Toffeeopolis Launches With Broken Dreams: Everton, The War and Goodison’s Lost Generation

Four Evertonians with a passion for the storied history of Everton FC have formed Toffeeopolis. This new imprint, part of the Mount Vernon Publishing Group, has a mission to create great books that celebrate the culture, history and magic of the football club.

The founding members are Gavin Buckland (Everton’s official statistician and author of Money Can’t Buy Us Love: Everton in the 1960s and Boys from the Blue Stuff: Everton’s Rise to 1980’s Glory), James Corbett (founder of deCoubertin Books and the author/editor of The Everton Encyclopedia and Faith of Our Families), Simon Hart (author of Here We Go. Everton in the 1980s: The Players’ Stories) and Rob Sawyer (a regular ToffeeWeb contributor and author of biographies of Harry Catterick and T.G. Jones, amongst others). 

The first output of the collective is Sawyer's: Broken Dreams: Everton, The War and Goodison’s Lost Generation. It tells the poignant story of Everton’s 1938/39 league title win and how the outbreak of war destroyed the ambitions of a team that looked set to dominate English football.

It follows the Toffees’ rollercoaster fortunes in the 1930s before focusing on the glorious 1938/39 season. Names like Joe Mercer, Tommy Lawton, Ted Sagar and T.G. Jones will be familiar to many Evertonians – but Sawyer gives equal prominence to their teammates. These include the mercurial wingman Torry Gillick, the effervescent Alex Stevenson, veteran club captain Jock Thomson, the tireless Stan Bentham and the fearsome full-back Billy Cook. 

The impact of the hiatus in competitive football caused by the war is examined, as are the later lives of the players and club officials, some of whom remained in football, while others faded from the limelight. Sawyer commented: ‘I’m delighted to have covered an incredible decade at Goodison Park, focusing on the great School of Science side of 1938/39 – and what became of the players in the wake of the outbreak of war. My father insisted that this was Everton’s greatest-ever team; my book seeks to explore just how good it was – and how it could have scaled new heights, had world events not intervened.’

Aside from Toffeeopolis, Mount Vernon Publishing publishes outstanding non-fiction books with a focus on sport and the city of Liverpool. It also operates the historic deCoubertin imprint. Broken Dreams is expected to be followed by a title in Gavin Buckland’s acclaimed series which documents and analyses Everton’s fortunes, on and off the pitch, since 1960. 

For more information on Toffeeopolis and details of how to purchase Broken Dreams, visit mountvernonpublishing.com

Toffeeopolis is on Facebook and can be found on Twitter/X as @Toffeebooks

 

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