It was a terrible dilemma for Nobby, and one compounded when his wife Kay, the sister of Johnny Giles and at difficult times no less feisty than her brother, insisted that the manly thing to do was defy the esteemed manager of Manchester United. That was the agonising decision Nobby made before calling Busby – and hearing the great man’s phone crash back on its cradle when he was told that his player was going to take his chance with England.
Unfortunately, Nobby’s torment did not end there. At half-time in Aberdeen, Alf pointed out to him that Cooke was creating a lot of problems and he was certainly in need of some close attention. This Nobby applied with his usual zeal but again the situation was not as straightforward as it might have seemed. In the turmoil of his decision to reject Busby’s command, he had travelled to Aberdeen without the fluid for his contact lenses, and it was a critical omission. When Nobby thought he had left Cooke in a heap after a fierce tackle, he received a tap on the shoulder from his team-mate Norman Hunter.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Hunter asked. ‘I’m doing what Alf asked,’ said Nobby. ‘I’m attending to Charlie Cooke.’
Hunter’s reply was chilling. ‘No, you’re not, you’ve just flattened Billy Bremner.’
Nobby and the great Scottish midfielder would regularly chuckle over the incident and my friend told the story himself once again when we travelled over the Pennines to Billy’s funeral in Doncaster more than thirty years later. After the game in Aberdeen, Nobby explained the problem to Alf and assured him it would never happen again.
What he could never do, of course, was give anyone, in any situation, a categorical guarantee that he was immune from the possibility of some kind of mishap off the field.
Once he came close to demolishing a hotel room we shared in London. He did it innocently, with the demeanour of a victim of outrageous ill fortune. First, he pulled down a set of curtains while drawing them in the morning to inspect the dawn. Then he bumped into, and knocked down, a radio attached to the wall. I packed my bag as quickly as I could, not such an easy task given the tears of laughter which filled my eyes.
On another occasion they came in a gale when he described the repercussions of a collision he had while driving down Market Street in Manchester. When he bent down to inspect the damage he inadvertently head-butted the other driver. As he told it, once again he was simply trapped by another conspiracy of fate.
Because of this clumsiness that was guaranteed to provoke so much hilarity – the sports writer Hugh McIlvanney once commented, ‘by comparison with Nobby, Inspector Clouseau was blessedly adroit’ – the impact of his efficiency on the field was so often all the greater. It was evident, paradoxically enough, in the brilliance of his timing in tackling and unerring ability to read the flow of a game.
Early in his career he determined these were his greatest strengths and there was no doubt they were the qualities that Alf found so compelling. When Nobby received his call-up to the Under-23 team in Aberdeen, and was so clearly on trial as a potential member of the World Cup squad, he spoke with our Old Trafford colleague Wilf McGuinness who did some work for Alf as a trainer. Nobby asked Wilf to point out to Alf that the greatest momentum in his career had come with his switch to central defence and that it was here he might be of most help to England.
Though sceptical, Wilf said he would speak to the boss. Predictably, the word came back that Alf had his own ideas about how best to utilise Nobby’s virtues. Nobby also had to understand that to win a place at the heart of the defence, rather than become its forward shield, he must surpass both Bobby Moore and the formidable Norman Hunter.
So Nobby played his game of brilliant foraging, of winning tackles and supplying the ball to his forwards at speed and with great accuracy. No one knew better than me the value of such service. Or valued higher the fact that, certainly in my belief, Nobby would not have made it to the England team under any other command than Alf’s. Possibly the same was true of my brother Jack. It was Alf’s genius to see certain players in certain situations where their strengths could be uniquely effective. It was the manager’s great triumph to recognise substance over mere style.
Both Nobby and Jack had come through serious career difficulties, Nobby triumphing over his faulty eyesight and Jack having to battle so hard to convince his Leeds manager Don Revie that he could become one of the great professionals of his age. The result was in that spring of 1965 they came to the England team really wanting to play.
Sometimes on the field their relationship smouldered to the point of an explosion. Jack always remembered the first time he learned of the consequences of failing to impress Nobby with the consistency of your performance. He recalled: ‘Once, when I lost my concentration for a second and made a mistake, all I could see was this little face coming at me from about thirty yards, breathing smoke and fire, and I remember turning away and thinking, “Oh, bloody hell, I’ve upset Nobby Stiles.” ’
No doubt he had but the depth of their respect for each other was never under serious threat and that included the time they squared up to each other quite ludicrously during a training session.
Both of them put in huge performances in the battle against Scotland, denying their opponents any chance of fully exploiting their two-man advantage in the second half. Gordon Banks was particularly taken with the fury of Nobby’s game, which might have been a ninety-minute celebration of the fact that his error of mistaken identity in the Under-23 match had been quickly dismissed by Alf as he admired the intense commitment of his new player.
Banks noted, ‘Nobby came into the game like a tiger. The way he tackled his Manchester United team-mates Denis Law and Pat Crerand made Alf realise here was a player totally committed to the England cause.’
There was indeed an instant rapport between the manager and his new player. Later, Nobby reflected, ‘When I went out in that England shirt with the three lions it was brilliant. And I cannot say enough in favour of Alf Ramsey. I would have died for him. He was such a man of his word. I could not see a single weakness in his approach as a manager. He treated you like an adult. He never hectored or laid down the law – and he was an Englishman through and through. He hated the Scots. I remember just before I made my debut asking Budgie Byrne what was the difference between Alf and Walter Winterbottom.
‘ “The difference is,” said Byrne, “when we’re playing Scotland, Alf will say, ‘Get into those Scotch bastards.’” ’
But then if Alf appealed to Nobby’s most warlike instincts, he also had the ability to make clear the detail of his expectations. Like me, Nobby would soon enough note the difference between the styles of the men who would do most to shape our careers, Matt Busby and Alf Ramsey.
Busby would make his demands, tell you what he wanted to see, and he could be wonderfully inspiring at times, and especially when the team was under most pressure to deliver an outstanding performance. But he didn’t explain any of it in the manner of Alf.
You listened intently to Alf because you knew it would be a big mistake to misinterpret anything he said. When we went to a room in Hendon Hall or some foreign hotel, usually after a light meal of poached eggs on toast, we always left the pre-game talk feeling secure in the knowledge that we had been perfectly prepared. We were insured against unwelcome surprises – and never in doubt about quite what was expected of each of us.
It was a state of mind that I knew, as surely as anything I had in all my life, would be both enlivened and strengthened by the arrival of my brother-in-arms, Nobby, and my other brother Jack.
6. Bond of the Blood
WHEN JACK CAME to the team that spring day, and proceeded to display the qualities that had persuaded Alf to pick him before younger and perhaps more polished contenders, he provoked in me a burst of pride that ran very deeply. It went all the way back to our shared roots, and my first understanding of who I was and from where I came.
Our Kid’s triumph was that of someone I thought I knew so well but who from time to time had made me fe
el that in some ways I didn’t know at all. And down the years until then there had been plenty of evidence that he had felt pretty much the same way.
We had shared everything and at times could agree on hardly anything, at least not beyond the touchline of a football field.
Almost everyone who grew up with us in the North East said that in many ways we were indeed quite separate. Yet here we were, suddenly and at a relatively late age, pitched together again. As boys we had shared so much we had been obliged to share a bed. Now we would be together in the dressing room of the national team.
He had gained a status I had seen him grow into over the years and, despite the view of some hard critics, which at one point included his Leeds United manager Don Revie, that he would never achieve it, I had been increasingly impressed by his determination to make his mark at the highest level.
At Elland Road he had had many rows and scrapes but he had come through all of them, whole and tremendously competitive. For me it was evidence of an extraordinary ability to become strong at points which in someone less resilient might have been permanently broken.
Jack had marched on in his refusal to stop believing in himself, even when he had come to see the point of listening to some people who might have something valuable to say, and his success filled me with something more than straightforward admiration. I have often reflected that maybe it also meant that a certain warmth, respect and, yes, love, would always be retained in a relationship with my brother which might otherwise have suffered potentially irreparable damage.
Perhaps if it hadn’t happened, if Alf had formed another view that for all his battling qualities and strength Jack just wasn’t made for the international game – a view that circulated widely within English football with the news of his selection – the paths of our lives would have drifted increasingly apart.
Already there was considerable tension in our relationship. I had gone my way and he had gone his. But now we were joined together again. We could examine ourselves and each other in the kind of opportunity that may never have presented itself again, had Jack not managed to convince Alf that he had something vital to offer. We might have gone through our lives, and finished up in our old age, quite apart once we had journeyed out beyond the streets and the pitheads of Ashington.
The mission of the team, after all, was to value each other’s strengths and compensate for any weaknesses and in such a challenge maybe brothers are given something of a head start. I feel the gift of this most strongly today when we meet and talk about our lives and our families, and, more frequently now, our aches and pains and sometimes our regrets that the time of our greatest, most thrilling experience in football seemed to pass so quickly.
We also, I think, in our different ways offer our thanks that the divisions which once spilled into the open, and made us appear in the eyes of the world brothers at war rather than the ones who embraced so warmly on the most wonderful sporting day of our lives, have softened down through the passing years. And to the stage where we know that, in the end, we have more to celebrate in each other than set us apart.
There were, to be honest, some points in our lives when such a perspective seemed remote, if not impossible. So often it could be said that we may have been united by our blood but not our natures. This may have been exaggerated to some degree, as is the case so often in lives which are at least to some extent under the gaze of the public, but then again it would be wrong to minimise the differences between us.
It was not true that as a kid I preferred to stay home and clutch my mother’s apron while Jack responded to the various calls of the wild. I loved the outdoors, too, and most particularly in the company of a football, but there was no doubt he was much more extrovert, much less restrained in his behaviour. If he had a thought, a sudden impulse, he acted upon it and he shrugged and laughed if the consequences were not as he had assumed they would be. I was more self-absorbed and I tended to seek the shadows in all but the action and expression that came to me when I played football.
On the football field I was certainly not averse to a little acclaim. I enjoyed being hoisted on to the shoulders of my school team-mates after a particularly good performance and I wanted to shout out my pleasure when Joe Armstrong, the famous scout of Manchester United, said after one trial game that I should see my future at Old Trafford. But then I tended to make football my safest place, one around which I could set comforting boundaries.
Football, for a long while, never provided Jack with such an underpinning. If he played, it was with the same relish that he packed his fishing rod and laid his bait. For him it seemed to be just part of his boisterous life. For me football was the core of it.
When the first degrees of fame brought me notice beyond the security of the pitch, my overwhelming instinct was one of retreat. There was, for example, the occasion infamous in our family when I demurred when our mother Cissie insisted I signed a stranger’s autograph book. The incident made me shrink in embarrassment. My mother was angry with me, couldn’t understand my reticence, and I wanted to hide in the furthest corner. For Jack it would have been no more consequential or disturbing than a gust of wind ruffling his hair as he marched along the sand dunes or a river bank.
Jack always knew who he was and what he wanted at any given moment and, more than anything, that was not to have to conform to other people’s expectations. He was his own, somewhat unruly, boy and he would be the same when he became a man.
His arrival in the England team re-conjured for me so much of our boyhood and not least those days when we travelled to Newcastle to see the beacons of talent, men like Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney and Len Shackleton.
There were days when he would often rebel against his duty to look after his kid brother, and this was especially so when he craved to be free to roam across the land and seascapes he loved so much. These were days when I automatically assumed it was more likely I would receive a clip on an ear than a brotherly hug.
They never included, however, those times when we pooled our earnings from a grocery round and made the pilgrimage to see our football heroes. Then, both of us inhabited a world of unbridled excitement which came to a climax after we lunched on pie and chips and then walked up the hill to St James’ Park.
Before the kick-off, we were filled with the most wonderful anticipation. Then, when the drama was spent, when the great men had done their entrancing work, we filled the homeward journey with our analysis of what we had seen. I remember, particularly, how deeply we scorned the various theories on how best to contain the genius of Matthews.
‘Keep your eye on the ball,’ defenders were warned before each game. ‘Keep your balance, jockey him, keep your patience and do not lunge in. Do not let him lure you into false moves as he shimmies, tauntingly, over the ball.’ So it went and at each new piece of advice we laughed and shook our heads. As far as we were concerned they might as well have been explaining how you nailed down the wind that swept along the Tyne.
Not the least wonder of those occasions was that we were able to tell ourselves that because we belonged to a quite formidable football clan we could take some proprietorial pride in the great spectacle that always filled us with such delight. We were touched, in the most intimate and familiar way, by something that meant so much in the lives of so many people.
Our grandfather Tanner, my first coach who was also a hard-headed, sometimes ruthless trainer of professional sprinters, spent some of his last days, when his eyesight had dwindled, hearing me read the football results from the local evening paper – and urging me to work at every scrap of the talent I had been given. Because if I didn’t it might just lead to a lifetime of regrets.
Not everyone got on with Tanner – many felt he was a hard and unforgiving taskmaster – but I adored him. He seemed to make it a personal mission to hammer out my pathway to the football life.
He trained me to run, build in those early days on the natural pace which would always be one of my greatest assets. Mo
st of all he talked about my duty to exploit all of my gifts; that not to do so was more than carelessness. It was the sin of neglect. You could never achieve anything, truly, if you did not work for it. When you did that you gave yourself the confidence to believe that you deserved everything that came to you. But of course it wasn’t always easy. At times it hurt.
Tanner underlined the great reality and pride of my young life. It was that if football was the game of our people, if everyone played it in the backstreets and the park and sometimes even fresh from coming off shift at the colliery, it was also the game of our family. It was a gift that should never be spurned or neglected.
Any recollection of those times inevitably returns me to the night when I went with Jack to the cinema in Ashington to see a film entitled The Red Shoes starring the beautiful dancer Moira Shearer. Well, that’s not quite true. We were drawn to a Pathé News report which would feature the England debut of Jackie Milburn, our mother’s cousin, against Northern Ireland in Belfast in 1948.
Unfortunately, most of the town had read the prominently displayed poster advertising the news film and when we arrived at the cinema we had to join in at the back of an extremely long queue. By the time we reached our seats it was the footwork of Moira Shearer filling the screen rather than that of our second cousin and hero of Newcastle United, ‘Wor Jackie’.
At the end of the feature film an usherette told us that our tickets were for the first show only and that we had to leave. We protested bitterly but it was only when many of the audience shouted that we were indeed connected to the local hero that the usherette relented.
So we stayed and joined in the cheering that greeted the brief clip of Jackie running on to the field. Most of the short newsreel was filled by an exquisite sixty-yard run by Matthews which ended with a goal and it was this that set us dancing on the cobbles as we went home to our house in Beatrice Street.
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