Based in a place once best known for its railway junction and its former Rolls Royce engineering works, Crewe’s unusually named and unashamedly progressive football club once gave its home town something of which to be proud.

Now, the opposite is true, as the staff and fans of Crewe Alexandra find themselves under the microscope after revelations from their former players Andy Woodward and Steve Walters, who have waived their right to anonymity to speak of the abuse they suffered at the hands of the serial paedophile Barry Bennell while with the club in the 1980s.

When Dario Gradi, an Italy-born former schoolteacher who had made his managerial name at Wimbledon but was still smarting from an ill-starred spell at Crystal Palace, arrived at Gresty Road in June 1983 he found a club in the doldrums. They had finished 91st of 92 and, in the days before automatic relegation for finishing at the bottom of the professional game’s pile, had – not for the first time – been forced to seek re-election to the Football League.

Since then, and over more than three decades, Crewe Alexandra have prospered on their own terms – there were five promotions, including two trips to Wembley, amid a climb to football’s second tier and back again – and Gradi became revered as a footballing alchemist, setting up a steady production line of talented youngsters who went on to bigger and better things.

The transfer fees they reaped along the way, said in 2014 to total at least £32m, were reinvested in rebuilding the ground, growing the academy and developing the club in a cost-effective, sustainable way within a strict wage structure. Attendances crept up and the club formed strong bonds with their fans and the wider community, despite the allure of more glamorous clubs nearby.

Jules Hornbrook, an advertising copywriter and Crewe fan, wrote in 2000 in his book The Gradi Years: “Under his leadership, Crewe Alexandra gained a reputation for playing excellent football and nurturing numerous young stars while surviving in an industry increasingly obsessed with money. Put simply, Gradi has instilled passion and belief in people who, years before, had written the club off.

“These days young players now opt for Crewe ahead of many clubs, and fans know that for every player sold there will be two, maybe three, fresh names emerging from the homegrown ranks.”

At the heart of all this was Crewe’s much admired academy and talent scouting network, even in the hyper‑competitive market for young players in the white heat of football’s north‑west hotbed. As a result, many young players and their families chose Crewe over bigger, wealthier clubs, confidently scanning the glittering list of alumni.

The production line of names include several internationals and many more who have gone on to play at the highest level including David Platt, Dean Ashton, Rob Jones, Geoff Thomas, Craig Hignett, Danny Murphy, Seth Johnson, Robbie Savage and Neil Lennon.

In an era when income flooded into English football as successive TV deals fuelled rampant inflation in wages and transfer fees, managers’ tenures grew ever shorter as owners sought quick fixes and supporters demanded instant results. Gradi and Crewe, meanwhile, were almost alone as standing for what was painted as a purer vision of football’s allure.

His name may not be as well known to casual observers of the national sport as those of Sir Alex Ferguson, Bill Shankly and Jock Stein but among his contemporaries Gradi was spoken of in the same revered terms. Sir Bobby Robson called him “honest, diligent and remarkable”.

His first spell as Crewe manager lasted an almost unheard of 24 years, during which he was handed a 10-year contract with a controversial clause giving him a proportion of transfer fees as a bonus, and spanned 1,244 games.

Dario Gradi was manager of Crewe Alexandra for 26 years and built the club up after taking over in 1983. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA

When Gradi initially stepped down in 2007 to take up a role as technical director, he passed on the role to Steve Holland – now assistant manager to Antonio Conte at Chelsea and Gareth Southgate with England. But he then returned twice more as manager, for a month as caretaker in 2008, and then for two years between 2009 and 2011.

When he stepped down for a final time, Gradi returned to the role of director of football and retained oversight of the academy that made his name. It was in keeping with a club often described as tight-knit or like a family that the man who succeeded him, his assistant Steve Davis, had played under Gradi between 1983 and 1987. One of Davis’s sons, Harry, plays for him at Crewe.

Davis, who retained his job despite relegation to League Two last season, had a very brief stint as player-manager at Northwich Victoria in 2003. On the books there was a player at the tail-end of his own playing career, who felt he could no longer be involved in football given the pressure of the secrets inside his head.

Woodward, whose decision to speak about the horrors he endured at the hands of the Crewe coach Bennell, would have been just beginning his career at Alexandra when Davis played his final game for them.

It is one of many haunting, troubling aspects of the stand made by Woodward and Walters in recent days that the very thing that has come to define Crewe is now so horrifically tainted. Hornbrook said there was a strange atmosphere on Tuesday night during the league game at Gresty Road, where a below-average crowd watched Crewe run out 2-1 winners against Morecambe under stormy skies.

Key to Crewe’s success over Gradi’s three decades was his relationship with John Bowler, the chairman. Bowler, a former marketing director at the pharmaceuticals giant Wellcome and a committed Christian, joined the Crewe board in 1980 and became chairman three years into Gradi’s tenure.

Andy Woodward now and in his time as a Crewe player. He has spoken of the abuse he suffered as a young player at the club. Composite: Chris Thomond for the Guardian/Rex Features

It was Bowler, who brought his business acumen to bear on Crewe and awarded Gradi that unheard of 10-year contract, who told the Guardian’s David Conn in his 2005 book The Beautiful Game that he believed football had a higher purpose. “It can sound a bit Holy Joe, but we believe football has a special place in society,” he said. “It unites people around a common cause and we have a responsibility to use that to benefit a community.”

Gradi was named an MBE in 1998 for services to English football, inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame in 2004 and got the Professional Footballers’ Association merit award the same year. Bowler was also awarded an MBE in 2014 and Crewe have repeatedly won prizes and plaudits for the values they are seen to represent to their fans and the game at large.

Now 79, Bowler cut a rather more diminished, troubled figure when – after several days of silence that had distressed Crewe fans and Woodward himself – he eventually recorded an interview for the BBC’s News at Ten on Tuesday after Walters had become the second Alexandra player to publicly tell his story of abuse at the hands of Bennell.

At the match on Tuesday night, Hornbrook – who had branded the club’s initial refusal to comment on the matter “disgusting” but later welcomed the fact they had now done so – said that Bowler looked “a shaken man”.

The club is a tight-knit family – literally in some senses, with Bowler’s daughter Alison employed as operations director. Whatever their intention, the undoubted impression from the outside has been of a club closing ranks. The unravelling scandal has badly shaken a supporter base who see themselves as part of that family.

The former Crewe player Steve Walters was abused by Barry Bennell while at the club. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Hornbrook said on his blog: “Every other message posted by Alex fans on social media recently seems to include the word disillusioned. That is sad, that so many seem disconnected from the club they love.”

As with the Jimmy Savile scandal, to which the slowly unravelling crisis at Crewe has been compared by Woodward, this has been festering for a long time. Just as the BBC was at the dark heart of Savile’s abuse, its tentacles reached out to his other charitable and media interests.

Bennell’s position at Crewe appears to have given him similar power and opportunity, but as the former England international David White affirmed this week, his sphere of influence appears to have spread throughout the north-west. Bennell was sentenced to nine years in prison in 1998.

While the broad reaction from the so-called “football family” has been warm and supportive, many former players and those connected specifically to Crewe speak vaguely of “rumours” they heard at the time but were unwilling to dwell on, as though unable to interrogate them for fear of what they might have found.

All of which makes the stand taken by Woodward, his fellow Crewe graduate Walters and the former Manchester City player White and others all the more remarkable.

There has been mounting pressure on Gradi, the garlanded and revered architect of Crewe’s academy over so long, to say more about what he knew and when. On Thursday he issued a statement to “express sympathy to the victims of Barry Bennell not only at Crewe Alexandra but at other clubs in the north-west” and said no one at the club was aware of Bennell’s crimes until Bennell was arrested in the US in 1994. Crewe have said they “take any allegation seriously” and that “any form of abuse has no place in football or society”.

But for victims, Crewe fans and the wider public there remain questions to answer.

As Hornbrook contemplated the crisis breaking over a club that for so long has been held up as an example to the rest of football, he added: “As a supporter base, we’re all familiar with the story that is slowly emerging. Many of us questioned from the sidelines what had happened. There was perhaps a reluctance from the club to dig. Now they will have to.”