Accrington Web - 6th March 1962 Significant Day

6 March 1962: Accrington Stanley resign from the Football League

The goalkeeper Alex Smith had played every game of the 1961-62 season when the team were abruptly told that the club had ceased to exist

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/...tanley-001.jpg Mrs Sarah Dewhirst wheels away Accrington Stanley's washing machine as the players and staff mill around Peel Park digesting news of the club's resignation from the league. Illustration: Rex Features

"It was my first professional club, and I'd only signed in pre-season. I'd been part-time for a while before that, working in the wholesale fruit trade. Then I break into football and I'm thinking, well, this is unbelievable. And it was.
I remember the day we were told like it was yesterday. I'd just moved into a flat in Accrington and the next week I turn up for training and they tell us that's it, the club's folded. We'd had all this furniture delivered, and suddenly I'm out of a job. In those days it just didn't happen. None of us could believe it. So I had to go home and tell my wife, and we hadn't been married so long either.
We had no idea it was so bad. It wasn't in all the papers, not like Portsmouth has been. We knew things were poor, but they always used to get the wages together. They'd sold our centre-forward George Hudson to Peterborough, and that seemed to help. We had another striker called Mike Ferguson, and they put him under pressure to go to Workington. He wasn't going to go there – he was probably our best player – and ended up at Blackburn.
We used to go in for training just the same. We could use the facilities so we'd keep turning up, just keeping ourselves fit and hoping something was going to happen. But unbeknown to me Bolton had been looking at me. A couple of other clubs were interested, but Bolton were in the First Division, and a Lancashire club, so once the summer came I moved there and I've never left.
Our last game was at Crewe. We got beat 4-0, and it was played in a blizzard. I was talking about it just the other week, because Bolton played Blackburn and it was just the same with the snow. I must have done all right even though I let four in, because that was one of the games where Bolton watched me. I cut my eye in that game. I remember getting on the train back home and somebody said: "Have you been boxing?"
Mikey and I, we were the lucky ones; a lot of the other lads went into non-league. When Accrington got back into the Football League, we had a reunion. It was good to see them all again. I've got a few programmes but I don't have any old Accrington kits – it's not something we did back then. Every now and then I get asked about them and I'll joke: 'Yeah, I took them out the league.'"
Then what happened

Smith played for Bolton, Halifax and Preston before becoming a goalkeeping coach at Bolton's academy. He left the club last year. Now 71, he and his family run the Bolton Bed Centre.