Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  It was Emily who decorated the house every year – papering over the previous year’s soot-caked wallpaper – and produced Yorkshire puddings baked in the kiln oven on the wall. The ceremonial fetching down of the tin bath from its hook on the wall, when the pit-shaft cage brought Samuel back to the surface, was her job.

  It was Emily, with her round face and inclination to grin, who Paisley most resembled, though it was Samuel whose character he took: taciturn, sometimes brusque, ‘not given to emotions’, as someone once said of Paisley Snr. And yet doggedly determined to prevail, as the incremental rise from the bottom rung of the Hetton-le-Hole housing stock revealed.

  It was his teachers whose wisdom and messages Bob Paisley would most often quote, not his father’s, though you imagine that their sentiments belonged to Samuel, too. Paisley often cited the words of his headmaster at Eppleton Senior Mixed School: ‘If you want to tell anybody anything, speak softly and you’ll find that they’re trying to listen to you. They’re trying to get what you’re going to say. If you shout at them, they’re not interested, really. So talk softly to them.’

  On the Durham coalfield, the 1920s were not days for talking. Tough times and tough places bred tough individuals. Like father, like son. There is a rare picture of Paisley at the front of the school football team, his face pinched and expressionless as he clutched a huge shield. Suffice to say the sun does not seem to be shining.

  When trophies were won, Paisley, as the captain and outstanding performer, would be asked to say a few words. He had his standard lines learned off pat and could still recite them years later: ‘Glad to have won the Cup. It’s an honour to Eppleton School.’ As he said much later, he would have been glad to keep it at that every time he won a trophy.

  His schools and their football teams – Barrington Primary, then Eppleton – is where he seems to have found the characters and colour in childhood. The Eppleton school caretaker Bowler Burns was as commanding as his name suggested and provided therapeutic mustard baths in the boiler room for the boys. (The combination of mustard seeds and piping hot water were thought to warm the muscles and blood.) Paisley and the other boys who showed promise would be summoned out of class for an egg and sherry tonic when a big school match loomed.

  There was a particular challenge for Paisley. He was a small boy who found himself with a size disadvantage to make up, but he was known to tackle hard and unflinchingly. Sports masters Bertie Rowe, Jimmy Johnson and Alec Wright became significant names in his world. Jack Walker was a particularly influential trainer and perhaps the wisest of all of them. Paisley never forgot Jack Walker’s name.

  The school team was a focus of all their lives. Eddie Burns, Bowler’s brother, who was unpaid assistant caretaker, earned half a crown by refereeing the team’s Saturday morning matches. Two schoolmistresses – a Miss Boyd and Miss Davison – would arrive for the inquest after the game. If they hadn’t seen the match, they wanted a detailed account of it. The Eppleton Senior Mixed honours board from 1931 tells the story: five trophies for the team and Paisley’s ‘county cap’ in that year alone. Word soon got around about the uncompromising strip of a lad with music in his feet when he took command of a football. He advanced to the Durham county youth side, earned a trial for England Schoolboys in 1933 and was just developing the sense that he could do anything, when rejection came – cold, hard and unforgiving. Sunderland, the team every self-respecting Hetton schoolboy lived for, had told him they were interested. They asked him to show them what he was made of and had him half convinced that he would be running out at Roker Park, wearing their red and white stripes in the First Division.

  He was too small, the Sunderland manager Johnny Cochrane and chief scout Tommy Irwin told Paisley. Tottenham Hotspur and Wolverhampton Wanderers said the same, but it was Sunderland who broke his heart. Paisley settled for a bricklaying apprenticeship instead and had started to resign himself to an ordinary life when semi-professional football offered another avenue. He advanced to the team at Bishop Auckland, 25 miles south of Hetton, and on a salary of three shillings and sixpence a game found a team who valued him. They liked his tough tackling style and his intuition about where spaces were going to be opening up on a field.

  For two hugely successful seasons, his 5 foot 7 and a half inch frame became a mainstay of the ‘Bishops’ midfield, where he operated as the team’s left-half – the position in front of the defence, which carried the designation of stopping the opposition right-winger. This was one of the best semi-professional sides in Britain and provided the chance to run out at Roker Park, after all. The team reached the FA Amateur Cup final and Paisley was a 20-year-old in the side that won the game there against Wellington.

  That was when Liverpool, managed by George Kay, became interested. Sunderland realised their mistake and re-established contact with him, too, though it was too late – Paisley had given his word to Kay. Many would later attest that there were no second chances when you seriously let Bob Paisley down. Sunderland would never be absolved of the folly of deciding he was not tall enough for their liking.

  It wasn’t easy, leaving Downs Lane in 1939 and taking a train to a new life 200 miles away on the other side of the country. Liverpool was another world and Paisley struggled at first. The individual who helped him find his bearings was Matt Busby, the captain of the Liverpool side who was on his way to becoming synonymous with Manchester United and whose kindness surprised the young recruit.

  Busby turned out to be a compassionate manager, too. He would allow a homesick young George Best to return home. When Alex Ferguson was taking United back to the heights Busby had scaled, he allowed another Irish prodigy – Adrian Doherty – to do the same. But Paisley’s homesick players would tell of a different experience. When they found themselves in digs they were desperate to be away from and would ask, in the most tentative way, whether a move might be acceptable, the answer was always, ‘No.’ One of Paisley’s own midfielders, Ronnie Whelan, reflected years later that, ‘There were very few shoulders to cry on. Their attitude was: “You’ve signed, we’ve put you in digs, now keep your nose clean and get on with it.”’

  They made them hard and unsentimental in Hetton-le-Hole and the troubles of Paisley’s own early years and his struggles to acclimatise did nothing to change that. ‘It’s not a question of ability. It’s all to do with adapting to new surroundings,’ Paisley once said.

  There was no time for him to mourn home, in any case. Military conflict was on the horizon. Paisley did not choose to join it but World War II caught up with him. He had not played a competitive senior match for Liverpool when he found himself stationed at Rhyl on the North Wales coast, then Tarporley, ten miles east of Chester, and eventually in the Royal Artillery, serving in Egypt, Italy and the Western Desert as a driver to a reconnaissance officer. He was 20 when the war came: the prime time for a professional footballer, and the few surviving images of him from those days – shirtsleeves rolled up to the bicep in the searing heat of the desert where he served – reveal the fact. The conflict took four years out of the career which, given the rejection of his teenage years, must have seem destined never to start.

  The sense of precious time lost seemed a very distant consideration out in the desert, though. In 1942, Paisley was serving with the Eighth Army at El Alamein in Egypt when a plane sprayed explosive bullets over his hideout. The chaos and momentary panic in the desert left him staggering around with his hands over his eyes, leaving one of his superiors, Captain Norman Whitehouse, convinced Paisley had been permanently blinded. Whitehouse ensured the young gunner was taken away to be seen by a medical officer and within 24 hours he was back with his 73rd Medium Regiment, wearing dark spectacles. Years later, during a break on a Liverpool trip to Israel, he told midfielder Graeme Souness the story of being in a convoy of vehicles which inadvertently drove into a German camp, in a sandstorm, and came under fire. They managed to retreat and make good an escape.

  Unassuming and taciturn: that was the Paisley hi
s regiment knew, though there was no soft touch behind the young soldier’s self-effacement. It was indicated to Paisley that the Major would not allow him to be in Hetton when the youngest of his brothers, Alan, had contracted diphtheria in 1944. If he was not given compassionate leave, then he would be away to Wearside of his own accord, Paisley respectfully informed the regiment. Permission was granted. Alan Paisley was 14 when they buried him.

  Paisley did not bring home the demons and psychological scars which would torment so many who served, though he did lose friends out in the desert. He returned with a new perspective; he was just grateful to have life and all that it could offer him. Years later, in the front room of the home he made in Liverpool, Paisley avidly watched the Granada Television series All Our Yesterdays, which detailed aspects of the conflict 25 years to the precise day. He always seemed to be waiting for the episode charting the story of El Alamein. In time, he looked back with some fondness on those days. He’d joke about how he and his pal Frank Owen, who would be a lifelong friend, had ‘won the war’. Later in life, he would be reunited with others he had served alongside: Sergeant Joe Bates, gunners Jack Moffat and Reg Stratton. He was proud that they had been ‘Monty’s boys’.

  The draw of the north-east and Hetton was as strong as ever when he returned to England at the end of the conflict, even though the task in hand was to break into Liverpool’s first team. A newspaper cutting from August 1946 reports of ‘Robert Paisley, the Liverpool half-back playing cricket for Eppleton Colliery Welfare’ against Belmont, another County Durham village. It was some performance by Paisley the bowler: seven wickets for one run conceded in 5.3 overs. Cricket would remain an integral part of his life.

  It helped his acclimatisation to Liverpool that he had encountered Miss Jessie Chandler. The story they both always told of their first encounter was that they’d been bound for London on the same overnight train from Liverpool. She, a trainee schoolteacher, was travelling to visit a friend during her half-term holiday. He, the aspiring First Division footballer, was bound for the barracks of Woolwich Arsenal in south-east London where he remained stationed after the war. Paisley accidentally threw his army issue coat on her sandwiches, apologised and they began talking. The couple’s children were never entirely convinced that Jessie would have acted on such an impulse. It was not in the nature of either of them to disclose the beginnings of a romance. But that was their story of how it had started for them and they always stuck to it. ‘We chatted all the way to London and all the next day,’ Jessie related years later.

  There was a supreme modesty about the lives they led during their courtship. Their time together was limited for three years after the war because Paisley remained stationed at Woolwich, returning north at the weekends to play for Liverpool and catch what time he could with her. Jessie was an assiduous diary keeper and her entries, which offer an insight into their snatched time together, reveal no great expectation in life.

  There were evidently few more agreeable recreations for the emerging Liverpool left-half than an evening’s rug-making with Jessie. Paisley would work at one end of the frame they weaved around, she the other. They had not long encountered each other, yet there was no self-consciousness from either of them about setting up the frames to ‘put the mat on’ and getting down to work. His regimental friend Frank Owen used to sell the rugs: 12 of them on one occasion, according to Jessie’s diaries.

  ‘Bob and I stayed in – cold day – we did some of the big mat,’ Jessie writes on 30 December 1945. Football and rug-making combine seamlessly. ‘We did the mat. Bob played in a Cup tie at Chester. Chester 0 L’pool 2,’ Jessie reports early in the New Year of 1946. ‘Bob and I went to church at night. We did the mat,’ reads a typical Sunday entry. Jessie was a churchgoer so Paisley went along, too.

  His concerns became her concerns. He was played out of position, at outside-left, in a 2–1 defeat to Manchester United. ‘He was annoyed about it,’ Jessie reported. He injured his left knee and right leg in quick succession and the doctors had difficulty diagnosing a problem. ‘Bob went to see about his leg. The doctor doesn’t know what it is.’ That would have amused the Liverpool players whose injuries were viewed so suspiciously by Paisley in future years.

  Jessie seized on the write-ups of his match reports with a satisfaction that he was making his way. ‘Cuttings about Bob – very good indeed – said he was the best of the 22.’

  Films occupied them when work on the mats did not call: The Seventh Veil; The Conspirators; a teenage Shirley Temple in Kiss and Tell; James Mason in The Night Has Eyes; and The Great Lie starring Bette Davis. Jessie was the one who organised their recreation. On the few occasions when Bob did, the results were decidedly mixed. He took her to New Brighton Tower to see the wrestling, after coming into temporary possession of a friend’s car. ‘They looked and sounded like wild animals but funny in kits,’ Jessie reported.

  They were engaged on 28 January 1946, by which time Jessie certainly seemed the more capable of the two in expressing the depths of her feelings: ‘Tried to show Bob how much he means to me – but I think that would be impossible.’ They were married on a Wednesday afternoon, seven months later. A honeymoon followed at the Bangor Castle Hotel in North Wales. ‘Bob and I were married at All Soul’s Church at 1 p.m. by Rev H.V. Atkinson,’ Jessie wrote. ‘Feel wonderfully happy. Hope Bob does too. It rained all our wedding day but did not spoil it.’

  The modesty reflected the way Paisley approached his career at Liverpool. Footballers had started to assume celebrity status by the end of the war and the media fascination with their lifestyles was reflected in the pages of titles such as the Daily Graphic and Liverpool Evening Express. Liverpool’s South African outside-right Berry Nieuwenhuys was pictured sizing up a golf putt in elegant waistcoat and flannel in one such piece. ‘Wireless enthusiasts’ Willie Fagan, a Scottish inside-left, and defender Barney Ramsden, were captured ‘delving into the mysteries of a nine-valve set’ while star striker Billy Liddell prepared to take sun-ray treatment under the eye of Liverpool trainer Albert Shelley. Paisley flinched. He wasn’t comfortable in the spotlight. He was always on the margins of the photographs: the onlooker, watching others line up shots at the snooker table in several articles examining the players’ favoured recreations, but never taking centre stage.

  His young wife offered a slightly more colourful backdrop for Paisley’s appearance in an ‘Our Footballers at Home’ magazine series, when a photo of her seated at the piano, overlooked by him, provided the main image. She ‘charms him into the bouquet of “Galway Bay” and other songs,’ readers were told, though there was no evidence that the Anfield half-back might be about to burst into song.

  The same applied to Paisley’s part in the team group shots. He was always on the periphery of these: bottom right in the paper’s ‘midday special’ of 6 March 1945; bottom right again the following January 1946; top right in the same publication on 9 October that year. His demeanour was always the same: the wrinkled brow and the wide smile filling the distinctly round face. There, as in so very many of the photographs over the years, was the Emily Paisley in him. The lick of Brylcreemed hair slipping down over the forehead and the stretched crew neck of his red Liverpool shirts created the slightly ragged and uncompromising look. ‘Recreation plays its part in keeping footballers at the peak of condition,’ the Evening Express article informed its readers.

  As he became comfortable in the company of his new teammates, a little comedy value emerged from the diffident and self-effacing half-back. He was known for his impersonations of the Scottish actor Alastair Sim. Faint evidence that Paisley might follow where Jessie led, on the keyboards, emerged in a small paragraph from the Liverpool Daily Post in January 1948. ‘Liverpool fans will be surprised to know that we have an organist in the team,’ it was reported from the hotel at Birkdale, Southport, where the side prepared for an FA Cup third-round tie against Nottingham Forest that year. ‘Bob Paisley gave us an organ recital on the hotel organ. Several n
otes were off key but the tones were at least recognisable.’

  Gradually, the Paisleys cemented themselves socially. He and Jessie moved from the front room of her parents’ home into a Liverpool FC house on Greystone Road, close to where the M62 would be built in the early 1970s. The striker Billy Liddell and his wife Phyllis lived opposite. Liddell would sit on the outside wall, waiting for Paisley to emerge from the house, and they would catch the number 61 bus to Anfield together.

  But Paisley’s social awkwardness was always there. When one of the players on the United States trip of 1946 announced he had lost 50 dollars, the squad decided that there should be a collection for him and a whip-round commenced. Paisley decided this wasn’t appropriate, concluding, rather oddly, that it might imply one of their number had stolen the cash. So he didn’t contribute. The 50 dollars was later discovered at the back of a drawer in the team hotel.

  Keeping the diary on that trip had been Jessie’s idea. It also meant he committed to paper his thoughts on the footballing value of the tour. He considered the whole idea a frippery and thought the dubious quality of the opposition might breed complacency – something he would always consider a scourge for the football teams he fielded. Liverpool handed out regulation thrashings – 9–0 v a Washington side, 11–1 versus the ‘Eatons’ club in his own first game for two months and 9–2 v Chicago. ‘This tour has proved the mentality of our directors and manager to think they have a world beating side. Time will tell,’ Paisley observed scornfully.