by Neil Baldwin
One time, I hadn’t been in the team for a couple of weeks, so one afternoon after training I went and knocked on Lou Macari’s office door to ask him why I hadn’t been in the team. Nello was sitting there with some coffee, and I said, ‘I’m doing well. I think I deserve to be in the team.’ Lou Macari said, ‘Tell him, Nello.’ And Nello said, ‘It’s because you’re no good, Carruthers, now go away.’ I didn’t know what to say, so I just walked out.
Ivan Gaskell says:
I think at times it trod a very fine line between what was acceptable and what went too far, and occasionally I asked myself whether something was right and whether Neil was accepting it because he didn’t want to lose the role he had. It was a different era, and much of those things just wouldn’t happen now. But I trusted Lou, who’s a good guy, to make sure that the line wasn’t crossed.
Nello also wanted to be taken as an equal. Banter and practical jokes are very much part of the dressing room. But I also knew that Nello could look after himself and stand up for himself. I only saw him thrive. His role evolved and he was given the title of kit man, which he took extremely seriously. I can remember him saying proudly to me, ‘I’m the kit man now, you know.’
One Stoke City fan on the ‘Oatcake’ Internet message board (Oatcake is the name of the club’s fanzine) remembers that Neil was quite clear how important his role was:
When I was a kid, I was getting autographs of the players in my autograph book after training when this bloke came up to me, snatched the book, signed it and passed it back to me. I later found out it was the kit man, Baldwin.
NEIL
Lots of people ask me for my autograph now. Maybe an early example would be worth something.
Ivan Gaskell is a very good friend of mine. He is a very good football reporter. I told him recently that I’m now more famous than he is. I did all the different jobs that Lou asked me to do. Sometimes you have to hold players’ hands with things like holidays, so I didn’t mind going to the travel agent with Martin to help him.
One day Lou suddenly wanted me to lose weight and tried to control my diet. I think my mum had suggested it to him. I wasn’t too keen on that, but I know she meant well.
MALCOLM
Jesse ‘Twinny’ Doyle, a Stoke fan who used to work on Stoke market in those days, remembers: ‘Neil used to come across to the market to buy his lunch. I remember him going to the fruit stall, and saying with a long face that Lou had put him on a diet and he had to buy fruit.’
Adrian Hurst recalls:
He told me he was a clown, but I didn’t really believe him. Once, the circus set up on the Victoria Ground car park. Nello said we would go down, as he knew them all. As we walked through the caravans it became rapidly apparent that he was very well known to the circus community; all the circus acts knew him as he knocked on their caravan doors. They told me he was a very good friend and greeted him, ‘Neil! How are you?’ We got cups of tea made for us. I got two complimentary tickets and we were treated like royalty. From that day on I always knew Neil’s claims to be well known in the circus community were true.
NEIL
Of course they were true. I’m well known in the circus because I was a very good clown. I think Adrian believes me now if I say I know someone.
We always played five-a-side against the young lads, the apprentice players, on a Friday. Lou and Chic Bates used to play. We usually beat them easy. I was a good keeper and the young lads didn’t like losing to us. I also took some good penalties, and I still take good penalties.
MALCOLM
Adrian recalls:
I remember five-a-side football matches between the staff and second-year apprentice players. Neil went in goal for the staff wearing purple mittens, which he struggled to get on. Agility wasn’t his strong point, but of course he filled the goal. The staff often won the game. The young lads were a bit lippy with him, but he simply responded, ‘You didn’t score any goals and you didn’t win.’
On Nello’s fiftieth birthday [in 1996] someone organised a stripper of rather large proportions in the Blue Room at the Victoria Ground. Others might have been embarrassed but Neil just took it all in his stride.
NEIL
I don’t know why they thought it funny to send that strange woman. I don’t like that kind of stuff, so I told them all off. They liked to play their little games. I suppose you have to let them have their kind of fun. But a lot of players came to my proper fiftieth-birthday party up at Keele, which was marvellous. That was a great night.
MALCOLM
Neil’s first season as kit man, and Lou’s as manager, 1991/92, had been very successful. It included a 2–2 draw against Liverpool at Anfield in the Rumbelows Cup (as the League Cup was then called), which was memorable for us for two reasons. First, my youngest daughter Lisa was the Stoke mascot that night. Second, Stoke’s equaliser, late in the game, was scored by Tony Kelly, who, as we shall see, was later to play a significant part in Neil’s story. Although Stoke were denied promotion by being knocked out in the play-offs by Stockport County, they gained revenge a few days later by beating them at Wembley in the final of the League Trophy (then called the Autoglass Trophy).
Ivan Gaskell recalls:
I remember the Autoglass Final against Stockport County. As was common, the squad went down to stay in a hotel not too far from Wembley a few days before the final. I accompanied the squad.
Nello was there. I remember karaoke at the local pub with full renditions from all sorts of people – including Nello, who showed he could sing – Chick Bates, the assistant manager, Tony Lacy, the coach, and Ian Bailey from The Sentinel.
There was an afternoon training session of five-a-side with the team on the day before the Cup Final, and amazingly, all of us played, including Nello. This is the day before a Cup Final, would you believe, and we are playing with the team. I think Lou wanted to reduce the tension and it worked.
NEIL
We won the Autoglass Trophy because I had shown them how to do it the day before in that practice game.
We used to have pre-season tours abroad. In my first couple of years at Stoke. These were to the Isle of Man, where they had a good football tournament with other clubs. We won it both times in 1991, beating Sunderland in the final, and 1992, when we thrashed Wrexham in the final. I told the team that was great, and that, if they played like that in the League, we would win it, which we did. We won the League Two Championship with ninety-three points, including a club record run of twenty-five undefeated games. Mark Stein became the first player to score thirty goals in a season for thirty years.
MALCOLM
Andrew Edwards, who was later to organise the funerals of Mary Gandey and Sir Stanley Matthews, recalls one of those tournaments in the Isle of Man. Andrew is a prominent local funeral director and a friend of Stoke City’s vice chairman, Keith Humphries. Andrew and Keith stayed in the Castletown Golf Links Hotel and took in some golf.
While they were on the golf links, they ran into some Stoke City players. Apparently one of the players, Steve Foley, was a very keen ornithologist, unlikely though that will seem to many Stoke supporters who have watched his style of play; and Steve was leading them on the walk. Neil was with them.
Andrew recalls:
Keith Humphries and I were on the first tee when they returned and surrounded us to watch. Neither of us were very good golfers. I promptly managed to put the first three balls into the gorse, to the great amusement of the watching company.
Nello went into Douglas [the Isle of Man capital] with some others to do some shopping. They came back with a child’s golf set made of plastic. Nello formally presented it to me in the hotel foyer in recognition of the golfing prowess which they had witnessed on that first tee. I was asked to demonstrate my golfing skills. The toy ball was placed on a glass table, and I swung the plastic golf club to hit it. Unfortunately, my swing hit the table, which promptly shattered into a thousand pieces.
Nello, of course, found this highly amu
sing and for some time mercilessly retold the story of how ‘Mr Edwards is so useless at golf that he even broke a hotel glass table with a child’s plastic golf club’ to anyone who would listen.
But he was great fun to have on those trips and added light-hearted amusement to the group. He’s a character, there’s no doubt about that, and a true Stokie.
NEIL
I didn’t imagine Mr Edwards would be a football hooligan. I think he could have improved his golf with practice. We won the Isle of Man tournament both years when I was there, which is not surprising.
I think I also helped win the league in 1992–3. Apart from telling the players that they needed to keep scoring goals and not let any in, that was when I started sitting on the bench in a variety of fancy dresses. The first of these was an away game at Hartlepool just before Christmas 1992.
MALCOLM
I can still remember our disbelief as Neil followed the team out of the dressing room wearing a top hat and tails. We had never seen anything like that at a football match before.
Lou Macari gave the background to this in his autobiography. The team were staying overnight in a posh hotel and Lou arranged for Neil to travel in a dinner suit and bow tie and top hat, which he wore for dinner in the restaurant. Lou introduced him to the waiters as ‘Lord Baldwin from Keele’. The waiters gave him special attention and at the end of the meal offered him a box of cigars with the words, ‘Would you like to choose a cigar, Lord Baldwin?’ Neil apparently was in his element, proudly enjoying his cigar. Everyone else was in hysterics.
Next day when he came down to breakfast in his normal tracksuit, Lou told him to go and get changed and wear the full dinner suit. So he became the first kit man to carry the bag wearing a top hat, and probably the last. The players found it hilarious, which was no doubt Lou’s intention.
NEIL
All the people in that hotel thought I really was Lord Baldwin of Keele, but that’s actually a good name, isn’t it? I think that, when I am made a lord, I will call myself ‘Lord Baldwin of Keele’. I’ve also been called the Bishop of Keele. I’m not sure which is better. The top hat only just fitted into the dugout. But it helped us win the game 2–1. Nigel Gleghorn scored right at the end. I wonder if my DJ put the Hartlepool players off.
A couple of months later at an away game at Leyton Orient I came out as a Mutant Ninja Turtle. But this time something went wrong: a defeat on a snowy day saw the end of the wonderful twenty-five-game unbeaten run.
Just a couple of weeks later Lou was at it again, this time getting me to dress up in a bright-yellow chicken suit for an away game at Bournemouth. Lou and I bought the chicken suit together. All the way down to the game on the team coach, I kept the suit on, including the chicken’s head. Malcolm and his daughter Zara were standing just behind the dugout, and they couldn’t believe it when I came out dressed as a yellow chicken.
The game was a draw. Nigel Gleghorn had to go in goal when Ronnie Sinclair had to leave the field injured, and had a great game. Nigel was a very good goalkeeper, even though he was a midfield player.
The chicken suit was really hot, and I was sweating very heavily, but Lou wouldn’t let me take it off all day. In the end I did. It was marvellous to see the crowd laughing at a yellow chicken appearing on the touchline. One of the things I learned in the circus is that getting dressed up always makes people laugh. But it is more difficult to carry the big kit bag when you are dressed as a chicken.
MALCOLM
We went to the game with a Stoke-supporting friend who had moved to Yeovil. I can still remember his jaw dropping when he saw the yellow chicken come out. You just don’t expect things like that to happen on a professional football field.
It helped relax the players – though they weren’t always sure they approved, as Lee Sandford told me:
Sometimes it rubbed us up the wrong way. You want to be professional and it’s hard when there’s a bloke there dressed as a clown or a duck. And sometimes, when we lost, Neil would shout out something we didn’t appreciate on the coach back. But Lou encouraged him and I think it was Lou’s way of saying things to us.
The season ended with one of the most memorable matches in my fifty-plus years of watching Stoke City, although on paper you wouldn’t expect this game to be at all memorable, and for most of the game it wasn’t. Here’s what happened.
Gordon Cowans had been a stalwart for Aston Villa. Stoke City were invited to play Aston Villa in his testimonial on 11 May 1993. The attendance was only 4,500, of whom nearly half were travelling Stoke City supporters.
After about an hour, Mark Stein, Stoke’s star centre-forward, was taken off. He peeled off his No. 9 shirt and was seen to hand it to Neil, who was struggling to put it on – a bit of a squeeze given Neil’s size. Towards the end of the game, we saw Neil lumbering up and down the touchline doing a sort of warm-up.
‘Look at Neil,’ said Zara. ‘What’s he doing?’
‘Well, it looks as though he is trying to warm up,’ I said.
‘Why’s he doing that?’
‘I don’t know, it’s very odd.’
George Andrews was a Radio Stoke reporter covering the game. His boss, George Gavin, was there too, and as Neil warmed up he said:
‘Who on earth is that?’
‘It’s the kit man and mascot. I think Lou is going to bring him on.’
‘Never!!’
But as Neil’s warm-up continued, a buzz started to develop among the supporters. Some started singing, ‘Bring him on!’ And about five minutes from the end of the game, Neil entered the field of play. In fact, Stoke didn’t take a player off, so, for the last few minutes, Stoke had twelve players on the field. The referee was Kieron Richardson who refereed the Cup Final that season. This could be a good quiz question: ‘When did the Cup Final referee allow a team to play with twelve men on the pitch?’
Neil immediately began pointing and shouting instructions to the other players. He wasn’t in the least fazed or nervous.
In his autobiography, Lou recalls how he called over Vince Overton, the Stoke City captain, and told him to tell the Stoke players and the Villa players to let Neil score. It seems that everybody on the pitch understood what was going on, including Nigel Spink, the Villa goalkeeper, except one player: Stoke City’s Tony Kelly.
The Aston Villa side included Martin Carruthers, later a Stoke player, who recalls the match:
The first time I saw Nello, I was still at Aston Villa. I was on the pitch for the testimonial game against Stoke and the Stoke management team had a word with our management team, they said they are going to put their kit man on the pitch, let him through to score a goal.
It had all been agreed for Nello to score. All the Aston Villa players were going to let Nello through to score, but then a Stoke player, Tony Kelly, bundled Nello out of the way and took the shot himself, and missed. He wanted the glory himself. It was a shame. It would have been Nello’s dream. If Tony Kelly hadn’t taken the ball away from him, he’d have got a shot and the goalkeeper would have stayed out of the way.
NEIL
Martin Carruthers played well that day and scored one of the goals for Aston Villa, who beat us 4–1. That was probably why Lou signed him up for Stoke City.
It was marvellous to make my debut for Stoke City. I was really pleased when Lou told me he was going to put me on. It had always been a dream to play for Stoke City. If he had put me on earlier, we might have pulled the game round.
I was about to score, but Tony Kelly took the ball off me and missed. If he had left it to me I would definitely have scored. He denied me the chance to score for Stoke City and I have never forgotten that.
At the end of the game, England international David Platt, who was playing for Villa, asked me to swap shirts. I bet my shirt is one of his prize possessions.
MALCOLM
At the end of the official club video of that season, Ivan Gaskell did an interview with Lou Macari in which he talks of the signing of a mystery Scottish
striker. The overweight ‘striker’ (Neil), dressed in a kilt and sporran, then wanders into shot behind Macari, and lifts his kilt to reveal a very large stomach, while Macari talks in a deadpan voice of his ‘doing his talking on the pitch’ but ‘not being in the best of condition’. Eventually, he and Ivan can contain themselves no longer and dissolve into hysterical laughter. It still receives multiple hits on YouTube to this day (If you’re interested, the link is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2h6qyEIVGw.)
Ivan recalls:
For the Scottish-striker film, which was at the end of the season, I can’t remember whose idea it was but I do know that Lou definitely wanted Nello involved. Lou played the part brilliantly. I could see Nello dressed up off screen. He was in my eye line, but not Lou’s. Lou’s straight face was hilarious. After it was over we laughed continuously for about three or four minutes.
NEIL
It was very funny making that film. I loved getting dressed up in the Scottish clothes. Everybody loves looking at it. You can see that I was a film star making people laugh even then, and I still am. You can always make people laugh when you dress up in fancy dress. I learned that in the circus.
MALCOLM
Ivan says:
Both Lou and Neil have hearts of gold. When I left the area to pursue my career elsewhere, I was very touched when Lou turned up with Nello at my leaving do. In the end it was Nello holding court and I almost slipped away unnoticed. But both Nello and Lou said good things about me, which meant a great deal to me.