The Birth of Football and the Origins of Manchester City

Twenty-one: Other People's Money

Mar 23, 2025

On 3 September 1892 Ardwick played their first game in the Football League. Although heavy rain kept the Hyde Road attendance down to just 4,000, the 7-0 win over opponents Bootle pointed to a bright future.

The club had been busy making improvements that summer. In July they had made their biggest signing yet, centre half Davy Russell, one of the stars of the Preston “invincibles” side that had won the League in the 1888-89 and 1889-90 seasons. Dressing rooms had also been installed at the ground (players had previously changed in the Hyde Road Hotel), while the club now had its first full-time secretary, pub landlord, cattle-trader and former Conservative councillor Joshua Parlby (who became the new landlord of the Wellington Hotel in Chorlton, now the Gold Cup on Stockport Road).

After winning their next three games, by 17 September Ardwick were top of the Football League's Second Division by four points. Two days later the club made another change, when Richard Stevenson was replaced as chairman by Thomas Cairns. The decision may have been linked to Stevenson’s health problems caused by heavy drinking. In his personal diaries, Chesters’ head brewer Charles Frederick Hyde revealed that Stevenson had got so inebriated that June ‘he fell head-first down his office steps, badly injuring himself’ (in January 1893 he noted that “Dickie” had been drunk for three days running.)

However, the change was more likely the result of internal problems at Chesters Brewery. Its finances were now badly strained (Hyde was owed eight months’ wages by this point), prompting shareholders to call in accountants Messrs Ashworth & Mosley that month to make a thorough examination of the company’s books.

What they discovered caused alarm among the increasingly restless shareholders. Although Chesters Thompson only owned 2.3% of the Brewery following its flotation in 1888, the “King of Ardwick” had been treating it like his private fiefdom. According to a later court case, Chesters Thompson ‘exercised unbounded authority and influence’ at the company (“there was not a man on the board who knew a packet of hops from a packet of malt”, one witness claimed) and from 1890 onwards he increasingly treated this public company as a private bank for himself, family and friends.

In March 1890 he had borrowed £250 from the company in return for an IOU (which was then placed into an account that other directors had no knowledge of). In March 1892 he had drawn £2,131 as an advance of his salary. By August that had ballooned to £4,420 (nearly three times his annual salary). Company money had been loaned out to family and friends including William Fletcher, a pub landlord and friend whose only connection to the company was to buy two to three barrels of beer a week from it. Ashworth & Mosley discovered that Chesters Thompson had authorized loans totalling £56,928 to Fletcher, despite no security being offered.

Chesters Thompson expressed surprise at the size of debts they found, and gave assurances that they would be cleared. Promissory notes of £3,583 were later received from his brother, sister, and friends and relations (his wife, son and daughter owned £3,000-worth of shares between them). Other assurances, including a promise to cut wages, were also given.

But his enemies were now circling, and with William Gladstone now back in Downing Street, Manchester's liberal establishment were primed for an attack. The Conservatives had made significant inroads into the Liberal majority in the council over the previous decade. They now had as many aldermen as the Liberals, and had 33 councillors to the Liberals’ 49). Speculation had been growing ‘that there was a movement to nominate him (Chesters Thompson) for the office of mayor at some not remote period’. As one letter to the Manchester Guardian in October 1892 stated:

‘I trust the wisdom of the members of our City Council will save us from the humiliation of seeing such a representative at the head of our municipality’.

There were many reasons for Manchester liberals to dislike Chesters Thompson. For starters, his position as one of the city’s leading brewers drew their scorn, as prominent liberals played a leading role in the temperance movement around this time. Manchester liberalism had also been closely tied with the railway industry since its creation, an industry that was feeling increasingly under threat from the Manchester Ship Canal project. Chesters Thompson was one of the canal’s most vociferous backers (he was appointed to the board of the Ship Canal Company when it opened in 1894). On one occasion he warned his opponents: “If any railway Member of Parliament voted against the (Ship Canal) scheme he would not be a member long”.

But for the most part it was personal. The outspoken Chesters Thompson regularly sparked outrage for his ferocious, and sometimes slanderous, attacks on opponents. In 1887 he was forced to pay damages and issue an apology to Dr Richard Pankhurst, a prominent Liberal and later husband of suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, after accusing him of being “one of the most irreligious men ever known”. In October 1891 the Manchester Guardian reported that ‘considerable indignation was manifested among a number of electors on account of an attack of a purely personal kind made the previous evening at the Conservative meeting on Mr Alexander Forrest (a Liberal politician) by Mr Alderman Stephen Chesters Thompson’. A letter to the paper referred to ‘similarly gross and vulgar speeches, both in this council chamber and outside’. In one such outburst, reported by Liverpool MP Thomas O’Connor in a House of Commons speech in 1892, Chesters Thompson declared to a fellow alderman in Manchester Town Hall:

“You are a liar, a beastly liar; you are a cowardly liar, and I will brand you as a liar: and wherever I meet you, no matter where, when you see me you can think this – Chesters Thompson thinks I’m a liar.”

(And that was the cleaned-up version. O’Connor claimed the actual language was too offensive to be repeated in the House).

In November, the campaign to bring down Chesters Thompson began in earnest. On 4 November a petition lodged Joseph Munro, the Liberal candidate in the Manchester East constituency, alleging illegal election practices including bribery, treating (offering goods at discount), and general corruption was heard before a Manchester court.

The charges were quickly dismissed. “We really had no case to open,” Edward Parry, a member of the prosecution team, later admitted:

“Those who had been employed by Professor Munro to collect facts had, I fear, been carried away by their enthusiasm and belief in the general inequity of their opponents, and had mistaken rumour and hearsay for evidence.“

However, Chesters Thompson's financial dealings were to present a much better opportunity for his opponents.

Chesters Brewery's worsening financial state was about to prompt the return to the board of one of his most outspoken adversaries. The ensuing battle would have devastating consequences for both Chesters Thompson and the football club he presided over.

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What was the first song at City? Why did Steve Coppell resign? Did City have a “Fifth Column”? Did the IRA try to burn down Hyde Road? Who started the “banana craze”? And what was Maine Road's Scoreboard End called before there was a scoreboard?

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