Fifty Years Ago: How Accrington Stanley Fell From The Football League

On the fifth of March 1962, the creditors of Accrington Stanley gathered for a meeting that would reveal the true, desperate state of the club’s finances. The numbers were far greater than anyone had realised. The club owed a total of £62,000, a sum which included a £9,000 overdraft, £3,000 to other clubs, and a £400 utility bill demanding immediate payment.

The financial turmoil of 2012, which has seen Rangers, Portsmouth, Darlington and Port Vale enter administration, has brought the fear of a club failing to complete its fixtures back into sharp focus. It is a thankfully rare event in the Football League, but fifty years ago this week, it happened to Stanley.

Problems had been evident for months. By the end of 1961, a transfer embargo was already in place over unpaid debts. A “Save Stanley” appeal yielded a paltry £450. As the team languished at the bottom of the Fourth Division, the already small crowds at Peel Park dwindled further. In February 1962, another £4,000 debt, this time to the Inland Revenue, was revealed. Chairman Edwin Slinger resigned, and Club President Sir William Cocker took control.

The Chairman from Burnley

In an attempt to keep the club alive, Cocker and vice-president Sam Pilkington made a fateful decision. They called for help from Bob Lord, the notoriously idiosyncratic and ruthless chairman of nearby Burnley Football Club. Lord’s first act was to demand the resignation of six directors. The potential conflict of interest in seeking advice from the chairman of a local rival seems not to have registered.

The club struggled through three more matches: a home game against Rochdale, followed by away defeats to Doncaster Rovers and Crewe Alexandra. But the biggest fight was off the pitch.

At the creditors’ meeting on March 5th, it was Lord who stood up and declared the situation hopeless. Stanley’s only option, he told the assembled group, was to resign its place in the Football League. Pilkington, the man who had brought Lord in, resigned his own position that same evening. The following morning, the club’s four remaining directors drafted a letter of resignation and sent it to the League.

A Second Letter

That should have been the end of it. But as the press filled with stories of the club’s demise, offers of financial support suddenly appeared. One man reportedly walked into the club offices with a bag containing his life savings of £10,000. Believing enough money had been raised to see out the season, Sir William Cocker announced he would fight on. A second letter was dispatched to the Football League, asking for the resignation to be withdrawn.

League secretary Alan Hardaker confirmed they would consider the new facts. A meeting was set for the eleventh of March.

At that meeting, new chairman George Clarkson and club solicitor Harry Disley argued their case. They stated they had the funds to finish the season and requested three weeks to formulate a long-term rescue plan. Hardaker, however, was unmoved. He had the power to call an emergency general meeting of all ninety-two League clubs, but he declined to do so. Instead, he cited “well-established legal precedent”, insisting the League had no choice but to accept the first letter. Stanley’s record was expunged.

The club had found itself in this position for several reasons. A club lottery had been declared illegal in 1955, costing it a vital source of income. Three years later, the board sanctioned the £2,000 purchase of a stand from the Aldershot military tattoo, neglecting to account for the cost of dismantling, transport and reassembly. The final bill swelled to more than ten times the initial price, and to make matters worse, the stand was not designed for football, with parts of the pitch obscured from view.

While the directors must bear criticism for concealing the scale of the debt, the actions of two men stand out. Bob Lord’s advice did little but hasten the club’s exit from the League. Alan Hardaker, meanwhile, could easily have done more to save the club. He chose not to.

Accrington Stanley continued in the Lancashire Combination until 1966 before finally folding. The new club, formed in 1968, famously carries the motto “The Club That Wouldn’t Die”. But for four years, it was dead.

Oxford United took Stanley’s place in the Football League for the following season. Since then, Maidstone United and Aldershot have also resigned mid-season. The old club’s final three results were a 4-0 defeat at Doncaster and a 2-0 loss at Crewe Alexandra, a world away from the meeting rooms where its fate was being sealed.