Episode 2 - Kings Without a Crown (1923–1959)

In 1923, Liverpool were back-to-back champions of England. In 1954, they were relegated to the Second Division. What happened in between is the story of a great club forgetting how to be great — of complacency masquerading as stability, of directors comfortable with mediocrity, of a scouting network that dissolved and was never rebuilt.

Episode Two covers thirty-six years of drift, punctuated by one brief return to glory — the 1947 championship under George Kay — and sustained, through the bleakest stretches, by a single extraordinary player. Billy Liddell was so dominant during Liverpool's years in the Second Division that supporters renamed the club "Liddellpool." He deserved better than he got. Most clubs do, during their dark years.

Player of the Era: Billy Liddell — the Scottish winger from Motherwell who gave the Kop joy in the barren years; a player of rare genius in service of a club that barely deserved him.

Research Sources

John Williams, Red Men: Liverpool Football Club — The Biography (Mainstream Publishing) — essential for the social history of the inter-war and post-war periods, and for the portrait of the Kop's culture in the 1940s and 1950s

Brian Pead, Liverpool: A Complete Record (DB Publishing) — season-by-season results and league finishes throughout this period

Billy Liddell, My Soccer Story (1960) — Liddell's own memoir, invaluable for understanding his character, his wartime service, and his relationship with Liverpool supporters

Liverpool Echo archives, 1923–1959 — contemporary match reports and supporter correspondence throughout the drift period; essential for getting the mood of the era right

Stephen F. Kelly, The Boot Room Boys (1999) — contains useful material on the institutional culture (or lack of it) at Liverpool in the pre-Shankly era

Transcript

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In the spring of 1923, Liverpool Football Club were back-to-back champions of England, four league titles in 22 years, a professional infrastructure, a loyal fan base, a well-run club with a history of ambition. The stage was set for a dynasty. The next time Liverpool won the league was 1947, 24 years later. In between, no titles, two near misses, a world war, a relegation they still cannot fully explain, and 36 years of a kind of suspended animation, a great club that kept existing without quite remembering how to be great. Welcome back to Reds Through the Ages. A complete history of Liverpool Football Club. I'm your host, and this is episode 2, Kings Without a Crown. Today we cover the years from 1923 to 1959, the longest stretch of footballing sleep in the club's history, and the question that has puzzled Liverpool supporters ever since. What does it do to an institution when it simply stops striving? And how does one man, one extraordinary, impossible, irreplaceable man, hold a fading club together almost entirely on his own? This is episode 2, Kings Without a Crown. The Britain that Liverpool Football Club inhabited between 1923 and 1939 was a Britain defined by anxiety and decline. The confidence of the Edwardian age, that swaggering certainty that Liverpool's port had embodied at the height of empire, was gone. Dismantled by the Great War and the economic convulsions that followed it. The docks, which had made the city rich and proud, were contracting. Unemployment in Liverpool was running above the national average through most of the 1920s and into the 1930s. The city that had once processed 40% of Britain's exports was struggling to find its footing in a world that had reorganized itself around the catastrophe of the Western Front. For working class Liverpool, this meant something very direct. Less money, less certainty, and an increased emotional reliance on the things that provided continuity. The pub, the church, the football ground. Anfield drew crowds of 30 and 40,000 through the interwar years. Not because Liverpool were winning anything, because football was still there, still happening, still offering the ritual of a Saturday afternoon when so much else had been taken away. The supporters did not require success to keep coming. They required only the game. This loyalty, unconditional, patient, almost inexhaustible, would define the relationship between the city and its football club for generations. On the pitch, English football in these years was being shaped by Herbert Chapman's Arsenal, the dominant club of the 1930s, winners of five league titles in eight seasons, inventors of the WM formation that the whole of English football scrambled to imitate. Liverpool watched Arsenal's dominance from a respectful and increasingly embarrassed distance. Everton, meanwhile, won the league in 1928 and again in 1932, and the FA Cup in 1933. Across Stanley Park, their neighbours were thriving. At Anfield, the question was slowly becoming: what exactly are we waiting for? It was into this world, contracted, anxious, watching others succeed, that Liverpool stumbled through four managers in 15 years, each one leaving the club roughly where they found it, no better equipped to compete, no clearer about what it meant to be Liverpool Football Club in an age that had moved on without them. When David Ashworth departed Anfield in 1923, leaving for Oldham Athletic in circumstances that were never satisfactorily explained, since Oldham were not obviously a more attractive proposition, Liverpool lost the manager who had won them back-to-back titles. His replacement, Matt McQueen, had been at the club for years in various capacities. He was loyal, experienced, and profoundly unequipped to take Liverpool forward. The next five years told the story clearly enough. Finishes of 4th, 9th, 4th, 9th, 16th. Not catastrophic, not embarrassing, simply insufficient. A club coasting on the infrastructure that Tom Watson had built two decades earlier, making do with the talent available, rather than systematically identifying and acquiring better. The scouting networks that McKenna and Watson had established, those careful relationships with Scottish clubs that had given Liverpool the team of the Max, and then Raisbeck, and then a dozen others, were allowed to wither. It was not a sudden collapse, it was something quieter and in many ways harder to arrest. A slow, comfortable slide into ordinariness. George Patterson took over in 1928 and managed the club for eight years with a record that suggests competence without ambition. Under Patterson, Liverpool finished as high as second in 1930 and as low as 18th in 1934. There were no trophy runs of note, there was no defining philosophy of play. There was a football club filling its fixture list without any particular sense of what it was trying to become. For a club that had, within living memory of supporters, won four league championships, this was a kind of institutional forgetting, as if the habit of excellence had simply not been passed on. The Second World War interrupted everything again, as it interrupted everything. Professional football was suspended in September 1939 and did not return until 1946. Liverpool, like every other club, lost seven years of competition. Years in which players aged, careers ended prematurely, and the carefully maintained rhythms of a football season were replaced by something else entirely. Several Liverpool players served in the armed forces. Some were fortunate, not all were. When football resumed, George Kay was the manager. A former West Ham and England player, a thoughtful and humane man who had taken over from Patterson in 1936 and now found himself trying to rebuild a club that had been in suspended animation for most of a decade. What he built in 1946 to 47 was, for one extraordinary season, good enough. Liverpool won the first division championship, their fifth in total, their first in 24 years, with a squad that included Albert Stubbins, signed from Newcastle United for £12,500, and the great Alicia Scott in goal, now in the twilight of his extraordinary Anfield career. They finished with 57 points, one point ahead of Wolverhampton Wanderers in Stoke City, clinching the title on the final day. It was, and this matters, a genuine achievement. Kay's Liverpool played attractive football and competed fiercely over a full season. The city celebrated. The supporters who had waited 24 years allowed themselves to believe that this was the beginning of something, that the long sleep was over, that Liverpool were back among the clubs that won things regularly and expected to. They were wrong. George Kay resigned in 1951, citing ill health. He had pushed himself to the limits of what his constitution could sustain, and the club he left was already declining again. Liverpool finished 9th in 1951-52, 11th in 1952-53, and then, in May 1954, the thing happened that nobody in the city had thought possible. Liverpool Football Club were relegated to the second division. Relegation. May 1954. For the first time since 1895, 59 years, Liverpool were not in the top flight of English football. They had finished bottom of the first division with 28 points, having won nine of their 42 league matches. It was comprehensive, it was humiliating, and it was, from a historical perspective, genuinely mysterious. Don Welsh had been manager since 1951, appointed without the kind of clear plan that the situation required. Welsh was a former Charlton athletic player, competent, respected, with no particular connection to Liverpool or understanding of what the club had once been. Under him, the squad deteriorated without adequate replacement. Recruitment was poor and inconsistent. The 1953-54 season was lost early. Liverpool won just four of their first 20 league matches and never recovered. When the final whistle blew on the season, they were down. The directors who presided over this relegation had been at the club through the years of drift without doing anything fundamental to arrest it. They had accepted mediocrity season by season, mistaking continuity for stability and confusing the two for success. When the consequence of that complacency finally arrived in the form of second division football, there was shock, genuine, wide-eyed shock, that suggests that they had not seen it coming. This is itself remarkable. Any careful observer of Liverpool's trajectory in the early 1950s could have seen it coming. The board, apparently, were not careful observers. Welsh resigned. Phil Taylor, a former Liverpool player and a gentle, earnest man, who was entirely unsuited to the task of rescuing a club in crisis, replaced him. Taylor managed Liverpool for three years in the second division. Three years of decent but not dominant football. Three years in which the club finished third, third, and fourth without achieving promotion. Everton, meanwhile, were thriving in the first division. The city had one club in the top flight, and it was the Blue Half. For Liverpool supporters old enough to remember the back-to-back titles of 1921 and 1922, this period must have felt like grief. What kept Liverpool afloat through these years, through the mediocrity, the relegation, the five seasons in the second division, was partly institutional habit and partly one man. The institution was Anfield itself. A ground with real history now, that had held enormous crowds and witnessed genuine greatness, that carried its own kind of authority simply by existing. Supporters kept coming. The cop, the vast open terrace at one end of the ground, capable of holding tens of thousands of standing supporters, maintained its identity and its noise even when the football did not deserve it. It is worth pausing on this. The cop in the 1950s was not famous yet in the way it would become under Shankly, but the culture was there, the wit, the warmth, the absolute refusal to be anything other than Liverpool, regardless of what the league table said. And there was Billy Liddell. We will come to him properly in the Player of the Era segment. But he must be named here in the main story because he is inseparable from it. During the years of drift, during the relegation, during the five seasons in the second division, Liddell was the player who made going to Anfield worth the effort. He was so dominant, so obviously categorically superior to anyone else on the pitch, that supporters began, in a mixture of affection and resignation, to call the club Liddell Pool. It was a name that captured something painful. A great player trapped in a declining institution, holding it together by the force of his own extraordinary ability, unable by himself to make it what it needed to be. Phil Taylor resigned in November 1959. The directors, having finally accepted that something fundamental needed to change, advertised the manager's job in the newspapers. That decision to put an advertisement in the newspaper for the manager of Liverpool Football Club is one of the small ironies of football history. Because among the people who read that advertisement was a Scotsman from a mining village in Ayrshire, who had spent his career in the lower reaches of English football, rebuilding clubs that others had given up on, and who had recently been doing it at Huddersfield Town. His name was Bill Shankly. He applied, he got the job. He arrived in December 1959. Everything after that is a different story. We'll tell it in episode three. Each episode of Reds Through the Ages features one player whose life and career illuminate something essential about their era. For this episode, 36 years of drift, decline, relegation, and the slow erosion of ambition. The choice is not difficult. There is only one player it could be: William Beveridge Liddell. Outside his immediate family and the people of Liverpool, he remains one of the most unjustly overlooked footballers in the history of the British game. Liddell was born in Town Hill, Dunfermline, in January 1922, the son of a Scottish mining family, raised in the austere, tight-knit culture of the Fife Coalfields. He was spotted by Liverpool's Scouting Network as a teenager and signed as an amateur in 1938, turning professional in 1939, just as the war was about to erase the next six years of his career. He spent the war years serving in the RAF as a navigator, flying bombing missions over Germany. He was mentioned in dispatches. He was, in other words, not only a footballer, he was a particular kind of man. Modest, principled, deeply religious, with a physical courage that expressed itself both in the air-over enemy territory and on the football pitch, where he was renowned for playing through challenges that would have kept lesser players in the dressing room. His playing style was almost paradoxically effective. He was built like a centre-half, broad-shouldered, powerful, with thighs that a contemporary journalist once described as being like oak trunks. And yet he played as a left winger with a pace and directness that First Division fullbacks consistently failed to manage. He was two-footed, which was unusual. He was lethal with his head, which was even more unusual for a winger, and he could shoot with either foot from distance, at pace, with the kind of accuracy that makes goalkeepers look inadequate by comparison. In 537 appearances for Liverpool across 15 seasons, he scored 228 goals for a winger, in an era when the winger's job was primarily to cross. What makes Liddell's story genuinely poignant is not what he achieved but what he was denied. He played the best years of his career, roughly 1946 to 1956, for a club that was going backwards. He was at Anfield during the 1947 title, yes, but he was also there for the relegation of 1954, playing brilliantly in a team that was not worthy of him, keeping a club in the public eye largely through the force of his own reputation. He attracted crowds to Anfield that the club's performances did not merit. He was, to borrow a phrase that would later be used of other great players at lesser clubs, the reason to watch. Liddell never won the league title again after 1947. He never won the FA Cup. He won 12 Scotland caps, a number that most observers of the time considered a significant underestimate of his ability, since the Scottish selectors were prone to the insularity that has always characterised their decisions. He retired from playing in 1961, by which point Shankly had arrived and was already transforming the club. Liddell stayed connected to Liverpool, working for the club in various capacities, deeply involved with the local community through his church and his charitable work, until his death in 2001. He was 79 years old. He had lived in Liverpool for over 60 years, long outlasting the career that had brought him there. There is a particular kind of loyalty that attaches itself to a player who stayed at a club through its worst years, who could have gone somewhere better and chose not to, or perhaps felt that he owed the supporters who came to watch him something that a transfer would have betrayed. Whether that is what Liddell felt, we cannot know for certain. What we know is that he was there. Through the drift, through the relegation, through the long years in the second division, Liddell Pool was not quite a joke and not quite a tribute. It was an acknowledgement that the club and the man had become, for a while, the same thing. And that without him, there might have been nothing worth watching at all. We have no podcasts from 1954, we have no audio diaries, no social media threads documenting the moment the final whistle blew at Anfield and Liverpool knew they were relegated. What we have are newspaper reports, and the occasional memoir, and the knowledge of what the city was like, what it meant to support a football club in a place that was already carrying a weight of economic decline, and to watch that club confirm its own diminishment on a Saturday afternoon in May. I think about the supporter who had been in the COP in 1923, watching the second consecutive title celebrated, convinced they were watching the beginning of something, who came back every season through the 20s and 30s, with the patience that the working-class supporters of English football have always shown their clubs. Not expecting miracles, but expecting something. Who watched the 1947 title and allowed themselves to hope again? Who was in the ground in May 1954? 31 years later, when it ended in relegation. What do you do with that? What do you do with 31 years of patience rewarded only once? You come back the following August, probably. You stand in the same place on the cop. You watch Billy Liddell in the second division, and you know he's too good for it, and you know the club is too good for it, even if it keeps behaving as though it isn't, and you wait, because what else is there? That waiting, that particular, stubborn, unsentimental Liverpool patience, is not a passive thing. It is a form of loyalty that the club did not deserve in those years, and that it would eventually, fitfully, learn to honour. It is also, if you want to understand what Shankly meant to Liverpool when he arrived in December 1959, where you have to start, not with him, with the 31 years before him, with the people who waited. So, Liverpool Football Club. 36 years, one title, one relegation, five seasons in the second division, and through it all, Billy Liddell, too good for the club he served, too loyal to leave it, too honest to pretend it was something it wasn't. The house that Holding built, as we called it in episode 1, was still standing. But by the winter of 1959, the roof was leaking and the foundations were cracking, and the people inside had half forgotten what it had been built for. What happened next required someone who remembered, or more accurately, someone who had never doubted, what a great football club was supposed to look like. Next time, on episode 3 of Reds Through the Ages, December 1959, Liverpool are 10th in the 2nd Division. A Scotsman named Bill Shankly steps off a train at Lime Street, walks into Anfield, and tells the directors exactly what is wrong with their football club and precisely what he intends to do about it. He is not gentle about it. He signs Ian St. John. He signs Ron Yates and invites the press to walk around him, calling him a colossus. He puts a sign above the tunnel and he begins to rebuild from nothing. One of the great clubs in the history of the sport. That's episode three, the man who changed everything. Until then, thank you for listening. You'll never walk alone.