A couple of weeks down the line I can show a wider audience what i finally write about Doug and at the same time give non-subscribers a glimpse of what you've been missing.
the moving finger writes
For many years now there’s been a bit of an elephant in the H&V room, namely what do we say when Doug dies?
It’s not morbid or disrespectful to have such plans – media outlets have obituaries already written for everyone in the public eye and they get updated regularly. For us, the big problem as how to write about him in a way that wasn’t either disrespectful or hypocritical. I can’t deny that we were heavily critical of Doug for most of the time he was chairman, and looking back perhaps some of it was a bit excessive or unfair.
Against that, we always tried to be rational and certainly never went in for the sort of abuse that he got from behind the safety of a few keyboards – which in turn got us accused of being paid off by him, but that’s another story.
And so, when the news broke that Doug had finally gone to that great travel agency in the sky, we were in a bit of a dilemma. Doug was always a controversial and divisive character. Even at our worst ebb, when we’d been relegated or were yet again battling to stay up, he retained more support than might have seemed likely. And during the good years there were always those who were opposed, sometimes because they remembered the bad times, or they thought we should be doing better, or they just didn’t like him.
But no matter how controversial a public figure might once have been, if they live long enough there always comes a time when they’re generally regarded as a wise elder , or simply a character. Margaret Thatcher, Tony Benn, Ian Paisley. All were, or are, the source of great hatred yet their deaths were met with widespread mourning. Doug isn’t on their scale of fame, or if you prefer, infamy, but it’s a fact that he was never more popular than he has been lately. I’m not sure if you can be entirely rational about someone in the immediate aftermath of their death, but make up your own mind which side of the fence to fall on.
Doug’s first foray into Birmingham sport wasn’t at the Villa, or even, as many of us like to point out, at St Andrews. Before all that, in 1960 he was co-promoter of Birmingham speedway, during one of the many eras of the sport at Perry Barr. Then it was off for a time to Blues before heading the consortium that took over at Villa Park in December 1968.
At this time Doug was putting into practice the lessons he’d learned in his previous business ventures. Although the board consisted of some well-known and talented directors, in reality Doug ran the show and that was what was needed at the time. Villa were still being run in much the same way they had before the war, and in some ways that was the Boer War. As the club was dragged into the modern age supporters needed someone to identify with, and Doug was that man.
The team’s fortunes weren’t so immediately transformed and it took a memorable two seasons in division three before we could be said to be truly on the way back. And it was after this first bit of success that the first controversy of Doug’s time started, when promotion in 1972 was immediately followed by a boardroom split that led to Doug being briefly voted out of the chair to be replaced by Jim Hartley. An EGM followed which posed the question “Ellis Villa or Aston Villa?” and resulted in him being restored as chairman while every other director who had been part of the consortium that had saved the club in 1968 had left within 3½ years.
Doug was finally forced to step down as chairman in 1975 and the façade of a united board was finally exposed in the bitter wranglings of 1979, when support from former directors and manager Ron Saunders was enough to give Ron Bendall victory over his bitterest foe.
Most of this time is fairly uncontroversial. Doug was the right man at the right time, but as Villa’s fortunes and more importantly the club’s finances improved, a broader coalition was needed and Ellis’s refusal to work amicably with his fellow directors led to his departure and set the seal on the cause of much of the disagreement about him and the anger felt in many quarters even now.
Doug took over the European champions in December 1982, paying a reported £425,000 for Ron Bendall’s controlling interest, a sum that back then was ludicrously small given the circumstances (“I think the old man was going senile, he sold cheaply to a man he despised,” was the later comment of another former chairman, Harry Kartz) and by May 1987 Villa were in division two.
Why this decline happened so quickly has been the cause of much debate ever since. Ellis claimed that the Villa’s finances were in such a bad state that economies had to be made and the club’s most valuable assets were its playing staff. Others had different opinions and it’s difficult to get past the idea that the most successful Villa side in a hundred years was broken up with indecent haste as part of Doug’s attempt to rebuild the club in his own image. The lack of subsequent recognition of their achievements and in particular the disgraceful treatment of manager Tony Barton was undoubtedly a low point in the club’s history.
Graham Taylor, promotion, the subsequent roller-coaster of title chases, relegation battles, trophy wins, successful managers, failures and Premier League stability could all be seen as evidence for either the prosecution or the defence, whichever way you looked at it. Villa did well at times under Doug, although there was a feeling that with a bit more ambition we could have done better, or alternatively it could have all fallen apart. Doug always seemed to value stability over risk-taking, and whenever Villa spent big it was invariably to plug gaps rather than to apply the finishing touches.
As Doug grew older so his reign on the club tightened. While others were bringing in marketing, financial and media experts, the Villa board of Doug, his son, his solicitor and his doctor carried on in the same manner they had in 1982, backed by staff whose loyalty to Doug Ellis often seemed more important than their ability to run a successful football club.
Yet, against this Villa were still reasonably successful, regulars in the top six although the gap between us and the clubs who were starting to flex their commercial muscles was growing. There was never a boom and bust cycle for the Villa, even if the team sometimes showed signs of inconsistency bordering on schizophrenia.
I don’t think even his staunchest defenders would disagree that Doug stayed on too far long. By the time Randy Lerner breezed into town with an open chequebook and a marketing team full of new ideas, even if most of them did breeze out again soon after, Doug was reported to be the seventh-oldest executive director of any PLC in the country. He was coming in for increased criticism, there were frequent protests at an d away from Villa Park and the club’s finances were starting to give cause for concern – Doug said himself that signing Stilyan Petrov could potentially have led to administration had Lerner not guaranteed the money.
From then on the newly-appointed President Emeritus settled into his role as elder statesman of Aston Villa with few problems. Watching matches from the Holte, shaking hands with Roman Abramovitch and being seen in AV1 travelling the length of the country to away games, Doug found life away from the top a lot easier than anyone had thought possible. He was donating large sums to local charities (one report showed him pro rata to be the biggest individual charitable donor the country) and this largesse finally saw him awarded the knighthood he had craved.
As the team declined, so Doug’s reign was made to look better in comparison. He was still attending games until recently and although his media appearances grew less frequent he was able to convey an obvious sadness at what was happening to ‘his’ empire.
And so Doug’s death was met with genuine mourning both amongst the Villa support and the wider football community, many of whom were keen to pay their respects to a proper football man, one of the last of his breed. That, undeniably, was what Doug represented. He was one of the last of the directors who were rooted in their community and saw serving on the board of their local club as a form of civic duty. He was also around at the time when, as writer Dave Conn once remarked, such men found themselves able to become very rich as a result.
Doug undoubtedly did very well out of the Villa. He was one of the first paid football club directors, rewarded himself handsomely in salary and dividends as the club’s share value soared, and the total value of the shares he sold was reckoned to be in the region of £30 million. Not bad for that initial £425,000 investment.
Whether Doug was worth that sort of reward depending largely on which body of evidence you wanted to believe. Was he the self-made entrepreneur who saved Aston Villa, returned to rescue the club from a further financial black hole, then steered us into the brave new world of the Premier League, financially stable, successful on the pitch and confident off it? Did his business acumen give us the financial clout and commercial set-up that others could only envy and his ability to spot a manager provide the cornerstone for a run of success that lasted for over a decade?
Or did he destroy the legacy of the European champions in a fit of jealousy, get lucky thanks to the arrival of Graham Taylor and the improved fortunes of football in general and spurn a host of chances to establish the Villa as big hitters on the European stage with his small-minded thinking and refusal to relinquish even the slightest control?
Was that obsession with financial stability the cornerstone of the success Villa enjoyed from 1989 onwards, or was it a handicap to what could have been even greater glory? None of us will ever know the answer to that one. Doug was certainly a lucky owner, as I’ve said many times. He was lucky that whenever the Villa were doing badly the other local clubs managed to do worse. And he was lucky to be in control of a top-flight club during a time when football was growing more lucrative almost by the day and the bigger clubs couldn’t help becoming richer with it. Shares that were going for £35 in 1992 cost anything up to forty times as much in the months before flotation five years later, and that hyper-inflation had little to do with the Villa’s own finances and more to do with football being the darling of the stock market.
Most of all, whenever Doug needed to pull a managerial rabbit out of a hat one invariably popped up for him. Sir Graham was looking for a fresh challenge at exactly the same time that we were sliding out of control. Ron Atkinson was always going to manage the Villa one day, Brian Little had been the king in waiting for five years prior to his appointment and John Gregory fell into Doug’s lap thanks to Steve Stride’s intuition.
So there you have it. King or knave, blessed with genius or just very lucky. Take our pick and by this stage there’s probably no point in trying to change the mind of anyone who thinks different. One things for definite, though. Doug was nobody’s fool. You don’t get that rich without knowing what you’re doing and he was always good at self-promotion. From 1982 Aston Villa was, in the words of Graham Taylor, run by Doug Ellis for Doug Ellis. Sometimes that worked to the Villa’s benefit, sometimes it held us back.
I don’t doubt that it’ll be many years before the very mention of Doug’s name won’t be enough to provoke bitter arguments. And even then I still won’t be sure whether he did indeed go on that final package trip smiling because he’d run rings round us all, leaving the Villa at the time of his choosing, with the sort of money that enabled him to do whatever he wanted in his final years, or whether he would be eternally disappointed that the thing he craved so much, to see ‘his’ club at the top of the tree, had happened under the watch of the two men he fought so bitterly.
There’s only one Doug Ellis, and there probably always will be
