The Long Read: M4 Corridors of Power

In 1983, the owner of Oxford United tried to force through a merger with their local rivals Reading, but the supporters protested and the illegality of what was going on was discovered.

No matter how many ways you look at it, there remains something mildly surprising about the fact that Reading Football Club was founded in 1871. We ordinarily associate the oldest professional football clubs with big cities such as Sheffield and Nottingham, but Reading were right there at the very beginning, founded in the same year that the first FA Cup matches were played.

They're one of the oldest senior clubs in the South of England and they first competed in the FA Cup themselves in the 1877-78 season. Neither of the teams they played that year, South Norwood or Upton Park, exist anymore. They went on to become a founder member of the Southern League in 1894 and won its Second Division title before joining the mass exodus to the newly formed Third Division South in 1920.

The 1920s were kind to Reading. In 1926, they won the Third Division South Championship and the following season they reached the FA Cup semi-finals, a run which took in beating Manchester United after two replays in the Third Round, before losing to Cardiff City at Molineux.

On the whole, though, the club failed to adjust to life in the Second Division and were relegated back in 1931. They wouldn't play outside the Third Division again until 1971 when they dropped into the Fourth Division and the club spent the remainder of the decade bouncing between the Third and Fourth Divisions.

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Meanwhile, Oxford United's origins and history were no less prosaic. Headington United were founded in 1893, but only played local league football until they decided to turn professional and joined the Southern League in 1949. They won the Southern League title in 1953, were runners-up the following year, and again in 1960.

That summer, the club changed its name to Oxford United and won the Southern League title in both 1961 and 1962. And when the end of that season came about, they applied for a place in the Football League to take the space created by the resignation of Accrington Stanley earlier that year.

Oxford's early years in the Fourth Division were a struggle and the team spent their first two seasons only just above the re-election places. They were, however, still able to summon up some giant-killing energy in the FA Cup, beating Blackburn Rovers in the Fifth Round before losing in the quarter-finals against Preston North End in 1964.

On the whole though, the club's upward trajectory continued throughout the remainder of the decade. Oxford were promoted to the Third Division in 1965 and then again into the Second Division three years later. They stayed there until 1976 before getting relegated back and by the start of the 1980s were still playing back in the Third Division.

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Jan Ludwicz Hyman Binyamin Hoch was born in Slatinské Doly in Czechoslovakia, although it's now part of Ukraine, on the 10th June 1923. An Orthodox Jew, he left home for France in 1940 shortly after Hungary reclaimed the area including that within which his hometown was built. Most of the rest of his family died in Auschwitz after Germany invaded and occupied Hungary in 1944. Hoch, however, fought with some distinction in the Second World War and became a British citizen in June 1946. Two years later, he changed his name by deed poll to Ian Robert Maxwell.

In 1951, Maxwell bought a three-quarter shareholding in a small publishing company called Butterworth Springer. The company name was changed to Pergamon Press and it quickly grew as a publisher of scientific, medical books and journals. In 1964, Maxwell was elected the Labour MP for Buckingham and retained his seat two years later, losing it only at the 1970 general election.

A year earlier, he'd failed in a bid to buy the News of the World newspaper when the Carr family, who owned it, baulked at the thought of a ‘socialist’ Czech immigrant gaining ownership of the newspaper, which led to the offer being rejected.

By the start of the 1980s, both Oxford United and Reading were in financial difficulty. Attendances had been dropping for years, and clubs in a general sense had been too slow to act in diversifying their income streams, meaning that they were having to try to cover increasingly high wages and transfer fees on incomes that were at best stagnant and in many cases decreasing.

By 1982, Oxford United were fundamentally insolvent and at the point of closure when Maxwell stepped in and took ownership of the club. His first season in control was fairly moderate, with the team finishing in 14th place in the Third Division.

They did, however, at least outperform Reading, who were relegated into the Fourth Division after finishing 21st. Everything that happened on the pitch over the last couple of weeks of that season, however, was overshadowed by an announcement made by Maxwell on the 16th April 1983 to the BBC.

He planned to merge Oxford United and Reading to form a new club, to be called Thames Valley Royals. It wasn't until after that Saturday's home match at Elm Park that club workers and players heard of the proposed merger between the two clubs.

And even then, they had to wait until Sunday's newspapers before any details emerged, and even then they weren't official. The players turned up for training as normal, still completely in the dark. The Reading manager, Maurice Evans, spent the morning fending off press inquiries, saying he couldn't comment on something he knew nothing about.

There had been no consultation whatsoever with the supporters of either club. Maxwell told the BBC that, “Everything in the world that cannot pay its way must go the way of merger to combine into stronger units”, which sounds surprising for someone who claimed to be a socialist to be saying.

But with the support of the Football League's Jack Dunnett already in the bag, it felt as though this was a fait accompli merely confirmed by Maxwell's statement, such was his certainty that the merger would go ahead. The reaction of the players was muted. Both squads knew that a new club would have no need for two squads worth of players, and it was reported that both sets of players were left feeling unsettled and apprehensive by Maxwell's announcement.

The Oxford United manager, Jim Smith, who’d already had the manager's job for the new club offered to him by Maxwell, attempted to assuage the Oxford players' fears by telling them that he was only doing it so that he could buy Kerry Dixon, and that all their jobs were safe.Dixon had scored 32 goals for Reading during the 1982-83 season, despite missing two months of the season through injury and the team getting relegated. Reading's players were considerably more negatively affected by the announcement, being considerably lower in the Third Division table than Oxford were.

They were only relegated by a single point at the end of the season, and it's unlikely that Maxwell's announcement did the players' states of mind a great deal of good. Indeed, had Reading won their penultimate game of the season against Preston North End, they would likely have stayed up and relegated Preston instead. Such things are, of course, unmeasurable, but it's difficult to imagine that the media scrum and uncertainty over their futures would have helped at all.

Supporters of both clubs quickly mobilised in protest against the proposals. The week after Maxwell's announcement, there was a mass protest at Oxford's Manor Ground before the team's match against Wigan Athletic. About 2,000 supporters invaded the pitch and staged a sit-in protest on the centre circle, delaying kick-off by 30 minutes, and there were banners in the crowd reading “Judas”, while Maxwell was both sworn and spat at by supporters from his vantage point in the director's box.

After the match, apparently unaware of the fact that his new club would need supporters, Maxwell simply doubled down, describing the demonstration as a “bloody disgrace” on a phone-in show hosted by BBC Radio Oxford. For all the protesting though, this was a dispute that was only ever likely to be disrupted in the boardroom.

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Fortunately for the supporters of both clubs though, there was somebody on hand with the determination to save Reading FC who had not only the means to do so, but who had also spotted a fundamental flaw in how Reading's directors had been managing shares in the club.

Roger Smee had been a product of the youth system at Chelsea before moving to Reading in 1967 at the age of 19. He scored 16 goals in 50 appearances for the club over the next three years before breaking his leg and then drifting down into the non-league game, before spending a year in Belgium playing for Ostend and then completing his playing career with a further nine appearances for Reading during the 1973-74 season.

He moved into building and property development after his football career ended and was very successful, a millionaire by 1983. But he hadn't lost his affection for Reading, and when news of the Thames Valley merger became public he immediately became suspicious of how this had come about.

Oxford United was an autocracy run by Maxwell, but this wasn't the case at Elm Park, although the Reading chairman Frank Waller was firmly pro-merger. Smee had examined the company accounts and noticed that they had some shares which had been authorised at Annual General Meetings which had been unissued. When the Thames Valley Royals deal was declared irrevocable by Robert Maxwell on the basis that Waller's faction controlled the majority of shares in Reading, he became especially suspicious.

A year ago, they didn't even have a majority, Smee later said. So how on earth have they issued these shares to themselves while Reading was a public company? That would be against the law. Smee contacted Roy Tranter, a director at Reading who opposed the merger, and Tranter's legal team filed a complaint with the High Court objecting to the sale of the unissued shares.

On the 22nd April, just as Waller and Maxwell were about to officially announce the merger, solicitors handed Waller a High Court injunction temporarily blocking the sale of the disputed stock. Three days later, the High Court imposed a further injunction, preventing any further dealing in Reading's shares until a further hearing on the 3rd May.

Maxwell insisted that there was no problem, calling the legal challenge a sideshow, though he did also make a fresh bid to all of Reading's shareholders for their shares. On the 1st May, the Oxford chairman falsely told the press that he and his supporters at Reading controlled 40% of the shares.

Reading supporters marched from the town centre to Elm Park in protest against the merger before the team's match against Millwall on the 30th April. Two days later, Oxford and Reading met at the Manor Ground in what the media considered to be the last ever Thames Valley Derby.

Reading won the game 2-1, but the headlines the following day were consumed by protests which had taken place before, during and after the match. On the 3rd May, a further injunction was granted preventing trading in shares in Reading FC for a further 10 days.

As if they knew what was coming, the three pro-merger directors at Reading all resigned their places on the day before the next injunction hearing and returned the undisputed, unissued shares to the club. The merger was effectively off, although this wasn't formally confirmed until two months later, when an EGM voted to accept Smee and Tranter's offer over Maxwell's.

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Robert Maxwell never did come good on his threat to fold Oxford United if he didn't get his own way over the club's merger with Reading. Indeed, it is striking about the aftermath of the Thames Valley Royals' story that both clubs had among the most successful periods in their history to that point shortly afterwards.

With Jim Smith still in charge, Oxford United won the Third and Second Division championships in successive years in 1984 and 1985, taking the club into the First Division for the first time in their history. They marked their first season in the top flight with their first trip to Wembley in the League Cup Final, which they won 3-0 against Queen's Park Rangers in April 1986.

Reading, meanwhile, were promoted back to the Third Division at the first attempt at the end of the 1983-84 season. Kerry Dixon did leave Elm Park in the summer of 1983, but he didn't go to join Jim Smith or Oxford United. Chelsea, who were just starting to awaken after several seasons of decline, paid £150,000 for him and he would go on to play for them until 1993, also winning nine England caps.

Dixon's replacement, however, proved to be just as successful as his predecessor had been. Trevor Senior joined the club from Portsmouth and would go on to score 184 goals in 362 League and Cup appearances over two periods playing for the club.

In 1986, Reading won promotion to the Second Division for the first time since 1931 as the Third Division champions. And in 1988, they too reached Wembley for the first time, beating Luton Town 4-1in the final of the Simod Cup.

By the time Reading had their day out at Wembley, Robert Maxwell had left The Manor Ground. Well, kind of. In 1987 he became Schrodinger's chairman, leaving Oxford United to take over as the chairman of Derby County and leaving his son Kevin in charge of Oxford while replacing his other son Ian at Derby.

With his attention elsewhere though, Oxford United were relegated back into the second division at the end of the 1987-88 season. By this time, his honeymoon period with Oxford was already a fading memory. The machinations over Derby County had left Oxford supporters feeling like second-class citizens, and Maxwell's agreement to also buy Watford resulted in the Football League introducing new regulations preventing a major shareholder of any member club from owning more than 2% of another Football League club.

There was a grandfather rule in place over this, a provision by which an old rule continued to apply to some existing situations, while a new rule would apply to all future cases, and this prevented Maxwell from having to sell up. But the Watford deal was off. Mark Lawrenson was appointed as Oxford's manager in March 1988, but his tenure lasted just seven months before he quit over the controversial sale of Dean Saunders to... Derby County.

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On the 5th of November 1991, Robert Maxwell was last in contact with the crew of his yacht, the Lazy Ghislaine (yes, named for her), at 4.25am local time, but was found to be missing later the following morning. Maxwell was presumed to have fallen overboard from the boat, and his naked body was subsequently recovered from the Atlantic Ocean. The official ruling at an inquest held in December 1991 was death by a heart attack combined with accidental drowning.

Although three pathologists had been unable to agree on the cause of his death at the inquest, he had been found to have been suffering from serious health issues. Some, however, remain convinced that he was murdered on account of his links with the Israeli Secret Service, Mossad, while others continue to believe his death to have been suicide.

There had been whispers that all was not what it should have been within the Maxwell empire for a few months before his death. It soon became apparent that Maxwell's business empire had more in common with a house of cards.

Without adequate prior authorisation, Maxwell had used hundreds of millions of pounds from his company's pension funds to shore up the shares in the Mirror Group. Eventually, the pension funds were replenished with money from investment banks, as well as the British government.

It cost about £100 million altogether, and the Mirror Group pensioners ended up receiving about half of what they were due. The Maxwell Group itself went into administration in 1992 with debts of £400 million, while Kevin Maxwell was declared bankrupt in the same year. Both Kevin and Ian Maxwell went on trial for conspiracy to defraud, but both were acquitted in 1996.

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Reading Football Club, meanwhile, were relegated back to the Third Division in 1988, the same year as their first trip to Wembley, and they weren't a million miles short of a second successive relegation a year later. Roger Smee sold his shareholding in the club to John Madjeski in 1990 and remains a highly successful businessman to this day. In 2013, he was awarded the MBE for his voluntary work with young people.

Maurice Evans, the Reading manager at the time of the takeover, left the club in 1984 and joined Oxford as a club scout the following year. When Jim Smith left the Manor Ground following promotion in 1985 following a dispute with Maxwell over terms of a new contract, Evans was brought in to replace him and was the manager when Oxford won the League Cup in 1986. The manager of Queens Park Rangers that day was Jim Smith.

At the end of the match, Evans sent the club's long-serving physiotherapist Ken Fish up to collect the trophy on behalf of the club. He resigned as manager in 1988 but stayed on in various positions at the club, although he did return to Reading as a scout in 1999. He died the following year at the age of 63.

Neither the Manor Ground nor Elm Park survived football's regeneration during the 1990s. Both venues were somewhat ramshackle even before clubs started moving en masse into shiny new homes made of steel and plate glass. Elm Park, into which Reading had originally moved in 1896, was demolished in 1998 when the club moved into the Madejski Stadium. Three years later, Oxford United departed the Manor Ground for the distinctly imperfect, three-sided Kassam Stadium.

Since then, Reading have played three years of Premier League football, while Oxford slipped out of the Football League altogether in 2006, remaining a non-league club for four years before winning promotion back after beating York City in the 2010 Football Conference play-off final at Wembley.

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The state of both Oxford United and Reading in 1983 was ultimately a reflection of a game undergoing a widespread recession. They were certainly not unique in having serious financial difficulties, and over the course of the period between 1977 and 1987 the game was skewed by this desperation to stop what looked by the end of the 1970s as though it could be a state of terminal decay.

Three points for a win was expected to produce more attacking football because a draw would be worth less than it used to be. It was introduced in 1981. Shirt sponsorship was allowed by the FA for the first time in 1977 and began appearing on shirts in televised matches from 1983 on.

In October of the same year, the Football League finally buckled and allowed live coverage of matches as in a contract signed with the BBC and ITV. The FA Cup soon followed suit. By 1988 that contract would be exclusive and by 1992 the Premier League would be starting.

All-seater stadia began to assume their position as the solution to hooliganism and a potential money raiser, first in Scotland at Clydebank and Aberdeen, and then in England at Coventry City. Artificial pitches briefly flourished, first at Queen's Park Rangers in 1981 with Terry Venables the public face for the campaign for Omniturf.

All of this was pushed by a need for money and reinvention. Gate receipts alone just didn't cut it anymore. Artificial pitches were introduced because they could be used seven days a week, opening up other potential revenue streams from renting them out. All-seater stadia were increasingly considered an inevitability.

The driving factor behind live television football matches, which were played live on Friday nights and on Sunday afternoons from October 1983, was obviously also financial. This was the point at which the fuse was lit that ended with the formation of the Premier League in 1992; the creation of modern football.

But some of these innovations didn't come off, or if they did, had a malign effect upon the game. An attempt to grab the rights to show matches on live pay-per-view in pubs got closer to happening than it probably should have done in 1983. The artificial pitches didn't come off.

All of this was driven by a rush for commercialisation and a desperation to stay afloat. It was also the point at which supporters, despite the fact that there have been fewer of us at matches than there have previously been for decades, started to become less important to clubs.

This is separate to the matter of the state of decay of stadia and the culture of neglect and containment which ultimately fuelled the disasters of the 1980s, although that is, of course, extremely important. But those cultures predate this period. The very act of diversifying revenue streams began the process of moving clubs' financial dependence from supporters to television companies.

The first live TV deal signed by the Football League in 1983 was worth £5.2 million for two years. By 1988, it was £44 million for four years, a four-fold increase in just five years.

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Thames Valley Royals fell into the category of failed experiments of the era. On paper, it presumably all looked good. Combine the support of two clubs, build a new stadium, and pay quite a lot of the cost of that by knocking down the two old ones and selling the land, all the while maintaining one thriving club for the area.

The problem, of course, was that Robert Maxwell didn't understand football. He didn't understand that the identity of the football club is absolutely at the root of what it means to be a supporter. It's why clubs found that they could ramp up prices and, while they'd grumble about it, people would carry on paying what was demanded. It's why, even when it was basically, fundamentally dangerous in several different respects, millions of us still did it every year. This identity is very powerful, and its nature flew straight over Robert Maxwell's head.

He didn't seem capable of understanding that he was destroying a piece of the identity of thousands of people, and that those people might not forgive him for that. Wider support for Oxford, even during their happiest times, was sometimes a little tempered by the sight of Maxwell mugging for the cameras in the director's box.

It's difficult to say what might have happened had it somehow gone through. Whether the notion of protest clubs would have been brought forward a couple of decades or so, had Thames Valley Royals ever happened as Maxwell envisaged it. What we know now is that what looked good on paper wouldn't necessarily look good in reality.

Or, as the former Oxford captain and manager Ron Atkinson astutely observed at the time: “Mr Maxwell obviously believes that if you add 6,000 United fans to 6,000 Reading fans you'll get 12,000 supporters for the new club. You won't.” It's a good job that the astuteness of Roger Smee meant that this wasn't a lesson that anybody ended up having to learn the hard way.

Accompanying image by Steve Daniels / The Beech Road stand at the Manor Ground / CC BY-SA 2.0