From the front page of The Northern Echo on January 1, 1935In his front page picture, he looks the model of respectability. As well as his hugely generous gift, he had served his time on Middlesbrough’s council, had twice been the town’s mayor, and had devoted 30 years to helping every conceivable sports club – boating, cycling, athletics, cricket, golf – in the district.
Nowhere in the coverage of the honour 90 years ago does the Echo mention the scandal that must have been indelibly attached to Gibson Poole no matter his good works.
The Northern Echo’s front page from January 1, 1935Because in 1911, as chairman of Middlesbrough Football Club, he had been banned for life from football for attempting to throw a match in order to get himself elected to Parliament in one of the most shocking instances of corruption ever seen in the beautiful game.
Gibson Poole had come to Middlesbrough as a young boy. A watchmaker by trade, as a young man, he had run a jeweller’s shop on Linthorpe Road, and then he had joined the army, rising to become a lieutenant-colonel. Aged 36 in 1896, he was first elected to the council.
Thomas Gibson Poole in his first spell as Middlesbrough mayor in 1907During the 1904-05 football season, Middlesbrough FC were in disarray. They were facing relegation and had been fined £250 for making irregular payments to players. The Football Association suspended 11 of their 12 directors, including the chairman.
Gibson Poole rode to the rescue, personally paying off the fine plus clearing another £155 debt that was owed to Stoke City.
Alf Common, who became the first £1,000 footballer when Gibson Poole transfered him from Sunderland to Middlesbrough in February 1905Then he financed the transfer that rocked football to its core: he bought Alf Common from Sunderland for a record £1,000, a scandalous sum. Middlesbrough were accused of offending the natural rules of sportsmanship by buying success and questions were even asked in the House of Commons.
But it worked. Helped by Common’s goals, Boro avoided the drop.
Steve BloomerEmboldened, next season, Gibson Poole bought Steve Bloomer from Derby – the Alan Shearer of his day – plus internationals Billy Brawn from Aston Villa and Fred Wilcox from Birmingham. Eyebrows were raised by the purchases and the rumour within the game that “the Borough”, as the Echo called them in those days, were colluding with other clubs to get Bury relegated.
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The FA investigated Middlesbrough’s finances and concluded they’d paid an improper bonus to Bloomer and that Gibson Poole was dipping in and out of the club’s bank account as he liked – he owed the club £500 (about £50,000 in today’s values).
The manager, Alex Mackie, was suspended, Bloomer was banned for two weeks, but Gibson Poole paid back the £500 and so avoided censure.
When he retired from football, Alf Common became the landlord of the Alma pub in Cockerton, Darlington. Here he is taking his regulars on a charabanc outing. The pub, radically altered, can still be seen as two retail unitsThis didn’t harm Gibson Poole’s political career, and in 1907 he became Middlesbrough mayor for the first time.
Middlesbrough, fired by Bloomer’s goals, then bobbed about midtable in the First Division without exciting much interest of the wrong kind. There were questions asked after an easy 1-1 draw on April 9, 1910, with Newcastle when the referee alleged there was collusion between the two North East sides so that the Geordies didn’t get roughed up ahead of the FA Cup final. No foul play was uncovered, and a fortnight later, Newcastle won the cup for the first time.
For the next season, Gibson Poole brought it a new manager, Andy Walker, and Middlesbrough started extremely well – but not quite as well as Sunderland, who were top of the table when they played fourth-placed Borough at Ayresome Park on December 3, 1910, in front of a crowd of 27,980.
The match was just two days before the General Election in which Gibson Poole was standing as the Conservative candidate in Middlesbrough. It was a tight race, with the Liberals attacking the Conservatives in the House of Lords for blocking their “people’s budget” which introduced the old age pension, so Gibson Poole knew in working class Middlesbrough he’d need every vote he could muster.
He persuaded some of his players to speak out on his behalf during the campaign which led to the local Liberals taunting them by saying they would lose the big derby.
So shortly before kick-off, the Middlesbrough manager Walker approached the Sunderland captain Charlie Thomson and offered him £10, with £2 for each of his team-mates, if he ensured Middlesbrough won “so as to help the chairman win the election”.
Thomson declined, but Sunderland still lost the match 1-0.
The derby victory did not much help Gibson Poole, who, on December 5, lost to the Liberal candidate by 3,749 votes.
But Thomson had told his manager of the illegal approach and he told his chairman who told the FA, who sent a special commission to investigate this most dubious of clubs – just a few weeks earlier, Walker had been suspended for four weeks and fined £100 for making an illegal approach to a player.
The commission concluded on January 16, 1911, that Middlesbrough had indeed made an offer to Sunderland to thrown the match. Manager Walker and chairman Gibson Poole were suspended permanently from football – banned for life. Middlesbrough were warned that if there were any more shenanigans, the club too would be expelled.
Locally, there was sympathy for Walker. More than 12,000 people signed a petition calling for his reinstatement because they felt he had been a puppet of the chairman who was given the full blame.
Mayor Thomas Gibson Poole opening Stewart Park, Middlesbrough, on May 23, 1928It seems amazing, therefore, that Gibson Poole should be able to rehabilitate his reputation and become Middlesbrough mayor for a second time in 1928.
Grey Towers at Nunthorpe, built by Darlington architect John Ross in 1865 for ironmaster William Randolph Innes Hopkins. It then became the home of ironmaster Arthur Dorman, and when he died in 1931, Thomas Gibson Poole bought it and presented it to Middlesbrough as a TB sanatorium. It finished as a hospital in 1988 and is now apartmentsThen in 1931, ironmaster Sir Arthur Dorman died and Gibson Poole bought his Nunthorpe mansion of Grey Towers and gave it to Middlesbrough as a sanatorium. It became known as Poole Hospital and in the New Year’s Honours of 90 years ago the hugely respectable figure of Gibson Poole was honoured with a knighthood for his generosity – and not his scandalous past, obviously.
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