest of the decade and beyond.
At that point in their history Everton had not won a trophy for 22 years, after their League Championship triumph in 1938/39 – the club’s third title in twelve seasons. When organised league football returned in 1946, Everton failed to recreate the momentum of the pre-war years. Losing players like Tommy Lawton and Joe Mercer was never going to be easy and with the club unable to sign top quality replacements then decline was inevitable, especially as several of the ageing 1930s team remained.
If 1945-1950 was the Age of Austerity, as the country struggled to rebuild after the end of World War Two, then the same description could easily have applied to events at Goodison Park. After a reasonably solid tenth place finish in 1946/47, there was a decline in the next two seasons and in 1948/49 the club finished just three places above the relegation places. The introduction of former player Cliff Britton as manager during that campaign failed to halt the slide and despite a losing FA Cup semi-final appearance to Liverpool in 1950, by the end of that year relegation was a distinct possibility, Everton taking just nine points from their opening eighteen games. A renaissance at the year-end took Britton’s side clear so that by early April they were six points above the drop zone, albeit having played more games than the two teams below them – Sheffield Wednesday and Chelsea. Two defeats meant they travelled to Hillsborough on the final day needing a point to survive. The result was a humiliating 6-0 defeat and, for only the second time, Everton slipped into the abyss. ‘Let us not shirk from the stern fact that unless there is a drastic overhaul of Goodison affairs it is going to be a long time before we see Everton back in their rightful sphere,’ were the words of Ranger in the Liverpool Echo. ‘It has taken them five years of consistent decline to get into the Second Division. In the absence of an all-out effort at rehabilitation it may take them as long to work their passage back.’
In the event it took them three years to claw their way back into the top flight, following statistically the worst season in the club’s history in 1952/53 when Britton’s side finished a lowly sixteenth. Promotion as runners-up in 1953/54 was primarily down to the forward partnership of Dave Hickson and John Willie Parker, who struck 55 goals. With the board showing no signs of investing in the squad, elevation to the first division failed to light the fires of success at Goodison, and manager Britton left in 1956 after two disappointing finishes outside the top ten. His successor Ian Buchan – infamously regarded as a ‘chief coach’ rather than manager – fared no better and when the Scot was sacked after a poor start to the 1958/59 campaign, the board turned to Carey. The only consolation during this period was future stalwarts like Brian Harris, Derek Temple and Brian Labone all made their debuts. Meanwhile one of the most important men in Everton’s long history began to make his presence felt.
John Moores – the Manchester Messenger
Born in Eccles, Greater Manchester, in January 1896, John Moores was one of a family of eight children. Even from an early age the future Everton chairman showed the entrepreneurial skills that would make him one of the richest people in Britain. Encouraged by his mother, Moores moved quickly after his first job as a six-shilling a week messenger boy for the Post Office, where the self-confidence and single-mindedness that characterised his rise to the top ultimately lead to his departure. After Moores objected to instructions to work during his break, the head messenger warned him that ‘In future you’ll do as you’re told.’ Moores replied ‘I won’t,’ and left by the end of the week.
Moores’ next job was as a trainee telegraphist with the Commercial Cable Company, which in many ways shaped everything that came afterwards. Shortly after World War One ended, the role took Moores to Liverpool for the first time, for training in Bixteth Street. The visit began a love affair with the city and its people that was to last more than seventy years, but typically one that worked both ways; asked once why he had never moved south, Moores replied: ‘I have made money out of this area and I like the people here.’
With training complete Moores was then stationed to Waterville Cable Station in County Kerry, Ireland. Following complaints over food, Moores was elected Mess President – effectively granting him overall management responsibility for catering – where for the first time he displayed the leadership skills and business acumen that would define him. Moores picked the committee members himself and after discovering that suppliers were overcharging, formed the Waterville Supply Company to source their own food, reducing costs and improving the standard of cuisine. Other Moores-led initiatives included the purchasing of books for the station’s library and, with the local golf course having no club shop, agreeing a deal with Dunlop to become their agent for ‘the supply of golf requisites’ in the area. With these lucrative sidelines, at a time when the average wage was £3 per week, Moores was earning nearly ten times as much, thanks to his hard work and gift for identifying gaps in the market.
With his appetite for success and wealth whetted, Moores was continually looking for additional ways of generating money. One of his companions in Ireland was Colin Askham, a friend from his days as a messenger boy in Manchester. After 18 months in Ireland,1 both men returned to Liverpool and teamed up with another former messenger boy, Bill Hughes. Taking their lead from a football pool run in Birmingham, they devised their own venture, putting up £50 each as start-up costs. The company’s name of Littlewood originated from the adopted Askham’s actual surname at birth, his business partner having been orphaned at a young age.
The first 4,000 coupons were distributed before a Manchester United game at Old Trafford in February 1924. Famously only 35 coupons were returned, the three founders’ income after the dividend not even covering their costs. Midway through the 1924/25 season, after contributing £200 each with little return, the trio convened a crisis meeting. After his two partners suggested they cut their losses and close the business down, Moores surprisingly disagreed, and offered to pay back both their original investment in return for all their shares. ‘I still believe in the idea,’ he informed them.
The Mersey Millionaire
Moores’ hunch proved correct: within three years the company was turning over more than £200,000 annually and by 1932 he was a millionaire. By then Moores was expanding into mail order catalogues and chain stores on the way to creating the largest private company in Europe.
As well as running the business, Moores had always been a man with a wide number of outside interests, including golf and painting. Moores had also watched Everton from his early days in the city and was a spectator when Dixie Dean scored his record-breaking sixtieth league goal in 1928. After acquiring shares in both Everton and Liverpool, he began a family association with football in the city that still exists today. The Littlewoods chief later explained why it was Everton, and not their rivals, who put the connection on a more official footing. ‘I was asked to put money into Everton, which they were to repay,’ Moores said in 1964. ‘At first it was £36,000 for floodlights then came more money for players. They also began to ask my advice on business matters. Soon it was suggested that I join the board to see my money spent. That’s how I came to join the one club rather than the other.’
Two years earlier Moores had told Bob Ferrier of the Observer that there was another motive for getting involved. ‘I’ve always been an Everton man2 – can’t tell you why. For ten years I watched the club flounder in management. It got so bad I took to going to St Helens to watch Rugby League.’ Moores later told Ian Hargraves of the Liverpool Echo of an unexpected shock when he joined the board in March 1960, ‘I was surprised to find the club was actually in the red, and I was struck by the amount of waste and the money that was being lost by inefficient use of resources.’ For a man used to being in charge, being a board member was always going to be a temporary appointment.
The chairman, June 1960
Unsurprisingly, within three months Moores was appointed chairman, at the annual shareholders’ meeting in June 1960. The people who ran football clubs, before Moores arrived, had traditionally been the local businessman made good. That was about to change when the multi-millionaire joined the Everton board. Whether it was intentional or not, Moores gave the impression of wishing to run the club on the lines of the continental giants – Littlewoods underwriting expenditure in the same way that, say, the Agnelli family had used their Fiat fortune to support Juventus. This was taking English football into new territory, and it was a vision that Moores reiterated when he entered the boardroom. ‘We want the best players, the best coaches, the best trainers and the best directors, he proclaimed, ‘Whether I shall prove to be one of the best directors will be answered in time.’ Moores immediately brought his business expertise to bear, making the financial changes required to bring some stability – a loss of £49,504 in 1959/60 becoming a profit of £25,504 in 1960/61.3
With his corporate business background, Moores was very much a modernist who also remained frustrated at the archaic structures at the top of the English game, which hindered the progress of the big clubs, especially when compared to those overseas. The biggest source of his frustration was the ‘three-quarters’ majority rule in the Football League, derived from each club in the top two divisions having a single vote each, with the bottom two tiers having four votes collectively. Of the 48 votes available, 36 was the amount needed to instigate change, but this rarely happened as the smaller clubs grouped to scupper the plans of the elite.
‘If we want really big professional football as a spectacle, that is one thing,’ he told Bob Ferrier, ‘but it is very different from what we have at the moment.’ Moores also believed that the big teams should have the best players appearing in modern stadia. ‘As it is now, we are at the mercy of clubs who cannot compete with us, but can veto our progress,’ he said. ‘The three-quarters majority rule is crippling the future of the game, we cannot tolerate amateur minds sitting in judgement on us.’ Moores tried to bend his counterparts’ views to match his own by widely circulating his correspondence with the Football League to fellow chairmen – and usually succeeded.
In August 1960, Moores led the protests over the £150,000 ITV television deal with the Football League to show matches live on a Saturday evening, as their management committee did not consult with the clubs. The Everton chairman voiced his fears in writing to all those in the top two divisions, and the agreement was effectively scrapped in the opening months of the season. Six months later, when the proposed ‘new deal’ with players may have allowed them to walk out at the end of their contracts, Moores – fearing the loss of his expensively assembled assets – wrote to the Football League for an assurance that there was no right to a transfer when contracts ended, circulating the letter to all 92 league clubs. The move proved highly influential and at their extraordinary meeting in April 19614 the clubs voted to resist the change.
Moores reserved his biggest gripe for the insular view of the game in England. In business Moores had been a regular traveller to the United States, visiting their equivalent companies to Littlewoods, returning to England with new plans to drive the firm forward. On cruises Moores would sound out fellow businessmen from across the Atlantic in an exchange of ideas and opinions. Moores was keen to apply the same principles to running Everton, but the ruling bodies and clubs in this country were averse to allowing overseas influences, protected by the restrictive employment practices operating at the time – there had been a longstanding Ministry of Labour and FA rule that overseas players had to serve a two-year residency period in this country before becoming eligible to play in the Football League. Such blinkered thinking annoyed the visionary Moores, as the sight of Real Madrid winning five European Cups with a cosmopolitan outfit had clearly fired his imagination, as did the Inter Milan side that faced Everton later in the decade.
The Everton chairman bitterly fired off his frustrations to Mike Langley of the Daily Express in August 1962, ‘Real Madrid, with naturalised Hungarians and Argentinians, are almost helped by the Spanish government to build the world’s best team. Our government has no interest in football apart from taking millions in pools money out of the game and putting none of it back.’ That had not stopped Moores trying to match the continental giants, even prior to joining the board. In December 1960 he spoke about trying to sign the great Ferenc Puskás, having six months earlier told shareholders about the barriers he faced:
It is no use people telling us to go out and buy world-class players like Real Madrid can do. The League rules will not allow it. If I had offered Puskas a £15,000 signing-on fee when he left Hungary, and made him a director of Littlewoods at £10,000 a year, I still could not have signed him for Everton because the Home Office would not have admitted him into the country as an alien, the Players’ Union would have objected and the League would have vetoed it too.
That did not deter Moores from trying to put together a deal to sign the great Hungarian again later in the decade, as he admitted in 1972. ‘I tried all I knew to get Ferenc Puskás when there was still a lot of football in him. He would have been given a top job as well as football. We could have satisfied him, but we just could not get permission,’ he claimed.
Shares across the Park
One of the more unusual aspects of Moores’ time at Goodison was his close links with their rivals across Stanley Park. Littlewoods’ involvement with the Anfield club began when their managing director Eric Sawyer joined the board as finance director after Bill Shankly arrived in 1959. ‘Liverpool wanted to revitalise their club so I suggested Mr Sawyer should join them as financial expert,’ Moores disclosed. Sawyer was to prove a hugely influential figure, prompting Bill Shankly to claim he was ‘the man who revolutionised Liverpool’. Previous business experience almost certainly influenced Moores’ thinking. After their initial success, the Littlewoods’ chairman fully understood that the competition provided by those rivals who copied their lead – such as the other major pools companies of the time, Vernons and Zetters – was not only good for the industry but it drove his company to work in more efficient and imaginative ways. Moores therefore always believed that a healthy rivalry between the two clubs was mutually beneficial. ‘I would like to see both Merseyside clubs as good as Spain’s Real Madrid and Barcelona,’ he admitted after becoming chairman.
However, as an Anfield shareholder Moores was always keen to ensure there was no conflict of interest, so after joining the Goodison board he ceased attending the Liverpool shareholders’ meeting. ‘I know I must never interfere,’ he said in 1964, ‘I have not given Liverpool money nor would I help them buy players to beat Everton.’ That said, the influence of Everton shareholders across both clubs was remarkable. By November 1966 individual shareholders in Everton also possessed 40 percent of Liverpool’s share capital, which was considerably more than the Anfield club’s directors. Furthermore, shareholders across the Park also owned 25 percent of the Goodison club. A total of 29 members of the Moores family and their Littlewoods associates collectively owned more than a third of the two clubs – if it happened today there would be examination of the rulebooks to ensure there was no conflict of interest. Moores’ benevolence to Everton’s closest rivals extended to indirect financial and other assistance – his architects designed the Anfield Road and Kemlyn Road stands for no charge, while Littlewoods found jobs for several amateurs on Liverpool’s books and freely gave time off for training.
Although there were a number of ambiguities with Moores’ association across both clubs, there was no question that Everton were his only love. ‘Split loyalties?’ he said early in the decade, ‘I don’t think so.’ To that end Moores wanted Everton to be the most successful club in the land, and on becoming chairman he repeated a previous statement about only employing the elite, this time with a twist. ‘Everton must have the best players, the best coaches, the best manager and the best directors,’ he informed the shareholders, before warning, ‘if any of them fail, they must go.’
Johnny Carey – the genial Irishman
Johnny Carey was an amiable and easy-going Irishman who during a brilliant playing career had captained Manchester United to the FA Cup in 1948 and was a member of their championship-winning side four years later. Carey was really a footballer by default, having youthful designs on being a tennis player – he was on speaking terms with the pre-war greats like Fred Perry. On retirement, the man who in the words of one journalist ‘smoked a pipe through each and every crisis, major or minor,’ made the successful and seamless transition into management, taking Blackburn out of the second division in 1958. The Everton directors noted Carey’s progress at Ewood Park and later that year gave him the opportunity to re-awaken a sleeping giant after the ill-fated reign of Ian Buchan. Improvement was slow, with the 1959/60 campaign particularly a struggle as the Toffees failed to accrue a single away win in eventually finishing fifteenth, just three points above the relegation zone.
Carey was fortunate that Moores wasted no time in giving Everton access to his fortune, albeit via an interest-free loan of £56,000. The Irishman had already signed Roy Vernon from previous club Blackburn and when Jimmy Gabriel and Alex Young were recruited from north of the border the Toffees were finally in a position to challenge for honours. A 3-1 victory at champions Burnley on Boxing Day 1960 left Carey’s men occupying third place in the table, but within 24 hours the Lancashire side had strolled to a 3-0 win in the return. The defeat triggered a depressing sequence of seven successive defeats, including removal from both cup competitions to lower division opponents.
Before Christmas 1960 Moores had been supportive of the manager. ‘John is very good. He knows how to deal with the players. I leave that side to him,’ he admitted publicly. The reality was that the chairman quietly disapproved of the Irishman’s ‘arm across the shoulder’ style. ‘Carey had many outstanding qualifications,’ Moores later said, ‘but let me say that we thought he lacked in one or two areas we considered essential in our plans for rebuilding Everton. One was that we thought him not to be tough enough.’ The chairman had originally decided to terminate the Irishman’s contract during the depressing run in the early months of 1961, but Everton flowered in the spring and a sparkling 4-0 win at Newcastle in early April was part of an impressive sequence which saw them pick up nine points from five league games. The former Manchester United stalwart was seen to be popular and regarded as more than capable within the game, but Moores had other ideas.
14 April, 1961
In her biography of the Littlewoods boss, author Barbara Clegg quotes Moores on the secret of his company’s success: ‘The facility for the quick training of employees, coupled with the organising ability of the directors and executive staff.’ Moores wanted strong leaders who were accountable for their actions. ‘If you live on high hills, you must expect high winds,’ was a favourite quote. In Moores’ world, if an employee was not doing their job properly then it was important to find out the reasons why, but ultimately their manager was accountable if they had done nothing to address the issue.
To ensure full oversight at Littlewoods, Moores took the extraordinary step of interviewing all their buyers from their mail order division personally, over the course of a week. These were strictly planned at 20 minutes in length, as Moores had an obsession over not wasting time and prompt timekeeping.5 The interviews were probing and managers were told in no uncertain terms if they were underperforming. One employee who was given a hard time later saw a Rolls Royce following him on the motorway, and was wrongly convinced Moores was chasing him. The keen football fan therefore established a reputation as being ‘ruthless with his executives. He didn’t slate the poor fellow down there, it was the management,’ according to one of his staff. Elsewhere, although there was a general warmth for Moores, some employees of Littlewoods consequently spoke of a climate of fear in the company, of staff going into hiding when supervisor checks were performed, for fear of being accused of some misdemeanour.
Nevertheless, Moores was cognisant that managing a football club was a different affair to Littlewoods, with players collectively given greater freedom to control their destiny than workers on a shop-floor. ‘I know, of course, that running a team of footballers is different from running a business,’ he told the Liverpool Echo in December 1960, ‘If you give players too explicit an order it spoils them, puts them in a sort of straitjacket. We try to get them to talk matches and tactics among themselves and act on the advice of teammates.’ Yet for all that talk, Moores struggled with that comparative lack of control during the early years, with the chairman being a regular visitor to the training ground, where he was not shy in passing on his limited knowledge to professional footballers. ‘They don’t head the ball these days as they used to,’ he told the Daily Mail’s Jack Wood shortly after becoming chairman, ‘There are no Lawtons or Deans around. But the right neck exercises and constant heading practice will make them all better in the air.’ Carey also resented the chairman’s regular presence in the dressing room before and after games, especially on one occasion in early 1961 when Moores clearly undermined his manager with a public rollicking of the players.
Although there were big differences in running Littlewoods and Everton, it was still inevitable that once Moores arrived at Goodison that some of his management principles would follow him and have a similar impact, particularly around job security. Having a significant amount of money to spend and with a ruthless chairman, players and staff were understandably wary of their immediate futures, as the press quickly realised. Speaking of the ‘club’s apparent policy to be one of unconcern for the individual,’ a Sunday Telegraph editorial warned that ‘Mr. Moores has more than once submitted that his aims are short-term, so perhaps the club’s tradition in personal relations is not paramount among his objectives. One can only say that Everton will find it hard to live at the top without internal harmony.’ In many ways that proved to be the case in the years that followed. However, in the short-term it was not the players who were vulnerable – in typical Moores’ style it was their manager.
His biographer, Barbara Clegg, said that during the 1960s Moores ‘seemed to have a speed demon behind him … he was always hustling, always pushing. And the first thing he did was to give the push to John Carey.’ When they travelled to London together for the Football League’s extraordinary meeting on Friday, 14 April 1961, Carey was probably conscious of the chairman’s cold-blooded treatment of his senior managers in business but unaware that for more than thirty years the last day of the working week was known as ‘sacking time’ in Littlewoods. On one Friday, Moores culled the firm’s buyers from thirteen to four in an almost Stalinist purge. Whilst in the capital, Moores therefore applied one of his standard business practices to the running of Everton Football Club. After leaving the meeting, the two men headed towards the Grosvenor House Hotel by taxi, at Moores’ behest. By the time they had finished talking ninety minutes later, Carey had been sacked.
The Everton directors was unprepared for such a development. Although they had voted unanimously for Carey’s dismissal from his £3,000 a year post, there was an agreement that they should offer the manager the chance to resign with some dignity. After the news broke, there was still confusion on the circumstances of Carey’s dismissal. Moores later claimed that the board had agreed to give Carey the chance to resign but ‘the opportunity was turned down and the action of last Friday was taken’. If that was the case then the sacking should not have come as a surprise, but Carey was in the dark. ‘The first I knew of the decision to finish as manager of Everton was after the meeting in London on Friday, when Mr Moores told me in a taxi,’ Carey claimed. Given the circumstances, unsurprisingly the legal ramifications associated with Carey’s dismissal lasted a long time, as Moores later admitted: ‘I was very naïve when I sacked Johnny Carey. The newspapers asked me to give my side of the story, but I refused because I did not want to hurt Johnny any more than was absolutely necessary. My lawyers said it would be a seven-day wonder. They were wrong.’
There was six years of legal wrangling to reach an agreement over compensation – the parties settling out of court just before a hearing at Liverpool Assizes in March 1967. At the time of his sacking, the general feeling was that Carey had been unlucky. Injuries to key players had blighted the second half of the campaign and his development of young talent – which was highly prized at Blackburn – again showed signs of promise, with Everton in the semi-finals of the FA Youth Cup. However, behind the scenes there were rumours of unrest and of a clash of personalities and methods. Although Alex Young said, ‘He [Carey] was very knowledgeable and a very nice, gentle man. If he had a sergeant-major type on his right-hand side he might have been more successful,’ that view was not necessarily shared by his teammates. Moores consequently felt that discipline was not as strict as it should have been. ‘I’d be a bit tougher than John Carey on training and things like that,’ his chairman confessed to the Liverpool Echo in December 1960.
Widely booed by the Goodison crowd before the Cardiff City game, 24 hours after the dismissal, in an attempt to curry favour with supporters Moores later denied that he was the driving force behind the sacking of the manager. ‘People have the idea that it was me who was determined to get him sacked from the time I took over,’ he claimed, ‘but on the contrary I was very much for him and defended him at first against the directors.’ Carey for his part largely kept his own counsel, save for an interview with the Daily Mail ten months later. Asked if there were any disagreements between the two, Carey replied:
You don’t have rows with him. There was talk about a Moores-Carey partnership at Everton. This seemed to upset him as there was no question of a partnership. He was not a partnership man. I think two things lead to my sacking. Mr Moores wanted a man who he had appointed as manager – I was there before him. And he wanted a tough man, someone to crack the whip. Whip cracking is not for me.
Intriguingly, four weeks after Carey’s departure, Wolves manager Stan Cullis revealed that Moores had approached him earlier in the year with a view to taking over at Goodison, on a huge annual salary of £5,000. ‘I told my chairman of the offer as soon as it was made,’ Cullis revealed, ‘but turned it down on principle.’ The Wolves boss did not elaborate on the principle in question, although it may have been that Moores made the offer when Carey was still in the post. Given Cullis’ career declined swiftly in the first half of the 1960s, it could have been a blessing in disguise for the Everton chairman.
By the time he sacked Carey, Moores had a new managerial target. Like Carey said, it was somebody in his own ruthless, disciplined and hardworking image. ‘I knew who was our man,’ he said, ‘we had taken the trouble to make a detailed check on him and his methods. I would say there are only about a dozen good managers in the league and he is one of them.’
Harry Catterick – the chosen one
Born in Darlington in 1919, Harry Catterick joined Everton as a player in 1937, but due to World War Two had to wait nine years to make his debut. After scoring 24 goals in 71 games as an effective, if not top-class, centre-forward, Catterick joined Crewe Alexandra as player-manager in 1951. At Gresty Road the novice manager took the Cheshire side to tenth place in the old Third Division (North) in 1952/53.
The achievement was enough to bring Catterick to the attention of other clubs and that summer, having now hung up his boots, the 33-year-old took on the job at Rochdale. The financial struggles at Spotland were symptomatic of the time in the lower divisions – a tale of a shortage of players and unpaid bills. The journalist Eric Todd later recounted interviewing Catterick at the Lancashire club. Writing in the Guardian, Todd remembered a card on his desk that said ‘take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves’. Bringing it to the new manager’s attention, Todd provoked a curt response from the Rochdale boss. ‘What,’ Catterick asked, ‘is a pound.’
After five years of steady progress at Spotland, Catterick moved to Sheffield Wednesday in September 1958. The Hillsborough outfit were universally regarded as a ‘yo-yo’ club in the immediate post-war years as they oscillated between the top two divisions, and had just been relegated from the top flight for the third time in seven years. Wednesday romped to the second division title in Catterick’s first campaign with 62 points. In 1959/60 the Owls reached the FA Cup semi-final while finishing fifth in the league – which could have been better. Two points off the top with five matches remaining, they won just one more game.
It was during the 1960/61 campaign that Catterick really made his mark. At the beginning of April, Wednesday were in second place, albeit with no chance of catching runaway leaders Spurs. However, it was an open secret that all was not well behind the scenes, and the expectation was Catterick would leave at the end of his contract in August. Therefore, it was no shock that on 10 April 1961, Catterick announced his resignation. ‘Mr Catterick’s decision did not come as a surprise,’ wrote the Yorkshire Post, ‘although he later said that he had not got any other work.’ Inevitably, talk turned to a return to Goodison although there appeared to be little chance. With Carey still in the manager’s hot seat, the Liverpool Daily Post headlined, ‘Forget Catterick For Everton Rumours,’ two days after his resignation from the Sheffield club.
When asked about the stories linking him with the role, Catterick’s line was that ‘I have had no official approach.’ Nevertheless, Everton officially offered their former player the job he coveted within 48 hours of Carey’s sacking. Tackled by the press outside his parents’ house in Stockport on that Sunday, Catterick confirmed his interest. Later that day club secretary Bill Dickinson issued a statement that the appointment of Catterick was expected on the Monday. The former Sheffield Wednesday manager made his position clear that evening. ‘Everton’s offer looks very attractive,’ he said, ‘and subject to certain details I am prepared to accept. There’s no doubt about it. I should get a tremendous kick out of managing a club I used to play for.’ The board ultimately considered the merits of four managers – Catterick, Cullis and Everton legend Joe Mercer, then at Aston Villa, with the other candidate unknown – but the club’s former centre-forward was the unanimous final choice from a shortlist of two, with interest in Cullis understandably cooling.
Catterick’s demands were mainly around total control over team matters and when they were satisfactorily resolved, he was presented to the press at 5 p.m. on Monday, 17 April. Returning to Goodison brought out the warm side of the manager. ‘I am terribly proud to have had this job offered to me. I think you could say it has been one of my ambitions to return to my old club,’ he told journalists. Asked about his level of authority, Catterick replied, ‘I have as much control as any manager should need. I am very happy about that side of the job. There is no point being called a manager if you are not one.’ His arrival certainly pleased the chairman. ‘The king is dead,’ Moores told the press, ‘long live the king.’
The challenge
During his welcoming press conference, Catterick alluded to the belief that ‘Everton is now being referred to in some quarters as the new hot seat of management in the football world.’ That was certainly correct. In the eighteen months prior to his appointment Everton had undertaken one of the biggest spending sprees in English club history. During that time, the Toffees had paid more than £200,000 for Tommy Ring, Roy Vernon, Mickey Lill, Jimmy Gabriel, Billy Bingham, Alex Young and George Thomson. The massive shopping expedition certainly raised the stakes, with now only Tottenham having the financial means to compete with the Moores-backed Merseyside club. The wider challenge though was to break the monopoly of the ‘big five’ clubs who had largely dominated post-war domestic football. At the end of the 1960/61 campaign Arsenal, Burnley, Manchester United, Spurs and Wolves had claimed eleven of the previous fourteen league titles, with nine runners-up places. Those clubs had also collectively won the FA Cup five times in that time with three other final appearances.
A super-rich, powerful and publicly ambitious backer with substantial funds available may be commonplace in the upper echelons of the modern game but in the early 1960s it was unknown in England. Moores’ money presented an opportunity, but it also brought overwhelming pressure on the manager that, by extension, spread to the players. Jack Wood in the Daily Mail once described John Moores with the words ‘his ambition is limitless, and uncompromising’. At his new manager’s unveiling, one scribe asked Moores, with some hesitancy, why the sacked Carey was classed as a failure, given the club was in fifth position. Moores replied coldly: ‘Fifth place is no good to us.’ Asked what would happen if Everton remained in no better than fifth under Catterick, Moores was even more blunt. ‘Then Harry will go,’ the chairman said.
The subsequent internal weight of expectation on Catterick as the first managerial alchemist, the boss capable of turning invested cash into trophies, was therefore immense and for many an alien concept. With Everton at the vanguard, critics claimed greed and financial muscle were creating an unhealthy environment for the domestic game. More than a half a century later and they are still saying the same things, albeit in a financial setting light years away. The modern equivalent of Everton in 1961 is probably the scenario played out at Stamford Bridge in 2003–04. For Moores read Roman Abramovich, while Claudio Ranieri mirrored Carey’s role as a gentleman considered, at the time, good but not good enough. Their new employer, who evidently required someone with more steel, sacked both managers after a single season. Catterick and Jose Mourinho were poles apart in many ways, but they possessed the single-mindedness and confidence of natural managerial winners. As the Football League secretary Alan Hardaker6 once said, an ideal manager must be ‘devious and ruthless and selfish’, and those characteristics sit easily with both. The man from Portugal was also, like Catterick, able to call on a gifted roll call of players bequeathed by his predecessor. Nevertheless, Catterick still felt the pressure placed on his shoulders, as he later outlined in a self-penned article in the Liverpool Daily Post in 1971:
Success. That was my brief when I came to Goodison. To earn it quickly without sacrificing Everton’s high standards of football. Mr John Moores made no secret of the fact he expected results. It was a tall order. I needed no reminding of Everton’s history for I grew up with it as a player. They had been starved of success. It was something like twenty-five years since they had seen a trophy. The club were becoming a bit like Villa, trophies were antique. This is wrong. You want modern trophies and this club simply has not had them.
The moniker of ‘Mersey Millionaires’ did Everton no favours. Like Chelsea in the twenty first century, their unabashed spending attracted wide criticism and accusations of trying to buy success.7 Although Everton were not the first to do this – Sunderland were once known as the ‘Bank of England’ club – they were certainly the first to do so with a hugely wealthy and ambitious benefactor from the world of big business. Not lost on opposition fans was the fact that Littlewoods’ wealth was founded upon their pools’ activities, effectively meaning that Everton bought players using money that indirectly came from supporters of other clubs. This brought a certain amount of negative attention, not least from the southern press, who saw them as a threat, especially to their beloved Tottenham Hotspur – conveniently ignoring the fact that the White Hart Lane outfit had been no strangers to the chequebook themselves before Moores’ arrival.
A 2-1 defeat at Fulham early in Catterick’s first season gave an indication of the negativity of the press. The post-match coverage featured a withering attack on the club and its ambitions by Desmond Hackett of the Daily Express. ‘If Mr Moores is not trying to by success, I am slightly puzzled at the way they are lashing their money around as though they were the lira lunatics of Italy,’ the flamboyant pressman wrote, ‘even millionaires do not beam upon the expenditure of £218,000 just to keep the natives friendly. As I was saying, Mr Moores, you cannot buy soccer success. There can be no price tag for the loyalty and ability of players like Johnny Haynes.’
Hackett’s simplistic view that Everton were attempting to buy titles misread Moores’ understanding of the game. The chairman knew that success on the pitch, first and foremost, required the right footballing infrastructure off it. ‘If the administrative, management and coaching sectors of Everton are on the right lines, then buying the best players can guarantee success,’ Moores told Bob Ferrier in the Observer later that season. Getting the club on a sound financial footing and appointing the best available manager (Catterick) was one half of the equation – the future development of Bellefield as a training centre of excellence was also part of this – but it did not necessarily follow that buying the best players guaranteed success, as the subsequent history of other clubs showed. Nevertheless, the cynicism of the press gathered speed as Everton threatened to lift the title in 1962/63. Following a vital 2-1 win late in the season at Upton Park, Mike Langley stated in the Daily Express, ‘Everton, at £300,000 soccer’s most expensive cast, openly declared at Upton Park that they are in the business of winning matches and not necessarily of entertaining anyone.’ Not only was the statement factually incorrect (Spurs’ team at the time cost £350,000), it unwittingly explained why victory was everything – the money coming into the game made success the sole priority.
1 There was one curious tale about Moores’ time across the Irish Sea. According to his biographer Barbara Clegg, in her book The Man Who Made Littlewoods, there was a possible attempt made on his life. Returning to his camp after a night out Moores discovered bullets that had been fired through a window at his bed. The reasons were unknown, although they could have also been a warning over his business activities.
2 Two years later though Moores told Brian James in the Daily Mail that, before joining Everton, the Liverpool chairman T.V. Williams ‘would have liked me to join the Liverpool board. I had a leaning towards Liverpool.’
3 Although a reduction in transfer expenditure contributed to this change, Moores’ business acumen was behind an increase of £28,000 in ticket receipts from home league games, following price rises, and savings of £10,000 in miscellaneous outgoings like travelling, training and matchday expenses. Pitifully small amounts in the modern era, but almost sixty years ago Everton’s annual income was around £200,000. In comparison Littlewoods’ revenue was more than £90m in 1960, having doubled in five years.
4 The meeting took place on an infamous day, of course, in Everton history.
5 After retiring, Bill Shankly had an appointment to interview Moores for radio, but found it cancelled after turning up late. ‘I’m sorry you are behind schedule,’ Moores explained, ‘and I have a schedule to live to.’
6 Asked in 1969 on the integrity of the game, the man dubbed ‘the Great Dictator’ famously said, ‘I wouldn’t hang a dog on the word of a professional footballer.’ A statement to remember when considering some of the claims made later in the decade about Everton.
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