Budgie - The Autobiography

by John Burridge

  I enjoyed rugby, but football was always my main passion, and for some reason I always wanted to be a goalkeeper. I don’t why, but I was just attracted to the one position that made you stand out from the crowd. I was a born showman. The field in the village was kept like a bowling green and you would find me and my mates down there most days kicking a ball about. When I go home now I’ll drive past that field, but you never see anyone playing football there now which is sad. I was the most popular lad in the village because every Christmas my dad used to give me a leather ball because I was always playing football. If I wasn’t in the football field during daytime, I was in the Miners’ Welfare boxing. I was a good boxer and I could look after myself. I was always fighting older lads. I was in the Cumbrian YMCA under-16 championship at Carlisle when I was 14, fighting lads who were 16; another thing that really toughened me up.

  I was playing rugby one week, football the next, and boxing in between. At 13 years old I was playing for the Workington district team, and I also later played for England schoolboys at rugby, second row. At 13, I was playing football with 16-year-olds – they were all big but I was a little hard nut, and I was an athlete, because I was so strong from working on the farm. We had a very good district team. We had a lad called Dave Irving, who played for Workington and then Everton, and Peter Nicholson, who started off at Blackpool and went on to play hundreds of games for Bolton. I got noticed playing for our district team and then made the progression into the Cumbria area team, where we would play against the likes of Scotland, Yorkshire and Lancashire, with our home games taking place at Carlisle. Scouts were starting to watch my games and I was getting noticed. It was only a matter of time before a club came calling.

  To be honest I was very ashamed of my house. There were no indoor toilets in those days, and our lavvy, like every other house round our way, was outside. If you wanted to go during the night, we had these quaint things we called ‘piss pots’, which would be kept under the bed for emergencies. Rather than walk across the yard in the snow in the middle of the night you would just forget about dignity and use one of those. They put flowers in them now and you see them being sold in antique shops, but they had a more practical use when I was kid. Unluckily for me, I was the one given the job of emptying the piss pots in the morning. I love the smell of piss in the morning! It wasn’t exactly the perfect way to start your day, that’s for sure. My dad had a novel approach when the piss pot was full – and after downing a few drinks, he would come in drunk and with his bladder full of ale and at bursting point, so he would be needing to go a few times during the night. But there’s no way he was going to stumble outside into the yard to use the toilet, instead he would just piss into the pot then chuck the contents out the window. It would go splashing all over the yard outside. Or, if he had really had a skinful and even that was too much trouble, he’d just open the window and piss straight out into the yard.

  It was shameless the way we lived, but I suppose that’s how you find footballers – a lot of them came from that kind of working-class background. You talk about favelas in Brazil, but a favela in Brazil looked like a five-star hotel next to my house. I was brought up in such a harsh way. The conditions and the squalor were horrendous. As I said, we had no hot water and when I came in from playing football or rugby I would have to do my own washing, and often my kit wouldn’t dry out in time for my next match.

  So when I started getting noticed playing football, people would be coming up to me after games and asking where I was from and where I lived, but I was a bit ashamed to tell them. Finally one day somebody took the plunge and turned up at my house unannounced. The first manager to set foot on the Burridge family pile was Tony Waddington, the famous manager of Stoke City, who signed Gordon Banks and later Peter Shilton, and won Stoke the League Cup in 1972. He obviously knew a good goalkeeper when he saw one! Waddington had driven all the way from Stoke to Workington, and we saw his big car pull up at the end of the drive.

  As courtesy demanded back then, before he could sign me he had come to speak with me and my dad about the possibility of me joining Stoke, who were one of the bigger clubs of the day. But when you were an apprentice professional in those days, it didn’t matter if you went to Manchester United or a Fourth Division team – your weekly wage was £5 regardless. It was all regulated by the FA, to stop the big clubs cherry-picking all the best young players, and to give the others a chance of operating on a level playing field.

  We had never seen a big car like his, so there was quite a buzz in the house as he pulled up, with everyone looking to see who it was. It had been a wash day and we had all the wet washing hanging up in the yard to dry on the wash lines. You could see Waddington fighting his way through the washing to make his way to our door, but after year on year of my dad pissing in the yard it had become a treacherous, slimy surface, and he slipped when he reached the middle of my dad’s target area, and went down like a sack of spuds, slap bang on his arse. His brand new Prince of Wales checked suit was covered in piss. It was so embarrassing, you could see the look of disbelief on his face as he put his hand to his nose to smell what he had slid in, and then had his worst fears confirmed.

  He came into the house all flustered and smelling of piss, asking: ‘What the hell is that?’ My dad had been out for a few beers, and was sitting there rolling a cigarette, and he barely looked up as he demanded: ‘Who are you, like?’ My dad didn’t know him from Adam. I didn’t know who he was, because we didn’t have a television and the only footballers and managers I knew were the ones I’d seen in my Charlie Buchan magazines. To his credit, he composed himself and replied: ‘My name is Tony Waddington, I’m the manager of Stoke City Football Club. I’ve been watching your son play and I would like him to sign for us.’

  My dad didn’t beat about the bush and asked straight out how much they would be paying me. Waddington told him £5 a week, same as any other club. Without a moment’s pause, my dad told him to fuck off. My dad wanted me to play for Workington rugby league team, because they were showing interest in me as well. He reckoned I could earn £10 down the pit and a further £10 playing for Workington – £20 a week, which in those days was an awful lot of money for a lad just coming out of school. My dad had already told me he didn’t want me playing football because he thought it was a ‘poofs’ game’. This poor fella had just driven hundreds of miles from Stoke, got covered in piss, and my dad had sent him packing with two brutal words.

  The next to have a crack at signing me were Blackpool, but they got the same treatment from my old man. I was in despair and I was sitting on the stairs crying my eyes out when my mum saw me and asked: ‘What’s up?’ I told her how much I wanted to be a footballer and that I didn’t want to play rugby or go down the pit.

  A few weeks later, it was the turn of my local club Workington Reds to try their luck. The manager Bobby Brown came to the house, and said he was aware that other clubs had been keen to sign me. He made a really strong case based on the benefits of signing for my local club, including being able to stay at home. My dad was just about to give him the usual response straight to his face, but then amazingly my poor old mum stepped in. You have to remember that in those days women had to mind their own business. If they opened their mouth they would most likely get a crack in the face. You wouldn’t even get done for assault in those days if it was a domestic matter between husband and wife; that was just the way it was. If you were a woman, you did the washing, you did the cooking, and your reward was respect, but nothing more. So it took all the guts in the world for my mum to speak up. ‘Jim, maybe we should let him sign?’ she said. My first thought was: ‘Oh, mum, what have you done? You are going to get the biggest black eye in the world!’ God bless her, I’m in tears now recalling the moment. I thought she was going to get battered. I will remember her selflessness and unbelievable bravery to my dying day. But thankfully my dad was in a good mood that day and he listened to what she was saying. He turned to me and said: ‘You’ve got a year
. If you don’t make it you’re going down the pit to earn a real living.’ I had one year to prove that I could play.

  I thought: ‘Brilliant – I’m signing for my home-town club.’ I was so excited. I couldn’t believe my luck and kept expecting my dad to go crazy and have a change of heart, but he was quite relaxed about it. So Workington took me down to their ground, Borough Park, the next day and said: ‘Here’s your contract, son’. I had three or four weeks before I could leave school but on the day I left I ran right down to the football ground at four o’clock; I just couldn’t wait to get my football career started. It wasn’t an easy job though. Every day at Workington I had to be there at nine o’clock because I was the only apprentice on the books. I had 30 professionals to look after – that meant there were 30 pairs of boots to clean, 30 jerseys to look after, 30 pairs of shorts, plus I had to mop the dressing rooms, absolutely scrub them. I’d be there at nine o’clock, hang everything out, make sure the boots were clean, then the players would start coming in from 9.30. One of them started calling me ‘Budgie’ – I’ve no idea where it came from, but it stuck. Maybe it’s because I was flying up and down doing jobs for them. I was only 15, but I would go out and train alongside them and they would treat me with respect – it was a fantastic grounding. There were only two goalkeepers at the club and, while I was in the reserves, I would be involved in all the training games with the senior pros in the first team. I also got my first pair of brand new boots! Everything I had ever played in up until that point was hand-me-down. In the past, I had always been given boots that my dad had found me, or old ones he’d played rugby in – even when I’d played for the schoolboy select teams – painted black. But now I finally had my first pair of ‘trendies’, a handsome pair made by Adidas.

  CHAPTER 3

  ONE GAME DOWN, 770 TO GO

  ‘Signing for Workington and becoming an apprentice footballer at the age of 16 may have been an exciting prospect, but there was no glamour in it. How could there be when we were toiling away in the depths of the old Fourth Division?’

  To begin with, I was playing in youth team and reserve games, and just keeping my head down and trying to make a positive impression. My first-team breakthrough, when it came at the end of the 1968/69 season, was totally unexpected. There was no big build-up, it just happened. I’d just walked a mile from my house and was waiting on the bus to take me to Sunderland for a reserve game, and as I was waiting the manager pulled up in his car, rolled down the window and said to me: ‘You’re not going to Sunderland today son…you’re playing for the first team.’

  We were lying mid-table and that day we were playing Newport County, who were third from bottom. My head was spinning with excitement as he took me back the 10 miles into Workington in his big Ford Zephyr 4 car. It was still hours before kick-off, so I just sat there in the boiler room from half past ten till about half past one when the players started coming in. There wasn’t even much opportunity to feel nervous because before the game, as part of my apprentice duties, I had to help get the dressing rooms ready and mark the pitch with the groundsman Billy Watson. Billy wasn’t one for soft-soaping you and treating you with the kid gloves; he treated you like a man and made you work like one too. One day, before our first game of the season, he was so pleased with his handiwork that he wanted a photo of the pitch, looking all lush and green like a bowling green, so he handed me an old camera and told me to climb up the floodlight pylon to take the picture. I was terrified of heights, but he told me ‘If you don’t get your arse up there, I’ll make sure you get the sack!’

  He was quite a character and had been great pals with Workington’s former manager, the great Bill Shankly, who had wanted to take him to Anfield as groundsman there. But Billy stayed at Workington to look after his mother. Shankly hadn’t been the only great former Reds manager; Ken Furphy had been there in the early 1960s, and it was him who had signed the man I was about to displace as No.1, Mike Rogan – a goalkeeper I was able to learn a lot from. He played more than 400 times for Workington, so he was the perfect guy to look up to in terms of his experience.

  But he’d picked up an injury and it was me and not him who would be in goal that day against Newport. There I was, sitting there an hour before kick-off, about to play the first of 771 games in my career. The older pros were doing their best to make me feel at ease, but there were 11,500 people in the ground and it was impossible to keep the nerves at bay. Newport had a big lump of a centre-forward, well over six feet, and when they took an in-swinging corner he got in front of me and scored at the near post. I couldn’t believe it – their first corner of the game and I’d already let one in. I was feeling a bit out my depth, thinking to myself, ‘My God, what am I doing here?’ But we equalised, and then we went 2-1 in front. They equalised again, but to my relief we won the game 3-2. It wasn’t a fantastic debut by any stretch of the imagination. I hadn’t done very well and I got a bit of stick for it. Welcome to professional football.

  But Mike was still out injured and I was the only other keeper they had, so it didn’t matter how I’d played, I would be in at the deep end again. Every team, especially in the harsh environment of the Fourth Division, had a big centre-forward in those days who would be used as a battering ram. They used to do their best to put the fear of death up goalkeepers, and while I wasn’t scared of them, I did learn some hard lessons playing against some of those grizzled old campaigners. I remember we had a midweek game against Oldham, and they had a centre-forward called Jim Fryatt, who had a reputation for being an intimidating character. He was bald and on a wet day you could hear the ball slap off his head. The local paper had been suggesting John Burridge was too inexperienced to be playing against an old warhorse like Fryatt, who was built like a brick shithouse and could dish out some harsh treatment. It was a big game for us, because Oldham had just been relegated the season before from the Third Division, and they were seen as the big boys of the league and the team that everyone wanted to beat.

  It was a horrible wet and windy Tuesday night, and they slung everything in for big Jim Fryatt. I may have been 16, but that didn’t matter to him – he was an assassin in football boots. If I was old enough to play, I was old enough to take whatever punishment he felt like dishing out. First chance he got, he came steaming in and broke my nose. There was blood everywhere. My nose was all over the place, and my eyes were stinging, but what I would in time refer to as the ‘John Burridge spirit’ kicked in and the broken nose just made me even more determined to succeed. I made save after save and I played a blinder. With five minutes left, we scored and won it 1-0. The manager ran on to the field and picked me up, shouting: ‘That was brilliant, son.’ I must have lost half a pint of blood out of my nose. The papers the next day had changed their tune after giving me some stick on my debut. They were now saying that I could be the next Gordon Banks and hailing a fantastic performance from the plucky 16-year-old who had stood up to big bad Fryatt.

  These big centre-forwards used to do everything they could to mash you up, but I never held any grudges. It was a man’s game, and all those hard knocks were part of my education. It was the making of me, and it only helped to toughen me up. So, to Jim Fryatt, I suppose I should say thank you for breaking my nose and preparing me properly for a life in football. Another game that sticks in the mind was an away trip to Southport where I was up against a fella called Eric Redrobe. He also had a reputation for being a bit of a hard man, and at corner kicks he would be growling under his breath that he was going to kill you. True to his word, he hammered into me and broke my rib. I was in absolute agony. I was still recovering from the smashed nose, and now I had a cracked rib to add to the broken bones collection. But again the never-say-die spirit kicked in. There were no substitute goalkeepers, so I just had to get on with it. I played on and had a good game and we won, so I was starting to believe in the philosophy ‘no pain, no gain’. If I had any broken bones, strains or bruises, they would just strap me up for each game and let me get
on with it. I was young, strong and a quick healer. To me, getting a few bumps and bruises was just an occupational hazard. I was loving it. I was also driven by the constant threat hanging over my head that if the football didn’t work out, my dad would make me play rugby and work down the pit – that was all the motivation I needed to stick at it and be a success.

  Although I was keeping Mike Rogan out of the team, there was never any danger of me getting ideas above my station. Whatever I did out on the pitch on a Saturday, I was still just a £5-a-week apprentice and the only way to survive at a club like Workington was hard graft and showing plenty of respect to your elders. I may have been playing every week, but I was still the dogsbody and I had plenty of jobs to do around the ground. After the home games, even though I’d just been playing myself, I had to run down to the opponents’ dressing room with a brush and sweep all the mud that had come from the players’ boots into a corner so they didn’t get their feet dirty when they stepped out of the bath. I would come down with my kit still on, and they would do a double-take when they saw me standing there and ask: ‘Haven’t you just been playing in goal for them?’ After I’d done my bit in the away dressing room the manager used to make me pick up and sort out all the kit in our dressing room. I had to make sure the jerseys weren’t inside out, then put all the red shirts together, gather the white shorts in another big tub full of soap powder, and pick up all the red stockings and stick them in another container. Next, I had to sweep out the home dressing room. When I’d done all that, I could finally have a bath myself, but I still had to cycle the 10 miles home. By the time all my duties had finished and I’d cycled home on my bike it could be about half past ten and all I was ready for was sleep.