The Names Heard Long Ago

CHAPTER ONE

THE TYPEWRITER SALESMAN OF MANCHESTER

The end is easy. Hungary ceased to be a great footballing power on 4 November 1956 as Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the Hungarian Uprising, prompting a wave of defections from which the national team has never fully recovered. There were some stirrings after that, it’s true, but it was nothing consistent, nothing compared to what it had been, nothing like that period between May 1950 and June 1954 when Hungary were unbeaten, when they won Olympic gold and thrashed England twice. That Aranycsapat – Golden Squad – itself appears in retrospect less an indication of the rude health of the Hungarian game than the final spasm of the true golden age of Hungarian football, a period of around a quarter of a century when, against a backdrop of seemingly perpetual economic and political turmoil, they taught the world to play.

Identifying the beginning is rather harder. The Communist version would have it that Hungarian football began its ascent in 1949 when, after the gradual Stalinist takeover and the formation of the People’s Republic of Hungary, clubs were nationalised and Gusztáv Sebes was appointed national coach. And while it is true that the focus of power at a couple of favoured clubs probably did help the development of the Aranycsapat in the short term, the longer-term consequences were rather less healthy, and the success of the programme that was instituted was possible only because there was such a fecund culture on which to draw. It’s only recently that the official version has begun to be challenged, that people have begun to reach back beyond the Soviet takeover, before the Second World War, and examine the hugely stimulating period when Hungary stood at the centre of the European game, sending out its emissaries to every corner of the footballing world.

So when did that age begin? Did it start in the autumn of 1914 with a knock at dawn on the door of a Vienna apartment occupied by the former Burnley and Bolton Wanderers forward Jimmy Hogan?

Or had it perhaps begun a decade earlier, when Spen Whittaker, the Burnley manager, responded dismissively to Hogan asking what he had done wrong in skying a chance high over the bar. ‘Just keep having a pop, lad,’ Whittaker said. ‘If you get one in ten you’re doing well.’ That wasn’t enough for Hogan, an intense and thoughtful player, possessed of an analytical mind and a thirst for self-improvement. There must, he reasoned, be more to it than luck. Had he been off balance? Had the position of his foot been wrong? From then on, he determined, he would dedicate himself to understanding technique. It was a decision that would lead him to a Viennese jail before the glorious flowering of his ideas not only in Austria and Hungary, but also in Italy, Germany, France, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Sweden, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.

But the true beginning, perhaps, was even earlier than that, in 1894, when an ambitious 17-year-old clerk called Edward Shires abandoned his job at a typewriter factory in Manchester^* and set off to make his fortune – and, as it turned out, shape the club whose players, more than any other, carried the Hungarian game around the world: MTK. ‘The island soon becomes small for an English merchant,’ he decided. ‘I said goodbye to Manchester and settled down in Vienna.’ The issue of just how and why Hogan had managed to extricate himself from wartime Vienna for the rather less stressful environment of Budapest, so that his expertise elevated Hungarian rather than Austrian football, is a mystery that for years had not been adequately explained. It is Shires, though, who holds the key.

Shires was a popular member of the British community in Vienna. A photograph taken perhaps 10 or 20 years later shows him in a high-collared shirt, his hair sharply parted on the left, his narrow features a little small for his face which, combined with a slightly raised left eyebrow, gives him a sceptical air. He played tennis and cricket and became friendly with Harold William Gandon, who was a manager at the gasworks. When Gandon won the inaugural Austrian Open tennis tournament in Prague in 1894,^* he returned with a challenge from the local football club, Regatta,^* to put together a team to represent Vienna. Shires responded enthusiastically, placing an advertisement for the First Vienna Football Club in an expat newspaper. They received numerous positive responses, but also a complaint from the northern suburb of Hohe Warte advising them that the First Vienna Football Club already existed, having been founded by gardeners working on the estate belonging to Nathaniel Mayer von Rothschild, part of the great banking dynasty.^* Shires merged his team with the Vienna Cricket Club, which had been founded two years earlier by British immigrants including Ernest Blyth, who owned the Stone & Blyth department store with his brother Eddie, and, in December 1894, set up a game against the Football Club, winning 4–0.^* They went on to beat Regatta 2–1 in Prague. ‘They did beat us later in Vienna, but for that match they brought in two guest players from Berlin,’ Shires said. ‘The point is, now there was a connection between the two cities and this provided an opportunity for further development.’

That development was rapid. Clubs sprung up not only in Vienna and Prague but also in Budapest, which Shires first visited in 1897 as the Cricket Club beat BTC, the Budapesti Torna Club,^* 2–0 at the Millenáris, the park that was the home of football in the city for years. It was redeveloped for the cycling world championship in 1928 and remained largely unchanged before finally being demolished in 2018. Shires was gifted enough to become captain of the Austria national side, but in 1904, he moved to Budapest because ‘my company needed someone to do business in the difficult Hungarian market’.

Shires was a representative of the Underwood typewriter company,^* but he is generally credited with introducing table tennis to Austria and Hungary and at least part of his job seems to have been importing sports equipment. Naturally enough, having arrived in Budapest, Shires sought out a football club to play for and joined MTK. Magyar Testgyakorlók Köre, the Circle of Hungarian Fitness Activists, had been founded in a Budapest café in November 1888 by a mixture of aristocrats, Jewish businessmen and dissident members of an earlier club NTE – Nemzeti Torna Egylet, the National Athletic Club.^*

Although MTK have always been seen as a Jewish club, the first president, Lajos Vermes, was a Christian,^* and it was not in any sense exclusive – unlike Vivó és Atlétikai Club (VAC – Fencing and Athletic Club), which was established in 1903 by Lajos Dömény, a law student, as the sporting arm of the Zionist student organisation Makkabea. Like the far more famous and successful Hakoah in Vienna, it was inspired by the theories of Muscular Judaism promulgated by the physician and author Max Nordau and sought both to combat the stereotype that depicted Jews as physically weak and to promote Zionism; one of VAC’s founder members was Ármin Beregi, president of the Zionist Organisation of Hungary. Dömény had initially wanted to call the organisation the Jewish Athletic Club but that name was rejected for breaching regulations of the use of denominational names (Makabi Brno was similarly rejected when the name was first suggested in 1914, and there were no clubs with overtly Christian names). The name VAC was chosen because a composite of the initials could be shaped into a Star of David.^*

At first MTK were dedicated to fencing and gymnastics but in 1901 they branched out into football. They took their place in the first division two years later and in 1904 won their first league title. Shires played eight games for them the following season as the businessman Alfréd Brüll took over as president, then, aged 28, with his health deteriorating, he took on a more administrative role and worked as a referee.

Backed by the wholesaler and sports manager Henrik Fodor, MTK won the title again in 1907–08, but in the years that followed found themselves unable to topple the might of Ferencváros. Founded 11 years after MTK (although their football section is a few months older than MTK’s), Ferencváros carried a vague sense of German ethnicity – their nickname, ‘Fradi’, is derived from Franzstadt, the German form of Ferencváros, the ninth district of Budapest. ‘At the beginning of the century,’ said the sociologist Miklós Hadas, although his work is far from universally accepted, ‘the concept and connotations of the “Fradi-heart” implied a sensitive, good-hearted, compassionate, enthusiastic petty bourgeoisie who felt Hungarian, as against the coldly calculating, business-like, alienated big bourgeoisie of foreign origin – MTK.’^*

That may have been the image the clubs had, the one the majority of their fans felt they were expressing, but in practical terms the divide was far from concrete and the players tended to come from similar backgrounds. Between 1900 and 1930, for instance, a quarter of Ferencváros players were Jewish, as opposed to a little more than half of MTK players.^*

By 1911, frustrated by MTK’s inability to end Ferencváros’s domination, Shires took radical action and strengthened the club with two imports from Britain. There was the English forward Joe Lane, who joined the club as an amateur in 1911, scored the only goal in the inaugural match at MTK’s Hungária körúti stadion,^* a 1–0 win over Ferencváros on 31 March, and ended up signing professional terms with Sunderland, who had been impressed by him after playing MTK in a tour match in 1913. And, far more significantly, there was the Scottish manager John Tait Robertson.

Robertson was born in Dumbarton in 1877. A combative half-back, he played for Morton and Everton, won the Southern League in his single season with Southampton, and then returned to Scotland in 1899 where he was part of a Rangers side that won three successive championships. In 1905, as an international career that earned him 16 caps came to an end, he became Chelsea’s first-ever signing as they made him player-manager for their inaugural season.^* Robertson also scored Chelsea’s first competitive goal, in a 1–0 win at Blackpool, as he led them to third in the table.

Chelsea were among the favourites for promotion the following season but something went awry. Robertson played in only three of the opening 12 games of the season and his frequent absences began to draw comment. When he failed to show for a board meeting on 6 November, the club secretary William Lewis demanded an explanation, while the directors decided that they should take over team selection.^* Robertson resigned a week later but early the following month the chairman Claude Kirby received a letter from an H. Raucorn. ‘Dear Sir,’ it read. ‘Knowing that Mr J.T. Robertson was no longer an official of the Chelsea FC, I thought it my duty to inform you that he was in your office after 11pm last Thursday Nov 29th.’^* What Robertson was doing there is unknown, but the following year he was named player-manager at Glossop, a position he held for two years. He was working as assistant manager of Manchester United when Shires got in touch. Persuading him to accept the job, Shires claimed, was his proudest achievement. ‘It was Robertson who did the most for developing football in Hungary,’ he said. ‘The Hungarians learned more from him in two years than they would have learned from somebody else in ten.’

That Robertson was a Scot was significant. From the first international in 1872, when a physically weaker Scotland side had surprisingly held England to a 0–0 draw through judicious use of coordinated passing, the game north of the border had eschewed the traditional dribbling game, focusing instead on the pass.^* The success of the policy was seen in Scotland’s domination of the early years of their rivalry with England, and by the extraordinary influence of Scottish players and managers on the early years of the English league.^* By the early 20th century there had been a general acceptance of the efficacy of passing, but the Scots were still regarded as the masters.

Robertson was not impressed by what he found in Budapest. ‘The mistake the players commit… is that they only use one foot,’ he said. ‘I think a player should be able to use both feet. The aerial game is very weak… The half line does not play well with the backs – when the backs lose the ball, the halves should be there to provide cover. The halves are not working together with the forward line either, and their shots are not good. [Sándor] Bródy [of Ferencváros] is clearly the best centre-half but it does not mean that he would be exceptional – I have not seen a really good centre-half in the whole league.’^*

But as Shires had hoped, Robertson began to implement the Scottish passing game in Budapest. ‘Because of Robertson’s work,’ Shires said, ‘and the example set by Lane, the MTK style was created and MTK became a stronger and stronger opponent for Ferencváros to face…’ Many would suggest that MTK already had an image of themselves as a passing side before Robertson’s arrival, but even as he built on those foundations, Ferencváros won the title in 1911–12 and 1912–13, extending their streak to five in a row.

That summer, Robertson returned home, for reasons at which Shires only hinted. ‘It’s a pity that he wasn’t teetotal,’ Shires said in that 1933 interview – which may explain what happened in those final weeks at Chelsea. ‘If he had been, he could still be around now.’ The team he had built, though, ended Ferencváros’s domination and won the championship in 1913–14. War brought the temporary abandonment of the league and there were three half-length unofficial seasons played, the last of them won by MTK, before a full resumption in 1916–17. The foundations were in place and MTK were ready to ascend to much greater heights.