There’s a counter narrative to that which will never be proven one way or the other. That narrative suggests that Weldon was never serious about moving to Molineux but was getting ever more frustrated with Walsall council who wouldn’t budge on stuff that would have helped with the redevelopment of FP. The threat of moving the club out of the town, it is suggested, was merely leverage in a bid to end a stale mate.
Wheldon or Bonser would be a very tough call.
Didn’t he also want Walsall to groundshare with Birmingham City once he’d taken them over?
Wheldon, for all his faults, was a far better Chairman than the leech, Bonser.
Wheldon took nothing out of the club (unlike you-know-who), put it on a financially sound footing and was responsible for paying out our record transfer fee (remember them?) which stood for many years.
As P.T. says above, Wheldon got p****d off with Walsall Council and tried to get us to ground-share first at the Custard Bowl and then St. Andrew’s. This should never be allowed to detract from the good that he did.
The best Chairman that the club has had, in my lifetime (no, I don’t remember Mr. Fellows! 
) was Bill Harrison.
Agree on both Wheldon and Bill Harrison who unfortunately died when we were ,in my view, on the verge of a really successful team… If you look at things over the long term we have not been well blessed for Chairman. To be fair JB brought us the greatest success over the longest time in my days of watching Walsall . If he had sold the club and land in the early 2000s he would have had an honoured place in our history but the last 15 years have seen his wealth increase as the club’s wealth and position has declined. He will now not be remembered for building the club up after the Ramsden debacle but as a man who allowed it to decline into a club struggling to survive in the League. Very sad.
A reasonable summary. Bonser did oversee our greatest years as a club. We could never have imagined attracting the likes of Merson, Samways, Corica, Junior and others to Walsall. His legacy ought to be a magnificent one, with a statue outside the stadium.
Instead, he will be remembered for one thing only - making his family very wealthy, at the expense of the football club he professed to love. More recent arguments about the pension fund being at arms’ length are disingenuous - he had ample opportunities to reunite the club and the freehold and he chose not to do so, but to follow a path of personal gain instead, leaving the club saddled with an unsustainable rent, which makes competing in even League Two difficult now.
I suspect that people who say that are only old enough to remember the later years of Wheldon’s time. We were in real trouble when he took over. He stabilised us, and had enough money over for some of our best-remembered players, as well as the cup runs.
And me i reckon hes been told he is off next week.
You’re probably right. I think Wheldons last couple of years will always cloud his legacy. But I don’t think anybody could disbelieve it being a frustration with the council. Then it wasn’t just his last couple of years with us it was the year or two afterwards too. When he went to Blues, his puppets were still in charge at our place and one or two things in the lead up to Ramsden flying in smelt a bit/a lot. Blues allegedly needed £100,000 to survive and Walsall pay over £100,000 for their centre half who never kicks a ball for us. Hmmm. Our board sympathetic to the ground share etc etc. I guess the 1985-87 bit shouldn’t undermine the 1972-1984 work. And despite the posturing at the death we owned our own home. It was legally the property of the club and therefore morally the property of all of us.
Unlike how we sat when Bonser left us. We are all but insolvent with only paper assets and a huge albatross of a rent bill holding us back.
So on balance you are probably right.
I’d say so mate certainly came across like he knew what we’d all been through over the years and that brighter days are ahead but not with him doing it,I may be reading it wrong but that’s how it came across to me.
That’s how I read it too. The part where he says:
when asked for his message to the fans, he said: "My message to the fans is, you’ve got a great football club here.
He was talking in the past tense.
But he also says:
“We must treat this 100-year disappointment as a real positive reflection period.”
Which is very much present tense.
There were 2 division 3s in those days North and South. We finished bottom 3 years on the bounce. It was actually impossible to be in a worse position at that time. We relied on the old boys network to vote for us to remain in the league. I think most of them voted for us because it was an easy win for them for the next season.
Looks the bottom two got re-elected every season.
According to that, Gillingham weren’t re-elected in 1937-38.
Ah ok, I only looked at post WW2 seasons
Yeah, as I said I get that. It doesn’t change that this is the lowest we’ve finished, even if that was the lowest possible at the time:
If you are saying Walsall finished 68th,
where are you saying Oldham, winners of division 3 north finished?
where are you saying Accrington Stanley, bottom club of division 3 north, finished?
When there was no automatic relegation from the 4th tier it was done by a process of re-election. Don’t we hold the record for the team re-elected most often?
We do in the days of division 3 north/south.
Hartlepool do for division 4
Same level 
68th at best. You missed that bit. Remember?