Jimmy was going to treat me, for all my boyish belief that I could play the game, as a work in progress and one that in his mind could never be finished because there was always something new to learn, some fresh adjustment to make.
His voice was untouched by all the years he had spent away from his native Rhondda Valley as a tough half back for West Bromwich Albion and Wales, and then as an army instructor whose ability to draw the attention of a group of soldiers in a wartime camp in Naples persuaded Matt Busby that he would make a most valuable number two. For me this voice would always have an hypnotic effect.
Also, Jimmy was sometimes going to be the most demanding companion for a young footballer who from time to time might agonise over the choice between an early bedtime and maybe a cup of cocoa, or going out into the drinking culture and nightlife that in those days seemed to raise hardly an eyebrow in the hierarchy of even the biggest clubs. He would spare no rage if one of his protégés surrendered the ball too easily in the tackle, or passed it stupidly, but he could also get upset if you turned him down when he invited you for a drink in a pub after special training on Sunday morning, or in his hotel room or a bar on an away trip. Always the conversation would be football, but you couldn’t be so sure about the type or the quality of the drink. Jimmy liked a pint of bitter, but he was also partial to sherry and, most disconcertingly if you didn’t have a sweet tooth, the Portuguese wine Mateus Rosé.
My exposure to this pitfall waiting for anyone who was picked out by Jimmy as worthy of his special attention would only emerge some time later. One of the reasons was that I was still short of my sixteenth birthday. The other was that at the time when he first met me at the station his entire football universe seemed to be filled by Big Duncan – Duncan Edwards. On that journey, Jimmy had said with shining eyes, ‘Bobby, I’ve got a player you will find hard to believe, he is so good. He has everything. He is tall and powerful, but he also has a wonderful touch. Right foot, left foot, it doesn’t matter. I’m going to make him such a player. Just look at him – and then remember I haven’t knocked the rough edges off him yet.’ I had bitten my tongue on the first thought that came into my head, which was, ‘Well, nobody can be that good.’
Instead of challenging Jimmy’s assessment I had thought it would be wise to try to change the subject, however difficult it might prove. I asked him about Old Trafford, where it was in the city and how far it was from my digs. The question brought on another burst of enthusiasm. ‘It’s in Trafford Park, and you’re going to love playing there,’ he said.
Though I had passed quite close to the ground on the day that I had had the Schoolboys trial a few miles across the city at Maine Road, Jimmy’s reference to Trafford Park was reassuring after the shock of first seeing my new surroundings, the big, dirty, alien city. ‘Trafford Park’ had a nice comforting ring, a suggestion of open spaces and clean air, a new Hirst Park. Later, I would boast in many corners of the world about the power and the energy of Europe’s largest industrial estate, but at that moment I preferred a vision of trees and grass and a little bit of tranquillity. ‘Thank goodness for that,’ I thought. ‘It can’t be so bad.’
The big Victorian house where Jimmy had left me promised roomy accommodation, but I quickly discovered there were plenty of demands on its space, from salesmen passing through as they sold their products to Trafford Park – and from half the team who would soon be known throughout football as the Busby Babes.
One by one my new club-mates introduced themselves, the great Duncan, Jackie Blanchflower, Mark Jones, Tommy Taylor, David Pegg, ‘Billy’ Whelan, Alan Rhodes – a full back on the youth team – and two goalkeepers, Gordon Clayton and Tony Hawksworth. With the introductions came an astounding discovery – that the new kid, so wide-eyed when he arrived in this strange and intimidating world, had automatic membership of the gang. If they went to the pictures, he could go too. If they went for a walk, he could join them. All our time would be spent together, and this extended to the hours of sleep. At Birch Avenue we slept two-to-a-bed, which in those days, for a working-class lad like me, was maybe the least of the surprises of my new life. My bed-mate was Alan Rhodes. He would not play for the first team, but at that time he shared all our hopes.
In those first days it seemed that I had, after all, been given access to my idea of paradise. I had the friendship of great young footballers who were ready to accept me and so clearly shared my passion to play the game that had always been an inspiration. The days stretched ahead so excitingly that, some years later, I could only nod in agreement with the football correspondent of The Times, Geoffrey Green, a great character who wore a long leather coat that was reputed to have once been the property of a colonel of the KGB. (There are several versions of how it came into Geoffrey’s possession on a long night in Moscow, but perhaps I should just say that the ones I’ve heard all suggest a man with a tremendous appetite for life.) He said to me, ‘Bobby, when you are doing something you love in the company of people you love, well, every day is Christmas Day.’
Soon enough, though, I learned there were complications in the life of even the most starry-eyed of young footballers. Mine came from my mother’s insistence that I must have something to fall back on. It would not be good enough for me to spin out a year or so as a groundstaff boy before I could sign professional and join my new friends as round-the-clock footballers. I had to continue my education even as I tried to learn the game.
My mother had talked with United and I was told that I had been enrolled in Stretford Grammar School, which was next to Old Trafford cricket ground and, like the football stadium, just a short walk from my digs. This was convenient enough, but right from the start I could see the plan wasn’t feasible. The class work I was given was completely different from that at Bedlington and I struggled to keep up. It didn’t help that I yearned to be with the United lads, living all of every day in football. Looking back, I see that I was still very much a boy who just wanted to play the game and for whom all else was secondary. I lasted three weeks at Stretford Grammar.
The early breaking point came after a football lesson in Longford Park, where the school played its games and where I used to go on Sunday mornings with the lads to watch the local teams. It was the most enjoyable, and important lesson, I would have at the school. They hadn’t seen me play before, and maybe because I was so pleased to be out of the classroom I played with even more than my usual enjoyment. I scored eight or nine goals.
The games master came to me as I was changing and said, ‘You’re in the school team from now on.’ I asked him when we would be playing and was shocked when he said Saturday mornings. I told him I was sorry but I couldn’t do it. I hadn’t come to Manchester to play for Stretford Grammar School; I played for Manchester United on Saturday mornings. ‘Well, you can’t any more,’ he snapped. ‘Your first duty is to your school. You’re in the team for the rest of the year.’ I was terribly dejected. As I fastened the knot in my school tie, I had probably never felt more depressed.
I didn’t speak to Jimmy Murphy or anyone at the club. Instead, I made a phone call to Mum. I imagine it is what most fifteen-year-olds who believe their world has just come crashing down would do. I just said to her, ‘I have a problem.’ She must have heard the desperation in my voice because when I had explained what the games master had said, she asked me, ‘What do you want to do?’ I told her that in my perfect world I would do what I came down to Manchester to do, and only that. I would leave school and play football. There was a short pause and then she said, ‘Yes, OK, Bobby, if that’s what you want.’ I couldn’t remember ever being so happy. A great weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I told the headmaster of the family decision, that if I couldn’t play for United at the weekend I might as well have stayed up in the North East. He nodded and said, ‘I quite understand,’ – and as he did so I got the impression that somebody had told him that, while I was unlikely to become a professor of science or a captain of industry, I was capable of scoring eig
ht goals without any great strain.
Now my life would be without any distraction from football; it would all be wonderfully straightforward. I would spend my days at the football ground, cleaning the terraces, the dressing rooms, the boots, breathing in the atmosphere, and in just over a year I would be a fully fledged professional. I said to my mother, ‘What could be better?’ – and of course she told me. She didn’t like the idea of my cleaning toilets and terraces. It wasn’t her idea of preparation for a working life if the football went wrong. She had accepted the need for me to play football seriously, and for the club I had agreed to join, but that was the extent of her concession. There had to be a compromise, she said, and she would talk to the club.
The result was that within a few days I was clocking on at Switchgear and Cowans, an electrical firm a few miles from the digs. The idea, at least in theory, was that I would train as an electrical engineer. There would not be the bonus of the free passes that I would have received as a cub reporter for the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, but my feeling was that I would try to keep everybody happy for a year, then get on with the real business of my life.
In practice the job meant that I would spend most of my days filing off the rough edges which are left when hot metal is cut. I was put in the charge of a foreman named Bert Jones, who was one of the contacts of United who helped young players whose parents demanded that they learn at least the rudiments of a trade. Bert understood the reality of my situation. He allowed me to clock off an hour early on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I trained at The Cliff ground in Salford, and if United had an away youth team match he would give me the time to travel. What he or anyone else could not do was persuade me that I wasn’t wasting time. So much of it seemed to be spent on buses travelling to the factory in Broadheath, near Altrincham, and then in the opposite direction to Salford. The bus ride to Broadheath took forty-five minutes, with stops every two hundred yards or so, and it took nearly as long to get to The Cliff.
One of my problems was that I didn’t have a watch, which several times meant that I clocked on late at the factory. When this happened your wages were docked, which seemed to me harsh on someone who was earning only £2 a week. The problem was that in the dark mornings I just couldn’t guess the time and on one occasion I woke up Alan Rhodes to ask him. He was not pleased.
For a while the only solution was to get out of bed when I first woke up, walk down the corridor to the communal bathroom, stand on the toilet and look out of the window. From there I could just see the blue clock on Stretford Town Hall. It is still there and I always have a chuckle when I pass it. Sometimes it would be as early as half past two. Then I would go back to bed and hope that I didn’t oversleep. More often than not there was no danger of that as I lay awake and thought about the future, and anticipated the day when I would be released from the rickety old factory building.
It came, on cue, on my seventeenth birthday in October 1954: Bert Jones thought he was making a news announcement when he said, ‘I’ve got something important to tell you, Bobby. Tomorrow you’re going to be signed by Manchester United.’ Of course, I already knew, but Bert had read it in a newspaper and I didn’t want to spoil his moment. ‘You don’t have to come in tomorrow,’ he added. When he said that, I couldn’t help blurting out, ‘Oh boy!’, but then I was quick to thank him for the way he had looked after me; he knew my dreams had nothing to do with being an electrical engineer and I think he understood my impatience.
When I left the factory in Atlantic Street for the last time I did it with the lightest of steps, but it would be wrong to say that the time I spent there was entirely wasted. It was not where I wanted to be, but Bert and the lads I worked with had always been kind and they also taught me something about real life, about how, if you are not lucky enough to be doing something you love, you cope with the tedium of life in a factory. You try to do it, they seemed to me to be saying, with as much humour as you can and always with a little time for your work-mates.
Later, when Matt Busby talked of the duty of professional footballers to provide a little spark, a little colour, for the men and women who come to Old Trafford at the end of a working week, I thought of those factory days. Busby said the people didn’t want more of the humdrum grind of their working lives. They wanted something to carry them through the drab days of winter. They wanted excitement, and it was a professional footballer’s duty to always produce as much of that as he possibly could.
I also learned a little about trade unions, and the need for them when management wanted to impose new conditions unfairly, on their own terms. There would be echoes of that when I came to know Cliff Lloyd, the secretary of the Professional Footballers’ Association, who worked so hard and brilliantly to lift the maximum wage limit on players as gifted as my old hero Stanley Matthews. On several occasions there had been talk of strikes at the factory, and I listened to the fierce debates at the union meetings. That made me think of my father and the miners back home, and when one of the lads spoke up with anger and passion in his voice I felt like giving him a cheer. It also reminded me of how fortunate I was to have the chance of a working life beyond the boundaries of any factory or shipyard or mine.
Soon enough, that feeling would be all the more intense when my football education became full time, when I travelled across the country and abroad and the start of my working shift was signalled by the referee’s first whistle. Then life was filled to the brim with pleasure – and not least in Switzerland, where United played in an annual youth tournament. There, in Zurich, I stood outside a shop window for a long, long time, trying to decide on the present I would buy myself to celebrate my new status. Then, proudly, I walked inside to buy my first watch.
5
LEARNING TO BE A PROFESSIONAL
ON ONE OF the higher slopes, beneath the peak occupied by Duncan Edwards, I found Eddie Colman. He was a boy/man whose every stride and shimmy announced self-belief – but it was also clear to me that he would never be in danger of running away with himself.
He welcomed me so warmly into his family – in Archie Street in Salford, a road which would become the model for Coronation Street – that the breaking up of the Birch Avenue football gang after a year was quickly made to seem like just another milestone in days that were now beginning to race by at a sometimes breathtaking pace.
I was moved to this smaller house in Gorse Hill, which also had Old Trafford in sight, when the club decided that the smooth working of the former digs had been irreparably damaged. The problem was that the owner of the Birch Avenue house, Albert Watson, had been surprised and alarmed when his wife walked into their bedroom. He was supposed to be taking a siesta, and Mrs Watson was not pleased to see that he had been joined by one of the maids.
However, any sense of dislocation I might have felt, when the fall-out from the incident persuaded United that their boys should be moved on, was soon dissipated by the hospitality of Eddie Colman’s family, and also that of the parents of another youth team colleague, Wilf McGuinness.
Eddie would always ask me to spend Christmas Eve at Archie Street, which was wonderful, but quite hazardous once I had made the reserve team and we both had to play on Christmas Day, especially as the kick off was 11 a.m. We protested that we had to go to bed early, but it wasn’t so easy when Eddie’s Uncle Billy, who was a fine singer, arrived in full voice. Christmas, we argued weakly, could not be celebrated by dedicated young professionals, but it was very hard to avoid that drinking culture which was so much a part of the life of many professionals – and even of my mentor Jimmy Murphy. ‘You can’t go to bed,’ the Colmans cried. ‘Uncle Billy wants to sing for you – and he’s the best singer in the world.’ To fuel the celebrations, at short intervals someone went to the off-licence on the corner of the street, with a white enamel bucket to be filled with beer.
Eddie’s grandfather, who had a bushy moustache, was also a short man. He had served in the First World War in one of the bantam battalions, formed by men who stood
less than five feet, and at a certain point in the evening he would tell of the day he marched past Lord Kitchener as he took the salute outside Manchester Town Hall. ‘I swear,’ he said, ‘that I heard him turn to the honour party and say, “Well, gentlemen, bigger men I may have seen, but smarter men, never.”’ Whenever I saw him I asked him about that famous day.
Eddie’s first role in my career was not supposed to be such a benevolent one. He had been told by Murphy to rough me up in my first practice match. Eddie was very flamboyant, even cocky, at our first meeting and he said to me, ‘Jimmy Murphy’s told me about you.’ After the practice, he said, ‘He told me to give you a kick or two and I tried my best, but I couldn’t get close enough.’ It was his quick and generous way of telling me I had been accepted, and in the following days he made it clear that he was my friend. He seemed especially concerned that I might get lonely in the new digs and, like Wilf McGuinness, he was eager for me to share in the family life that was so important to him.
Beyond friendship, though, on my side there was also pure admiration. I loved the swaggering way he played. It was especially thrilling to see him perform his ‘drag-back’, when he completely destroyed his marker with a dummy and then went off in an entirely different direction. I had never seen the move before and I shook my head and said, ‘Boy, imagine being able to do that.’ The crowd loved his confidence and they seemed to associate with him naturally. He wasn’t a great star, he was the cheeky-faced, mischievous boy from next door, but of course there was the great bonus that he could also play like an angel.
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 6