I’ve just checked and it had been nearly two years since I last wrote something in this section about a former City player (Mel Charles in September 2016), now, in the space of a few days, I’ve had to write two pieces on players who have passed away this month.
Ron Healey was a prominent member of the City side for much of the seventies and, now a former captain of the club, for whom the same could be said during the sixties, has also died.
Gareth Williams did not play as often for City as Healey did, but he just made it over the two hundred games mark during his six years involvement with the first team.
I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that this picture of Gareth Williams was taken as he led the team out for the match which stands out to me as the most memorable he played for the club. It was a Fourth Round FA Cup game in front of a crowd of over 37,000 at Ninian Park against Manchester City in February 1967.
On a filthy, rain sodden, day, Williams continuously drove City forward after they had fallen behind courtesy of a Graham Coldrick own goal and it was entirely fitting that it was the captain who fired home an equaliser to give his side a 1-1 draw. This was the very least City deserved on a day when the visitors were grateful to take us back to Maine Road for a reply four days later that they won 3-1.
To be honest, although I can remember Williams playing for us, I was only eleven when he left the club and so I’m not really able to do any sort of detailed analysis as to how good or important he was for us. Better that I reproduce this description of his time with us which I read just now;-
“Large, barrel chested wing half who could also play inside forward, a locally produced player who rose through the ranks to become skipper of the side for a number of years. Although he was born in London, his family moved to Blackwood when he was about 6 months old and it was in South Wales that he started playing football. Spotted by City playing for Cefn Forest in Monmouthshire football, he was signed on professional forms after a short trial. He managed to force into the first team remarkably quickly, but his career took off in a big way once Jimmy Scoular took over as manager and probably saw him very much as a player of the Scoular style. With the recovery from the slump of the mid 1960’s, he became something of a hot property and it was with some dismay among City supporters that he was sold to Bolton Wanderers for the then substantial fee of £45,000. His popularity merely transferred with him as he spent 4 seasons with a Bolton side that were themselves in decline, and made 109 League appearances for them, scoring 11 goals in the process. He moved on to Bury in October 1971 where he played 2 more seasons, making 42 League appearances, and scored 4 goals. He left the game during the close season of 1973, and took up employment in the prison service.”
Williams is reported by Wikipedia as having died on 4 June on Gran Canaria at the age of seventy six.
RIP and commiserations to his family and friends.
I remember Gareth playing for City. very good wing Half, moved to Bolton Wanderers in 1964 I believe. caused a stir at the time because he was the best player at the time & was captain. City at the time was struggling near the bottom of the 2nd
division at the time, &a lot was put on the shoulders of Peter King.
sorry to hear he has passed away & commiserations to his family
Thanks for that Paul.
Gareth Williams was very much a favourite player of mine during his time with us and it was no surprise that Jimmy Scoular made him captain soon after he (Scoular) became manager because he played very much in the Scoular mould. I’m pretty sure you’re right about that picture being before the Manchester City game. One of my lasting memories of him was in a match against Northampton a couple of months earlier when having let a two goal lead slip he took the game by the scruff of the neck and powered his way through the Northampton defence to put us back in front before Bobby Brown wrapped it up with a fourth City goal.
I remember being pretty gutted when we sold him to Bolton for £45000 which I’m pretty sure at the time was a record fee for a transfer involving City. In retrospect though, Scoular used that money to buy Leslie Lea, Fred Davies and crucially Brian Clark and we certainly became a much stronger second division side than Bolton over the following few seasons.
Thanks to Gareth Williams and Ron Healey for happy footballing memories from my younger days.
I remember him playing for Cardiff City. He was a good strong player. I was at the Manchester City game all those years ago. it was an awful day and the ground was very muddy. Thanks Paul for letting us know. Hope you are keeping well.
Thanks for the update on Gareth Williams, Paul, albeit a sad one. I was at the home match v Manchester City you describe with a group of friends from uni. We deserved to win that one and were so confident of the reply that I drove up to Manchester in my recently acquired Austin A35 with my girlfriend and two other friends for the replay – a very tight squeeze! We didn’t deserve to lose that one either and the score was not a fair reflection of the game. Gareth was a very strong and dynamic “midfielder” (I don’t think they used that term back then). The closest equivalent in today’s squad is Gunnarson (that is assuming he is still one of ours!)
Mike Herbert
I was sad to hear of the passing of Ron, but I am almost heartbroken by the loss of Gareth. What a player he was.
I recall selling booze in Blackwood in the 90s and asking a publican to direct me to the house that Gareth grew up in…and this was nearly 30 years after Gareth had ceased playing for City, and was by now running the Winston Churchill pub on Gran Canaria.
Such was the hold he had on me.
Two early performances of his stand out for me…but for markedly contrasting reasons.
Let us get the “bad” one out of the way first. Let me set the scene…
It is the eve of St David’s Day 1964. I along with a fellow 16 year old schoolmate, have caught an evening train from Porth to Cardiff General, and boarded a late train to Crewe. It gets into Crewe at some God forsaken time…something like 1am.
Nothing for it but to sleep on the platform, and wait for the “milk” train to Manchester at about 5.30.
I get into Manchester all excited…my first ever visit to that great city. My eldest brother had done his geography degree at Manchester in the early 50s, and had handed down to me his match programmes for his many visits to Maine Road, and occasional ones to Old Trafford. Plus I was 10 at the time of Munich, and had two huge scrapbooks with all the traumatic events of the disaster detailed…plus the heroic rising from the ashes to make it to Wembley.. and the near GBH from Nat Lofthouse. I cried real tears that day. (Incredible to think I would grow up into an “ABMU* till I die” man, eh?
YCNMIU**
So finally experiencing the dawn air of Manchester, was so exciting to me, as me and my mate walked across Manchester from Manchester Piccadilly to Manchester Victoria. I recall us standing in awe under the Cooperative Society’s recently built CIS Tower in Miller Street…it was all lit up for early morning cleaning, and was a sight to behold. It was at the time, the tallest office building in all Britain, and remained Manchester’s tallest structure until as recently as 2006. We just gaped at the thing, stretching up to the heavens. At 387 feet tall, I had never seen anything so dizzyingly high. Cardiff had nothing like it. It was to be another 4 years before we got our own skyscraper, the Hodge Building on Newport Road…now the Mercure Holland House Hotel. Yet that was not even to be 200 feet high…and roughly only half as tall as this Jack in the Beanstalk structure in Manchester.
And do you know…years later when I stood on the observation deck on the very top of the South Tower of the World Trade Center, even though it was over three times taller than that Cooperative Building all those years previously, it bizarrely never seemed as high. Maybe because there canyons of skyscrapers in Manhatten, and the mind gets accustomed to height very quickly.
Anyway, I Dai-gress. Back to Huddersfield. Me and my mate arrive around 9 am…and have over 5 hours to kill. I recall us sitting in a churchyard listening to Brian Matthew’s Saturday Club on my transistor radio, and then walking up and down High Street and Queen Street till we knew both backwards. But we killed time effectively and before we knew it, it was now just past 1pm.
We were standing outside the spectacular English
Heritage listed facade of Huddersfield Railway Station (look at that for a full five minutes, and you will not need to go to Rome or Athens…!!). We looked to our left, and we noticed a group of men coming out of The George Hotel.
It couldn’t be…could it…?
We both blinked hard.
It blooming well was.
It was our heroes…boarding the coach that would take them the mile to the stadium.
We dashed over. By the time we got to the bus, all the players had just about boarded. The top sliding windows were open. We went up to the window where King John was sitting. “All the best John” says I.
He looks down at me and says “Have you two boys got tickets?”
“No, John…” we said in unison.
He fumbled in his pocket, and muttered almost to himself. “I don’t seem to have any”. And then louder, to the blond haired warrior sitting in the next seat “Have you got a couple of tickets, Gareth?”
And ten seconds later, Gareth Williams handed him two, which John passed out the window to me…just as the coach started to pull away.
“Thank you very very much indeed…” calls out cloyingly obsequious me to the great man, as he and the team started to pick up speed in their bus.
My friend and I could not believe our luck. And it was to be only the second time in my life that I had sat down in a football match. Extraordinary.
But note I said at the top that this was a bad experience for Gareth. How come?
Well, City lost 2-1 that afternoon at Leeds Road, and Gareth was sent off, due to an off the ball incident that the Huddersfield player massively playacted over…and the fat, bald, homer referee sent the poor lad off. Never a sending off in a million years. Classic “handbags”. But the home crowd swayed the man in black.
And now a contrasting memory of the best game I ever saw him play. It was 8 days before Christmas in 1966, and Cardiff were at Portman Road. It ended 0-0 …but there were times it seemed like Gareth was taking them all on single handedly. He was immense that day.
It was not that long after that he moved to Burnden Park. The then Bolton manager told the fans that he knew they were disappointed in the club selling Francis Lee to neighbouring Man City, but he promised them that in Gareth they were buying a player they would grow to love with an equal passion.
And so it proved. I would pick up the Sunday newspapers and read time and time again that the star man of the match award in the Bolton game went to Gareth Williams.
An extraordinary player. The best wing half I ever saw play for South Wales club…and that is some claim is that…!!
Just think who I am putting him above..
Steve Gammon, Barrie Hole, Leighton Phillips, Herbie Williams, Colin Baker, Derrick Sullivan, Brian Harris…even the amazing Andy Bowman.
And a dozen other pretty good wing halves over 60 years.
His playing style was in a direct line of descent from none other than that of the barrel chested, all energy, and wonderfully engined… Duncan Edwards.
Oh yes… Gareth was the real deal alright.
Condolences to his friends and relations…should any of them read this.
*= Anyone But Man U
**= You Could Not Make It Up (even if you tried)
Thanks all for your replies – in particular to Dai (am I right in thinking Andy Bowman played for Newport?) for not only some great football memories, but also some reminders of what life was like in the sixties. Richard makes a good point about who was bought with the Gareth Williams money and about Bolton’s decline – I can remember them buying Roger Hunt and Peter Thompson from Liverpool but it was only when youngsters like Reid, Allardyce and the Jones’ broke into their team that they started to climb again. Also interesting to hear Mike say that we played well in the replay of that FA Cup tie with Man City – I had always assumed we were beaten fairly comfortably after coming so close to causing an upset down here.
Thanks, Paul.
Forgot to say by the way, that The George Hotel inHuddersfield is famous for being the hotel where the Rugby League was founded…back God knows when…but probably well over 100 years ago.
And weirdly I was to stay there for two weeks many years later when working for Nu Swift fire extinguishers of nearby Elland. And I was able to tell the veteran waitress of that incident on Feb 29th, 1964…and she in turn regaled me with fascinating tidbits about famous Huddersfield natives she had served there…from James Mason, to Derek Ibbotson to Anita Lonsbrough…to Harold Wilson.
But anyway…enough of my reminiscing…you ask about Andy Bowman.
What do they call that book on Robin Friday by the Oasis man…? Is it something like “The Greatest Player You Never Saw”….? I think so.
Well trust me, that could have been the same title for Andy Bowman.
I hardly missed a midweek game at Somerton Park in season 63-64…and saw most Saturday games on those days when I was not watching City away. And Bowman (who I seem to recall had played – like our SuperCal – for Hearts) was just incredibly good. Very similar to Gareth in fact…even down to the blond looks. It was a heck of a good County team…Len Weare a dependable keeper; Graham Rathbone a centre half built like John Stones and probably better defensively; Granville Smith was a wonderful winger along the lines of Wee Willie Henderson (a pocket dynamo, built for speed, with a wonderful cross on him); and those crosses were manna from heaven for our old “ex” Joe Bonson, and the very fine Ralph Hunt. (Even though Tommy Tynan and John Aldridge would eventually succeed him, I promise you that Hunt was just as good. Alas, he was killed in a car crash within a few years of his heroics at Somerton Park.)
Train from Porth to Cardiff. Then change for Newport. And then the mile walk to Somerton Park. Then the reverse journey. I’d get home at gone 11pm…then up at 5.15 to meet the train at Porth station to help Mr Owen with the newspapers which arrived at 0550…and we would wheel this massive trolley along Station Street to his newsagents’ shop…Morton’s, on the edge of Porth Square.
Gee …I had such energy then.
Will sign off now.
Excuse typos in the last posting from me…and probably in this one too…!! My proof-reading skills have deserted me.
In the last one I noted a hanging/broken parenthesis, and also a missing “are” in “there are canyons”, and a missing “a” in “play for a South Wales club”. Apols.
How amazing it is that a thread about Gareth Williams would lead to my having to echo Dai’s sentiments extolling the virtues of Huddersfield station – a place that I got to know very well during my three years at Huddersfield Poly’ in the early 70’s. I became quite a regular at Leeds Rd in those days as the Terriers plummeted down the divisions.
Incidentally Dai that game at Ipswich you mentioned was 3 days after the Northampton match I referred to. I’m pretty sure we were enjoying a spell of very wet weather at that time producing the kind of muddy conditions which Gareth always excelled in.
Great stories, all.
Thanks Richard, for your kind words.
That railway station stunned 16 year old me. I had not read Nikolaus Pevsner back then. Nor had I come to know the great mill towns of the North of England, and seen the sensational architecture of their town halls…had I done so, I might have been more prepared for the shock.
Above all, thanks for not berating me for my Dai-gressing. My wonderful eldest brother Graham in Pontyclun, 88 years young in three months…always tells me I am self-indulgent in my writing…!!*. So it is nice to know this kind of thing from me is appreciated by some of you.
Graham btw, is some City fan…! Within days of being on the supporters’ club bus to Villa Park, he was back on the bus to the KC Stadium …and that vital 2-0 win.
I have – as they say in RAP parlance – total respect, brother…!!
*I tell him if I cannot indulge myself, who CAN I indulge…?!