Source: Liverpool_Echo
Football historian Peter Lupson sheds light on 1892 Liverpool and Everton rent row
Peter Lupson[LNB]IT'S the most famous rent row in football history.[LNB]Except football historian Peter Lupson has now shed new light on the 1892 argument which saw Liverpool Football Club emerge from a split with Everton.[LNB]And living up to Liverpool stereotype, it was a row over a drink - or rather attitudes to the demon drink - which caused the seismic shift.[LNB]Even fans with barely a passing acquaintance of the history of this city's two soccer giants know that Everton came first, until a row over rent at their Anfield home led to the formation of Liverpool.[LNB]Lupson, author of the best-selling Across The Park and Thank God For Football, has spent months researching, studying and meticulously chronicling the background and the history of the events of 1891 and 1892.[LNB]And he delivered his findings at a packed Hornby Room in Liverpool's Central Library yesterday.[LNB]For 127 years it has been accepted that rent, pure and simple, was at the heart of the acrimonious row.[LNB]Everton were the tenants of Anfield, and John Houlding wanted to increase the rent on the stadium he owned.[LNB]Leading committee members, led by George Mahon, disagreed - and the situation escalated to the point of irretrievable breakdown.[LNB]The whole row, however, was infinitely more complex - and at the heart was alcohol and politics, always an explosive mix.[LNB]On one side was John Houlding, a Tory and a wealthy brewer - and his only ally on the board, Edwin Berry, a solicitor to the Licensed Victualler's Association.[LNB]Ranged against him were a selection of some of the most zealous moral puritans of the day.[LNB]George Mahon was the organist of St Domingo's Church and a member of the Liberal Party which, despite the name, was the party of moral purity in the austere Victorian age.[LNB]Rev Ben Chambers, loosely described as the founder of Everton, was a prominent member of the Temperance Movement and once took a pub to court in Stoke for breaking a licencing law.[LNB]Dr Clement Baxter was a committed and much loved city doctor who regularly witnessed first hand the appalling affects of drink on his patients - and a Liberal councillor to boot.[LNB]Will Cuff was a choirmaster at St Domingo's, a strong and committed Christian who once declared that: 'Football is the greatest teetotal agency in the world.'[LNB]There was William Whitford - an active temperance campaigner who went around talking about the 'iniquitous influence of brewers' at a time when Houlding still owned his club![LNB]And William Clayton, a committee member who used to give regular temperance talks to a Formby church.[LNB]Houlding never stood a chance.[LNB]'The Temperance Movement was at its height in the 1880s,' explained Lupson. 'There is no doubt that had Houlding been a butcher or a baker, he would have had no problems.[LNB]'But he was a brewer.[LNB]'And at the time the association with drink was something that people of high moral standards were strongly opposed to.'
