Precious Insight Into Institution That Kept On Giving

Gerry Taylor, Bob Hatton and Steve Daley were present to hear the word ‘factory’ used more than once. Well, Wath Wanderers always was regarded as a unique production line or conveyor belt leading all the way to Wolverhampton.

For decades, under the stewardship of a former Molineux winger, this outstanding nursery system sent a stream of talented lads down from South Yorkshire to the West Midlands.

And, now, the window offering an insight into the whole fascinating process is being pushed considerably wider.

We have spoken before on this site of the under-construction Feeding The Wolves book that is due out later this year. In the meantime, we have learned more about the ways of Wath through a two-hour presentation that showed us what that place actually looked like and how it operated.

It also became clear that the parent club overseen by the disciplinarian Major Frank Buckley and then the similarly-principled Stan Cullis (with a bit of Ted Vizard in between) were guilty of poaching young players in a way that was quite legal back then.

Ok, so Wolves famously missed out on Dudley’s finest, Duncan Edwards, partly, it is reported, because they were unwilling to offer inducements to lads and their parents. Edwards might well also have become England’s finest of the 1960s – and may even have skippered our heroic 1966 World Cup team – had he and seven others off the Old Trafford playing staff not perished in Munich in 1958. 

But imagine if Matt Busby had set up a feeder club in Tipton, Cannock or Rugeley – Wath upon Dearne is no more than a small town, after all – and drawn in the top teenage players from this area and beyond, then hand-picked the best of them for United. Neither The Major nor Frank would have been too chuffed!

At that time, though, Wolves were openly raking in lads from under the noses of not only Barnsley, Rotherham and Doncaster but also the bigger fry like the Sheffield clubs and Leeds, even those in the north-east. It was an academy of the most basic kind long before that term was applied to football.

Ron Flowers, Roy Swinbourne, Jack Short, Barry Stobart and Geoff Sidebottom were among the Wath graduates just before or while Wolves were at the pinnacle of the English and European game.

Numerous others followed, including Alan Sunderland, Ken Knighton, Jim Barron, John Galley, Jimmy McVeigh, Dave Galvin and the incomparable maverick who preceded the three we named at the start of this piece, Peter Knowles. In all, 27 Wath players or trialists graduated to Wolves’ first team.

Taylor, Hatton and Daley were part of an enthralled audience who learned much more in the Molineux Museum audiorium three nights ago, each speaking of their gratitude to this long-disbanded nursery.

Our hosts, author Ashley Ball and project manager and football historian Chris Brook, teased us with the thought that Crook might have tipped off his first professional club, Blackpool, about Alan Ball after Wolves decided the future World Cup winner wasn’t for them. They could easily be right. Some years before highlighting his six-season Molineux stay with two crucial late-season goals in the escape from relegation in 1932-33, Crook played for two years under Major Buckley at Bloomfield Road.

To anyone with Wolves’ history and past greatness at heart, the Wath story is a wonderful one; overdue in book form and now being told by those on the ground in the area in which the 1984 coalminers’ strike began.

What gems Ball – a journalist on the Barnsley Chronicle – and former schoolteacher Brook have unearthed through their own digging.

Like the fact that Wolves despatched not only a pristine set of old gold and black kits for Wath to play matches in but also a trusted groundsman to ensure playing and practice conditions were as good as possible. They discovered too, that Sunderland wore borrowed rugby boots to his first Wath trial because his family couldn’t afford to properly kit him out. 

Crook’s grand-daughter, Jane Whitlam, who we mentioned in a previous piece, has also been interviewed at length.

Wolves Heroes will continue to support this belated acknowledgement of a remarkable institution. We plan to travel to South Yorkshire at the end of next month for the unveiling of a commemorative Mark Crook plaque – manufactured here in Wolverhampton by cast iron specialist Robin Lumley – and to provide further publicity to what sounds like an outstanding publication.

Anyone who wishes to pre-order a copy, at a reduced cost, can do so by clicking on https://dondearneschoolfootball.wordpress.com/mark-crooks-wath-wolves