My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes

by Gary Imlach

  His friend Sandy Reid was a naturally left-sided player. He welcomed me at his front door – the same height as my father, but with the fair complexion suggested by his name – and led me through into the living room on stiff joints, rocking slightly as he favoured one side. The act of sitting down was skilfully executed, but clearly something he needed to brace himself for.

  ‘Noo then, fit d’ye want to ken aboot?’

  He sounded like my father would have if he’d never left Lossiemouth. The way he used to sound on Sunday phone calls home to May, standing in the hall growing progressively more Scottish, while we sat in the living room listening and laughing. Sandy was the player that got away, or more accurately, the one that never got away. With his dog asleep beside him on the sofa and his wife in the armchair opposite, nodding and smiling, I was looking at my father in a parallel life, the one in which he said no to a trial with an English club. The best team Sandy ever played for remains his first.

  ‘A’body kent what y’was gan t’dae. Robbie was centre-half and I was inside-left. I never used to look for the ba’ – when the ba’ came up and Robbie was going to head it, I just moved o’er and he just always nodded it over to the left . . . always. Y’kent ain another – even mair so than some of them big teams nowadays – y’kent what was going to happen. It’s never been the same since, I don’t think, nae in my head anyway. Nah, nae as good.’

  ‘They say you might have been the best of the lot, Sandy.’

  ‘I don’t know, that’s what they say but . . . I was a fool for m’self really.’

  Sandy’s football career, like most at the time, was interrupted by National Service. (My father had a perforated eardrum, to Bury’s later relief.) It didn’t have to be much of an interruption, though. Good players quickly became regimental favourites, and Sandy settled in as wireless operator and star inside-left for the Royal Artillery at Andover. ‘Oor battery sergeant-major was a scout and after two or three games he says to me, “Right, you’re going on a two-week trial to Everton.” I said, “Ach, I’m nae going.” I didna’ go – stupid eh?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know, I just didna’ go. I wished I’d went, y’ken – nothing to lose. I still played for the regiment, like, till I was demobbed. I aye look at Everton right up to noo on the TV to see how they’re daein’, ken? Mebbe I’d a’ met Stewart if I’d gotten into that after I was demobbed, like . . . ach I dinna ken if I’d have made the grade or no . . .’

  While he was stationed at Andover Sandy did meet up with my father and Robbie Campbell, to see Scotland play England at Wembley. It was 1955 and my father had just joined Nottingham Forest. Within three years he’d be playing for Scotland himself. Sandy went back and played for Lossiemouth.

  ‘Aye, very first game back for Lossie, up at Fort George against the Army. Early in the game I went up to head the ba’, the keeper came oot, put up his knee and broke my arm. They said they heard the crack right roon’ the pitch. So that was me in the hospital Saturday night. You got no pity on a Saturday night, they thought everyone was drunk. So they just bandaged it – it was swinging aboot like this. Oh it was sair the weekend. I had to go back and have it done again, they’d done it wrong. I never forgot that – the things that stick, eh?’

  It’s a phrase he uses more than once. Lots of things have stuck with Sandy, perhaps because nothing’s come along since to dislodge them, details that I’m sure would have been long lost to my father if ever I’d sat down with him like this. He’d have been more like Robbie Campbell – happy to talk, but short on specifics. Robbie didn’t manage quite the career my father did despite his ability. Still, he had four seasons with Hearts to remember, a move to Cowdenbeath and 150 professional games before he left to join the police force.

  The games and goals still shiny in Sandy Reid’s mind had been crowded out in Robbie’s and my father’s, pennies in an arcade game pushed over the edge by the steady supply of new ones. At St James’ youth club, though, they’d all been together, stacking up the future anecdotes a game at a time. Hat-tricks, late-game heroics, endless wins against older teams from bigger towns. In 1949 St James’ record read: Played 44, Won 44, Goals for 104, Goals against 4. Even an all-star eleven made up of the best players from every other team in the league couldn’t beat them.

  I finally came across a picture of that team; someone had found it in a drawer and sent it in to the local paper. Sandy Reid and my father are sitting next to each other on the end of the front row. Sandy may be slightly stockier, but there’s nothing to choose between them: arms folded, ankles crossed, hair slicked back. They played together, dived from the harbour wall in summer, teamed up for cycling holidays. From May to October they all lived together in tents up by the lighthouse beyond the West Beach, cooking their meals outdoors. It was a Lossiemouth tradition, a rehearsal for leaving home.

  When it came time to graduate from St James’ to the Lossie juniors team – one level below the Highland League – they’d all gone together. But then, piece by piece, the tight group that Joe Edwards had moulded started to fragment. Robbie Campbell signed for Lossiemouth’s Highland League side, followed by my father. A couple of the older lads got their call-up papers.

  The Highland League was the pinnacle of local footballing achievement, which is to say that it was the highest anyone had ever gone. But a local scout had been watching the St James’ generation from the beginning. Willie Shanks was a referee from Elgin, who’d officiated at some of their early matches, and had connections with a number of English clubs, Second Division Bury among them. Robbie Campbell was the first to head south to try his luck. In November 1951 the Northern Scot sent him on his way with a back-page editorial: ‘When you leave next Monday you will be carrying the wishes of every North soccer fan.’ Robbie carried them back again a few weeks later, having decided that a landlocked mill town wasn’t somewhere he’d like to settle.

  My father was next to try, the following Easter. He travelled down to Bury on the eve of Good Friday 1952 and immediately played three games over the holiday weekend, scoring on his debut. Before the month was up he’d signed. A week later, the Northern Scot reported that Eddie Archibald had gone to Portsmouth on trial. Lossiemouth had never produced a professional footballer before and hasn’t since. Joe Edwards’s church youth team turned out three. Three and an asterisk.

  Before I left Sandy Reid’s house for the short walk back to May’s where I was staying, he rolled up his trouser leg to show me the cause of his stilted gait – a long scar arching ungracefully around his knee joint. It was a double of the one my father had, the mark of a cartilage operation in the days before keyhole surgery.

  ‘That’s nae the fitba’. Years as a slater – that’s why that’s gone. Up on roofs a’ my days in snow and a’thing. Wear and tear . . . wear and tear, that’s what I put it down to. Look, it’ll nae bend. Strong enough but it’ll nae bend.’

  Chapter Three

  Retain-and-transfer:

  Bury 1952–54

  SHORTLY AFTER THE RESIDENTS of Colindale board the Northern Line for their morning commute south into central London, two groups of people set off the other way, into the past.

  Turn left out of the tube station for the RAF Museum (don’t forget the Airfix shop on the way back), turn right and cross the road for the British Newspaper Library. We had scrapbooks full of cuttings at home, but they were all highlights and headlines, sort of a director’s cut of my father’s career. Here’s where the rushes were stored.

  Eventually the millions of pages of newsprint stacked decades-deep in this utilitarian brick Tardis will be kept nowhere. All of it will be on an unlocatable series of hard drives that anyone can access from their computer, sitting at home or in a café: all the exclusives, the obits, the declarations of war and denials of adultery scanned in and searchable by keywords or dates. It will be a massive convenience and a great pity.

  For the moment though, The Past, Contemporaneous Reports Of, has a geographic
al presence, two stops from the end of the Edgware Branch; you can visit it. I wasn’t expecting to make up for the years of unasked questions in here – I didn’t have that much faith in journalism. I was looking for the kind of material my father wouldn’t have been able to supply anyway, a solid framework, not just of dates and games and goals, but also injuries, off-days, missed sitters and rows with the boss.

  The story began in weekly instalments every Saturday in the Northern Scot. When he turned professional it became twice-weekly, the Bury Times offering a Wednesday as well as a weekend episode. By the time he reached Nottingham his career had gone daily, with a double helping on Saturdays when the Evening Post would give a cliffhanging account of Forest’s first twenty minutes and the Football Post would finish off the storyline with the result and a full account of the game a couple of hours later.

  I sat and rooted futilely for him in retrospect. I hadn’t expected this, to be gripped by a narrative I couldn’t influence and whose outcome in any case I knew perfectly well. Yet I celebrated when he broke through into the first team, cheered his goals and wished injury, or a poor performance at the very least, on anyone who took his place when he was dropped or out hurt. I transcribed match reports with a kind of press-box urgency, as though I were channelling a real-time account of the game: ‘A splendid equaliser came in the 13th minute. Plant broke through on the right and when he pulled the centre back Imlach, who had moved into the middle, volleyed it with tremendous speed past the hapless Hardwick.’

  I could hear the portable typewriters, and the reporters reading their pieces over the phone to the copy-takers. I’d done the same myself at Anfield and Goodison Park: ‘Imlach, that’s I-M-L-A-C-H, who had moved into the middle . . .’

  Perhaps it was the straight-faced innocence of the language that drew me in, the days of Splendid Equalisers and Hapless Hardwicks. I came across a claim from an irate losing manager: ‘We were robbed.’ Another piece started with a post-match quote from Doncaster Rovers’ boss, the former Irish international Peter Doherty: ‘It’s a funny game is football.’ Good God, surely I hadn’t stumbled on its first recorded usage? At the very least, these had to be early sightings, portraits of the cliché as a young quote, before repetition had made it meaningless, then humorous and, finally, archly postmodern. I was reading football-manager in the original.

  My dad’s career kicked off on microfilm. To save its fragile fibres the Northern Scot had been preserved on the futuristic format of yesteryear. The microfilm viewing room at the British Newspaper Library is a serious and silent place – save for the squeaky spooling of the machines – where illumination of all kinds is strictly rationed. At any one time each customer is allowed no more than four items from the archive and a small splash of light – enough to see, but not so much as to overlap onto anyone else’s. People guard their lit patches of the past like cave dwellers, suspicious of passers-by who might be angling for a historical insight over their shoulder.

  I was glad to get into the light when he turned pro. In the main reading rooms the bound volumes of newspapers are delivered on ancient trolleys by whispering porters. They have to be propped up on large wooden lecterns that reproduce the classic five-past-one reading angle at which you might hold the paper yourself if it wasn’t attached to twenty-five other editions and weighed the best part of thirty pounds. The pages have to be peeled gently in slow motion – too much wrist and the tear can be heard around the room. But even handled carefully the heavy volumes lose weight on every trip out of the vaults. The past is as much inhaled here as it is read. And when the bell sounds at the end of the afternoon, each reading place has its own crumbly covering of newsprint filings to show for the day’s foraging.

  Long after he’d left Lossiemouth for the English Second Division, the Northern Scot had kept running regular stories on my father, reporting back to Scotsmen at home on yet another who had gone abroad. In the Bury Times’ 1952–53 season preview, though, he didn’t rate a mention. Unsurprising really, since he started as a part-timer in the fourth team.

  The minutes of Bury’s board meeting for May 1952 show that they paid Lossiemouth a transfer fee of £150. Later, the Highland League team must have felt they’d struck a poor bargain. The minutes from January the following year record that: ‘A letter was read from Lossiemouth AFC regarding the signing of Stewart Imlach and it was agreed to send a further donation of £50.’ My father was to receive £6 a week during the summer and £7 during the season, rising to £14, which was the league maximum, if he was in the first team.

  He was twenty when he signed for Bury and still had nine months of his joinery apprenticeship left; giving up a solid trade for the short-lived, long-odds life of a professional footballer would have been against everything his parents believed in. The club found a local joinery firm where he could finish serving his time, and digs with a landlady who already had a couple of other young players in the house. There was nothing exceptional in his situation. At the start of the ’52–53 season Bury had a playing staff of thirty-two, which included one amateur, four servicemen, and eight part-timers including my father.

  Over the first few weeks of that season I watched him surface through the back-page newsprint at startling speed. On 20 August he was listed as a scorer for the B team against the A. The following week he was promoted to the A team line-up. Seven days later, on 3 September, he moved into the reserves and scored in a 3–0 win. On 10 September the reserves won again, while the first team lost. In fact, the first team was without a win in its opening half-dozen games. On Wednesday 17 September the Bury Times back-page headline read: ‘YOUNG FORWARDS IN TEAM TO MEET PLYMOUTH.’ There were three of them: my father, his roommate in digs, Eddie Gleadall, who’d actually made his senior debut the previous season, and Bobby Dale. The climb from fourth string to first team had taken him a playing month. He had to be called down off the roof of a house he was working on to be given the news.

  Away at Plymouth the revamped Bury line-up managed a 0–0 draw to pick up what was only their third point of the season. In their next game they won at Southampton. The local paper scrambled to feature the three newcomers before their home debut the following week.

  Their pictures are stripped down an inside page: Gleadall in action, Dale during a training session. My father is at his workbench in overalls and a cloth cap, self-consciously sawing a piece of two-by-four for the camera. Since his job meant that he could train only on Tuesday and Thursday nights, he’d been at work when the pre-season photo call took place, and the paper had evidently had to send out a photographer to get whatever picture he could for the story. It looks a little strange on the sports page, and faintly ludicrous next to its neighbours as one in a series of three rising stars, but it locates him as a footballer of his time as well as any endorsement shot of David Beckham’s. Football was a game of the working class, for the working class, by the working class. One thing it wasn’t was a golden passport out of the working class.

  In significant ways footballers were actually worse off than the crowds watching them from the terraces on a Saturday afternoon. True, their standard working day – two or three hours of physical exercise – was usually over by lunchtime, and they had the potential, at least, to earn more than most labourers. In 1952 the average manual wage in the UK was £8 13s. Footballers could earn up to £14 during the season and £10 during the summer – if they were on the league maximum. According to Players’ Union figures, though, only 20 per cent of them were. As late as 1955, the union put the average footballer’s wage at £8, by which time factory workers were earning closer to £11.

  No other industry in the country had a maximum wage. Football clubs were alone in operating a cartel that imposed an arbitrary ceiling on the earnings of their employees. And the minimum retaining wage they were obliged to pay a player was £322 a year, a little over £6 a week. That innocent-sounding term ‘retaining wage’ was the pointer to a more fundamental problem. The real disadvantage footballers saw when they
compared themselves to the ranks of working men who paid to watch them every week was their lack of freedom. The lads from the feltworks and the cotton mill and Benson’s toffee factory may have had tough, unrewarding jobs, but at least they were free to leave one for another.

  My father’s apprenticeship as a joiner lasted five years, from the age of sixteen until his twenty-first birthday. The contract he signed with Bury FC gave the club the rights to his services in perpetuity. Not that he enjoyed a reciprocal commitment from them. His contract – every footballer’s contract – was for twelve months only. At the end of a season clubs could release a player, put him up for sale, or retain him – often on reduced wages if the team had a bad year. Any player who refused to agree terms, whatever they might be, would be paid no wages. Not paid no wages and sacked, or released, but paid no wages and retained. If he walked out he couldn’t play anywhere else because the club held his registration. If he demanded a transfer they could simply refuse – or put a price on his head so high that it was a refusal by other means.

  And while he was on the transfer list they weren’t obliged to pay him. A man sitting at home with an artificially high market value and no income had limited options. The majority caved in. Those whose principles wouldn’t let them had no choice but to leave the professional game altogether. Three years before my father joined Bury, T.G. Jones, the great centre-half and captain of Wales, had caused an uproar when he walked out on Everton for non-league Pwllheli FC. It had been his only means of escape from a club that had him on the transfer list but refused to sell him.

  John McNeil, the manager who signed my father for Bury, had cut the players’ wages on his arrival at the club two seasons earlier. The team’s right-back at the time was Cyril Fairclough, the first professional full-back my dad ever lined up against, in his trial game. Cyril was a solid, one-club man who spent twelve seasons with Bury, before playing and managing non-league. He’d scouted until he was seventy-eight, and was proud of having watched more than seventy games in his final season on the road for Manchester United.