Leeds United was one of seven clubs served by the First World War veteran who was one of the game’s greatest innovators.
It was a Lancashire Combination match between Clitheroe, the home team, and Darwen in the early 1950s – and it was pouring with rain.
Roy Wood was in goal for Clitheroe and remembers the pitch was a terrible one at the best of times, laid out on a pronounced slope. This particular day the weather was making it even worse.
What Wood couldn’t understand was that although ‘it was still banging it down with rain, there was this chap behind the goal. He’d got on a trilby and a military mac and was soaked to the skin.’
Wood told him he was going to get his death of cold. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ the man replied.
Before leaving at halftime, the stranger approached Wood with an unbelievable offer for someone who thought of himself as a jobbing goalie. ‘I’d like you to sign for Leeds United,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to make up your mind now. You’ve got until the end of June. When you make up your mind, ring this number and we’ll do the rest, your travel and everything like that.’
The man was Major Frank Buckley whose name may largely have disappeared into the mists of long ago but was a substantial figure in football’s postwar development. As a character he would almost certainly have stamped his personality and ideas on whatever profession he had chosen in whatever era.
With limited funds, it is reckoned he served Leeds exceptionally well as manager between 1948-53, during which time he oversaw the early years of John Charles’s outstanding career.
Buckley was born in Urmston, Lancashire, in1882. Photographs of him in middle age show a strong face with a slightly wry expression. A physiognomist would almost certainly have concentrated on the well-set chin. Had he been a Hollywood actor in the 1940s and ’50s he would have been much in demand as a gunslinger. Gary Cooper might not have got the High Noon part.
He had served in the army briefly from 1900, advancing rapidly through the ranks before buying himself out to play football professionally until the outbreak of the First World War. On 15 December 1914 he travelled to London where he was among the first to sign up for the Footballers’ Battalion, officially known as the 17th Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment.
Sir William Joynson-Hicks, Conservative MP for Brentford, addressed Buckley and his fellow recruits, telling them: ‘I am inviting you to no picnic. It is no easy game against a second-rate team. It is a game of games against one of the finest teams in the world.’
None of these ‘games’ was more hideously fought than the Battle of the Somme where Buckley received lung and shoulder wounds.
Generally, despite the wounds, he had a good war and given his previous military experience he was awarded a commission, rising to the rank of Major. Although intended only as a temporary title, Buckley chose to keep it. It chimed so perfectly with his character as an unbending disciplinarian and organiser that even his wife took to calling him the Major.
Despite being wounded at the Somme, Buckley played on briefly after the war before turning to management. He took the reins at seven clubs in all and made his name as the most innovative manager of his time. Some of his ideas and methods survive to this day.
His shrewd deals, such as when he was at Leeds acquiring the unproven Roy Wood, went largely unnoticed but were the sort of thing that could transform a club’s finances. As manager of Wolverhampton Wanderers from 1927-44, Buckley was remembered for making the club a six-figure profit in transfers in a single year.
He also came up with numbering on shirts and the first structured scouting system.
Above all, though, it was his attention to coaching that singled him out. Coaching hardly existed before the Second World War and sports psychology was a distant whisper. Buckley engaged with both. In particular, he was at the forefront of introducing routines with a wider purpose than simply keeping players fit.
For a start he challenged the quaint notion that practising with a ball was unnecessary because players saw quite enough of it on Saturday afternoons. Buckley put practice matches at the centre of his coaching and demanded a direct style of play rather than excessive elaboration.
He developed a contraption that shot out balls in no particular pattern to sharpen players’ close control and stressed the importance of being able to kick with either foot. He even encouraged players to do ballroom dancing to improve their poise and balance.
He also introduced rowing machines so that fitness sessions were not simply a case of running up and down the stadium terracing.
Some of his other ideas were downright strange, including his opposition to players marrying. He thought it suited neither partner: the wife being a distraction to the husband and the threat of a career-ending injury to the husband being a constant worry to the wife.
An even wackier idea associated with Buckley was the use of monkey glands.
The story went, and maybe/probably it was just a story, that Buckley was persuaded that monkey-gland implantations helped with stamina levels, recovery and improved mental performance. It was said he tried them on himself and the Wolves players.
Nothing was conclusively proved and after Wolves lost by three goals to Portsmouth in the 1939 FA Cup final – sometimes referred to as the Monkey Glands Final because Portsmouth were also said to be sampling the treatment – the whole episode was consigned to being one of Buckley’s more bonkers ideas.
Roy Wood had heard all the talk about Buckley’s plans ‘to plant monkey glands into footballers to give them a boost’ but was offered nothing more stimulating than a bog-standard contract. It carried with it the promise, maybe, of a slightly better life than his current one.
Buckley’s journey to Clitheroe and decision to sign Wood on the flimsiest of evidence demonstrated a keen intuition, although the early signs were not promising. Wood took time to settle after making his debut for Leeds in the 1953-54 season when the regular goalkeeper, John Scott, was injured. He played in ten games that season, letting in 20 goals, including five at Nottingham Forest on Christmas Day.
As things turned out, though, Buckley’s judgment proved flawless. In the three seasons from 1955-58, which included the season 1955-6 when Leeds gained promotion to the First Division, Wood played 125 out of 126 League games. In all he appeared in 196 League games for Leeds and seven FA Cup ties.
This is an edited extract from When Footballers Were Skint by Jon Henderson / @hendojon published by Biteback Publishing.