Saved United
T hey call James W Gibson the man who saved Manchester United and yet when you look closely at what he accomplished at the club which would become a modernday behemoth, even that status sells short the great Edwardian entrepreneur.
Gibson did not just rescue United from bankruptcy with a loan never repaid. He persuaded disenchanted supporters in the 1930s to come back. He established the club’s first youth team. He was fundamental to the building of Old Trafford station, which allowed supporters to travel from the city to matches. He acquired United’s first training ground. He rebuilt the stadium after it was bombed in the Second World War. He appointed Sir Matt Busby.
Being mischievous, you might say that Gibson did for United in the 20th century what Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan has done for City in the 21st. The very least Gibson deserves is the new memorial to him which will be officially opened tomorrow in a park in Hale Barns, in Cheshire, by members of the Manchester United Supporters’ Trust and the surviving relatives of this remarkable man.
Why does Gibson’s story matter now? It matters not just that he built the foundations for the modern-day super-club that is United, it also matters why he did it. There was no reward then, and none for his descendants. As we build up to the Manchester derby on Saturday, a multi-billion-pound collision of US venture capitalists and Gulf petrodynasties, of Jose and Pep, of a global audience in the hundreds of millions, it is always worth recalling what this used to mean. Gibson was also rich, but when it came to football he was motivated by a love of sport and loyalty to the city that had given him so much. After all, he took control of United at a time when City were Manchester’s stronger club, with the modest ambition that, in his own words, “There is sufficient room in Manchester for two good football clubs”.
His great nephew Alan Embling, 78, will be there tomorrow, one of the few still alive who met Gibson, who died aged 74 in 1951. “They only ever gave,” Embling says this week of his great uncle James and James’s wife, Lillian. “They never took money out of Manchester United. Their generosity has made it exactly what it is now. Everyone else has made money out of United but that was never what the Gibsons chose to do.”
Embling was a child when he first visited the Gibson family home in Hale Barns – now demolished– and on his way to call in on his ailing uncle recalls his great aunt Lillian producing the FA Cup from inside a wardrobe. United had won the trophy in 1948, but with Old Trafford bombed, and the club operating from the Manchester citycentre offices of a cold storage business belonging to Gibson, there was no safe place for the trophy. “My aunt took this item wrapped in cloth from the wardrobe,” Embling recalled, “and inside was the FA Cup, which she passed to me, a 10-year-old boy, to hold.”
By then, Gibson had suffered a stroke and was unable to attend the 1948 Cup final at Wembley, but when the team returned from London they came straight to his house to present him with the trophy.
Gibson was orphaned by the age of 14, his father having been one of those who had made money in Manchester’s booming Victorian textile business.
Placed in the care of an uncle, William Fell, another successful businessman, Gibson later made his own fortune supplying uniforms to the military during the First World War. He later diversified into a new uniform business – for tram and bus drivers – and survived the Depression with his workforce intact.
The meeting that changed United’s history was on Dec 19, 1931, between Gibson and Walter Crickmer, club secretary and sometime manager, who would die in the 1958 Munich air disaster. It was then that Gibson pledged £2,000, the modern equivalent of £118,000, to save the club – then labouring under crippling debts and unable to pay players or officials.
He later pumped in a further £40,000 and went about saving the club, having first insisted that the existing board resign. He pleaded with supporters to stay loyal and persuaded the Midland train company running services out of the old Manchester Central terminus to make a stop at Old Trafford, where he helped build the original station.
“My great uncle always had a great deal of respect for the supporters – he always considered them,” Embling says. “There was no merchandising in those days, no television rights. There was no other way of earning money than boots through the turnstiles, as he would say. So he put the fans first.”
United recovered under Gibson. He got them back into the First Division in 1936, and then again when they were relegated the following season. In 1945 he appointed Busby, arguably the most crucial decision of the club’s post-war history. “Busby was the one candidate who agreed strongly that United should develop their youth policy,” Embling says.
Gibson had already established the Manchester United junior athletic football club in an attempt to put United in the centre of the community. MUJAC, as it was known, was originally just a place local boys could come to play football, and promising young prospects were not obliged to sign for United, rather they were asked merely “to consider playing for the first team”. As it turned out, MUJAC produced six members of the 1948 FA Cup-winning side, including Johnny Carey and Charlie Mitten.
In 1939, Gibson acquired what became The Cliff training ground on Lower Broughton Road, a central part of life at the club for more than 60 years, through to the emergence of Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and David Beckham. As well as appointing Busby, Gibson’s last great act of service towards the end of his life was to lobby government to grant a licence for the rebuilding of Old Trafford and make sure the club were awarded war compensation.
Gibson and Lillian lost five children to birth complications and illness: a son, twins and two of three triplets. Their son Alan Gibson, born in 1915, survived childhood pneumonia and went on to serve as a vice-chairman and director of the club until his death in 1995. He was due to be on the trip in February 1958 for the European Cup tie against Red Star Belgrade but broke an ankle a few days before and was unable to go. Crickmer took his place.
Alan lived to see United’s first two Premier League titles, and Sir Alex Ferguson read at his funeral. By then the Gibson influence at the club was long waning. Lillian attended matches into her mid-nineties and was a strong voice at the club up to her death in January 1971. Death duties meant that over the course of the 1970s Alan Gibson had to sell many of his shares to Martin Edwards, son of Louis, who had taken control of the club.
There is a plaque in Gibson’s honour in the Old Trafford tunnel, and another on one of the bridges leading to the stadium. So vast were his achievements it would be hard to know how to recognise them properly, other than to say that no matter how big United continue to grow, this is one man whose legacy demands to be remembered.