The Long Read - Accrington & Colne: Touched by the Hand of Burnley
A story of three Lancashire football clubs, two of them far smaller than the third, and how one of them ended up quitting the Football League while the other ceased to exist altogether.
The Lancashire mill towns of Accrington and Colne are 14 miles apart. Accrington is situated between Burnley and Blackburn, Colne a little further north-east on Lancashire's easternmost side, was the terminus of the East Lancashire railway line.
Both grew during the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution. Accrington grew to around twice the size of Colne, with cotton and wool providing the majority of jobs during the period when association football was first being codified. Along with Nottinghamshire, South Yorkshire and the West Midlands, Lancashire was one of the earliest growth areas for the professional game.
By the start of the 1880s, it seemed that every town had to have its own football club. Accrington FC were founded in 1876. The club was expelled from the Football Association in 1883 over illegal payments to players, but were allowed to rejoin upon the FA allowing professionalism for the first time in 1885.
They also became one of the original twelve clubs to form the Football League in April 1888. Their best season was in 1889-90 when they finished 6th. However, in the 1892-93 season, the team finished second from bottom and were relegated after losing a test match 1-0 to Sheffield United at Trent Bridge.
Rather than continuing to play in the Second Division, however, Accrington resigned their place in the Football League, becoming the first of the founding 12 members to permanently leave. But after a first season in the Lancashire League, the club realised the error of their ways and applied for re-election, only to be—unsurprisingly—turned down. Shortly afterwards, the club suffered further financial problems and disbanded altogether in 1896.
Accrington Stanley, formed in 1891, had become theirs rivals throughout their final years and were themselves admitted to the Football League's Third Division North upon its creation in 1921. Stanley's League career was largely undistinguished. Their best finish was as runners-up to Barnsley in 1955 and again behind Scunthorpe United in 1958, at a time when only the champions were promoted. They finished third during both of the seasons in-between these two.
Upon the formation of Division Four in 1959, they were placed into the Third Division, but with storm clouds mounting, they only finished narrowly above the relegation places in 1959 and were relegated the following year, settling into what already looked as though it might become an attritional life in Division Four.
The club's financial problems have been evident since the end of 1961 when they had been put under a transfer embargo by the Football League over unpaid debts to other clubs which already totalled £3,000. The club launched a “Save Stanley” appeal, but the response from their local community was poor and only £450 was raised. Chairman Edwin Slinger resigned, and club president Sir William Cocker took over instead. A week later, a letter arrived from the Football League seeking clarification of the club's financial position.
Cocker brought in Vice President Sam Pilkington to get the club back afloat, and Pilkington in turn called on Bob Lord for help. Lord was the Chairman of nearby recent Football League champions Burnley, but his first demand was to request the resignation of six members of the Stanley's board.
The possible ramifications of seeking advice from the infamously ruthless Chairman of a local rival doesn't seem to have occurred to Pilkington until it was too late. The team, meanwhile, struggled through its next three league matches, a home match against Rochdale and away defeats at Doncaster Rovers and Crewe Alexandra.
A meeting of creditors held on the 5th March 1962 finally revealed the full extent of the club's debts, and they were in a far worse position than anyone had previously realised. Accrington Stanley owed a total of £62,000, including a £9,000 overdraft with their bank, £3,000 over to other clubs, and a £400 utility bill which was required to be paid immediately.
Lord stood up and told those assembled that the situation was hopeless, that Stanley's only option would be to resign their place in the Football League. Pilkington resigned his position that evening, and the following morning the four remaining directors of the club drafted a letter of resignation.
The sending of this letter, however, didn't quite prove to be the end of the Accrington Stanley story. As newspaper sports pages filled with stories of the club's demise, offers of money started to come in, including one man who walked to the offices at the club's Peel Park ground with a bag containing his life savings of £10,000.
Sir William Cocker went immediately to the press, stating that he would fight to keep the club in the Football League and that enough money had been raised to keep them afloat until the end of the season. A second letter was sent to the Football League requesting that the resignation letter be withdrawn, but the League's Alan Hardaker confirmed that they would consider the facts with a meeting between the club's chairman and solicitor, with Hardaker and the Football League's Management Committee agreed for the 11th March.
At the meeting, chairman George Clarkson and club solicitor Harry Disley stated their positions. They had the funds required to keep the club trading until the end of the season and requested three weeks to come up with a longer-term rescue plan.
Hardaker had the power to call an EGM of all 92 members of the Football League to discuss the matter, but this did not happen. Instead, he replied that well-established legal precedent meant that the Football League had no alternative but to accept the first letter sent in and expunge the club's playing record.
There was briefly a likelihood that legal action would follow, but this never came. Legally speaking, the club had tendered its resignation. Accrington Stanley would continue to field a side in the Lancashire Combination League until 1966 before calling it a day. The current club, which has since won its place in the Football League back and currently plays in League Two, was formed in 1968. Argue among yourselves over whether this is ‘the same club’ or not.
There were three significant reasons the club found themselves in such a desperate position in the first place. Firstly, Stanley had lost money when the type of lottery that the club ran was outlawed in 1955. This was compounded three years later when the club paid £2,000 to purchase a new stand from the Aldershot Military Tattoo without having taken into account the costs of dismantling, transporting and reassembling it elsewhere. By the time that it was complete, its cost had swollen ten-fold, and on top of that, not being designed for watching football, the pitch wasn't even viewable from some seats.
Finally, the Football League de-regionalised its bottom divisions in 1959, a bad piece of timing for Accrington when we consider increased travelling costs needing to be factored into an already precarious financial position. In those final weeks, though, there were many more that could have been considered to have had some explaining to do.
The directors of the club could certainly be criticised for keeping the full extent of the problems quiet for as long as they did. while the decision of Sam Pilkington to bring in Bob Lord as an advisor was clearly disastrous. Two names, however, stand out as being key to the demise of the club. Lord and Alan Hardaker.
It has been said before that Lord couldn't be held responsible for the size of the debt that the club had accumulated, but there is little to suggest that his advice did anything but hasten its departure from the Football League, whether intentionally or not.
Hardaker, meanwhile, could easily have done more to save the club had he been so inclined. But he wasn't. Oxford United replaced Accrington Stanley in the Football League for the start of the following season, and in an extraordinary coincidence, Oxford were one of the clubs relegated when the reincarnation of Accrington Stanley completed their journey back to the League in 2006.
Two clubs, Maidstone United in 1989 and Aldershot in 1992, have had to resign from the Football League during a season since then, while a third, Bury, was expelled in 2019. It is in many ways extraordinary that none have befallen that fate since, although the spectre of financial crisis has loomed large over much of the English game for much of that time.
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A year after Accrington Stanley fell from the Football League, a new club was formed 14 miles away to no fanfare whatsoever. It was a team for a group of old school friends from primary school in Colne. Their founder's name was Graham White, and the club's name was Colne Dynamoes.
The new club won the Nelson & Colne League Division One title in their first season and within a few years had received planning permission to build a small ground on the site of a former cricket pitch called Holt House. In 1975, after having made their way slowly through the local amateur leagues, the club joined the Lancashire Combination, improving year-on-year before finishing runners-up for three years in a row between 1980 and 1982.
In 1982, however, the Lancashire combination merged with the Cheshire County League to form the North West Counties League. Colne Dynamoes were placed in the Third Division, which they won in the first time round. For the next four seasons, however, they sat solidly in the Second Division, finishing mid-table and no higher.
Good fortune, however, was on their side. Following the departure of twelve clubs from the League to form the Northern Premier League's new First Division, Colne were promoted, as it were, to the First Division for the start of the 1987-88 season despite having only finished 8th the previous season.
Graham White, meanwhile, had been successful with his business interests in property and timber, and had started to put money in the club in the middle of the decade. Following the League title win in 1987, this stepped up. Also symbolically important was the club's journey in the 1987-88 FA Vase final, a run that included beating Fleetwood Town, now of League One, and which ended at Wembley, where they beat Emley by 1-0 to lift the trophy.
That summer, the spending stepped up another level at Holt House in preparation for a shot at the Northern Premier League title and a place in the Football Conference. Professional players Billy Rodderway, Kevin Hurd and Alan Kennedy all arrived at the club. Kennedy had scored the winning goal in a European Cup final for Liverpool just eight years earlier.
It was reported that the wage bill had exploded to £10,000 a week. This would be an extremely high-wage budget below the National League now. More than three decades ago, it was clearly hopelessly unsustainable. The club was effectively full-time, with several of the players having club cars on top of salaries greater than they would have earned playing two divisions higher.
But their further progress, was hurtling at full speed towards a brick wall. The Football Conference had tightened its ground-grading rules with the introduction of automatic promotion and relegation with the Football League two years earlier, and Holt House, which had a capacity of 2,500 and had just 200 seats, didn't make the grade by a considerable distance.
White had a planning application for a 10,000 capacity stadium in nearby Nelson turned down by Pendle District Council on account of concerns over a loss of playing fields and objections from local residents. The club had come to build Holt House of a cricket pitch, a very clear change of purpose.
Elsewhere, White was at the centre of a consortium which offered £1 million to buy Burnley in the same year. This was rejected by the club. White may have been a childhood Burnley supporter, but there were already suspicions among Burnley's support and almost certainly replicated at a boardroom level, that his motives of owning both clubs could be about more than merely running them both.
As the 1989/90 season wore on, there was no indication of where Dynamoes might start the following season. Playing in the FA Trophy for the first time, the team knocked out four GM Vauxhall Conference sides including three former FA Trophy winners Altrincham, Northwich Victoria and Kidderminster Harriers, as well as Farnborough Town on the way to a semi-final match against Barrow.
Here their luck ran out and they were beaten 1-0 at home in the first leg and 2-1 in the second. But in the League, no-one could keep pace with them. They ended the season with 32 wins and 102 points from their 42 matches, 26 points clear of second-placed Gateshead.
None of this, however, addressed the stadium issue. White's search for a temporary home for Dynamos had returned nothing but rejection. Preston North End and Blackburn Rovers both turned them down, as did Burnley, to whom White offered half a million pounds to share Turf Moor for two years.
An agreement to share Bury's Gigg Lane was rejected by the League. At more than 25 miles Colne, Bury was too far away for them to allow it. With nothing having come of any of White’s searches, Colne Dynamoes were denied promotion into the GM Vauxhall Conference for the following season.
When the end came for Colne Dynamoes, it was almost as sudden as their rise had been in the first place. After a pre-season friendly against Newcastle Blue Star in July 1990, White called the players into a meeting at which they were told there was no more money and that the club were to fold.
There was no desperate rallying around to save them. There wasn't any time. On the 31st of July 1990, with Gray and White having claimed to have received death threats, a claim that has become a familiar trope in recent years, Colne Dynamoes folded.
White hasn't spoken publicly about the Dynamoes since then, and in the absence of clarification, rumour and counter-rumour have swirled around this story for more than three decades. Some have suggested that White's money just ran out, whilst others have claimed that all might not have been as it seemed behind the scenes at the club.
What we know for certain is that the closure of Colne Dynamoes was sudden and that it was permanent. Unpaid players considered suing for their wages through the PFA, but were told that it would be pointless. The club had gone. There simply wasn't any money to pay them what they were owed.
But why had Burnley turned down half a million pounds just to share Turf Moor with Colne for two years? After all, this was a considerably greater amount of money in football terms then than it is now. The answer to this question most likely lies in the condition of Burnley at the time.
They may have just avoided relegation from the Football League on the last day of the season just three years earlier, But the condition of the club hadn't improved a great deal since then, and the 1989/90 season ended with the Clarets finishing 16th place in the Fourth Division for the second year in a row.
This, combined with the aggressive growth of Colne Dynamoes, meant that the non-league club were considered a threat rather than merely neighbours, and the fact that White had been involved in a bid to buy them in 1989 meant that his ground share offer was treated as a stalking horse towards a takeover or, even worse, a potential merger of the two clubs.
By the end of the 1989/90 season, there were only 30 League places between Burnley and Colne Dynamoes, with one club on a clearly upward trajectory while the other continued to stagnate. Small wonder that many at Burnley saw this sudden offer of a substantial amount of money for a ground share as being about more than just using their facilities for a couple of years.
It took six years for a new football club to emerge at Holt House. Colne FC, made up primarily from a pub team called Rock Rovers, were admitted into the North West Counties League in 1996, with reserve and youth sides in the East Lancashire League. In contrast with their predecessors, Colne FC have been run in a slow and steady manner.
In 2004, they reached the semi-finals of the FA Vase before losing a penalty shootout against AFC Sudbury. AFC Sudbury's predecessor club, Sudbury Town, had been the team that Dynamoes had beaten in the semi-finals of the 1988 FA Vase. Colne's first league title came in 2016 At the time of writing, they play in the North West Counties League.
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The growth of professional football in England hasn't come without casualties. Though the number of professional clubs to have completely collapsed, never to be seen again, is perhaps surprisingly small, considering how precarious a position so many of them are in. The problem is the ambition that sits at the heart of a football club. A competitive environment doesn't just end at the dressing room door.
The temptation to spend is always there. And this makes the finances of all football clubs that haven't completely corporatised or gone in the opposite direction and established themselves as trusts who aren't allowed to go into debt, the temptation to spend is always there.
And this makes the finances of all football clubs that haven't completely corporatised or gone in the opposite direction and established themselves as trusts who aren't allowed to go into debt, inherently more liable to be unstable than other businesses.
Perhaps it's this that pushes so many clubs to the edge. They can't help themselves. But that doesn't mean that there aren't many different ways in which football clubs can go out of business. One is the coming together of a number of factors, each of which feeds off each other.
The decision of Accrington Stanley to purchase a stand from a military tattoo which was patently unsuitable for use without even looking into the complications of transporting it from one end of the country to the other was an act of unforgivable stupidity. It was, however, both a symptom and cause of the team's decline, which came immediately after its most successful ever period.
The loss of a revenue stream in the form of its lottery and added travelling costs following the ending of regionalised Third Dvision football also probably contributed to the club's decline, as did the widespread slump in attendances which followed the post-war boom.
Colne Dynamoes paid the ultimate price for two years of astonishing success, a period during which they lost just five league matches, reached Wembley once, and came close to doing so twice. Running a club on the money being thrown into the club was obviously unsustainable, and when the owner pulled the plug, there wasn't even time for anybody to react.
At the heart of both of these stories, however, is Burnley Football Club. The decision of Accrington Stanley to seek the advice of Bob Lord looks, with the benefit of hindsight, like letting a fox guard a hen house. Stanley weren't a threat to Bob Lord, but why would he act to save a club whose closure might hand his own a couple of thousand extra supporters at a time when crowds generally were declining?
Somewhat more perplexing in this case, however, was the role of Alan Hardaker in it. It's fairly universally acknowledged these days that Hardacre was not a very nice man, but his officiousness in the case of Accrington Stanley, where his decisions can only be interpreted as actively hostile to the continuation of a football club, does remain surprising.
One would expect a league secretary to be aghast at the thought of losing a club from their competition. Hardaker, however, was almost indecent in his haste to accept Accrington's resignation, and his subsequent refusal, without reasonable explanation to allow them to withdraw it, feels almost counter-intuitive for those of us who are familiar with football administrators.
There was substantial evidence that Accrington Stanley could have been saved, but there were no CVAs in 1962 and there was little protection for anybody from the whims and peccadillos of a man like Alan Hardaker. The most obvious assumption to make would be to assume that he took Bob Lord's advice at face value, and little more.
This could be considered laziness bordering on neglect, of course, but there areother explanations as well. Lord was long dead by the time Colne Dynamoes exploded onto the scene and Burnley was a very different football club by then too.
In 1962, when Accrington resigned from the Football League, Burnley reached the FA Cup Final. In 1987, when Colne embarked on the first of three consecutive title-winning seasons, Burnley needed a win on the last day of the season just to stay in the Football League. We may never know exactly what Graham White's desired relationship between Burnley and Colne Dynamoes even was.
Burnley had survived their closest shave in 1987, but they were in little better financial condition by 1990. While the team remained wedged in the bottom half of the Fourth Division, Colne's upward trajectory was so rapid that it's easy to see how the club could have been considered an existential threat to Burnley, and that's before we even move on to the subject of ground shares or mergers.
Indeed, considering what happened to Colne Dynamos in the summer of 1990 and where they are now, it's reasonable to say that Graham White was a bullet dodged for Burnley. His positioning at the centre of a takeover bid for the club that was rejected, and the subsequent attempt to ground share at Turf Moor for a lot of money, would seem to indicate that this wasn't mere paranoia on the part of club supporters. Whether true or not, it's definitely plausible. And it's not really a conspiracy theory if they actually are out to get you.
Coincidentally I recently took the train from Accrington to Colne. The line passes not only through Burnley but also Nelson, which also hosted League football in the 1920s and 1930s. Apropos of nothing, Burnley must have the worst railway station for a town hosting Premier League football. Burnley Central sits on a single track next to a burnt-out pub.
Fortunately we also have the far superior Burnley Manchester Road train station which gives you a good five minute walk between platforms with a vertical climb of about fifty metres!