Wehen a record 11,000 fans turned up - for works team game

THE eye-witness recollections given to Looking Back last week by veteran Clarets' fan, 89-year-old Ernest Wakefield of the record 54,775 gate at Turf Moor in 1924 were not the only memories he has of a biggest-ever football crowd in Burnley.

For back in the 1930s, when Ernest (seen with the ball at his feet) was the centre forward for Burnley Corporation's Electricity Works team, pictured right, he took part in a game that drew a monster crowd to the town's old cinder-covered Clifton Street recreation ground.

"There were 11,000 people there that day - a record," he recalls.

"There were absolutely no facilities - no stands, or anything like that. But it shows just how much interest there was in football in those days."

Indeed, just how immense was soccer's following back then is made plain by the fact that the game in question - in 1937 or 1938, Ernest says - was no more than one of the preliminary rounds in the knock-out Burnley Hospital Cup contest in which the town's works teams competed.

"It was one of those trophies that every side wanted to win, but we never managed it," says Ernest, of Rosehill Road, Burnley.

That day, the Electricity Works, where he was employed from 1935 to 1939, were up against the cotton mill workers of the Worsthorne Manufacturing Company, who had lifted the Hospital Cup in the 1930 final - when their mascot, pictured below, with the triumphant players prior to their celebration charabanc trip to Blackpool, was none other than Ron Greenwood, then a soccer-mad eight-year-old who, after a playing career that took him to West Ham, Arsenal and Chelsea, was destined to become the England team manager. "They were a good side," remembers Ernest. "And a couple of other outstanding clubs in the works league at the time were the Corporation Transport Department and Hapton Valley Colliery."

This picture of the Electricity Works team was taken in March, 1936, when the side the lost 3-2 at the Lowerhouse Canteen ground against the eleven of textile machinery manufacturers Butterworth and Dickinson Ltd in the decider for the league championship.

In the 'Electrics' team were several young men who were destined to make significant contributions in the looming Second World War - among them captain Frank Percival (second right, front row), who was killed while serving as a lieutenant on the battleship HMS Barham which was blown to pieces in the Mediterranean in 1941; Dennis Doak (second left), who became a Flying Officer with the RAF's Coastal Command; Harold Bradshaw (fourth left, back row), who also served in the Navy as a lieutenant; Billy Bennett (rear, first left) who was an RAF air gunner and centre-half Billy Potts who became batman to an Army general.

But one of this group found himself in the wars long before the rest - trainer Horace Langford, the tall fellow pictured left behind the back row. A navvy with the Electricity Department and standing 6ft 4in and weighing 15 stones, he boxed at heavyweight level.

In 1931, when Larry Gains took the Empire heavyweight title from Britain's Phil Scott, the Burnley bruiser spent several weeks working as a sparring partner for the Canadian challenger.

Ernest recalls: "In those days, sparring partners were treated like mincemeat and poor Horace came back a wreck," he says.