How Peter Swales became City chairman (Pt 2)
2. Prince of the City
Malcolm Allison arrived in Manchester with the force of a hurricane.
It was the summer of 1965, and the 37-year-old had recently been sacked by Plymouth Argyle after having been caught sleeping with a director’s wife. On his first day on the job a year earlier, the police had turned up at the ground to arrest him over unpaid parking tickets. In between those two events Allison had transformed Second Division Plymouth into an exciting side—and led them to a League Cup semi-final.
Allison had retired as a player aged thirty after having one of his lungs removed due to tuberculosis. According to his autobiography, Colours of My Life, he then became a professional gambler, a car salesman, and nightclub owner. And dated a Rothschild.
But most of all, Malcolm Allison was one of football’s great thinkers.
He’d developed his ideas at an unorthodox footballing “academy”. In November 1953, a group of West Ham players began meeting in the upstairs room of a cafe near their ground. The reason was Hungary’s 6-3 humbling of England, a defeat that prompted many in the game to question the way football was played in Britain.
Using bottles of sauce, ashtrays and pepper pots as players, they sat round a table and argued about tactics, usually from lunch to tea-time. Four would become First Division managers; Frank O’Farrell at Leicester and Man United, Dave Sexton at Chelsea and Man United, and Noel Cantwell at Coventry. But according to the Sunday Mirror’s Frank McGhee, “the head man was the big laughing guy in the middle of the table, the hub around which the arguments whirled—Malcolm Allison.”
“Malcolm was the cheeky one,” Sexton recalled. “The one with the pluck to go in and see the boss and put up ideas, argue and answer back. He was the one prepared to flout authority to get what he felt was right.”
At City his revolutionary coaching methods included a punishing fitness regime, improved diet, and blood tests. To many, he was the reason for City’s dramatic turnaround. For the newspapers, however, it was “Joe the Soccer Genius” who got the credit for City’s success.
That summer Noel Cantwell, one of the junior members of the West Ham “mafia”, was appointed manager of Coventry City. Dave Sexton had become Chelsea’s boss a year earlier, while Frank O’Farrell had taken charge of Leicester. As the press marvelled in the “Magic of Mr. Mercer”, Allison was getting increasingly restless in the role of the magician’s apprentice.
But it wasn’t just his relationship with Mercer that was becoming strained.
Allison’s £40 a week wage at City would have seemed like chicken feed to a man who claimed to have made £80,000 in a year as a professional gambler. The club had paid off Allison’s £600 bank overdraft after City were promoted in 1966 and given him a £400 bonus. But by 1968 he is broke, and forced to borrow £134 from Joe Mercer after his car was reclaimed by a finance company
In July, newspapers claimed that Bolton had offered him £5,000 a year to manage them. The City board offered him an improved four-year contract, but Allison declined signing it.
Soon he would wonder if he would ever take charge of a First Division club.
Malcolm Allison was an alcoholic, whose angry outbursts towards match officials were getting him in increasing hot water with the FA. They’d fined him three times in 1966 for insulting officials. By October 1968 their patience had run out. After finding him guilty of making ‘foul and abusive remarks’ to a linesman, the FA imposed a lifetime touchline ban on Allison and fined him £100.
In January 1969, Cantwell offered him the job of Coventry City manager for £7,000 a year. But after being hauled in front of the City board, Allison agreed to sign an improved four-year contract.
Allison, no doubt, sensed there was more silverware in this great side. In April 1969, City won the FA Cup with a 1-0 defeat of Frank O’Farrell’s Leicester. Newspapers hailed “Mercer’s Marvels”, noting he was first person to win the League and FA Cup as both a captain and a manager.
The lucrative Cup campaign meant that City had made nearly £100,000 in profit (including transfer fees) over the previous three seasons. Earlier in April, three products of City’s youth team—Mike Doyle, Tommy Booth, and Glyn Pardoe—had been selected for England’s 14-man under-23 squad. A new training ground in Cheadle had also been opened that season (amazingly, City didn’t have a training ground the season they won the title).
Four days after the Cup win, Allison was hit with another £100 FA fine, this time for abusing a referee during a reserve game. The FA also announced that, for the first time ever, it had also imposed a suspended sentence, but refused to elaborate further. Fearing he’d never be able to manage in England, Allison looked abroad.
On 18 May, Juventus revealed they wanted Allison to be their manager, and were prepared to offer him a two-year contract worth £20,000 a year tax-free, a £1,000 per game win bonus, and a private airplane.
Allison spent four days in Turin at Juventus’ expense. Chairman Alexander responded by demanding £60,000 compensation for their assistant manager. It took two weeks for Allison to announce he was staying at City. Alexander only found out from the radio.
According to the Manchester Evening News, Allison was “upset by at least two City directors” for “taking hard earned success for granted.” However, the club’s fractured shareholdings now offered him a path to power.
Allison had been accompanied by vice-chairman Frank Johnson and “a City solicitor” for his FA hearing in May. The solicitor was most probably his friend, 47-year-old Michael Horwich, who was a member of the takeover group. That day, it appears the three discussed a plan to oust Alexander as chairman.
Horwich was already finding his City connections to be profitable. In July he got Allison off a drink-driving charge on a technicality. The following month he represented Mike Summerbee’s mother, who was charged with possession of a pair of stolen antique guns valued at £260. The City winger had paid £20 for them from a man in a London hotel before giving them to his mother.
Now it was time for the plotters to turn their guns on the City board. At the club’s AGM on 9 September, director Chris Muir nominated Horwich for a seat on the board in place of Sidney Rose. Horwich lost the vote, indicating that Johnson had been persuaded to remain loyal to the board. Alexander’s response demonstrated why he had been dubbed, “the only man in England who can frighten Malcolm Allison.”
In a board meeting later that day, Alexander opened proceedings by telling Muir he had “lost all confidence in him and his integrity”. After the other four directors agreed with him, Alexander demanded his immediate resignation.
What happened next became the subject of a case heard before the Lancashire Chancery Court. In October, Alexander told the court that Muir had agreed to go and shaken hands on it. Muir issued a “complete and absolute” denial that he had verbally resigned. But after the other four directors—including a wavering Johnson— backed Alexander’s version of events, the Court ruled in the board’s favour.
Alexander had pulled up the drawbridge. But as history has shown, most sieges end from within.
Part 2
Excellent, looking forward to part 3