A man of many talents, Colin Veitch was an articulate scholar, musician, actor, playwright and very politically aware. He was a leading activist of the Players' Union's cause at a time when they struggled to survive, the organisation's chairman from 1911 to 1918 and was also nominated to stand for Parliament as a socialist. Married to an actress, he was heavily involved in the Newcastle Playhouse, Newcastle Operatic Society and Clarion Choir, and counted George Bernard Shaw among his close friends.

In an article he wrote in December 1908 for the Athletic News, C. E. Sutcliffe violently attacked the Players' Union's "amazing proposals". They were, he said, "but the outward and visible sign of their inward greed". The Union's resolutions were "contemptible clap-trap"; "immoderate and unreasonable", and to grant them would be "suicide" for football, and would lead back to the days when such a spirit of selfishness was ruining the game and the clubs".

Just why Sutcliffe should have responded in such a way appeared a mystery to many. A few months prior to his outburst he had personally presented his own bonus scheme to the Players' Union Management Committee and although he had subsequently expressed impatience with the Union for not having expressed an opinion on the matter, it had been made clear to him that this was not a condemnation of his ideas - simply that the Union had no appropriate platform, being unrepresented on the FA council, and would wait until its AGM before stating its opinion.

Furthermore, the Union's subsequent opposition to the maximum wage was shared by the FA and a majority of First Division clubs. Thus, in attacking the Union in such sneering and insulting terms, Sutcliffe was behaving, on the face of it, rather oddly.

But Sutcliffe had a clear vision, that of the Football League system as it then stood, sacrosanct and inviolate. The continual arguing, lobbying and pressure by the bigger clubs for wage reform clearly irked him. Talk of a Super-League was both unsettling and distasteful to him. His own club, Burnley, would not feature in such a breakaway; it was too small and vulnerable. At that very moment it was languishing in the lower half of the Second Division and struggling financially. The nationwide craze for roller-skating could only damage clubs like Burnley; it was said that the town had six roller-skating rinks taking over £1000 a week.

Thus the idea of players being free to demand more money for their services must have been genuinely disturbing. Add to the fact that famous club chairmen were helping the new Union and perhaps Sutcliffe's venom can be understood.

Response to his outburst, however, was at first muted. No official Union reply was forthcoming but within days, Colin Veitch, Newcastle captain and a future Union chairman, did take him to task in his Weekly News column - though politely and almost apologetically.

Veitch pointed out the obvious - that the Union was not alone in advocating abolition of the wage limit, that changes to the present system would be welcomed if that was all that could be expected. Indeed, Veitch wondered what exactly the Union could do, "for to have suggested another scheme in its place would surely have placed it [the Union] in an illogical not to say farcical situation".

But Veitch was more concerned to answer Sutcliffe's more serious charge - that professional players could not be trusted, that they were not to be regarded with the respect that professional men might automatically deserve. For this, one senses, was the real issue - the status of professional players and their right to stand as equals alongside administrators, managers, directors, etc. and to have a voice in their own affairs.

Sutcliffe clearly preferred to see the players as they had supposedly been in the 1880s - mercenaries, pirates, racing from club to club grabbing whatever they could. Veitch was adamant that those days had gone: "The type of man in the professional ranks of today is of another stamp altogether to the professional of twenty years ago and you must not saddle the misdeeds of his predecessors upon his shoulders."

The players are joined in brotherhood through the agency of the Players' Union and I am quite at one with him (Sutcliffe) that the Union should take strong measures with any member found guilty of offences detrimental to the true interests of the game and incidentally harmful to the rest of the professionals by the same process.... It is the duty of the present-day professional to vindicate himself in the eyes of everyone, even those whose prejudices prove a formidable barrier to understanding, and the Players' Union can help in the manner suggested.