Taking No Prisoners: The Story of Frank Barson, Football's First Hardman

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Chapter One

A Burnt Offering

‘This has been a week in which one or two surprises have come upon the football world. Such, for instance, as the transfer of D.B.N. Jack from Bolton Wanderers to the Arsenal (who have spent a little fortune on their team in recent years) and the suspension of that great exponent of football – Frank Barson.’ AEM Between Ourselves Villa News and Record, 20 October 1928.

IN JULY 1928 Frank Barson, 37-year-old ex-England, Barnsley, Aston Villa and Manchester United centre-back, signed for Watford of the Football League Third Division South on a free transfer. On 29 September (a day after penicillin was discovered), eight games into the season, Watford entertained Fulham. Late in the first half trouble ensued, witnessed by the Sporting Life football correspondent:

Exactly how the situation arose it would be difficult to say – things happen so quickly in football. But with the centre of play some fifteen yards away I saw Barson and Temple, the Fulham outside-right, spinning round apparently locked together. Temple was clinging to Barson round the thighs and the Watford man was striving to free himself. Barson obviously annoyed by Temple’s refusal to release himself, lifted his arm into what the police would call a ‘striking attitude’. Before any blow could or would have been struck, however, other players came between the pair.

Now the referee, Mr W.E. Russell of Swindon, was following the play and could not have been a witness to the incident. He at once went across to the linesman on that side of the ground and, presumably acting on what was told him, ordered Barson off. Barson argued his case in vain and though Barrett the Fulham captain added his entreaties, the referee stood his ground. Opinion was unanimous on the ground at the time that the other party was the aggressor.¹

Watford supporter Mr C.T. Edgar of Railway Cottages, Hatch End, claimed he saw the incident and that Barson was not wholly to blame: ‘I say he has been most unfairly dealt with.’ On the other hand, a Fulham supporter, ‘Veritas’ of Maida Vale, who said the incident took place directly in front of him, declared that, ‘it was significant that the home supporters, who outnumbered the Fulham supporters by about 50 to 1, were silent and there was not the slightest demonstration against the referee.’²

Within a few days, a petition was drawn up, arranged by the Mayor of Watford, Alderman T. Rushton, who felt that Barson had been unfairly treated: ‘My view is that Temple caught hold of Barson’s leg and as far as I could see Barson was endeavouring to get his leg released when the referee ordered him off the field. I did not see Barson kick Temple unless he kicked him in trying to release his leg.’³

The petition was signed by some 5,000 Watford fans and letters from fans started to appear in newspapers, all generally supportive. A Daily Herald reader wrote, ‘I was booked off duty and went along with a Willesden friend to see a match in which Watford took part. This was the only time I had seen Barson play. Both my friend and I were neutral but it appeared to us that Barson touched an opponent and a free kick was given against him. I should think this happened at least half a dozen times. When an opponent was to blame no action was taken. On one occasion a whistle was blown for a foul and both teams and spectators expected it was in favour of Watford but to the surprise of everybody it was given against Barson. What surprised me most was the fact that Barson always came up smiling instead of losing his temper as he easily might have done in the circumstances.’⁴

Football Association Secretary Frederick Wall was immediately contacted and agreed to meet Rushton some days later. Wall commented, ‘I know nothing about a petition. There have been petitions from time to time but I don’t recall whether they had reference to cases of men being sent off the field.’⁵

On 16 October, however, it was announced that Barson would be suspended for the rest of the season, a ‘savage’ sentence that Barson protested would impoverish him: ‘I have a wife and three children and am faced with the prospect of seven months without a livelihood.’

Barson gave his own account of the incident to a reporter the next day:

‘What exactly happened was this: Temple got hold of my left leg and persisted in holding it for between 15 and 20 seconds for which the referee gave the Watford team a foul. It was some five seconds after the whistle blew before I managed to free my leg. I hopped round on one leg trying to get the other free. The referee seemed in doubt and consulted the linesman, following which he came over and ordered me off the field apparently thinking I had been trying to kick Temple. The Fulham captain, Barrett, came up and told the referee that I could not be sent off the field, as I had done nothing, but he was ordered away. I understood that Temple informed the Football Association that he was not kicked by me. I asked to be given a hearing but this was refused.’⁶

As the confusions and outrage mounted, the question arose: what had happened to the petition signed by Watford fans and presented by the Mayor? Alderman Rushton thought it inadvisable not to say anything regarding the matter: ‘The player has been suspended for the rest of the season,’ he said, ‘and the penalty is certainly sufficient for any offence he may have committed.’⁷

Referee’s report

All would be revealed, however, a week later when Frederick Wall was interviewed. When Mayor Rushton arrived at the FA offices on 12 October, Wall had rather disingenuously asked him why he had come.

‘He said he had come to present a petition on behalf of Barson and he asked if he might read it. I said, Before doing so, I think it right to ask you whether you have seen the referee’s report with reference to Barson.

‘He said he had not. I showed him the original report [see illustration].

‘It read:

A Fulham forward had the ball when in my opinion Barson viciously tackled him. I at once blew for a foul and was walking across to caution him when he deliberately kicked at this forward (Temple) who, to prevent Barson from doing him an injury caught hold of his foot. On the Fulham forward releasing his hold of the foot Barson made a further attempt to kick him.*

When told to get off the field he did not do so at once but remained for three or four minutes and persisted in saying, ‘Wait until the game is finished I’ll then smash your bloody face in.’ (signed by the referee)

*This was confirmed by the Linesman nearest the incident, Mr A.R. Small.

‘Do you know, Wall asked the Mayor, anything of Barson’s history as a football player?

‘The Mayor said he did not. I [then] read him information showing we – the FA – had had to consider numerous reports on Barson’s misconduct on the field; that he had been suspended on three previous occasions, once for a month, and twice for three months and reported three times for misconduct while playing for the Watford club.

‘I then asked the Mayor what he proposed to do.

‘He said, Well, Mr Wall, I will not ask you to receive the petition.

‘I said, You have taken the right course. I feel that you have been placed in an invidious position.

‘The Mayor said, I don’t want to carry the petition away with me. Will you destroy it?

‘I destroyed the petition with his knowledge and approval.

‘Was it burned?’ asked the interviewer.

‘It was burned in his presence,’ Wall said.⁸

Suitably chastened, the Mayor headed back home. Meanwhile, Frederick Wall proceeded to reduce to ashes what was left of Barson’s football career.

Charles Buchan, the newly retired Arsenal forward, wrote: ‘I am extremely sorry to learn of Frank Barson’s suspension. At this time of his career, for Barson has been playing for a good number of seasons, it may have serious consequences for it will be difficult to resume after such an enforced rest. In fact, it may mean the end of his playing days …’⁹

Endnotes

1. Sporting Life , 29 September 1928

2. Daily Herald , 19 October 1928

3. The Scotsman, 10 October 1928

4. Daily Herald , 16 October 1928

5. Dundee Courier, 10 October 1928

6. Derby Daily Telegraph , 16 October 1928

7. Dundee Courier, Wednesday, 17 October 1928

8. Derby Daily Telegraph, 25 October 1928

9. Watford Observer , 20 October 1928

Chapter Two

Sheffield

‘The other evening my new comrade Albert Pape, the centre-forward, asked me what I should have been if I had not become a footballer.

‘A blacksmith, I replied.

‘Pape laughed. He thought it was a joke. But it is a fact. Not the village blacksmith – but a Sheffield blacksmith.’ The Truth About My Football Troubles, Thomson’s Weekly News, 2 May 1925

(Thereafter ‘Mems’).

IN 1727 the novelist and travel-writer Daniel Defoe wrote: ‘This town of Sheffield is very populous and large, the streets narrow, and the houses dark and black, occasioned by the continued smoke of the forges, which are always at work. Here they make all sorts of cutlery-ware, but especially that of edged-tools, knives, razors, axes and nails; and here the only mill of the sort, which was in use in England for some time was set up, (viz.) for turning their grindstones, though now ‘tis grown more common.’¹

Over 150 years later, Alfred Gatty described how Sheffield had changed: once when looking down into the Don Valley, ‘the eye traversed a rich and extended scene of agricultural interest and beauty.’ An ancient wood, Hall Carr Wood, clothed the hillside above the village of Attercliffe and beyond, the church spire of Laughtonen-le-Morthen and the church tower of Handsworth, were distinctly visible through the clear atmosphere with Treeton and Whiston in the intervening distance.

Now, however, ‘The wood has disappeared, cottages have sprung up on the hillside, and down in the valley, where the railway shoots its straight line beside the meandering Don, there stands, as it were, Dante’s city of Dis: masses of buildings, from the tops of which issue fire, and smoke, and steam, which cloud the whole scene, however bright the sunshine.’²

The transformation had been largely wrought by technical innovations such as newer, swifter processes for producing steel invented by Bessemer that helped major firms to establish Sheffield as a centre for heavy engineering, shifting the emphasis away from the traditional lighter trades such as edge tools and cutlery.

The new heavy industry plants were built on ‘green field’ sites in the wide River Don valley to the east of Sheffield itself, in the neighbouring villages of Brightside, Attercliffe (the ‘East End’ of Sheffield) and finally Grimesthorpe, where Frank Barson was born in April 1891.

There was a constant supply of water from the River Don and railway access to the coking coal from local collieries and to pig iron from the continent. The flat land beside the Don afforded the construction and subsequent expansion of large industrial sites so that by the 1890s there had arisen a solid mass of works and railway sidings surrounded by rows and rows of terraced houses, principally along Sheffield’s Carlisle Street and Savile Street. Here were situated Charles Cammell’s Cyclops Works, John Brown’s Atlas Works (both named appropriately after giants of Greek mythology) and Thomas Firth’s Norfolk Works, with the railways running beside and between them. Workers had been attracted from all over the British Isles.

The first Barson family had arrived in Sheffield in the 1850s. Frank’s grandfather William, born in Derby to a poor family, his father a frame worker, initially worked as a groom and in 1851 was living in Bag Lane, Derby, with his wife Mary Ann (nee Camp), a dressmaker from Leicester whose father had been an agricultural labourer. They had three children at that point: Elizabeth, George and Thomas.

William had been drawn by the prospect of more prosperous work, which was typical of the many workers drawn into Sheffield during the middle years of the 19th century. By the first decade of the 20th century Sheffield’s population had grown from 135,310 in 1851 to 380,793 in 1901, or well over 400,000 if newly incorporated areas are added. Many of these workers were, like Barson, new to the steel and coal trades – migrants from the surrounding countryside and beyond, including many from Ireland.

By 1861 William was working as a labourer at the Cyclops Steel Works in Brightside and living in a back-to-back at 21 Sutherland Street, Burngreave. In that same year, his eldest son George, aged 13, was already employed in the nearby rolling mill. Thomas was an errand boy and William, Frank’s father, was just two years old. Four years on, however, everything changed.

On 11 March 1864 there occurred what became known as the Great Sheffield Flood, also known as the Great Inundation, a disaster that devastated areas in and above the city. At about midnight, the Dale Dyke Dam at Bradfield, one of four reservoirs built about eight miles north-west of Sheffield and planned to supply the developing steel industry, collapsed, releasing a torrent of water that ultimately killed some 250 people. It also devastated an area that stretched from the Dam itself, down the Loxley Valley, through Malin Bridge and Hillsborough, into Sheffield town centre and beyond, ultimately reaching Sutherland Street, where the Barson family lived.

In the disaster’s aftermath, a special Act of Parliament was passed to enable compensation to be paid to those who had suffered damage to property, injury to persons, and loss of life – one of the largest insurance awards of its time. A three-man commission, under William Overend QC, worked their way through 6,500 claims, eventually awarding some £273,988. The claimants represented a remarkable cross section of the town’s population, from the poorest and most lowly to the wealthy and enterprising, and their stories were frequently distressing and tragic in the extreme: sole survivors of large families, the permanently crippled, the orphaned and widowed. Sometimes the stories were dishonest and occasionally ludicrous, and sadly the Barson family’s claims fell into this category.

Their home (or rather, two rooms) in Sutherland Street was at the furthest extent of the flood, but they were still eligible to make an application, as overflowing river water had caused a lot of collateral damage to buildings and property. In fact, 60 houses and basements had been flooded in Sutherland Street.

The first part of William Barson’s claim was simple enough and consisted of a list of items damaged by or lost in the water, and a sorry list it was: viz. Maiden & Pot, Bread, Pot and Bread, two Panshons, Rabbit, Frying Pan, Clothes Horse, New Pair of Boots and other articles. These came to £3 12s. There was then the ‘Cleaning House, Cellars and Furniture, which came to 12s.’ The total came to £4 4s. The adjudication panel awarded them just £2 5s, somewhat typical, as most small claims were reduced almost automatically.

What followed was more problematic. William Barson suffered from rheumatic fever and inflammation of the liver, but he tried to prove that his worsening health was a direct consequence of the flood and claimed injury compensation of £200. Sadly, he died in the months before the case came to adjudication. Thus, Mary Ann proceeded to put in a claim for compensation for the loss of the family breadwinner, ‘being wife or husband of the deceased person or his or her parent or child as defined in 9 and 10 Victoria C.93’. (This was the Fatal Accidents Act 1846, commonly known as Lord Campbell’s Act, which allowed relatives of people killed by the wrongdoing of others to recover damages.) The Barson family at that time consisted of Mary Ann herself, then aged 46, Elizabeth, aged 18, George, aged 16, Thomas, aged 14, William, aged 6, Jane, aged 3, and Frederick, aged 4 months.

Mary Ann put in a claim for £500 – but was awarded just £5. Frank Barson would often recall the bitterness that the family continued to feel at the paltry amount awarded to a widow and six children. ‘How were they supposed to survive on £5?’ he would ask. ‘It was a terrific struggle and I often wondered how they managed.’ It looked to someone like Barson, in retrospect, like a grave injustice. ‘It made me angry just to contemplate it...’

The official explanation for the parsimonious nature of many of the awards was that although Overend and his colleagues, ‘were deeply moved by the wretchedness of such cases,’ and much as they sympathised with the bereaved, they were empowered to award only ‘the pecuniary loss’ sustained. If, for example, a father claimed for the death of a son, it was necessary to ascertain how much that son had been earning and how much financially he had benefitted the father.

What adds to the tragedy of this whole situation is that the Relief Committee found themselves in the embarrassing position of having almost half of the original monies donated to relieve distress left over so that it had to be returned to the donors, and £8,000 given to local hospitals. Clearly, the committee could have been far less miserly towards those whose lives had been devastated on that terrible night of 11 March 1864.

In the Barson case, however, it looked like the committee simply didn’t believe Mary Ann’s story.

The family survived, of course, and by 1871 they had moved a mile further out to Grimesthorpe, to 36 Bland Street, close by the Grimesthorpe Cammell Lairds works.

George was now a ‘spring fitter’ and Thomas a labourer, plus there was a lodger, a ‘hammer driver’ called Alfred Easthorpe who would soon marry Mary Ann. Their neighbours included a ‘puddler’, several labourers, railway spring fitters, iron workers, a hammer driver, a shopkeeper, a school mistress, a coalminer, and an engine smith hailing variously from Derby, Wolverhampton, Newcastle, Gateshead, Stafford, Nottingham, Herefordshire, and Norfolk. Almost everyone worked for Cammell Laird.

The Barsons would ultimately multiply, Frank’s uncles and an aunt producing between them some 17 cousins, the majority of whom continued to live in streets surrounding the Cammell Laird works, the men almost invariably working for the eponymous steel firm.

Frank’s Aunt Elizabeth would escape the immediate area, however, when