Woodfield: Fitness Fanatic Who Travelled The World
David Instone looks back at the colourful, globe-trotting and Wolves career of David Woodfield, who died at the start of this month and is about to become the subject of a celebration of life near his Cambridgeshire home. It’s nearly time to make a toast….
Warwickshire-born Duggie Woodfield.
When Wolves Heroes was launched, Dave Woodfield was one of those Molineux favourites we fretted over ever locating and interviewing. Meeting him, even more so.
We weren’t to know at that point, of course, that we would still be going strong more than 15 years later. More pertinently, who was to say when and even if ‘Duggie would return to these shores after decades of living and coaching in distant parts of the world?
Look at this line-up of workplaces: Finland, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Brunei, Thailand and Malaysia, with a bit of Japan, South Korea and South America thrown in. He and the Middle East and Far East, in particular, saw plenty of each other.
Happily, he eventually returned to England to catch up on some lost family time and twice revisit the club he served across more than 270 first-team matches – sufficient longevity to earn himself a 1974 testimonial.
He and I first met when he came back to do some corporate work in 2016 and had another link-up when he descended with his family nearly four years later for what he was sure would be his last visit to Molineux. Illness had taken hold by then but, amid gloomy soundings that he might have only another few months to live, he demonstrated his resilience by surviving several more years. There were also several phone calls, so we scratched the surface and then some in becoming acquainted with him long before he died on May 1, aged 81.
It would have been nice to go further, though, and sit down, record book and statistics at hand, to walk him through his Wolves career. There was certainly lots more to explore.
“We encouraged him to write down his memories and he made a start without getting very far,” said his Wolverhampton-born son, Gary. “There’s a lot we don’t know about him because he was abroad for a long, long time. But I was always used to him being away a lot anyway, often on summer tours with Wolves.
“The post-playing side of his life over 30 years or more is largely a mystery to us and I can’t verify much of what is on record about him. He didn’t really want to open up about it after he came back to England in 2011. He never seemed to make much money and was the ultimate Wolverhampton Wanderer!”
Born in October, 1943, Dave spent time at his childhood favourites Manchester United as a schoolboy but signed at Molineux as an amateur at 15. His brother, Paul, who had a modest non-League career with Banbury United and Redditch, recalled accompanying him on day one and being awe-struck in the company of Stan Cullis while Billy Wright also showed his face.
Woodfield turned pro at 17 and was still in his teens when Central League football gave way to First Division combat.
Cullis handed out no fewer than six debuts in the second half of the troubling 1961-62 Molineux campaign and the Leamington-born centre-half outlasted all the other five in terms of time.
Another photo of Dave at Molineux in his match-day garb.
Debut day was a 1-1 Easter Monday home draw against Chelsea in the penultimate fixture and he stayed in for the following weekend’s defeat at Sheffield Wednesday and the 8-1 humiliation of Manchester City that kicked off the next season on an upward trajectory after the unhappy 18th-place finish in the spring. The sentence could really have been shortened and simplified to ‘he stayed in’.
Woodfield amassed 35 senior games in each of the 1962-63 and 1963-64 campaigns, effectively taking over from 1960 Cup Final-winning captain and Footballer of the Year Bill Slater. That was some act to follow.
Wolves were a club in decline, though, and a final placing of 16th in Cullis’s last full season hinted at trouble ahead. Sure enough, the other side of an early-summer trip to the Caribbean, a 3-0 home defeat against a Chelsea side with whom they had been travelling, staying and competing in the West Indies had the manager clutching desperately for solutions.
Out went Woodfield for the midweek trip to Leicester (also lost, with three goals conceded) as Ron Flowers was used in the no 5 position for the first of nearly 20 times that season, often alongside George Miller. And when the younger man was recalled for a home game against Manchester United in mid-October, it was as an emergency centre-forward – by coincidence the same role that long-serving defenders Eddie Stuart and George Showell had briefly been switched to in the 1950s.
The experiment didn’t last and there was another substantial absence from the side en route for the relegation that Cullis’s successor, Andy Beattie, couldn’t fend off.
But it was during the two years of Second Division exile that followed that Woodfield laid down a stronger claim to a regular place by impressing Beattie’s replacement, Ronnie Allen.
We have written before about how the ruggedness he was associated with surfaced when he ‘cleaned out’ Mike Summerbee in August, 1965 and became the first Wolves player to be sent off in a home game for nearly 30 years. It was as pleasing as it was surprising when the Manchester City forward, having gingerly picked himself up from the front rows of the Molineux Street Stand, subsequently spoke up for him and helped him avoid a suspension.
Woodfield wasn’t a man to be messed with. A look in the nostalgia books reveals any number of photos of him clad in short sleeves, even for matches on winter days and nights. Furthermore, his fitness levels were legendary.
Sleeves rolled up for the mid-winter visit of FA Cup holders Everton on fourth-round day in 1967.
Former team-mates such as his long-time central defensive partner, John Holsgrove, and Dave Wagstaffe talked of him walking or running to and from training rather than the soft option of jumping in the car. It would have been a handy ‘loosener’ when home was in Fordhouses but we perhaps shouldn’t assume the practice ceased after Gary arrived in 1964 and the family moved to Codsall. Didn’t we once hear, too, that he was fuelled for this voluntary ‘overtime’ by consuming a pint of milk bought from a shop near the ground?
Woodfield remained a virtual ever-present after the return to Division One, even refusing to miss games after breaking his nose at Ipswich on the first day of 1968-69. An ankle injury suffered at Manchester United in the early weeks of Bill McGarry’s reign was a more serious setback, though, especially as Frank Munro and the emerging John McAlle had chances in the meantime to show what they could do.
The 20 first-team games the older campaigner played in 1969-70 added up to the last hurrah; his final run as something like a regular at that level. He kicked off with a few outings as an emergency centre-forward and the fact his 276 Wolves matches were adorned by 15 goals – two-thirds of them in the two seasons Wolves had out of the top flight – show he had a certain instinct at the other end of the field as well.
The parting of the ways came in 1971 when a £30,000 deal took him to Second Division Watford – by coincidence one of McGarry’s former clubs. And the two would link up again more than once.
“I know people talk about Elton John having been at Dad’s testimonial game at Molineux in 1974 but I had already met him and (Luton director) Eric Morecambe in the directors’ box at Watford,” Gary added.
“Brian Clough and Peter Taylor also took Nottingham Forest to Qatar when I spent a year out there with him, so I was introduced to them as well. ”
Woodfield Snr moved into coaching at Vicarage Road when injuries restricted his playing time and had the good fortune to time his delayed testimonial match for the spring Wolves supporters were still in party mood after the first League Cup final triumph.
Woodfield (right) with West Midlander Pat Wright in their time together in the Middle East.
The beneficiary went in the middle of the decade with McGarry to Saudi Arabia, then followed the manager to Newcastle when opportunity knocked closer to home. The subsequent experience of running a pub in Newmarket for three years was miserable enough for the assistant to want to pack his bags and travel again.
He worked under former Wolves team-mate Frank Wignall in Qatar and had three seasons in Saudi during the era of Jimmy Hill influence there, his stay being extended from two years because of the delayed staging of the Gulf Games. Woodfield eventually worked alongside Bobby Houghton at the tournament following Ronnie Allen’s brief spell in the kingdom.
And so life in the sun rolled on. He evidently visited Brazil and Japan as well and described South Korea to Gary as the best country in which he had spent time.
There was a flying visit home in the second half of the 1990s following the birth of a grandchild and Christmas cards were apparently sent with more frequency after that.
“I have a half brother, Jason, who lives in Coventry and who has a different mother,” the older sibling added. “I’m sure we both wish we knew more about his life in all these locations. We are aware he did football coaching in Malaysia, for example, and combined that with teaching English in schools.
“But I’m not sure he worked for much more than free board and accommodation at times. He just seemed to enjoy the lifestyle in hotter countries, getting involved in coaching and teaching.
“He couldn’t let things go when he returned home either. He had to be involved in sport and fitness because they were his loves.
Woodfield in 2016 in the ‘big hair years’ on his first visit back to Molineux in several decades.
“He coached girls’ and boys’ teams back here near Cambridge, where we live, and even became a scorer in local cricket. And, at the gym, he was a legend!
“He spent three hours a day there, one and a half hours of it on a cycle programme. Nobody could keep up with him on that.”
Wolves, happily, invited a family delegation, including Gary and his Uncle Paul, to the game against Brighton on May 10. The Match of the Day cameras picked out John Richards standing with them during the minute’s applause for David and Peter McParland shortly before kick-off – a role the former striker then repeated at the visit of Brentford on Sunday when accompanying members of Gary Pierce’s family at their own time of high emotion.
Over on the edge of The Fens, the locals will be raising a glass tomorrow to Dave Woodfield at the Five Bells pub in the village of Burwell, ten miles north-east of Cambridge. From a distance, we will do the same and remember someone for whom the tag ‘free spirit’ is not enough. He WAS a Wanderer in every sense of the word.
Our thanks in the compiling of this article go to Charles Bamforth, John Lalley and Clive Corbett.