Key Characters off the Field

MARK BARBER

Mark Barber was one of the earliest members of what appears to have been the earliest Bedford Town club, founded in the 1880s, but his playing days seem to have ended around 1890. Born at Wilstead in 1866, he is also known to have played for Britannia FC.  In the 1911 census he is shown as a “commercial clerk” for a firm of agricultural engineers, probably at Britannia Works.  By 1891 he was secretary of the Town club and is one of the few figures who seem to have also been involved with their successors, the Swifts, who adopted the Town name in 1893/4. He was one of their Vice-Presidents, took the chair at their AGMs and refereed many of their home matches. Later he became referee’s secretary for the Bedford and District League and eventually chairman of the League, as well as a council member of the Bedfordshire FA. He played cricket for numerous clubs as a young man and was for many years an umpire and official of the Bedford Cricket League, as well as acting as organist for St Mary’s Methodist Church. He seems to have been a teetotaller -he was secretary of the temperance organisation, the Rechabites- and his profile seems typical of the public spirited nonconformist types who did a great deal for early sporting organisations.  He died in 1934[1]. 

[1] Obituary in the Bedfordshire Times for 25 May 1934

CHARLIE CHESTER

Charlie Chester[1] appears in virtually every Bedford Town team photograph from 1910-the earliest I’ve found-to his death in 1937, in basically the same pose with a towel over his  shoulder, sometimes in a smart-looking waistcoat,  watch chain and shirt sleeves. He was “trainer”-a mixture of physio and kit man in modern football parlance-from the reformation of the club in 1908 until his death, but it’s likely that he would have had some input into tactics and team selection as well.  Pre-season training in 1910, which he would have organised,  included “skipping, running for loosening of joints and strengthening of muscles”[2]. 

Chester was born in Lincoln in 1873, and played for Lincoln City and Doncaster Rovers in their pre-Football League days as a left-winger.  He moved to Bedford in 1896 to take up a job with WH Allen’s at Queen’s Works-in the 1911 census he is shown as a boiler riveter-and settled in Marlborough Road near the works. He may have played a game or two for the then Bedford Town (formerly the Swifts) in 1897[3], but his main role was with his works team, Queen’s Works FC. With them he won Bedford and District League championship medals  around the turn of the twentieth century, although he seems to have hung up his boots and become their trainer around the time when they had a possibly over-ambitious few years in the Northants and South Eastern Leagues. From 1902 to 1904 the club played on Joe Evans’s meadow off Ford End Road, and when the Eagles were founded in 1908 Chester, who became their trainer from the start, was instrumental in persuading Evans to let the club use the same ground after they had been unable to attract decent crowds to their original home in London Road.  He was known as “Pop”, at least once his son Jack started to play regularly in the 1920s, and his death in the summer of 1937, still in his post as trainer, may well have persuaded the club to appoint two player-coaches in the next two seasons[4]. 

[1] In his lifetime his name would not have provoked thoughts of the comedian of the same name-a stage name in his case-whose career didn’t take off until the war years.

[2] Bedfordshire Times, 12 August 1910

[3] A player called Chester appeared, apparently on the left wing, for the Town against Hitchin in March 1897 (Bedfordshire Times,  27 March 1897), although we can’t be sure this was the same man. And although his own playing career had effectively ended several years before, Charlie may well have been the "Chester" who appeared on the wing for the Eagles against Peterborough GN Loco on Easter Monday 1909, no doubt covering for absences in the crowded holiday programme. 

[4] See his very interesting interview in the Bedford Record for 13 December 1932-In His Own Words-Charlie Chester

JOHN T HOBKIRK

John Travers Hobkirk was the eldest of three members of the same family who were to have a big impact on Bedford Town in the first half of the twentieth century.

He was born in Leith near Edinburgh in 1868 and was apprenticed as a brass moulder in a foundry, working his way up that trade in Liverpool (where his two sons, Jack and William, were born) before coming to Bedford in 1902 to take up a post as foreman in the brass foundry at WH Allen’s Queen’s Works plant. In 1911 the census shows that his family lived in Hurst Grove, almost next door to the works. Round about the end of the Great War he left Allen’s and became landlord of the “George and Dragon” pub in Mill Street, and later started his own foundry business, initially-and what on earth would modern Health and Safety inspectors make of this?-in the yard at the back of the pub, before moving to bigger premises in Ampthill Road where the business flourished for many years.

In 1911, while still at Allen’s, Hobkirk was persuaded to become chairman of the struggling Bedford Town club which was in debt after two very unsuccessful initial seasons in the Northants League.  Perhaps the influence of his older son Jack,  by now a regular player for the club, and his Allen’s colleague, Charlie Chester, was at work here. Many years later[1] Hobkirk recalled how attendances averaged about 1,800, and went on: “I used to go all over the district to get players, and even had to buy stockings for one fellow”.  Unlike some of the characters in the club’s history it seems that Hobkirk didn’t personally refinance the club but organised sufficient fund-raising drives to put it back into the black. The three successive runners-up finishes from 1911/12 to the outbreak of war, and the Northants Senior Cup triumph in 1913, may well owe a lot to his organising ability.

Although he stepped down as chairman in 1914, he remained interested in the club right up to his death in 1953 at the age of 85. The sudden death of his older son, Jack, a very popular member of the team, in 1923 must have been a big blow. The younger son, William Turnbull Hobkirk , known as Billy, is thought to have played for the reserves in the early 20s and later took over the running of the family business. In 1950 he was the leader of the group of investors who negotiated the buy-out of Jack Salsbury’s loans and the formation of a limited company. He became the first chairman of the company from 1950 to 1953, launching the start of the most successful era of the club’s history before its decline in the late 60s (see 1950/1 Summary) .[2]

[1] Article in Bedfordshire Times for 26 December 1947

[2] Article in Bedfordshire Times for 31 December 1937 (marking his golden wedding anniversary)

TED HUMPHREYS

Edwin (Ted) Humphreys succeeded John Hobkirk as chairman of the club in 1914 and filled this thankless role until the summer of 1930, when the club was almost overwhelmed by debts and had to be rescued by Dick Spencer.

He was born in Bedford in 1874. His parents kept the “White Horse” pub in Midland Road and later the “Horse and Groom” in Queen’s Park, where the players changed in the early days of the Eyrie (see The story of the Eyrie, 1908-39 ). Ted had taken the White Horse over by 1901, and by 1911 had moved to the “Commercial Tavern” in Commercial Road, where he was to stay for the rest of his working life.  As a young man he had played football for the Swifts FC which changed its name to Bedford Town around 1893/4 (see Earliest Days-before 1908), and was also a leading local swimmer and water polo player. When the old Town club folded early in 1899 he played for Bedford Albion.

In his time as chairman the club ran into repeated financial difficulties caused by the seemingly endless dilemma of whether to pay top wages to attract the leading semi-professionals in the area (mainly from Northants but also from Luton), or to balance the books at the cost of indifferent results. When he and his committee resigned in 1930 it became clear that he had plugged some of the gaps from his own pocket, and a settlement had to be negotiated with the new committee under Dick Spencer. 

Humphreys was never involved with the Eagles again and was said only rarely to have attended as a spectator. Instead he devoted himself to recreational football, succeeding his old Swifts team mate, Lyonel Finch, as President of the County FA and  later serving as its representative on the national FA Council. When he died in 1944, the Bedfordshire Times paid tribute to him thus: “Bedford Town never had such a generous friend as he was….More than once in its history the club would have found it an almost hopeless struggle to carry on but for the financial assistance given by Mr Humphreys”.[1] 

[1] Bedfordshire Times, 29 December 1944

DICK SPENCER

The above fragment of a photograph, clipped from a team photo in which he is almost hidden by others, is the only image I could find of Richard (Dick) Spencer, without whom Bedford Town might well have collapsed in the summer of 1930. He had a good reason for not being more prominent-when the photo was taken in 1931 he was in effect the chairman of the club, but he had been forbidden by the Beds FA from actually holding the office because he was a professional bookmaker, and bookies were not allowed to take part in club management. The nominal chairman who appeared in the centre of this picture was therefore his wife, Mary, who was voted into the chair when Spencer was forced to stand down soon after taking over in 1930, but seems to have been largely a figurehead. Even after this, the County FA issued several warnings that Spencer still appeared to be running the club (the fact that he took the chair at the AGM was possibly a clue here!), but they stopped short of any further sanctions.

Dick Spencer had been born in Acton, West London, in 1891, and had been a Labour councillor in Acton for some years before he moved to Bedford in 1921 and set up as what was then discreetly known as a “commission agent”-a bookie in everyday language, but at a time when there were no betting shops and only people like Spencer could legally take bets off course. He soon became a county councillor for Bedfordshire and after several attempts, in 1933 he became a town councillor representing the Queen’s Park district. 

In 1927/8 together with Bob Baker, Spencer re-founded  the Eagles’ Supporters’ Club and agitated for representation on the main football club committee. The following summer the club managed to secure two representatives on the committee but agitated for two more. Spencer was a persistent critic of the management of the club, claiming that the facilities for players and spectators had to be improved if better players and a better class of football was required by the public.  Faced with a blank refusal from chairman Ted Humphreys to consider his ideas, Spencer disbanded the Supporters’ Club. But in 1930 he was the obvious man to return to the club when Humphreys and his committee resigned with the club heavily in debt. When the AGM voted to carry on rather than disband, Spencer was elected to the chair and Bob Baker to the secretaryship and between them they managed to avoid the club being thrown out of the Northants League; when no representative had attended the League AGM, the other clubs for a while assumed the Eagles had been dissolved.

Spencer then had to negotiate a settlement with Humphreys who had personally paid off some of the debts, and with the landlords, Charles Wells, over 18 months of rent arrears. Inevitably he became a creditor of the club himself, but there followed five very successful seasons where the club was never out of the leading positions, won three Northants League championships and went further in the FA Cup than ever before. New dressing rooms and two new shelters for spectators were also built. All this happened with Spencer as a sort of unofficial chairman after December 1930, when he was forced to stand down in favour of his wife.

As the economic slump took its toll and expensive players had to be released from 1935, Spencer had to face a harsher future and in January 1936 he helped the Mayor to launch the first of several public appeals for funds. This had barely started when he fell ill with pneumonia and died on 27 February 1936, aged only 45. 

Outside football, bookmaking and politics, Spencer was a patron of the local homing pigeon societies and many charities: as his obituary put it, “he helped many unfortunate people, and a large number of Bedford homes, especially at Christmas time, will be the poorer by his death”[1]. The writer added: “His zeal alone saved the club in 1930….[when] there seemed every possibility of Bedford losing its senior association football club”.

[1] Bedford Record, 3 March 1936.

BOB BAKER

Bob Baker was not only Dick Spencer’s right hand man as secretary under his chairmanship, first of the Eagles’ supporters’ club and then, from 1930 to 1935, of the football club itself; he was also a tireless worker for the club, and the wider game,  in his own right.

Born in Tranmere, Merseyside about 1893/4, Bob Baker grew up playing club football in the Wirral and became secretary of his club, Tranmere Wesleyans, when he was barely 20. War service in the Cheshire Regiment saw him billeted in Bedford during 1915, and he decided to return to the town when demobbed[1]. He set up a painting and decorating business and soon became involved with the Eagles. Once he became secretary in 1930 he was reckoned to put in countless hours at the ground, because the club had no full-time staff. He once fell off a ladder during preparations for the annual Whit Monday fete, but returned to help organise it with his leg in plaster. He was a man of his own mind, however and in the summer of 1933 Baker offered his resignation after disagreements over policy: a few weeks later he agreed to carry on, but in autumn 1935 the disagreements could not be patched up and he left the club. 

He was, however, so respected by his fellow administrators that he was co-opted on to the committee of the United Counties League, even though he was no longer connected to a member club, and held that position at least until 1939. He was also the main person behind the foundation in the late 1930s of the Bedford Minor League, a competition for under-18s that later became the Bedford Youth League. After the war he was involved on the coaching side with Bedford Avenue (previously Bedford QPR). In 1958 he wrote a moving tribute to the players of the early 1930s to mark the Eagles’ 50th anniversary[2]. He died in 1978.

[1] Pink ‘Un, 27 August 1933-this contains a profile of him.

[2] Bedfordshire Times, 22 August 1958. See In His Own Words-Bob Baker