Viking Supporters Co-operative
Viking Chat => Viking Chat => Topic started by: graingrover on February 03, 2016, 02:14:02 pm
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We seem to have learned from our history lol : ...
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And sadly, I see the poisonous name H Bates up there too. He is second only to the infamous Firestarter in the damage he wrought at BV. Every time he clapped eyes on the little squirt, my old Dad almost had apoplexy.
Cheers
BobG
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And sadly, I see the poisonous name H Bates up there too. He is second only to the infamous Firestarter in the damage he wrought at BV. Every time he clapped eyes on the little squirt, my old Dad almost had apoplexy.
Cheers
BobG
Hi BobG,
For the younger generation, is there anything to read about Mr Bates? Would be interested to read up on him.
Thanks
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I don't know tbh Matty. I'm no expert on Hubert Bates, but what I do know, mostly from my Dad, is that he was on the Board for decades, he was Chairman for a very long time, that he engineered the removal of Peter Doherty, I think on religious grounds. I can't remember if it was Bates who was Catholic or, more likely, Doherty, but the story has always been that Bates didn't like the Irish Catholics.
Bates presided over the decline from Division 2 to Division 4. He was, and I do remember this, a little squirt of a grey, grey, grey man. He looked like a sort of much less attractive version of Captain Mainwaring. Stuffy. Looking down his nose. Up himself. My Dad loathed him.
That's about all I know sadly Matty. If anyone knows more, or better, I'd be chuffed to read it.
Cheers
BobG
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Thanks Bob, appreciate it.
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And if anyone remembers "Harrisons Sports" on East Laithe Gate now a beer off, that belonged to him, his staff did not like him but a job is a job, I bought some rugby boots from there when I was at St. Peters.
Yes my dad too would have liked to have run his lorry over Bates. Nearly in the first Div at one point under PD, Bates disassembled the team to relegation fodder for years to follow. Lots of Irish Catholics in the team around that time
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Peter Doherty was a Catholic, Bob. When he left the then chairman, club surgeon (who was also a director) and secretary resigned. Thereafter Bates was the most powerful man in the boardroom.
Bates was only chairman for a short time, but the chairman (Jack Garnham) was very much in Bates's camp. The board was accused of meddling in team affairs by two managers after their departure (Norman Curtis and Bill Leivers). The situation only changed for a short time when Frank Wilson became chairman. But Wilson was eventually pushed out.
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Thank you John. I always did wonder why Frank Wilson left when he seemed to be so successful. I've not heard this explanation of it before so thanks. It explains why Bill Leivers went too - another unexplained departure that I was too young to understood at the time and never enquired about after.
Yet more reasons to loath that horrible little man. Effectively, you could argue a convincing case that he was the direct reason why we spent 50 years in the 4th division with only the odd foray into the third. With Peter Doherty we were an established 2nd div side. Playing an average of one league higher than we ended up doing for 50 years would have been eminently possible.
BobG
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Yes there was a big Irish contingency brought in by Peter Doherty .. I remember having seen , Harry Gregg, Eddie McMorran , Len Graham all Northern Irish Internationals and then Paddy Gavin and Jim Kilkenny .
Did the sort's shop belong to Bates or to Ray Harrison ?
Bob G .. I was too young to 'know' Bates but even so I recall how very unpopular he was and when he drove out Doherty our best players left one quickly on the heels of the other and the club plummeted .
footnote ... In the same programme as above there is a note of thanks to Messrs Chas J Fox Piano Co for the LOAN of the records played today' ...
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And if anyone remembers "Harrisons Sports" on East Laithe Gate now a beer off, that belonged to him,
Wasn't that Ray Harrison's shop?
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Peter Doherty was a Catholic, Bob. When he left the then chairman, club surgeon (who was also a director) and secretary resigned. Thereafter Bates was the most powerful man in the boardroom.
Bates was only chairman for a short time, but the chairman (Jack Garnham) was very much in Bates's camp. The board was accused of meddling in team affairs by two managers after their departure (Norman Curtis and Bill Leivers). The situation only changed for a short time when Frank Wilson became chairman. But Wilson was eventually pushed out.
Aye, it was always said to me that Garnham and Bates were partners in crime.
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And if anyone remembers "Harrisons Sports" on East Laithe Gate now a beer off, that belonged to him,
Wasn't that Ray Harrison's shop?
Bates either owned it or had the biggest stake in it.
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I seem to remember the shop when exactly did it disappear ?
I also remember hearing about Bates when I first started going. The descriptions above seem to fit exactly what the older supporters thought of him.
We certainly haven't been blessed with the best running our club over the years that's for sure :(
Bob's comments about being a yo-yo club at both 1st and 2nd tier weren't far from the truth.
Post WW2 we had very healthy crowds and excellent players. If only Doherty had received that extra support from the Board and from the town then hhings could have been so very different.
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It's certainly interesting to see some people slating Bates and the board for running the club in a sustainable manner and wondering where we'd be had they found that little more investment.
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It's certainly interesting to see some people slating Bates and the board for running the club in a sustainable manner and wondering where we'd be had they found that little more investment.
I've said the very same thing a while ago, and still haven't had an acceptable response.
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It's certainly interesting to see some people slating Bates and the board for running the club in a sustainable manner and wondering where we'd be had they found that little more investment.
If you had been around in the mid to late sixties you would have wondered where the gate money was going.
65/66 season's gates were very good and we were booming. Investment and foresight then and we could have followed Coventr'ys example.
John Nicholson's death, Alick out for three months and selling Laurie Sheffield killed us. Bates cashed in at the expense of the fans.
It wasn't about sustainability it was about greed.
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It's certainly interesting to see some people slating Bates and the board for running the club in a sustainable manner and wondering where we'd be had they found that little more investment.
It WOULD have been interesting if anyone had actually said that.
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Not having a sly dig at some of our current posters and the current board by any chance Sad?
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It's certainly interesting to see some people slating Bates and the board for running the club in a sustainable manner and wondering where we'd be had they found that little more investment.
He didn't run it in a sustainable manner, though. The business model of football clubs was very different in the 60s. Most of the income came from gate receipts.
As idler says, Rovers' gates were good in comparison to other comparable clubs, and as the 1965-66 season showed, people in Doncaster would still support a winning team.
Bates and Garnham were also noted for meddling in football matters. Two managers complained of interference after leaving the club.
To compare Bates to the present board is deeply insulting to them. You may as well compare them to Richardson!
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This is the first time I've ever seen religious bigotry described as a sustainable business model.
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Whether Bates' period in control involved greed and/or religious bigotry or not isn't the point of the argument. The point is that, even if it was in pretence, his reason for our fall back down the leagues was down to low investment in order to attain a sustainable business model.
The present board, although considered genuine in their reasons for sustainability, might find the club suffering a similar fate as a consequence.
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BB
If you define it your way, EVERY business model is what you define as "sustainable". Your definition is effectively that the owner pays in, or takes out as much as they wish to.
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Lack of investment? It was always suspected that Bates took money OUT of the club!
You're comparing chalk and cheese here, BB.
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TRB
I'm not comparing their personalities at all.
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To compare Bates to the present board is deeply insulting to them. You may as well compare them to Richardson!
I haven't made any comparisons.
If you take the personalities out of the equation it becomes a bit more interesting.
If our owners had invested more in the mid sixties we may have tasted the top flight. They didn't and we slumped and attendances dropped off.
If our owners had invested more in the mid two thousands we may have tasted the top flight. They didn't and we've slumped (although not as far) and attendances have dropped off.
I suppose it could be argued that we'd have made it off the back of our own finances in the 60s, fair enough, but no club has made the top flight in the past 20 years without external investment.
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Sad
You said that Bates ran the club in a sustainable manner and implicitly compared that to the current situation. That was what riled a few folk.
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The way i look at it is thus.
It's alright having a mandate of sustainability, but the problem lays when it's unsure at what level the sustainability will work.
Now I might be wrong (for once) but I reckon that our current sustainability level is about where we actually are in mid league one.
Of course, our sustainability level could rise with a bit more investment.
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Maybe more investment will be available as DF shows that he is capable of building a good squad. They might trust him more than PD to spend wisely.
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The two eras are completely different. Rule 34 of the FA handbook forbid any taking of profit or paying dividends to shareholders until that was changed in the late 1990's. Clubs were essentially that; clubs that were to all intents and purposes non-profit organisations. Sustainability wasn't so much an ambition more a fact of life.
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The way i look at it is thus.
It's alright having a mandate of sustainability, but the problem lays when it's unsure at what level the sustainability will work.
Now I might be wrong (for once) but I reckon that our current sustainability level is about where we actually are in mid league one.
Of course, our sustainability level could rise with a bit more investment.
Mid table league one is the real problem here. It's the one league where sustainability is very difficult to achieve, you don't get the revenues of the Championship, nor can you get away with spending very little on wages as you would in Lg2. It has to be one or the other, up or down?
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Sad
You said that Bates ran the club in a sustainable manner and implicitly compared that to the current situation. That was what riled a few folk.
Didn't go bust, did we?
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No. But in an era of very big crowds, we invested next to nothing in the ground and laid the ground for the club's fall to the very bottom of the pile by the mid-70s and generation-long stay there.
There is a reason why the likes of Barnsley and Rotherham were better supported than us throughout the 80s and 90s even when we were at similar levels. It goes back to the way the club was neglected through the late 50s and 1960s.
By contrast, whilst the KM2 have been bankrolling us, we've had the highest league position and attendances in half a century, and we've secured a century-long lease on an excellent stadium.
Not really any comparison.
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Mid table league one is the real problem here. It's the one league where sustainability is very difficult to achieve, you don't get the revenues of the Championship, nor can you get away with spending very little on wages as you would in Lg2. It has to be one or the other, up or down?
That's what still riles me about our relegation(s) from the Championship, SM. If only we'd had just that bit more quality in the team, to set our target just that bit higher than one capable of avoiding relegation, especially when considering the rewards of Championship football, it seems it would have been a worthy investment.
What riles me more than that though was following our second relegation, when people were saying that we would be better off financially in league one!
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There is a reason why the likes of Barnsley and Rotherham were better supported than us throughout the 80s and 90s even when we were at similar levels. It goes back to the way the club was neglected through the late 50s and 1960s.
Well, that as well as those two places being reminiscent of the song 'frigging in the riggin'.......in terms of there's f**k all else to do.
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Mid table league one is the real problem here. It's the one league where sustainability is very difficult to achieve, you don't get the revenues of the Championship, nor can you get away with spending very little on wages as you would in Lg2. It has to be one or the other, up or down?
That's what still riles me about our relegation(s) from the Championship, SM. If only we'd had just that bit more quality in the team, to set our target just that bit higher than one capable of avoiding relegation, especially when considering the rewards of Championship football, it seems it would have been a worthy investment.
What riles me more than that though was following our second relegation, when people were saying that we would be better off financially in league one!
We've had two relegation's from the Championship, and for two very different reasons. The first one is because JR was desperate to see PL football in his time as Chair of DRFC and so the 'experiment' was born, and at a time when our wage bill hit a record high. Just goes to show that money isn't always the answer as we maintained Championship football in previous years on less.
The second relegation, I believe, was due to an inexperienced manager. I also think that the squad that he assembled, from the January window onwards, was one of the best squad of players that had ever played for DRFC. There was a belief that we wouldn't, couldn't, be relegated after beating LUFC at Elland Road.
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I can't argue with that SM. I agree that there was little doubt of our surviving the drop with that team, it was definitely one of the best teams we'd had. But it had to be, we were competing in the best league we'd ever been in.
Your last paragraph sums it up for me though. The belief that we wouldn't be relegated was about the best us Rovers fans could hope for, and having that belief alone was what we all classed as a successful season.
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It's true that squad of players was probably as good as we're likely to ever see. It's also true that we had the 3rd smallest wage bill in the Championship that season.
It's not a huge surprise we finished 3rd bottom, really.
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And the second lowest attendances...
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Undeniably true. But attendances were certainly better than this season and last.
As Martin says L1 is a difficult division to operate in financially. We either invest to make the step up or cut costs to L2 level and accept the inevitable.
Perhaps this is the decision that Hubert Bates and the board made back in the 60s?
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Attendances in the Championship are always going to be better than in league one.
The quality of the opposition is always going to be a bigger draw for the floating fans and of course the away end is always going to be more full, in most cases considerably more full.
It is my understanding that the extra gate money alone generated from the away end in Championship seasons is worth around £1m.
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Undeniably true. But attendances were certainly better than this season and last.
As Martin says L1 is a difficult division to operate in financially. We either invest to make the step up or cut costs to L2 level and accept the inevitable.
Perhaps this is the decision that Hubert Bates and the board made back in the 60s?
I very much doubt they considered players' wages to that degree, because wages were nothing like as significant as they are now.
The parameters under which football clubs and their directors are operating now bear no comparison with those of 50-60 years ago.
Another thing that has largely been ignored is the issue of boardroom interference. Two former managers complained of that during Bates's watch. Have you heard of anyone complaining that our current board meddle in football matters? I think not.
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Sad
If you're going to make that sort of argument, you'd be as well looking at the numbers.
You suggest that back in the 60s, it might have been a reasonable argument to say that we couldn't financially sustain Tier 3 football. But in 1965/66, when we won Div 4, we were the 46th best supported club in the country.
Put that in context. We were the 46th best supported side in the country in 2008/09. When we finished midway up Tier 2.
That says to me that in the 1960s, we comfortably had the income potential through the turnstiles to cover top-end Tier 3, bottom-end Tier 2 status. And in recent years we haven't.
So comparisons between the eras are fundamentally flawed.
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At least one manager resigned over Bates' interference and there may have been 2 more. Bates was a creep and a shyster of the first order. Defending him, his role and his actions displays nothing but ignorance of the events and personalities extant at that time. The man was and is indefensible.
Cheers
BobG
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Bob
The two managers who went public were Norman Curtis and Bill Leivers. Doherty kept his own counsel, but I'll bet he had some tales to tell!
Bates liked to appoint player-managers. One could argue that these were fashionable at the time. At the same time, they could be seen as being subservient to the board because of their playing contract. I very much doubt that Bates would have had any truck with men as independently-minded as O'Driscoll or Ferguson.