I was devastated when he died. I missed him most sharply on Saturday evenings, the time when I used to go to his bedroom with the Newcastle Evening Chronicle sports pink edition and read him the scores and the reports, starting with Newcastle United and the performance of ‘Wor Jackie’. Tanner’s sight was failing, but his vision of the game seemed to be as acute as ever. He wanted to know all the details of the important matches. Inevitably some of his last words to me, which I will never forget, were about never letting yourself down just because you weren’t prepared to take the extra stride, make that last vital effort to be at least as good as the gifts you had received.
He need not have worried about that as he slipped away. Sometimes on a Sunday I played non-stop for as long as six or seven hours at the nearby Hirst Park. Jack and I would go there hoping for a game and invariably we found one. Lads would come and play for several hours, then go back home for their dinner. Sometimes they would drift back and play again, often, in the case of the older lads, the worse for their time in a pub.
I never tired of kicking the ball and most days I did it until it went dark – and even then we would play under streetlights until we were exhausted or a policeman arrived threatening prosecution. It was the purest pleasure and often I might be the only one left. That was one of the great beauties of football. You could practise on your own. In the end you didn’t need anyone to help you polish your skills. You just needed to get hold of a ball, although that wasn’t always the easiest of chores. Footballs, like square meals, were not always so readily available. Often you had to go into the street to find someone who had a ball and was willing to come down to the park and start a game. Sometimes I would go into the school field in a gale and practise swinging in corners. I did it with the inside and the outside of my foot and always tried to put some spin on the ball. I never juggled the ball, I had no time for that, I just wanted to improve my game in the most practical way.
Getting hold of a ball was one of twin priorities – that and satisfying the hunger that so often growled in your stomach. Football knowledge was, for me, the one commodity that overflowed, and I never wanted for advice. On the rare occasions when he was slow to offer, I bombarded Tanner with questions. After he died, my uncles faced the same fate when they came home for what they might have hoped was a few weeks’ break from the game.
My uncles were the constant, walking, running evidence that, if I followed Tanner’s advice, I too could escape the pits and the shipyards. I was proud of my father, his toughness and tremendous work ethic and his lack of self-pity, but he did convey to me, without ever saying it, the benefits of the world my Uncle George first showed me when he took me to Chesterfield to stay while he and his team-mates prepared for a new season.
At the pithead in Ashington I saw the relief of the miners when one day’s ordeal was over. At Chesterfield I saw a different kind of life and if, even at my age, I could see there were tensions in the fight for first-team places – and often heard language that would have drained the blood from the face of my old headmaster – there was also a lot of laughter along with the thud of the ball and the cries for a pass or for someone to make a tackle. My annual visits to Chesterfield were a sort of pre-university course in the game which so besotted me. They also provided the signposts to that other life where football was not the weekend escape but, and this always seemed such an unbelievable gift, the centre of your existence.
The life that I would be leaving behind, no one needed to tell me, was rich and warm in so many ways. But no matter how many years passed I would never forget the trials imposed on those who had no way of replacing their existence with something easier, something in which the simple business of putting food on the table – when you had, as in my family’s case, one miner’s wage and four sons to keep – was not a daily challenge to both nerve and ingenuity.
On Beatrice Street, where we had a house with four bedrooms – grand by mining standards as my parents graduated through smaller, company rented properties with the births of Jack, me, Gordon and Tommy – there was a form of workers’ co-operative. Pigs were reared communally and vegetables were grown on the allotments. When a pig was killed it was a kind of fête. I still remember keenly my disappointment when it was first explained to me that the killing of a pig did not mean an instant feast of bacon and ham and pork. The animal had to be cut in pieces and salted and hung for weeks before a careful distribution among the families.
Life could be as hard as nails. I thought this was particularly so whenever our cat had kittens. I was told it would be too expensive to keep them. Usually Tanner would kill them. Once, he showed me how to do it. It involved two buckets, one filled with water, and then the other would go in on top, but I could barely look and there was no question that I would ever do it.
One of the abiding memories is of the hunger, but then I thought it was natural to have that feeling. There were games we played against private schools, when a warm drink and food were provided afterwards, but this represented extraordinary luxury, a rare treat that you accepted as no more than that, and certainly not as a pattern for gracious living. It was much more natural to dream of our lazy whippet rousing itself to catch a rabbit and the ensuing paradise created by the cooking smells back home in the family kitchen.
Poaching was illegal but everyone ignored the law. Often it was a choice between doing that and having nothing to eat. My Uncle Buck was one of the Milburns who didn’t become a professional footballer, but he did achieve a kind of stardom. He was a top poacher, so legendary that some locals said that he used dynamite. I had this wonderful image of a river exploding with beautiful salmon. Possibly the claim was just a piece of neighbourhood folklore, but it could have been true because, apart from being known as a dynamite man, Buck also had a reputation for being, in local idiom, a ‘cramper’, which was another way of saying he was capable of more or less anything that came into his mind.
Whenever I think of Uncle Buck it strengthens my sense that rarely did a boy have such a cast of remarkable relatives. On my mother’s side they played football and sprinted and drew allegations of blowing up salmon; on my father’s, two of them, Uncle Dave and Uncle Tommy, managed to create a scene that would surely have been seized upon by the scriptwriters of Last of the Summer Wine.
Tommy was a kind and gentle man. He bought me my first pair of football boots, Playfair Pigskins, the best you could get, I always believed fondly. He took me to the shop to get them and I’ll never forget putting my feet into the boots and thinking, ‘This has got to be the best day of my life.’
Uncle Dave had a little boat moored on Wansbeck River. He was a character who I once heard described as a knave, which I thought was putting it a little strongly because as far as I was aware he never did anything illegal. However, he had a certain talent for getting into scrapes and on a day of high family drama he entangled his brother Tommy and me.
We met in the street one Saturday morning when Tommy was dressed for a wedding. His hair was slicked down and he wore his best clothes, including a pair of baggy trousers which were fashionable at the time. Dave said to Tommy, ‘I’m just going to throw out a few lines, why don’t you join us?’ Tommy replied, ‘We can’t, man. Can’t you see I’m dressed for the wedding?’ Dave was unimpressed by the importance of the ceremony, saying, ‘You’ll be fine, boys, I’m not going out to sea – we’ll just put out the lines at the mouth of the river.’ Tommy thought about it for a little while, then shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Aye, all right.’
Unfortunately, the boat became grounded in the mouth of the river and Dave said we would have to wait for the tide to lift us off the sand. Tommy was upset, pointing out that he was going to be late for the wedding. Dave assured him that we would be off soon enough but Tommy was not placated. ‘We can’t wait for ever until the tide comes in, man, I’m never going to get there in time.’
Dave was impatient with his brother now, saying, ‘For heaven’s sake, Tommy lad, the water is only shallow
, three or four feet deep, I’ll carry you to the bank.’ He told me to wait in the boat, he would be back in a few minutes. However, almost as soon as he started wading into the water with Tommy’s arms around his neck, the boat started drifting off the sand. I cried out to Dave and he promptly made it quite clear where his priorities lay. He dumped Tommy into the water in his haste to save the boat, and possibly me.
I loved the sea and the rivers and especially those trips down to Newbiggin to the promenade and the dunes, where the wind could be so wild and I could sit for hours on the rocks looking at the changing sky. I cannot argue with Jack’s recollection that he was much more of an outdoors man, but I would challenge his memory that I was always happiest in the house near my mother when I wasn’t playing football. Maybe Jack prefers to remember it so because, like most older brothers, he wasn’t always thrilled to have ‘Our Kid’ tagging along, getting caught in hedges and other traps, diverting him from the primary quest for rabbits or birds’ nests.
My father wasn’t a football man, which was probably just as well considering the weight of my mother’s attachment to the game through her own family. He had other pastimes: pigeons, ducks, geese and rabbits, and, most valuably for the family income, a little horse. He used to take it down to the seashore to collect coal. Some of the coal came from ships which, when hit by heavy weather after putting out from Blyth, shed some of their cargo. I used to say to my dad, ‘Well, you’re never going to get that happening on a regular basis.’ I thought about it a lot and it concerned me, but my father explained that the seam he worked on went right under the sea and after the shot-firing inevitably some of it would float to the surface and come in with the tide. My father would glean the coal and sell it cheaply to the pensioners.
As the family expanded we moved from Hawthorne Road to Chestnut Avenue and then to Beatrice Street, all mining company houses, all dependent on a man’s health holding sufficiently for him to go underground for the coal. Another concession was that the company would dump coal outside your house, a benefit we most appreciated in the terrible winter of ’46, when the snow piled so heavily against the doors and the windows. The coal would be loose, and there was a lad down the street called Walter who would shovel it into each of the ‘coal holes’. If anyone tried to muscle in on the job, Walter would fight hard for his ‘pitch’ – sometimes to the point of fisticuffs.
In that way Walter summed up the toughness of the life we all faced. Whatever you got, even if it was only subsistence, you had to work for it, and then defend that right to work so hard.
The men went about their jobs out of need and also pride, and women like my mother were obsessed with the idea that their children do well at school so that they might have more of a chance of gaining something better, something easier in their lives than that which faced them and their menfolk every day. Such pressures no doubt brought strains on marriages, including that of my parents. However, they stuck it out, surviving their difficulties as so many couples did in those days, and if there were times later in my life when I became – as it has sometimes been, for me at least, painfully documented – estranged from some of my family, there has never been a day when I haven’t been proud of my roots and deeply appreciative of the support I received when I was a boy.
The pangs of hunger were never accompanied by the impoverishment of not being surrounded by people who cared, passionately, about your wellbeing and, if Jack and I have had our differences, some of them expressed, much to my regret, in public, I am pleased that we have found ways of working them out. It would be tragic, otherwise, because rarely have brothers had such privileges to share, most notably when we played alongside each other on the day that England won the World Cup. As boys we had good times together and also, like most siblings, those when we used to fight. Sometimes we would agree to carry each other when we walked long in the fields; I would support him for a hundred yards, then he would take me for twenty or so before throwing me off. It was, I supposed, the right of the elder brother.
His greatest pleasure was fishing and sometimes you could see his face cloud when he was told to take charge of his kid brother for a few hours. Occasionally there was a flashpoint. Once I watched him play for his team at the Ashington Colliery Welfare football ground. He played well in defence before giving away a daft goal. Later, when he came into the house, I said, ‘That was a bloody stupid thing to do.’ He hit me hard enough for me to remember that, with Jack, criticism, constructive or otherwise, had to be carefully timed. I knew from that moment that when he was fuming with frustration was not a good time to offer candid opinions.
In our different ways – and some of them are undoubtedly extremely different – both of us have reason to be proud and grateful for our inheritance. From our mother we received the benefit of a brilliant football gene pool – and her passionate insistence that neither of us neglected any talent we had been given. From our father I like to think we learned to be steadfast in what we did, and proud of it.
Many years after I left the North East I discovered fresh evidence that the Milburn football blood had indeed been generously distributed. It was when I was staying for a night with my youngest brother Tommy, who had never been involved seriously in football. He worked in mine safety and lived in a flat above the place where they kept the fire engines. He told me that he and his colleagues were obliged to keep fit for the job and the most agreeable way of doing this, they had decided, was to play two games of football every week. This gave them the required three hours of physical exercise.
Tommy said they were having a match the following day and it would be great if I could play for his team. I could see how much he wanted me to, but I had to point out that I couldn’t because it would go against my contract with Manchester United. I told him, ‘Tommy, they’d go mad if I got injured in such a game. I would love to play but I just can’t. But I’d like to come to watch.’
Tommy was fantastic. I would never have known what a fine natural player he was if I hadn’t stayed with him that night. Everything he did was easy: passing, controlling the play, reading defence and attack. He had great balance and natural strength and he struck the ball so comfortably. After the game I said to him, ‘Tommy, you have lovely skills, why didn’t you ever try to play?’ He said, ‘Well, Bobby, you know, trying to follow you and Jack, it would have been a bit much.’
The truth is that if Jack and I were our mother’s boys in our ambition, Tommy was his father’s. He was more interested in whippets and greyhounds than football and fame. His vocation was to scramble the fire engines and go to fight fires in any of the collieries in his region. I think of him – and my father – whenever I see a news flash of a mining disaster anywhere in the world. I am grateful that when he had a heart attack recently – while playing snooker in Rotherham, where he is now based – one of the top specialists in the country was waiting to operate a few miles down the road in Sheffield. Like the former Liverpool football manager Gerard Houllier, Tommy suffered a burst aorta – and was saved by the speed with which he was taken to one of the few men capable of performing the emergency surgery.
Tommy’s current interest is compiling a family tree. He has shown me charts of the ‘clans’, but has also confessed that sooner rather than later he might have to seek professional advice. This is despite some discouragement, such as ‘Tommy, why bother to trace a bunch of sheep stealers.’ Well, I tell him, we are more than that. We have had lives of our own and some us could play a bit of football.
My father’s gift to his sons was energy and courage and a sense of responsibility to all around him that shaped every day of his life before he died in his early seventies. It seemed to well out of his native soil. He was never drawn to football, and was often embarrassed by the attention that came to him because of the success shared by Jack and me, but if you caught him off guard you might just see his chest swell with pride. Sometimes he would say to me, ‘Why didn’t you tackle more, why didn’t you give that bugger a kick?’ but I kn
ew he wasn’t speaking from real knowledge. He had heard people talking. He was saying it just to show interest.
He didn’t know much about football, but he did know how a man should tackle life. He couldn’t be an idler. He couldn’t slack, and as he saw it this was as true whether a man clocked on at Old Trafford or Elland Road or the pithead. Absorbing this truth was something that Jack and I always had in common. It was underlined every time our father came home to Beatrice Street with his scars from the colliery, or brought home some coal after walking with his little horse down at the shore.
2
BEACONS IN MY PAST
THERE ARE DAYS you know you will always keep in the sharpest and warmest of memory, days, it is reasonable to believe, that have contributed significantly to who you are. They stand out like beacons in your past. One of them came to me when for the first time I saw Stanley Matthews performing, in the flesh rather than on some grainy film, skills which pushed back the boundaries of the game I thought I already knew.
One moment he was just another footballer of great reputation in the tangerine shirt of Blackpool. In the next he was utterly separate from any player I had ever seen before. He had taken my breath away, created an aura that I knew, instantly, would never die as long as I ever thought about football.
His movement was both mysterious and thrilling in a unique way and it was a major reason why on at least one issue Jack and I were always united: the importance of earning enough money to go to Newcastle and Sunderland to see the masters of the game.
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 3