Those Were The Games
Top Gun Fred
Published by Eccles on April 19, 2009
Gillingham v Merthyr Town – Saturday April 26th 1930
History has dubbed the 1920’s “The Roaring Twenties”. A celebrity time with people like film star Rudolph Valentino, Charles Lindbergh flying solo across the Atlantic, blokes dancing the Charleston and the Black Bottom on top of taxi cabs with flappers whose skirts got ever higher – while at Gillingham Football Club things got ever lower.
There certainly hadn’t been much “roaring” on the terraces at Priestfield during the 1920’s. In the ten seasons since the day in May 1920 that had seen them elected to the Football League the Gills had finished in the top half of the Third Division just once (1925/26). That was after three years of patient team-building by highly popular manager Harry Curtis. Harry then had the nerve to ask the directors for a ten shillings a week pay rise. They flatly refused, so he resigned and went to Brentford. There he became a legend, lifting them from being one of Gillingham’s Third Division (South) rivals and into the First Division by 1935, where they stayed until 1947. His contribution to Brentford Football Club is recognised to this day by “The Harry Curtis Suite” at Griffin Park being named after him.
There was not one Gills’ fan at that time who did not believe that the success that Brentford had could have been Gillingham’s had Harry stayed, and the finger of responsibility for that was very firmly pointed at the board. The dominant figure there was Chairman Alderman Jack Knight, four times mayor of Gillingham. Alderman Knight saw the club as part of the civic fabric, and it was he who in 1931 was the main mover behind changing the shirts from New Brompton’s black and white stripes to blue, which was the “Borough Colour”. But strangely the Alderman didn’t seem to see the irony of a borough that saw itself as thrusting and forward-looking, and a Football League club within it that continually struggled and was seen by some as a laughing stock.
There were good players at Gillingham and there were good results, but there was little continuity. There were big turnovers of staff season on season, and any player who was any good was sold with almost obscene haste. The two notorious examples were Freddie Fox and Dick Edmed. Goalkeeper Freddie was signed from Preston in August 1922. The Gillingham “goals conceded” column showed an immediate improvement and Freddie started getting some rave reviews, none more so than when he defied the First Division leaders at Ninian Park in 1924 (see Part 10). His performances so impressed that he was picked to play for England – an almost unheard of honour for a Third Division player. So the directors immediately sold him to Millwall for £625, and threw in outside-right George Chance as well. Such was their speed that when Freddie played in England’s 3-2 win over France in Paris on May 21st 1925 it is not clear whether it was Gillingham or Millwall who actually held his registration.
Outside-right Dick Edmed was born in Gillingham and at 21 years of age had burst into the first team. In those days with two years National Service required, followed by Buggins’ turn in team selection, to be a regular at that age meant that you were seriously talented, and Dick was. The fans loved watching the kid from Grange Road ripping defences apart in each of his 27 appearances and cracking in seven goals. Alderman Knight and his board loved it too. This kid was worth some money – £1,800 in fact, which was the club record fee Liverpool paid them in January 1926.
So with the Curtis, Fox and Edmed incidents (and others) it was hardly surprising that the team drifted downwards again and the fans got cynical. In the first post-Curtis season (1926/27) Gillingham finished third from bottom, rallied to 16th and then in 1928/29 finished bottom and had to apply for re-election for the second time in nine years. Exeter, who finished 21st, got 42 votes, Gillingham got 35, Argonauts (a London amateur side playing at Wembley Stadium) 6, Aldershot 5, Thames and Kettering 1 each, and Llanelli no votes.
Things were little better in the 1929/30 season. New manager Dick Hendrie had signed over a dozen new players, including a 22 year old Wandsworth-born inside-forward from Charlton called Fred Cheesmur, and paid a club record £250 for centre-half Albert Collins from Millwall. The new players took a long time to gel, and the season developed into a long slog to stay clear of the bottom of the table. The home record was patchy, the away record was the usual of a very rare win and regular defeats (in this case 16 out of 21 starts), and there was the humiliation of being beaten at home 2-0 by Margate in the first round of the FA Cup.
Even more irritating when looking at the table and seeing Gillingham slumped in the nether regions was seeing Harry Curtis’ Brentford flying at the top. That season they established a record of winning every home game – 21 games, 21 wins – a 100% record that has never been equalled to this day. And as the logic of the football fan goes, Harry would have signed those players for Gills, and Fortress Priestfield really would have been just that – unchallenged and forever.
As the 1929/30 season moved into its last month Gillingham’s league position was desperate. Five straight defeats during March had dumped them to second from bottom, and despite a better run of two wins and two draws in April, the last two games would be a frantic scramble to avoid re-election. At least they were both at home, starting with Merthyr Town on Saturday April 26th.
Before the game the bottom of the Third Division (South) table was:
Newport County Played 40 32 points Walsall Played 38 30 points Torquay United Played 39 28 points Bristol Rovers Played 39 27 points Gillingham Played 40 26 points Merthyr Town Played 39 17 points
A below average crowd of 3,513 was inside Priestfield to see the last rites to the season because, if the Gills couldn’t beat bottom club Merthyr Town, they had no chance.
Our team was:-
Jim Rutherford; Jock Robertson, George Bishop; Walter Jones, Albert Collins, Fred Ellis; Jim McCafferty, Tom Brennan, Fred Cheesmur, Roy Bethell, Joe Speed.
The game was played in expected April conditions, on a firm but almost grassless pitch, in pleasant sunshine and with a slight breeze blowing towards the Rainham End. Merthyr attacked that end at the start, but Jim Rutherford dealt comfortably with a couple of crosses. The Gills slowly started to exert themselves and Lewis in the visitors’ goal had to make several smart saves.
After fourteen minutes Gillingham were in the lead when Jim McCafferty slipped the ball through to centre forward Fred Cheesmur. Fred raced on, held off a challenge by left-back Scott and drove the ball low past Lewis. Three minutes later Fred picked up a long through pass from Albert Collins and beating the full-backs for pace cracked another low left-foot shot past Lewis. 2-0 to the Gills. The pressure was off. They started to play with abandon and Walter Jones brought a terrific save out of Lewis when the keeper turned his free-kick onto the bar and over.
But it wasn’t all one-way traffic. Merthyr nearly reduced the arrears, as the local paper records – “Rutherford, fielding a hot drive from Hargreaves, allowed the ball to fall to the ground and he was charged over, with the ball lying behind him. Fortunately he succeeded in reaching it with his hands and rising, got it away to a safe position.” But that potential mishap aside the “effective passing of the home forwards coupled with the neat work of the half-backs led to many dangerous attacks.”
From one of them centre forward Tom Brennan, almost on the goal-line, lifted his shot over the Gillingham End bar, but he quickly made up for it when he carved out an easy opening for Fred Cheesmur to swoop and side-foot his hat-trick after half an hour. Then Jim McCafferty hit the angle of post and bar before Fred got his fourth. Inside-forward Roy Bethell dribbled through the Welshmen’s defences, and rather than take a shot himself unselfishly fed it to Fred, who gave keeper Lewis no chance with a powerful shot from ten yards and made it 4-0 for the Gills at half-time.
The second half turned into a bit of a romp. There were more Gillingham goals to be had, and just after the hour it was five for the Gills and five for Fred Cheesmur. Some nice approach-work by Joe Speed down the left wing finished with a centre onto Tom Brennan’s head. His downward header was into Fred Cheesmur’s path. Despite being jostled by Merthyr right-back Carlton, Fred’s speed took him clear and another close range shot gave Lewis no chance.
Game over. The Gills sat back a bit and allowed Merthyr into the game, but Albert Collins at centre-half marshalled his troops well and there were few scares. Merthyr left themselves open somewhat, and near the end a neat counter-attack down the left by Joe Speed and Roy Bethell let Fred Cheesmur in. The twenty-two year old Londoner had the chance for immortality, and he took it. His speed took him clear of the last line of defenders and he gave Lewis no chance with a powerful shot.
Final score – Gillingham 6, Merthyr Town 0, and centre forward Fred Cheesmur had got the lot. And eighty years later, despite subsequent goal machines like Hughie Russell, Ron Saunders, Pat Terry, Brian Yeo and SuperBob Taylor, he still remains the only man to score a double hat-trick for Gillingham in a Football League game.
Fred was at it again in the final game the following Saturday, bringing his final goals tally for the season to 17 when he and Joe Speed scored second half goals to beat Luton Town 2-0. But although the two-week goal gale meant that Gillingham finished with 30 points from the 42 games it did not lift them above 21st place. Other teams around them won too and Bristol Rovers, with a better goal average, squeezed clear into 20th position and safety.
And so for the third time in ten years the Gills had to apply for re-election. They were lucky. The voting was Gillingham 33 votes, Thames 20, Aldershot 19, Merthyr 14, Llanelli 4 and Argonauts no votes. Merthyr Town lost their Football League status, never to regain it. No-one knew how Thames, who had polled just one vote the previous year, got enough to make them a Football League club. They played at the West Ham Stadium, which had a capacity of 80,000, but they had West Ham United drawing crowds of 30,000 within a mile of them. The chances of Thames ever establishing themselves were bleak, and they collapsed two years later.
Gillingham were lucky then too. In 1931/32, Gillingham finished 21st again and applied for re-election for a fourth time. Thames’ collapse in the Third Division (South) and Wigan Borough’s collapse in the Third Division (North) meant that there was little chance of a third club being thrown out, and Gillingham survived comfortably with 41 votes. They weren’t so lucky with the fifth re-election application in 1938.
All this should have been a warning to the Gillingham Football Club Board that they couldn’t expect to carry on with their cap-in-hand policies for ever. They needed to do some serious Harry Curtis-type team building, and where better to start than with this young goal-machine who’d got the club record against Merthyr Town. But of course they sold Fred Cheesmur six months later – in December 1930 to Sheffield United for £1,050. Now there’s a surprise.
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