By Bob Holmes...
Mention Ben Warren in football circles today and the best you’ll get is: “Ben Who?”
So, how about Ben of Derby County, Chelsea and England? Ben, a member of Herbert Chapman’s Greatest Team of All Time? Or Ben, chosen by Charles Buchan in the Greatest England Team of the first half of the 20th century?
Alternatively, there’s Ben, certified insane, classed as ‘a pauper’ and dead at 37.
Benjamin Warren was many of those but much more: a forgotten legend, if ever there was one. Even his grave was forgotten for decades – so overgrown that those who knew its whereabouts took an age to find it.
But recently he has been remembered. The grave has been tidied up by relatives and, thanks to the efforts of a local historian, a blue plaque was unveiled at his birthplace. It is now part of the Newhall Heritage Trail in South Derbyshire. Recognition of sorts but 100 years too late.
‘Insane’ is a word used all too frequently in football today – invariably to describe the amounts of money moving around. But in more hushed tones, ‘SANE’ is also mentioned – that most apt of acronyms being the name of a leading mental health charity.
In 2017, in excess of 400 footballers requested support from the PFA for mental health related illness. Sport as a whole is belatedly realising that neither fame nor fortune are effective vaccines against it. Indeed, they may well trigger it as the above figures and the celebrated cases of Frank Bruno, Marcus Trescothick and Tony Adams suggest.
But there surely can be no more poignant mental health-related tragedy than Ben Warren’s. Today there’s help to be had from organisations like the PFA and the Sporting Chance clinic: Ben never had a chance.
Just 17 months after earning his 22nd England cap against Scotland at Goodison Park on April 1, 1911, he was certified insane. What triggered his vertiginous decline was no more than a knock on the knee while playing for Chelsea against Clapton Orient in October of the same year.
The Blues won the game 4-1, a victory one report claimed, “was enhanced by the fact that Ben was a passenger for the second half”. Still, it was regarded as little more than a routine injury and a Telegraph & Post report of November 22 suggested he was making “excellent progress” and would soon be “back in harness”.
Such claims would prove wildly optimistic. The knee would not heal and the longer he was out of action the more he fretted about how he’d feed his wife and four children. In those days, if you didn’t play, there was no pay. There was no NHS and no PFA either.
Other journals reported that he had developed “brain fever” and that this mild-mannered man had “become very strange and at times violent”. The coverage fluctuated as much as Ben’s condition but reflected his celebrity status – not unlike that for certain modern metatarsals.
On December 15, 1911, as Rick Glanvill records in his Official Biography of Chelsea FC: “He was admitted to a private clinic in Nottingham, the Coppice, suffering from acute mania, delusions that he was being poisoned and hallucinations of hearing and vision.”
Ben received another blow in February, 1912, when his mother, Emily, died. She had had congestion of the lungs and caught influenza, her condition not helped, it was believed at the time, by worrying about Ben. She had good reason: her famous son would soon be admitted to the unfortunately named Derby County Lunatic Asylum.
As Britain sleepwalked towards world war, Ben’s condition deteriorated. Glanvill writes: “His case notes from what would be a five-year stay, catalogue a devastating decline in which he is at various times described as incoherent, restless, destructive, ‘stuporose’ and ‘a danger to himself’.”
In September, that decline reached a new and pitiable low. The following is an abridged account of what The Courier called “an amazing incident” that took place on September 4.
“Spotted by a group of men while walking down Derby Road in Nottingham, a man was acting strangely, smoking a cigarette and had nothing on but a collar and tie. He jumped about the pavement and roadway, as though playing an imaginary game of football. When approached, he told them he was going to Trent Bridge to play in a football match and had to be there by 3.30.”
Eventually he was taken to a police station and recognised by a reporter as England’s erstwhile right-half. What made the story even harder to digest was that Ben had escaped from the asylum and walked the 20 miles to Nottingham apparently unnoticed. He had played at ‘Trent Bridge’ many times – at least on Nottingham Forest’s adjacent City Ground.
As a shocked nation came to terms with the desperate plight of one of its finest footballers, some papers suggested his career was not yet over. And his relatives claimed that he had been suffering from nothing more than a severe nervous breakdown.
But Chelsea’s assistant secretary A.J. Palmer dismissed reports of a comeback as “mere piffle”, adding: “I doubt whether he will ever again be well enough to play first-class football.”
Sadly, “piffle” was all it was and Ben would never play again. Back at the “asylum”, nurses would take him out to a nearby field and put a football at his feet. But after a career of being able to make a ball ‘talk’, it remained steadfastly mute.
He would never be the same again either as a player or a man. He wasn’t even a shadow of the weird ‘footballer’ who had walked 20 miles to Nottingham. Then he had “nothing on”, now he just had nothing - least of all self-respect. He ripped sheets into shreds and attempted suicide, saying: “I’m no use to anyone – and ought to be out of the way.”
If it was money worries that tipped him into despair, nothing shows more graphically how different a footballer’s lot was a century ago than the players’ wages. Ben’s modern counterpart - he was an international star described both as “the best wing-half in the kingdom” and “worth three men to a team” – would be in the £200,000 a week bracket, perhaps coveted by Real Madrid and Barcelona. Ben earned £4 a week.
Local historian Stuart Haywood, 84, who knows more about him than anyone alive, suggests that Steven Gerrard would have been the nearest to a recent equivalent. “Of course, I never saw him play and there’s no footage either, but based on reports about his fitness, non-stop running, crisp tackling and passing, his style was probably similar to Gerrard’s.”
Unlike Stevie G, Ben had yielded to the blandishments of Chelsea, even back then considered a glamour London club compared to Derby, and was transferred for a princely maximum fee of £350. But Ben, a home-loving type, eschewed the glamour, preferring to train on his own on a public pitch in Newhall and travelling to London by train only for matches.
That he was granted such licence said much about his lofty status in the game – and his fitness. A dedicated trainer, he was often described as “finishing a match fit enough to play another”, and was renowned as a hard but fair tackler and a popular team player. Even his moustache was immaculately groomed.
His professionalism made his decline all the harder for his family and wider public to take. And the long-term loss of his income dealt a devastating blow to Ben’s wife Minnie and their four children. A measure of the affection the nation had for him can be seen from the benefit matches that were organised. A North v South game at Stamford Bridge raised some £67,000 – equivalent to ten times that today.
But Ben was not getting better. Besides the loss of his mother, there may have been added concern about several of his brothers who left for the trenches. Whether that played on his disturbed mind, it cannot be corroborated but the tragic irony is that while they survived the Somme, it was Ben who didn’t make it through the war.
As Glanvill’s sympathetic account records: “A year before his suicide attempt in 1916 the ominous symptom of ‘dry cough’ had been noted. Two months after it, in October 1916, the unmistakable signs of tuberculosis were noted and his enfeebled body rapidly succumbed. At 11.30pm on 15 January 1917, international footballer Ben Warren was found dead by a night attendant. He was 37 and when they buried him the records described him as a ‘pauper’.”
However you look at it, it is the salutary tale of a footballer worrying about money. And it began with a knock on the knee. It wouldn’t happen today but is the starkest reminder of what ignorance of mental health can lead to.
Thanks to Rick Glanvill for permission to quote from his Chelsea FC: The Official Biography.
.jpg)
