Bobby Buckle – Only A Boy, Only An Idea
by Christopher South
88 Pages
Published by Bobby Buckle Matters Partnership (2020)
ISBN – 978-1-83805-380-2

 

For those who didn’t know, Bobby Buckle was one of a group of schoolboy cricketers who gathered under a lamp-post on Tottenham High Road to decide what they were going to do during the winter.  What they came up with was a football team that became a football club that became Tottenham Hotspur plc.

As Keith Burkinshaw once said, “There used to be a football club over there” and never a truer word was said about what Buckle and his mates formed back in 1882.  But that was never their intention.  A few boys looking for something to do to keep them off the streets during the dank days after the sunshine of the cricket season had ended and look how it ended up.

And that is one of the slightly annoying things about this book.  It’s the ‘if he knew what was to happen in the future’ comments that irritate a little, when, of course, he didn’t know what a bloated monster his little kickabout would turn into.  The fact that he began Tottenham Hotspur Football & Athletic Club, only for it to take on a life of it’s own – away from his original intention – even within his lifetime, in political in-fighting and dodgy deals leading to the club turning professional and going on to win the FA Cup as a non-league side in 1901 being two of the major events in the early life of the team.

There are a few too many “we can only imagine” passages in the book, which may or may not have been what happened, so it is odd that these act to somewhat undermine the major strength of the author.  That is putting together the picture of his life as it actually happened as told to him through members of the family and through thorough research not just about his involvement with Spurs, but in his life in general.  It paints the picture of a thoroughly honest man who wanted to do his best in his family life, his sporting life and his business life.

The club’s first captain and reportedly the first goal-scorer for Tottenham Hotspur, Buckle is often over-looked amongst the key figures in the club’s history as the past has kept many of the secrets that mean we don’t know every detail of his association with Spurs.  Living nearby in White Hart Lane and using his home address as that for club correspondence, his vision of taking the club from Tottenham Marshes to the back of the Red Lion pub on the High Road raised Spurs from a park team to the talk of the South.

With personal documents, memorabilia and photos, there are some fascinating illustrations of not only Buckle himself, but his family, the area and old team photos from the late 1880s.  It is great that these have been shared in this book to give a glimpse at these pieces of Spurs history that would not have otherwise seen the light.

The business of the club in those early days was carried out in the same pubs around Tottenham and Edmonton that fans drink and debate in today (see, even I’m doing it now !), with wildly differing opinions dividing the room.  So, yes, some things don’t change, but the changes in Buckle’s time are covered really well in this book making it a really good read. 

And it is not known exactly where Burkinshaw was aiming his famous comment, but the book also queries exactly which lamp-post it was where the boys dreamed of playing football.

You could say that Bobby Buckle was one of the founders of the club that lived up to the club motto of “To Dare To Do” … and boy, did he do !

Marco van Hip