1923 by Marvin Close

Author:Marvin Close
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2022-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

12

Third Division North

‘When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.’

Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, 1895

NELSON IS a small former mill town four miles north of Burnley in east Lancashire. In 1923 it had a population of just 39,000 people, and against all the odds, their football club became champions of the Third Division North. For the purposes of this book, we could just go through the facts and stats of the one and only honour season in their short history. But buried beneath every simple story is a much greater and wider narrative thread. And there’s a strange thing about small, seemingly unremarkable towns and their football clubs that you may only have vaguely heard about, because the deeper you dig the more remarkable they become.

Here are a few facts about Nelson that you probably didn’t know. In 1918, to mark the end of World War One, local confectioner Thomas Fryer invented the jelly baby. A couple of years later, his Nelson-based company created Victory Vs. Nelson was the birthplace of one of Britain’s most innovative, most successful and unsung coaches and managers of all time, Jimmy Hogan. In 1923 he was effectively being blackballed by English football. Because of its strong left-wing affiliations, Nelson was known as ‘Little Moscow’. The cotton mills in the town were heavily trade unionised and many local workers had joined the Communist Party. Though small in size, Nelson was a place that fought big for workers’ rights and apart from the mill owners and their managers who lived in the big houses up the hill, was almost exclusively a working-class town.

Yet prior to the Industrial Revolution, Nelson did not exist – a rare Victorian community that came into existence from virtually nothing. It was a town built on cotton weaving and by the time of the 1921 Census, 88.9 per cent of the adult population, around 17,000 people in total, worked in the local mills. By 1923 its population made Nelson the smallest community to have a professional football team. Nelson were tiny minnows in the game, having just fought their way into the Third Division North the season before after years playing in regional leagues. Their first season in the big time had been a struggle. Hovering in and around the bottom places throughout the campaign, Nelson limped home just four points above the re-election places in 16th.

Their ambitious young player-manager David Wilson decided upon drastic action and for their second season he got rid of 13 members of his squad and recruited extensively. Wilson proved to be a shrewd operator in the transfer market, thanks largely to two things. He’d arrived at Nelson from Oldham Athletic where he had played over 400 matches – and he was still a current player. Wilson had played against everyone and everybody, knew all of their respective worths on the pitch and was canny enough to work out which of them he might manage to attract to the tiny, highly unfashionable Nelson. Allied

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