Bobby Buckle inducted into Hall of Fame - 144 years after founding the Club
On the 144th anniversary of the Club's founding, we start at the beginning for the first inductee into our re-launched Hall of Fame.
Is there a more important figure in the history of Tottenham Hotspur than Bobby Buckle?
One of the club's founders - the motion to form a football club, also to be called Hotspur, was moved by the Hotspur Cricket Club members Buckle, Hamilton Casey and John Anderson at a meeting, apocryphally held under a gas lamp on the Tottenham High Road.
How apt that we announce Bobby's Special Recognition induction on 5 September - it's 144 years to the day the first sixpence subscriptions to the club were collected - Tuesday, 5 September 1882 – ever since accepted as the date of the club’s formation.
Buckle was the Club's first captain, first known goalscorer (in a 3-1 loss against Grange Park on 20 October, 1883), yet it's off the pitch where Buckle's influence cannot be underestimated.
Alongside Casey, Jack Jull and Frank Hatton, Buckle urged the Club to move to a stadium of their own and helped spearhead the switch from our first home on Tottenham Marshes to Northumberland Park in 1888.
He was only 21 when he took the position of honorary secretary in 1889, the first of four stints in that role.
On 16 December, 1895, he proposed that the Club should turn professional, a motion carried and in 1898, he was a director when the Club became a limited company.
Buckle then played a huge role in the Club moving to the site that would become known across the world as White Hart Lane - the site that still remains home in Tottenham.
Responding quickly to a rumour that a new football club was planning to take over a plot of land called Beckwith's Nursery, attached to the White Hart pub and near to the Club's Northumberland Park home, Buckle and chairman Charles Roberts negotiated and secured a lease with owners, Charrington, by guaranteeing crowds of 1,000 on matchdays.
The first official match on this new site followed on 4 September, 1899 against Notts County in front of 5,000 spectators.
A little over 10 years later, having won the FA Cup (1901), secured Football League status (1908/09) and promotion at the first attempt, the same site housed a stadium capacity of 50,000 for our opening Division One fixture against Manchester United on 11 September, 1909.
By then, Buckle had moved on. He married Ethel Brown in 1901, moved to South London and no longer played a part in Spurs, although he retained a lifelong interest in the Club's progress.
He passed away aged 90 in 1959 and now, as a member of our Hall of Fame, his legacy will always live on in N17.