1966/7-off field rows, on field disasters

After the disappointing outcome of the Football League AGM, the club settled down to plan for the new season. Ron Burgess finally landed the centre-forward he’d wanted all along in Ron Fogg from Hereford, a proven goalscorer who was also Alan Wright’s brother-in-law. Other newcomers were Tony Gregory, a midfield player with local origins who’d played for Luton in the 1958/9 FA Cup Final and later for Burgess at Watford, Graham Willis, a defender, and Steve Hyde, a winger, both from Oxford, John Blake, a wing-half from Hastings, and Brian Robinson, a goalkeeper from Peterborough. The last signing was needed because shortly before the start of the season Bellotti, the number two keeper, followed Brown and Bailey to join Basil Hayward at Gillingham, for a fee of about £3,000. Cheered by England’s historic win in the World Cup, supporters should have approached the new season with confidence.

The new Selective Employment Tax introduced by Chancellor Jim Callaghan was the pretext for another increase in admission prices from 3s to 4s (£0.20), but more far-reaching financial issues were about to take up much more column space in the local press than playing matters.

At the football club AGM in July, chairman George Senior announced that the Supporters’ Club, an organisation that had jealously guarded its independence for many years, was being asked to place its committee (and by implication its funds) under the ultimate control of the football club’s board. Fund raising would become the responsibility of a sub-committee of three directors and three Supporters’ Club representatives, with the directors having a casting vote. This was an attempt to change completely the relationship that had existed between the two entities since the incorporation in 1951. A legal agreement had been drawn up at that time under which the Supporters’ Club would pass at least 60% of its annual income to the football club board; in fact, the Supporters’ Club claimed, the actual donations over the intervening 16 years were closer to 85%, and had recently averaged £10,000 a year.

At the start of August, the Supporters’ Club rejected Senior’s request, only to be hit with an ultimatum. On 6 August the chairman announced that from the start of the new season the board would take over all responsibility for management of the ground including programmes, catering, PA system announcements and advertising rights. At their own AGM shortly afterwards, Supporters’ Club members were told by their solicitor that the board were in breach of the 1951 agreement and that: “In effect they [the board] are saying ‘Get out in 14 days’ ”. Senior denied, in a letter to the Club officers, that they were being “evicted”; he claimed that the board merely wanted everyone “to work together in harmony”, and that similar arrangements existed at many other clubs[1].