As Bad As Things Got: Brentford, 19th January 1967
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On the 2nd September 1939, Brentford beat Huddersfield Town at Griffin Park in front of a crowd of 12,079, with the only goal of the game scored by Jack Holliday. Having finished the previous season just four points off the relegation places and having taken just one point from their first two games of the season against Everton and Blackpool, it was a relief to get off the mark.
This turned out to be the last round of Football League matches to be played for seven years. War was declared the following morning, and having learned a severe lesson from the events of 25 years earlier, in particular the castigation received when they played on for a full season after the outbreak of the First World War, this time operations were shut down immediately, with wartime tournaments taking the League’s place until peace was restored.
When the football returned Brentford started their 1946/47 season excellently, with four wins from their first five games, and by the middle of September they were second in the First Division, three points behind leaders Manchester United but with a game in hand. But then the wheels fell off the wagon. They only won five more league games all season, three of which came in a brief upturn in form after Christmas during which they briefly lifted themselves out of the relegation places.
But an impressive 4-1 win against Wolves in the middle of January was followed by a run of seven successive defeats. Brentford only won once more all season and were relegated by eight points, a massive margin under two points for a win. For their first home league game of that season against Huddersfield Town on the 7th September, 31,407 had turned out. By the final game of the season, a 1-0 home defeat against Arsenal with relegation having been confirmed weeks earlier, just 17,976 were there.
The 1946/47 season turned out to be Brentford’s last in the top flight for 75 years, and kicked off the beginning of a decline that would almost lead to the death of the club altogether in less than twenty years. In 1954 they were relegated into the Third Division South which was followed by a brief upward swing, with 2nd place being achieved in 1958. But finishing as runners-up was worth little at a time when only the champions went up, though it did result in them being placed into Division Three rather than Division Four when they were reorganised that summer. Brentford’s first season in the new Division Three saw them finish 3rd, and in 1960 they finished 6th.
Enter stage left Jack Dunnett, a solicitor and local councillor who’d been born in Nottingham. Dunnett had arrived at the club at the start of 1961. Their accounts of the time exposed a pretty terrible situation. Brentford were £50,000 in debt and still losing money. Spending had to be cut to the bare bones, and the team which had come close to getting promotion into the Second Division was effectively broken up. This may have kept the club’s head above water, but it came at a price. On the pitch, Brentford’s decline was sudden and steep, from 6th to 17th in one season, and in 1963 they were relegated into the Fourth Division.
The cheque book came out again, and this time the gamble paid off, in the short-term, at least. Brentford were promoted straight back as champions. But again, the Third Division seemed to be a glass ceiling that they could break through. They finished 5th in 1965, and started the 1965/66 season with a 6-1 win against local rival Queens Park Rangers. Jack Dunnett had been elected as a Labour MP a couple of years earlier. All seemed right with the world.
But then the wheels fell off again. Brentford only won three more league games before the new year, and two of those came in September. By the 1st January, they were one place off the bottom of the table, and with just six wins from their last 26 games of the season they were relegated in the same position, come the end of the season. 15,000 people had turned out to watch that opening day match against QPR. Just 4,450 turned out for their final game of the season, a 2-0 home defeat against Gillingham.
The first half of the 1966/67 season, their first back in the Fourth Division, turned out to be one of mounting crisis. The club’s finances were worse than ever. They’d lost almost £85,000 on transfers alone over the previous three and a half years, a hopelessly unsustainable amount for a club of that size at that time. At their AGM in December 1966, Dunnett stated that Brentford had lost £20,000 in the last year alone, and that they were still losing £400 a week.
But few were prepared for the news story which broke on the 19th January 1967, when London’s evening newspapers reported that Dunnett and his Queens Park Rangers chairman Jim Gregory had reached an agreement in which Rangers would move into Griffin Park, with Loftus Road to be redeveloped as housing and Brentford ceasing to exist.
The appeal to Gregory was obvious. At the time, Griffin Park was the better-developed of the two grounds. While Griffin Park was a well-developed stadium, at that time Loftus Road had barely altered in decades, and in 1966 Gregory had hired the architect Michael Newberry to come up with a redevelopment plan for it. But this would be expensive, and effectively taking over Griffin Park would save a considerable amount of money.
It later transpired that the fuse for this story had been lit by a chance conversation between Gregory and the Brentford General Manager Dennis Signy prior to a League Cup match at Loftus Road in December 1966. Signy claimed to Gregory that he’d have had a much higher attendance for the match had it been played at Griffin Park, and it didn’t take long for this informal conversation to flower into an offer to buy the Griffin Park site for QPR and close Brentford down altogether.
What of Dunnett, though? What was the argument for Brentford? In short, there wasn’t one. In a later interview with supporters Dave Lane, Greville Waterman, and Mark Croxford, he told them that, “The reaction of the fans did surprise me somewhat because here I was, in good faith, trying to do something which would give the club a future”, and that, “I didn’t really care about whether Queens Park Rangers would have taken up more of the new club than Brentford”. His reason for supporting it? “My objective was to secure a future for Brentford but without me having to run up and down between Nottingham and London.”
Meanwhile back at Brentford, the fightback began. The Supporters Association, under the stewardship of Peter Pond-Jones, started an immediate pushback, raising bots funds and awareness. The surprisingly meadia-savvy Pond-Jones appeared on Grandstand, dismantling Dunnett’s arguments for the takeover to be approved. A walk from London to Brighton was arranged with players joining in, to raise funds. To achieve such a level of organisation at a time when not only were there no mobile phones but most people didn’t even have home telephones was no mean feat.
Five weeks after the initial story broke, a take-over was confirmed, but it didn’t involve Jim Gregory or QPR. A six-man consortium headed by the former Plymouth Argyle chairman Ron Blindell took over the running of the club with a 12-month bridging loan of £104,000 to keep it afloat. The funds raised by the fans had been a critical element in keeping the club going.
But even this only turned out to be a temporary respite. Having lost five of their last six matches of the 1966/67 season and missed out on promotion, the club started the following season with severe financial constraints in place to try and pay down a debt that had grown to £135,000 over the Dunnett years, although it was confirmed at the AGM at the end of that year that they were finally trading on a break-even level.
And three months into 1968, Jim Gregory arose again with another bid for Griffin Park. This time Gregory was offering £250,000 for the use of the Griffin Park, with Brentford this time to move to The Leas, the home of Southern League club Hillingdon Borough. All debts would have been repaid, but where would this have left Brentford? How many supporters would have just given up on the club completely at that point?
Blindell agreed to the deal, and again Brentford only kept control because somebody else stepped in to help. This time, a loan from another director, Walter Wheatley, paid down Blindell’s loan to the club and kept Brentford at Griffin Park. With this, Gregory’s interest in Griffin Park finally started to fade. In the summer of 1968 the South Africa Road stand at Loftus Road was constructed at a cost of £150,000 to replace the old open terracing, the first part of a redevelopment that would completely transform Loftus Road by 1981.
When Blindell died unexpectedly in January 1969, a local builder merchant called Les Davey took over as interim chairman, with Wheatley appointed later in the same year. Both had been involved in the 1967 campaign to save the club, but Davey and Wheatley would scrap for control of the club for several years—even having them as joint-chairmen throughout the 1972/73 season didn’t seem to resolve that—and it wasn’t until the arrival of the colourful Yugoslavian Dan Tana in 1974 that the boardroom discord would really start to recede.
Troubled waters would return in the late 1990s with David Webb and Ron Noades, and as recently as 2001 it was being suggested that the club could be selling Griffin Park and moving to ground-share with non-league Woking. In 2003, with the club having only narrowly avoided entering administration in the slipstream of the ITV Digital collapse a year earlier, Noades—who’d even had a go at being the club’s manager—handed control to the Bees United supporters trust, but it wouldn’t be until the start of 2006 that ownership of the shares was finally wrested from him and that chapter in the club’s history was fully brought to a close.
Of course, Brentford are in the Premier League these days. Griffin Park was finally replaced by the Brentford Community Stadium in 2020, and the club is owned by a long-time fan who was previously involved in the 2006 share purchase. But those previous former difficulties helped to shape the character of the club today, and continue to serve as a reminder that for most clubs who achieve it, top flight football seldom lasts forever.