How Two Scots Made Spurs
(And One Made And Two Saved Arsenal)

Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, "Spurs", did not enter senior football until 1896 and then not in the top flight. Founded only in 1882 by local lads it took a decade to join a league, the Southern Alliance, which lasted less than a season. Yet within a decade it had won the FA Cup, still more remarkably as the only club ever to have done so from outwith the Football League. Spurs did it from the Southern League, only stepping up in 1908. And by then the man, who had made it all possible, was a year gone.

John Cameron - Spurs - 1901

He was a former shipping-clerk born in and learning his football in Scotland, in Ayr, one whose local mother had died young and who had been raised by his Highland father, who had come south to work on the railways, and and equally Highland step-mother. His name is John Cameron.

In fact his early, senior footballing career had been shaped by Cunard. A bright lad born in 1872 in Newton he had attended Ayr Grammar School and played, a central forward, for amateur-side, Ayr Parkhouse, that is until 1895, when, already twenty-three, he moved to Glasgow probably to join the shipping-line.

There he was to turn out Queen's Park, albeit briefly, making five starts, before the company transferred him South, to Liverpool, where, still an amateur, he joined Everton, another Scot on their books and probably with initially little expectation from the club. But he must quickly have turned heads because by October he had made a first senior appearance, still at centre-forward.

However, he did not retain a regular place and was, in any case moving between Mersey- and Clyde-side. He continued also to feature for Queen's Park, when available, and clearly with impact enough for in March 1896 him to be selected for Scotland against Ireland between Hampden team-mates, Bob McColl and Willie Lambie. In fact the game in Belfast finished a 3-3 draw and was to be his only cap but in it he played at inside-forward, a position, to which he had switched and was to make his own for the rest of his on-field career.

Now, with amateur Queen's Park anxious to retain his occasional services and Everton also wanting them and now tempting him with shamateur and professional contracts Cameron had to make a decision. And by the 1896-7 season he had made up his mind to turn full-time, for two seasons playing thirty-two games as goal-scorer, ten in all, but also goal-provider. However, by 1898 all was not well at Goodison Park. Derby County had in 1893 proposed that the Football League should introduce a maximum wage of £4 per week, a rate that was above that of the journeyman player but below, in some cases well below, an elite player's. And, although not agreed to by the other clubs, some of those same players saw the proposal as a hovering threat and in February 1898 they reacted by forming the Association Footballers' Union (AFU). Dumbarton-born Jack Bell of Everton became its first Chairman. Its Secretary announced it had two hundred and fifty members and stated that in addition to its concerns about payment it,

"wanted any negotiations regarding transfers to be between the interested club and the player concerned - not between club and club with the player excluded."

That Secretary was John Cameron.

The consequence for Bell was that his contract with the club was terminated so he first moved briefly south to Tottenham, in the Southern League and with no wage ceiling, mooted or otherwise, and then back to Scotland, to Celtic, also outwith the constraints. And John Cameron, breaking his Goodison contract, would follow him to White Hart Lane but stick, meaning effectively the end of the AFU but marking the beginning of an almost decade long Tottenham association.

The 1898/9 season was to be Spurs' third in the Southern League. It was also its first under Frank Brettell, the former Bolton secretary. In the two previous years it had finished fourth and third but now by April 1899 it had slipped to seventh with Brettell already gone by February, lured away by considerably better money from league-rivals, Portsmouth. And it was at this point that Cameron at the age of twenty-seven was invited to step up into a role not contemplated in the game before, that of effectively player-manager. And the result was instant. As the nineteenth became the twentieth century Tottenham would take the Southern League championship, followed the next season by a seventh finish but the Cup triumph.

And it was done also with a distinctive style of play, an innovative twist on the traditional Scottish Cross, the 2-2-1-5. In the final against Sheffield United and played initially at Crystal Palace but requiring a reply at Bolton John Cameron himself was at his accustomed inside-right in a central forward-line that was all Scots. Inside him at nominally centre-forward was Glenbuck's Sandy Brown. At inside-left and also from Ayr, indeed also Ayr Parkhouse, was Davie Copeland. Both had been expressly recruited by Cameron. Then on the right-wing was the Irishman, Jack Kirwan, who had also been at Everton, with on the right the Cumberland-man, Tom Smith, whose half-brother would captain England, but at rugby-league. Then behind them at centre-half was the Welshman, Ted Hughes, who also played left-half.

So to the innovation. In what today is rather pompously called the "forward transition", i.e. the change from defence into attack, John Cameron would would drop back to fetch the ball and advance with it, fetch-and-carry. Hughes could then reposition to his favoured left and the team, albeit perhaps briefly 2-2-2-4, which with the traditionally wider Scottish-style full-backs, of which Spurs had two, became a "Table" with a pedestal, stem and top. And, whilst other teams had not yet figured it out and Cameron was in his prime it worked like a dream. However, in April 1902 he turned thirty and it seems to have been the case that nature was not as kind to him as to others in terms of longevity. In 1900-01 he had played almost all the games. In 1901-2 it was four in five, in 1902-3 three in five and in 1903-4 one in six, by which time several other players had seemingly been tried in Cameron role, on the right and also on the left, some already at the club, some brought in but, whilst results continued to be good, they never reached previous heights.

Herbert Chapman - Spurs 1906

However, force majeur, by 1904-5 Cameron had all but hung up his boots, his role largely filled probably by John Brearley, a Liverpudlian utility player. who was also ex-Everton. But in the background there was another arrival, an inside-forward, who that campaign played just seven times, scoring twice. But he must have impressed because the following season, 1905-6, that seven became thirty-five to Brearley's twenty-four and the two fourteen. The new player was a certain Herbert Chapman.

In 1905-6 Tottenham was to finish sixth in the Southern League, the lowest that decade but hardly a disgrace. And its squad was ageing. Only two of its first eleven, one being Chapman, were under thirty and then only just. Refreshment was needed but Spurs did what it has done on several occasions since. It decided to invest in White Hart Lane, on this occasion with an eye to gaining Football League status, rather than in players. Cameron clearly disagreed and even before the end of the 1906-7 season he had handed in his resignation and was gone, as indeed was Chapman soon after. The latter turned to first player-management and then management at Northampton, following the precedent set by the former. The former himself turned to coaching and journalism. As to Spurs, a year later it did achieve election to the top-flight, albeit to the Second Division, then remarkably with no management finished second to be promoted at the first attempt, hovering in lower First Division mid-table for three seasons until the fall started, at which point the club did not turn once more to Cameron but another Scot, Peter McWilliam.

Peter McWilliam - Spurs

McWilliam arrived at White Hart Lane in December 1912, so three months into a Spurs' season that had seen the wheels fall off. He came originally from the Scottish Highland capital, Inverness, but via St. James' Park, Newcastle. He was thirty-two and had recently through injury called a halt to a nine year stay with The Toon, where he was known as Peter the Great, had made over two hundred starts at left-half and from where also won eight Scotland caps.

But he was a half-back with a difference. With his passing ability he was permitted, indeed encouraged, by the club to wander, with team-mates schooled in covering for him in what had been a series of fluid but very effective half-back lines.

But now as a manager Peter the Great was hardly an immediate success. The drop to the Second Division was avoided but not by much. And there was very little in the way of additional recovery at all for two seasons until in 1915 as the League was suspended for the rest of the duration of The Great War relegation proved unavoidable.

However, perhaps this time the Tottenham directors understood that quality of player matters. McWilliam did not lose his job, was able in the interim completely to revamp his starting half- back line and his new team did the necessary by immediately bouncing back. Yet there was no resting on laurels with 1920-21 seeing the club finish sixth, one place below Newcastle, one above Everton but also take its second FA Cup and doing it with four still newer faces, two brought through and two bought in. Moreover, it would be followed in 1921-22 in defence of the trophy by semi-final defeat and second place in the league, albeit a full six points behind a rampant Liverpool.

Yet, at what would the first of two stays with Tottenham for the Invernesian the following campaigns would not be anything like as successful. Performances would lead to five seasons in lower mid-table with no obvious reason. However, analysis of the squads year-by-year produces a probable answer. The Cup team was getting old; the average age was 28. Centre-forward, Jimmy Cantrell, had been two weeks short of his thirty-ninth birthday and his replacement, Charlie Wilson, the following season was promptly tempted away by none other than Herbert Chapman, no fool himself, and ambitious for his then new club, Huddersfield. It left McWilliam with effectively no centre-forward for the 1922-23 season, added to which he was now also having to replace aging others and a centre-half beginning to struggle with injury. The team needed a rebuild and in 1924-25 it meant eighteen players were used, amongst them one brought through and six brought in, including one, Harry Skitt, from Northfleet.

Skitt was the first sign of what was to come, the first obvious result of what McWilliam had decided had to be the future of a club with limited budget like Spurs. Indeed, it would prove to be so, although not in the end for the man with the original foresight. As early as 1919 Peter McWilliam had approached Charlton Athletic, then in the North Kent League, with a proposal that it should become White Hart Lane's feeder club. But Charlton knocked it back. It had ambitions, first turning professional in the Southern League and in 1921 stepping up to the Football League. Nevertheless relations between the two clubs remained excellent. Charlton's first full-time manager had been a coach at Spurs and several of its early League players came from there too, amongst them a winger, Sid Castle, much of whose career had been lost through The Great War, yet would from The Valley have an Indian Summer at Chelsea before going on to coach in Holland at Ajax.

However, rejection by Charlton did not deter McWilliam. Instead he turned to another club, also in the same league, and this time with a positive response. It was Northfleet, now Ebbsfleet, and the resultant agreement, signed in 1923, essentially stipulated Tottenham would supply young players with in return the Kent club playing the London club's, i.e. the McWilliam way.

For Northfleet the effect was almost instantaneous. In the first season of the arrangement, 1923-24, it finished runner-up in its league. A season later it was champion with at centre-half an eighteen year-old Tottenham-born amateur. He name was Arthur Rowe. Then from 1924 to 1928 it would take the Kent Cup four times in a row and in 1927 win the Kent Senior Cup, reach the second round of the F.A. Cup and join the Southern League-East. And for Tottenham, albeit more slowly given the youth of players, there too would be product. Rowe would make its first team at the age of twenty-three in 1929.

By then, however, Peter McWilliam was no longer in charge. His wife was from Redcar. Middlesbrough, newly promoted to the First Division, offered him £1,500 a year, twice his then salary, to move north and take over. He suggested to his London club a compromise of £5 a week more to stay but, with a reaction that mirrored its treatment of John Cameron exactly twenty years earlier and ground improvement, real estate, again preferred to personnel, it was turned down.

In fact the team McWilliam was to find at Ayresome Park was initially to prove weak. It was relegated, as was Tottenham, but with the difference being that the latter took six seasons to climb back, whereas a McWilliam-reinforced Boro' did it on the bounce. But in the end with the Teesside team for the next six seasons sitting in mid- or lower-mid-table it was perhaps a period that neither club nor manager particularly enjoyed and in 1934 there was a parting of the ways, but one with background.

On 6th January that year Herbert Chapman, the lauded manager now of Arsenal suddenly died, aged just fifty-five. Having with Huddersfield won the Cup and three Leagues he had in 1925 also been tempted away by money, taken five seasons to rebuild and by the time of his passing had with the Highbury club finally enjoyed another Wembley triumph and two more Championships. In the circumstances there was the possibility that Arsenal's wheels might have come off. That they did not deserves examination.

Under Chapman he had headed up the club from the PR to the bringing-in of players, whilst the day-to-day training of them was left to Tom Whittaker with the first-team and Joe Shaw the reserves. Shaw had been appointed a trainer on retirement as an Arsenal player in 1922. Whittaker, also a former Arsenal player, had been put in place in 1927 in controversial circumstances with a twist. George Hardy, the long-time incumbent, had been summarily dismissed by Chapman. Whittaker, just a year from his own retirement as a player, was installed as Hardy then promptly moved in as McWilliam moved out to train at Spurs and would become coach at Northfleet.

And on Chapman's death it was Shaw and Whittaker, who would run the team until the end of what was to be a title-winning season, this as the club sought a managerial successor. Who they approached remains unknown, with one exception, Peter McWilliam, and he would turn the offer down. He did it because, it is said, he understandably did not want to move himself and the family south once more and so a compromise seems to have been reached. Shaw and Whittaker would continue training. They did so throughout the Thirties. And the Chapman role would be split. Club director, journalist cum broadcaster George Allison became the managerial front-man but did not involve himself in player assessment and recruitment. That was left to the club's new Chief Scout, who could operate throughout Britain from his base in England's North-East. It was Peter McWilliam, who, at the end of the 1933-4 season, resigned from Middlesbrough and got to work for The Gunners.

Now, at this point it is worth stepping back a few years. Herbert Chapman's arrival at Arsenal had not been smooth, despite finishing runner-up in the League in his first season, pipped by the very Huddersfield team he himself had assembled. There was political and therefore team interference at the club, which had culminated in the Hardy/Whittaker episode and the resignation that same year, 1927, for financial irregularities of the very long-term Chairman, Sir Henry Norris. It left Chapman in more or less full control and thus able to make changes, his changes.

John Cameron - circa 1906

There is little doubt that throughout his managerial career Herbert Chapman had remained a disciple of John Cameron. At Northampton he had played the Cameron system with him to 1908 in the role himself. That was before, having signed Kirkcaldy's Jock Manning at centre-half, he hung up his own boots, handed over to Albert Lewis, won the Southern League title in 1909 and finished as runner-up the next season. And after the inactive war-years at Leeds with Huddersfield he had then done the same with Clem Stephenson the fetch-and-carry.

Moreover, having moved to Arsenal in 1925 he was again either lucky or canny about what he had seen in assessing not just the starting eleven but the full squad. He had thirty-year-old Billy Blyth from Dalkeith at inside-left. He found thirty-three-year old, also left-sided Andy Neill from Crosshouse by Kilmarnock in the third team. He bought in thirty-four year old Diasporan-Scot, centre-forward Charlie Buchan from Sunderland, put him in at inside-right, dropped Bob John back to left full-back, Blyth back to left-half and installed Neil as his fetch-and-carry. And it worked. Arsenal finished runners-up. However, Neill's legs were going and for the following far-less successful season first previously-dropped Jimmy Ramsay from Clydebank was restored in his place before being found wanting, at which point John was moved back to left-half and Blyth to inside-left but now with responsibility as mid-field link.

Thus the previously right-orientated Chapman now found his preferred system left-sided as Blyth proved successful in his new role. But by 1927-28 with Chapman for the first time now in real, full control that player too was aging. By 1928 he was at almost thirty-three beginning to struggle. Chapman needed to look for a replacement, recruiting Leonard Thompson from Swansea. But he quickly suffered what was to be a permanent knee-injury. Chapman then tried squad-player, Harry Peel, before in 1929 being forced into the market once more, finally signing literally the pivot of his successes over the next four and a bit seasons, the wee genius from Bellshill via Kirkcaldy and Preston, then twenty-eight year-old, again left-sided Alex James.

Billy Blyth

Herbert Chapman (1929)

Alex James

With James in place Chapman would now construct a team that would win the FA Cup in its first campaign and then two League titles in three attempts. It also allowed him to do it with the dropping of the attacking Scottish centre-half and its replacement by the centre-back, the so called W:M, which at Highbury was certainly a "W" but with the "M" suggesting the necessity of an eye-test. A better analysis is that Chapman all his days until then had played 2:3:1:4 in defence cum 2:2:1:5 in attack and now his team lined up as 2:1:3:1:3 cum 2:1:2:5. But it too was on his death also aging. Alex James was thirty-two and managed just twenty-two starts that season. A couple of the other players, John and Johns, both first choice half-backs, were in their mid-thirties and were needing replacing in what was McWilliam's first task, one he did well. Jack Crayston was signed from Bradford Park Avenue at right-half. He would stay at the club seven seasons. Wilf Coping was brought in on the left from Leeds, remaining at Highbury until 1939. Arsenal took the League title once more.

And over the next three seasons as Allison fronted, Whittaker and Shaw trained there would be a steady flow of scouted talent into the Arsenal pool, enough for the FA Cup to be taken once more in 1936 and the League again in 1938. In fact over the four seasons the trio plus McWilliam guided the club exactly the trophies won by Chapman in the five years he and James worked together were replicated in both type and number.

Peter McWilliam - circa 1937

Now it may have been at this point that Peter McWilliam felt his part in effectively perpetuating Arsenal's success and to a not inconsiderable degree consolidating its reputation bordering on myth was not being fully appreciated. It could even have been that after four years away from football management he simply missed it. Whatever the case he, as Arsenal won its second title notionally under Allison, clearly had had approaches and was making plans. At the end of 1937-38 he stepped away from Highbury and, at just short of fifty-nine, back into White Hart Lane to become manager of an again tepid Spurs.

However, once more it was to be to little apparent effect, except notably that Arsenal would slip the next season to fifth. Meanwhile, Tottenham having also just finished fifth but in the Second Division, would also drop a little, to eighth and then to seventh, that is before football was suspended for the duration of the War and McWilliam at just sixty-two seemingly stepped back from involvement in football for good. But not quite so. In fact, although he would, quietly retired, die in his home in Redcar aged seventy-two in 1951, it would be with a twofold legacy, from which he had just seen the very first results.

Peter McWilliam - Return to Spurs 1938

Even after his first departure from White Hart Lane the arrangement McWilliam instigated with Northfleet had continued. In fact it was upgraded in 1931 to full nursery status, was flourishing when he returned and only ceased again with the War. In the meantime it proved itself to be a finisher at relatively low cost of high-quality but raw talent scoured from across the country. One to step up to Spur's first team in 1935 had been Londoner Vic Buckingham. Then In 1938 McWiliam would elevate two more half-backs, Welshman Ron Burgess and from Scarborough, Bill Nicholson.

And all three would still be at the club when football resumed post-war, new manager, Joe Hulme, a former Arsenal-man, began to mix the local talent with signings, was then replaced in 1949 by none other than Arthur Rowe, ex-Tottenham, indeed Northfleet. He would continue the mix, notably bringing from Southampton a certain Alf Ramsey, but adding his tactical master-stroke. It was Push-and-Run, a system of playing that he readily conceded he had translated from a Peter McWiliam, Tottenham training-ground drill.

Alf Ramsey

Arthur Rowe

Bill Nicholson

With Push-and-Run Rowe would take Spurs back into the First Division in 1950, win the League title in 1951, both of which McWilliam would witness, be runners-up the next League campaign and lay the foundations for the great Tottenham team of the 1960s under Bill Nicholson and to a degree even Ramsey and 1966. As to Northfleet Sid Castle would take it as a concept to Ajax, Buckingham would reinforce it at the same but also first play Johann Cryuff. And he after Rinus Michels would in turn take it to Barcelona, where it manifested as La Masia, with, from little acorns, all that that has and still entails for Spanish and World football, Manchester City and, and to complete one of two McWilliam circles, now even Arsenal once more.

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How Two Scots Made Spurs(And One Made And Two Saved Arsenal)