Len Duquemin

Spurs old reliable

Leonard Stanley Duquemin, footballer: born Cobo, Guernsey, 17 July 1924; played for Tottenham Hotspur 1946-58; married (one son); died London 20 April 2003.

No one who spent time with Len Duquemin was surprised to discover that the squarely built centre-forward in Tottenham Hotspur's first League Championship- winning team had worked in a monastery before stepping into the hectic world of professional football at White Hart Lane.

The Guernsey-born marksman, a ceaselessly competitive study in perpetual motion on the pitch, was a quiet, gentle, engagingly unassuming fellow away from the action, and it was not difficult to imagine him moving tranquilly among the monks as he tended their garden during the German occupation of the Channel Islands in the Second World War. Indeed, of his two nicknames, "Reliable Len" and "The Duke", the first fitted his character far more neatly, offering due recognition of his unobtrusive but incalculably valuable service to one of the outstanding sides of the era, while the second was no more than a glib abbreviation of his surname.

Duquemin scored 134 goals in 308 senior games for his solitary Football League club and, despite his lack of extravagant natural ability, he was considered a key man by both manager and team-mates as he helped to lift the Second Division title in 1949/50, then the First Division crown in the following campaign.

Arthur Rowe's team won renown for their flowing push-and-run style, which involved slick interchanges of short, accurate passes as they swept from one end of the pitch to the other. It was a fresh, swashbuckling approach which lit up the post-war soccer scene and won lavish plaudits for the ball-playing likes of the inside-forwards Eddie Baily and Les Bennett, the wing-half and skipper Ronnie Burgess, the wingers Les Medley and Sonny Walters, and a full-back named Alf Ramsey, who one day would lead England to World Cup glory.

But there was a need, too, for players who would run ceaselessly when they were not in possession, providing extra passing options for their artistic colleagues; they didn't always get the ball and rarely took the eye, but without them the system would have foundered. One such was the wing-half Billy Nicholson, destined to become the most successful manager in Spurs history, and another was Duquemin, whose honest sweat was an important lubricant to the smooth running of Rowe's captivating machine.

After being recommended to the club by a Guernsey-based fan, "Reliable Len" joined Tottenham as an amateur in January 1946, turning professional nine months later. Quick, strong and immensely effective in the air through standing an inch under six feet, he netted on his senior debut, a 5-1 win at home to Sheffield Wednesday in August 1947, and thereafter retained a regular place. At that point Spurs were a tolerably enterprising but unexceptional second-flight outfit, but they were transformed when Rowe replaced Joe Hulme as manager in 1949, sweeping to their divisional championship in his first season at the helm with the help of 16 Duquemin goals.

The Channel Islander supplied 14 more on the title trail in 1950/51, including the sole strike of a tense springtime encounter with Wednesday at the Lane which clinched the domestic game's top prize. In 1951/52 he continued to prosper as Tottenham exchanged places with the previous year's runners-up, Manchester United, and enjoyed his most prolific personal season in 1952/53, when he registered 24 goals in the League and FA Cup. Duquemin never made it to an FA Cup Final at Wembley, though he went close in both 1948 and 1953, each time scoring in a semi-final only to be beaten by Blackpool.

He never made the international reckoning, either, being kept at bay by such top-quality operators as Tommy Lawton, Stan Mortensen and Nat Lofthouse, though he had the satisfaction of riding out mid-1950s rumours that Bolton's Lofthouse was about to replace him at club level. In fact, when competition did arrive at Tottenham in the shape of York City's David Dunmore in February 1954, he resisted it doggedly, and it was not until 1956, when he was past 30, that finally he was supplanted as first-choice number nine by the future England spearhead Bobby Smith.

By then Spurs had declined into mid-table mediocrity, Rowe had departed due to ill-health and Duquemin was one of the few survivors of the revered title-winning combination. He played his last senior game in March 1957 but remained at the club until 1958, when he entered non-League circles with Bedford Town, then served Hastings United and Romford.

Later he ran a newsagent's shop in Northumberland Park, not far from White Hart Lane, before becoming a pub landlord at the Haunch of Venison in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, until his retirement.

Ivan Ponting