‘Mind-blowing’ - Michael Mackman, grandson of Club co-founder Bobby Buckle, visits clock and new lamp post at the stadium

Imagine your grandad was one of the founders of Tottenham Hotspur back in 1882. For Michael Mackman, it’s reality.

His grandad, Bobby Buckle, was one of three schoolboy members of Hotspur Cricket Club, alongside Hamilton Casey and John Anderson who, legend has it, moved a motion to form a football club, also named ‘Hotspur’, in a meeting under a gas lantern on Tottenham High Road in 1882. The motion was duly accepted, and our Club was born.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that Michael described it as a ‘tear-jerking’ moment when he visited our historic Tottenham Hotspur Clock, which has been reinstated and installed on a new lamp post on the corner of Tottenham High Road and Park Lane, a goal-kick away from the South Stand of Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, symbolising the gas lantern where it all started over 140 years ago. Alongside the clock and lamp post, a new plaque explaining their historical significance.

“It’s another tear-jerking moment!” said Michael, who remembers meeting Bobby at his house in Merton as the youngest of his grandchildren, before Bobby passed away in 1959. “To see Bobby’s name placed on something around the stadium is immense, it really is. It is mind-blowing.

“You are standing there, and you think that Bobby was only 13 when he put forward that idea and took those other lads with him on that journey. Think back to what you were doing at 13. I wasn’t forming a football club, that’s for sure! To have recognition and acknowledgement now from the Club of where he stands in terms of the history of the Club is absolutely wonderful, and very special for the family.”

Bobby Buckle

Bobby Buckle was one the co-founders and one of 11 schoolboys who were the first members of ‘Hotspur FC’ in 1882. He was our first captain and scored the Club's first recorded goal in a friendly against Grange Park on 20 November, 1883. Bobby became Honorary Secretary in the early 1890s and was on the Club's first-ever Board of Directors in 1898. He played a key role both in taking the Club to professional status and the move from playing at Northumberland Park to the site that became White Hart Lane in 1899, and today, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. He lived just around the corner at White Cottage, White Hart Lane, until moving to Merton with his wife, Ethel, in 1900.