The mystery of Thomas Fairfoul, an unmarked grave and English football’s biggest fixing scandal

West Derby cemetery is a reminder of Liverpool’s sectarian roots. It is divided into three zones, with paths separating the resting places of Catholics, Protestants and those more loosely described as non-conformists.

Despite its neat arrangement and an online directory detailing everyone who is known to be buried there, it is not easy to navigate because winds have toppled many of the headstones. Inscriptions are not always visible.

Somewhere on the site, two and a half miles to the east of Anfield, Liverpool’s home stadium, Thomas Fairfoul’s body has laid beneath the ground since 1952. The Scot, who played 71 times for Liverpool between 1913 and 1915, is registered as being in plot 196 of section six in the graveyard, but there is a problem finding him because there are three sections with the same numbers, two of which are unmarked.

No one seems to know exactly where Fairfoul’s remains are because there is no official record of his faith. Indeed, any information about him is thin: the last mention of him in a press report concerns his attendance at the 1950 FA Cup final after being invited to Wembley by his former club as a guest.

Liverpool were beaten 2-0 that day, with Fairfoul one of the 100,000 fans in attendance — and surely the most controversial, given his role 35 years previously in arguably the greatest corruption scandal in English football history.  

It was on Good Friday 110 years ago that Fairfoul, along with three Liverpool team-mates — Jackie Sheldon, Bob Pursell and Tom Miller — were judged by the English Football Association to have fixed a First Division match against relegation-threatened Manchester United at Old Trafford. Three United players were also found guilty; they, like their Liverpool counterparts, were banned from football for life. 

Fairfoul — born in the Scottish oil shale mining village of West Calder, halfway between Edinburgh and Glasgow — played as a half-back (loosely a deep-lying midfielder in modern language), with responsibilities that were primarily defensive.

That seemed to suit his character. Two newspaper reports from before the scandal refer to him as “dour”, although the Birmingham Daily Gazette did acknowledge that he had been “Liverpool’s most consistent half” in the 1913-14 season, when the club had finished a lowly 16th out of 18 and reached the FA Cup final, losing 1-0 to Burnley. “(He) is a great believer in passing back to his goalkeeper in order to relieve the defence,” the Gazette observed, perhaps not entirely generously.  

Liverpool and Burnley contest the 1914 FA Cup final at the Crystal Palace (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Fairfoul’s role in the fix, however, remains unclear: there was a lack of transparency over the FA’s findings and how it had decided to mete out its punishments. What is known is that reporters who were sat in Old Trafford’s press box on April 2 1915 could sense something was off after United who, needing a win to help stave off relegation fears and with a strong breeze behind them, eased into a half-time lead with the Liverpool Daily Post suggesting “a more one-sided first half would be hard to witness”.

The performance of the visitors — comfortable in mid-table before kick-off — did not improve. “The Liverpool forwards gave the weakest exhibition seen on the ground during the season,” suggested the Sporting Chronicle. “The play in the concluding stages was too poor to describe. The proceedings in the second half reflected no credit to either side.”

This period also involved United missing a penalty, with Patrick O’Connell striking his kick “ridiculously wide” according to the Post, a moment that led to the officials becoming suspicious. When the referee was interviewed in the investigation that followed, he described what he’d seen as “the most extraordinary match” he had ever been involved in. 

The Manchester Dispatch newspaper would detail the “lifeless football” of a second half where United “never tried to increase their lead” after going 2-0 up. Curiously enough, the same report suggested “Jackie Sheldon’s centres were always dangerous”. Sheldon was unmasked as the middle man in the fix, having moved to Liverpool from United in 1913. 

Maybe he realised he needed to do enough to show he was trying. The most detailed coverage of the affair is in a book by Graham Sharpe, Free the Manchester One, which also chronicles how Liverpool’s Fred Pagnam hitting the United crossbar late on led to his implicated team-mates protesting to him for almost scuppering the bet. 

Fred Pagnam almost scuppered the bet by hitting Manchester United’s crossbar (PA Images via Getty Images)

The sharper focus in Sharpe’s book falls on the United player Enoch “Knocker” West, who never admitted his alleged part in the fix and went to his grave in 1965 protesting his innocence. 

The authorities were alerted to West because of a rash of bets laid in Hucknall, the Nottinghamshire colliery town where he was from. It was later claimed by Sheldon that he met West and three other players in Manchester’s Dog and Partridge pub four nights before the fixture but each of the men left before any of the other punters could question why they were together.

On the eve of the game, Sheldon said he met West again, this time in a pub near to Grand Central Station in Manchester. On this occasion, their conversation was overheard and rumours started to circulate across the city. 

Football was developing a problem with betting and match-fixing. After a 1914 fixture between West Bromwich Albion and Everton, a bookmaker’s father was jailed for trying to influence the outcome of a match. In the 1938 book, the Story of the Football League, there is a reference to the 1911-12 season and the sport beginning “to be the object of increased activity among betting agents who did not hesitate to get into contact with players and give rise to suspicions regarding the bona-fides of certain games”.

In 1915, encounters between Liverpool and United did not hold the sporting or emotional significance they do now. The idea of players from the teams socialising before a game now would be ludicrous; then, it was far less controversial. And from Sheldon’s perspective, having a foot in both camps was useful in terms of facilitating the fix.

The wider historical context also played a part in creating ideal conditions for corruption.

There was mounting criticism for the sport, and the men who played it, from Britain’s military commanders. By 1915, only 122 of 1,800 players registered with the Football League had signed up for service, which led to one historian writing to the Times newspaper to suggest football was “doing its best for the enemy”.

The counter argument — that football provided a useful distraction from the conflict and that a cancellation of the calendar would be an admission that normal life was over — won out, but by April 1915 there was a feeling that competition would be paused until the end of the war. Attendances were falling (only 18,000 watched the United-Liverpool game on Good Friday), clubs were already facing hardship and United, especially, were in financial trouble, with a report in the Sporting Chronicle from May 3 suggesting the club’s position was causing “real anxiety” for directors. 

Nobody knew when the war would finish and footballers like Fairfoul who were approaching the end of their careers (he was 34 at the time) faced even greater uncertainty. None of these men were on contracts any more lucrative than the jobs held by spectators and suddenly they were having their income pulled away by events beyond their control. The matchday programme from the game between United and Liverpool even warned that the following season might be delayed, with an editorial note saying, “only players with existing agreements will receive summer wages”.

In that context, not finishing bottom of the First Division and therefore being the only team relegated to the second tier was of paramount importance. And United’s victory over Liverpool helped them stay up at Chelsea’s expense.

Eight days after the match, however, concerns were raised about its credibility when an anonymous bookmaker called “The Football King” placed a notice in the Sporting Chronicle, claiming that he had “solid grounds” for believing a “certain match played in Manchester over Easter weekend” was “squared”.

Within three weeks of the Good Friday match, the Football League set up a commission to investigate “certain complaints” and a holding statement at the end of that month said that any player found guilty of contravening rules in this case “would be put out of football forever”.

Interviews took place at Manchester’s Grand Hotel. Within a couple of months, half of the United team joined the war effort by securing employment at the Ford Motor Works near Old Trafford, while Sheldon enlisted with the army. The report from the commission landed on Christmas Eve later that year, with Fairfoul, Sheldon, West and the other accused men told they had “sought to undermine the whole fabric of the game and discredit its honesty and fairness”. Though the commission suspected others were involved, it “restricted findings to those as to whose offence there is no reasonable doubt”.

The Liverpool Echo reacted by saying the development was “the worst blow football has had. The smell from the stigma cast upon football will permeate the air for many a day.” Liverpool’s chairman, John McKenna, held the same role with the Football League and had played a role in setting up the commission. It was his view that the players “had to be ousted from the game” and this meant they would no longer be able to enter a stadium, even to watch a match. “There shall be no contamination,” he said.

United admitted the punishment was “fully deserved” but the club was also fortunate as it had benefited from the actions of their employees and, according to the Athletic News, “escaped from the consequences of the acts of men for whom they are technically responsible”. Given that the result helped United stay up at Chelsea’s expense, it was suggested that the game should be replayed at some point but Chelsea, for reasons unknown, accepted the verdict and did not push for a rematch.

The reporting became more revelatory after the findings were released, with the Sporting Chronicle claiming an argument had broken out in the Liverpool dressing room at half-time between those wanting a fair game and those who didn’t. At one point, the former group threatened not to reappear for the second half but changed their minds. This allegedly led to a game within a game, where the “rogues” tried to keep the ball from the “honest men”.

The six Liverpool and Manchester United players who admitted their guilt in the fixing scandal, and apologised, had their lifetime bans revoked in 1919, part of the FA’s move to acknowledge footballers who had contributed to the war effort. The pardoning of United’s Sandy Turnbull was posthumous: he had been killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917. 

Pursell was young enough to resume his career, playing twice for Liverpool before joining Port Vale where his career was finished by a broken leg at the age of 33. Sheldon, suffered the same injury in 1921 wearing a Liverpool shirt and this led to him being granted a benefit match after playing 80 more times for the club following the lifting of his suspension. He would settle in Manchester and is buried in the city’s Southern Cemetery. Meanwhile, Miller would receive international recognition with Scotland before joining — of all clubs — Manchester United.

And Fairfoul? He was the only Liverpool player who did not return to the game because he was at retirement age by the time the conflict ended. Yet he was the only Liverpool player involved to remain living in the city until the end of his life.

He would settle in Kensington, a working-class district two miles to the south of Anfield, where he became a taxi driver having started a firm with the former Everton goalkeeper Bill Scott, whose older brother, Elisha, became an outstanding presence in the same position for Liverpool in the 1920s.

Liverpool and Arsenal walk out for the 1950 FA Cup final, for which Thomas Fairfoul was a club guest (Barratts/PA Images via Getty Images)

Quite why Liverpool decided to reintegrate him and make him their guest for the 1950 FA Cup final is unclear. Maybe it was simply the fact that he stayed local to the club and was a visible presence in the area. Maybe enough time had passed for the wounds to heal.

There is no record of Fairfoul having said anything in public about his role in the fixing scandal before his death in 1952, at the age of 71 — what motivated him, how he felt about his punishment and its legacy for his and the club’s reputation. 

Like his final resting place, it remains a mystery that may never be solved. 

(Top photos: Getty Images; Simon Hughes/The Athletic)

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