Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  There was no ostentation in the way he played football. It was unspectacular, uncomplicated, uncompromising, utilitarian, consistent, mindful and hard: very hard. There were no tricks or fuss. Actions spoke louder than words.

  Back in his Hetton days, Paisley’s friend Jackie Wilson had taught him what they then called the ‘Sammy Weaver throw’ – hurling throw-ins like missiles into the goalmouth in the style of Weaver, a Newcastle United and England left-half. Images of Paisley running to launch a ‘Sammy Weaver’ feature prominently in the newspaper discussions of him but it was his style of defending which Liverpool liked. He operated alongside Phil Taylor and Bill Jones in Liverpool’s three-man half-back line, whose job was to provide a protective shield for the three-man defence – and they did so with extreme effectiveness when football resumed after the war.

  Match reports repeatedly extolled Paisley’s work ethic and commitment at a packed Anfield. ‘The toughest man of 51,911,’ he is described as in one report. He broke into the first team on 7 September 1946 when Liddell, the Scot who became legendary among Liverpool strikers, was making only his second appearance, against Chelsea. Their wait had been interminably long. Both had signed professional forms for Liverpool a full seven years earlier.

  Liddell shot freely and frequently and scored twice, the first goal direct from a corner Paisley had won. Then Liddell provided for Paisley as they drove forward. ‘Paisley and Liddell engineered a move which ended in Paisley shooting over the bar. These two were making a big difference,’ stated one report, though proceedings were also delayed because Paisley ‘received a boot thrust in the midriff’. Those who paid three ha’pennies for the Liverpool Echo final edition that Saturday were left in no doubt about the prime contributors to the performance watched by 49,995 people. ‘Reds sail in Chelsea sunset,’ stated the front page headline. ‘Liddell and Paisley transformed Liverpool attack.’ It was some debut: Liverpool won 7–4.

  Paisley was not always so eye-catching but he was consistent, and the finest of the First Division’s wingers did not seem to intimidate him. Not even Stanley Matthews, who had just made his big move from Stoke City to Blackpool when Liverpool played at Bloomfield Road in the seaside town on 1 November 1947. Matthews mesmerised Paisley’s Liverpool teammate Ray Lambert that day, the Sketch reported. Yet, having also been skinned by the England international, Paisley ‘did not let the matter rest there, but went back for a second tackle. And more often than not he succeeded,’ the Sketch continued. ‘Here is the tip for a player who will have to deal with Matthews – only [that] they will need an outsize heart to do it.’

  The Liverpool Evening Echo agreed. ‘Lambert, having suffered [Preston’s Tom] Finney, now went to Matthews with a defeatist attitude common to all those whose job it is to suffer this player all of the time. Paisley was different. He went in, was beaten, and then had the temerity to go back for more. The result was that a Matthews who had left him yards behind suddenly found the second tackle the lethal one.’ But Liverpool still lost 2–0.

  The refusal to yield to injury, which bordered on lunacy at times, was a precursor of the way Paisley later expected his players to play through pain and felt suspicion for those who did not.

  Early in one league match at St James’ Park, he was hit on the side of the head and, it was reported at the time, briefly knocked unconscious by a ball struck with immense power by Newcastle United’s Norman Dodgin. He remained on the field, was still so shaky by the half-time interval that trainer Albert Shelley helped him off the pitch, but was determined to return. ‘During the interval, the unusual method of him walking up and down outside the main grandstand was used, in the hope he would come to,’ the Liverpool Evening Express match report revealed. Nine minutes after the match restarted, Paisley trotted on again, to do useful work at outside-left before trying to head a goal off [sic] a [Billy] Liddell centre.’ Still evidently concussed, Paisley did not last the second half. The newspapers are littered with similar such incidents involving ‘Bobby’ Paisley, as some of the reporters called him. He ran hard against Derby County despite ‘stitches inserted in a scalp wound which bled profusely throughout the second half’.

  Paisley was widely accepted to be one of the top four or five First Division half-backs of the time: part of a Liverpool side who found brief and unexpected glory after the war. The team became the surprise success of the first post-war campaign – winning the 1946–47 championship, their first silverware in 23 years, in the face of such pre-war giants as Newcastle, Sheffield Wednesday and Sunderland. He was a mainstay, playing in 33 league games in the title-winning year. The achievement was remarkable – and rather overshadowed by the success that would follow for him decades later.

  Paisley could play the individualist, too. Evidence of that came in Liverpool’s 1950 FA Cup semi-final against Everton, where his pre-match instructions from Kay had echoes of the kind of orders Paisley would issue to an over-ambitious Liverpool full-back, Alan Kennedy, two decades later: ‘Don’t get too far forward.’ Kennedy would be gratified to know that Paisley ignored instructions and did just that. He was thus in position to send in a lob which – more by accident than design – found the net in the 2–0 win which sent Liverpool to face Arsenal in the Wembley final. The newspaper reports of the game were full of allusions to how Kay had instructed Paisley not to waste possession by taking shots at goal when advancing up-field. ‘Times without number, Paisley in the past has followed his own forwards . . . to make a shot. Results have not been encouraging. Mr Kay therefore chatted with Paisley and suggested that he might profitably elect in future not to court glory and marry failure.’ No one was complaining when he got the team to Wembley.

  He was injured in the build-up to the final and missed four games after the Everton victory, though told Kay that he had recovered full fitness in time for the big day. His confidence that he would be rewarded for his semi-final contribution with a place in the final starting XI was buoyed by the fact that his name was published in the Wembley match programme.

  But it was not to be. Paisley discovered, via a newspaper report, that he had been omitted. A vote among directors – who picked the team – went 5–4 against him. He was devastated. A newspaper offered him money to tell his story, he said years later, but he declined.

  It was subsequently suggested that Paisley had considered leaving Anfield in protest, though images of the Liverpool squad completing a lap of honour at Anfield after losing the Wembley final, 2–0, did not suggest the half-back was in a mood of insurrection as he walked the pitch in his immaculate dark Liverpool-issue suit, waving amiably to the terraces. Paisley was never a man for the barricades. He said the disappointment taught him how others would feel if dropped for a final, though his players would be sceptical of that comment. His managerial career would be littered with instances of them discovering in the pages of a newspaper that they had not been selected. Paisley was reminded at Wembley that the world of football was hard and unforgiving. That did not make him any more inclined to soften the blow for the generations which followed. He was, in any case, too embedded in the city of Liverpool to make a serious stand against the club. He was a 31-year-old already beginning to wonder how he could evolve his career at Anfield in order to sustain his domestic life.

  Paisley and Jessie’s first child, Robert, had been born at 7.40 a.m. on a Friday morning, 24 September 1948. ‘Bob came to see me before he went to Blackpool,’ Jessie reports in her diary. For once, she didn’t record the newspaper’s verdict on her husband. That was a match Liverpool lost 1–0. A second son, Graham, was born two years later and, by the hot summer of 1951, both the Paisleys and their neighbours the Liddells were becoming homeowners, leaving their club houses on Greystone Road for south Liverpool’s suburbs. The Paisleys were destined for a pebble-dashed semi: 14, South Manor Way in the Woolton district of south Liverpool. Paisley, a firm if unassuming leader, was made captain of Liverpool in the summer of 1950. He was destined not to run out for England. A call-up as a r
eserve for an England ‘B’ international with Holland at Amsterdam’s Olympic Stadium in 1952 was the closest he came.

  Their new property was well beyond what had been his parents’ means, and he wanted to get to work on it straight away. He would be into his overalls, with his bricklaying trowels out as soon as he was through the front door. He must have been the first Liverpool captain to have built a porch on the front of his own house. He knocked down the back of the garage to extend it, too, and put on a basic conservatory, after digging out the foundations.

  Jessie’s father Arthur Chandler was an organ-builder of repute, who worked for the firm which had installed Liverpool Anglican Cathedral’s organ. He helped Paisley with the carpentry, both for the porch and for something of a conservatory – a glass-roofed lean-to – which they added. ‘One of dad’s constructions,’ as eldest son Graham called it. There is an image of Paisley’s two sons in front of the conservatory, lining up for the camera with their football.

  Then the music stopped – incredibly abruptly. Paisley ought to have been looking into the middle distance by that point, comfortable in the knowledge that he had provided the trappings of the new British middle-class security. The Paisleys had the only television in the street. He and Jessie had albums full of snaps from the holidays, Jessie generally taking the pictures. They captured Paisley with the boys in an assortment of deckchairs on myriad British beaches, sometimes in full suit befitting the enduring formality of the day, sometimes suit trousers, rarely in shorts. Butlin’s 1950 and 1951; location unknown 1952; both Newquay and Aberystwyth in 1953.

  In another age he would have been able to contemplate easing himself into coaching – imparting the skills of a sport which, when World War II was behind them, had delighted so many people every week. But that door did not exist in the early fifties. There was no obvious next step to deliver an income. The Football Association’s own coaching scheme was a fledgling one, just two years in existence at the start of the decade, and most Football League clubs did not believe there was a need for anything more than physical training. Keeping players fit and fast was the only requirement. Skills were innate and God-given, most clubs thought.

  The need for an alternative course was hastened when Paisley experienced the decline which comes to all players, just as the money started evaporating at Liverpool and the team’s national standing crashed. The club’s wealthy and charismatic chairman Billy McConnell, a catering industry entrepreneur who possessed the vision of building the best team in the land, had died unexpectedly, and at the end of the 1953–54 season the side were relegated as the First Division’s bottom club, ending 50 consecutive years of football at that level. Paisley had become more peripheral amid the decline, making only 19 First Division appearances that season, and on 4 May 1954 the Liverpool Evening Express reported that ‘Bobby Paisley, the tough little North-Easterner who specialises in the long throw and is of the never-say-die order,’ was not on the retained list of players for the first season down in the Second Division. His last game had been a 3–1 defeat to Sheffield United at their Bramall Lane ground on 13 March.

  He was 35. It was the year the couple’s daughter, Christine, was born. Robert was six and Graham, four, and Jessie was worried. ‘We were young and unaware then, of course,’ says Graham. ‘But Mum and Dad both always remembered it as one of the times of most uncertainty.’ It was suggested years later that Paisley had considered moving back into bricklaying, returning to the skills picked up during his brief apprenticeship in Hetton after the colliery closed, or perhaps trying his hand at running a shop. It seems improbable that he gave serious consideration to either idea. His intermittent journeys back up to the north-east vividly revealed the struggles of those with the same narrow horizons that he had known before football. The Hetton Lyon Colliery was closed by the National Coal Board in July 1950 and on a Wednesday morning in early July 1951 there was an explosion at the neighbouring Hetton Downs mine, which Samuel and Emily Paisley’s Downs lane terrace overlooked. More than 500 men were working 1,300 feet below the surface at that moment and nine were killed – the youngest 25 and the oldest 54. They included Jack Walker, the football trainer to whom Paisley felt he owed much. He was a ‘cutterman’, operating heavy machinery where the seam was mined, and like all but two of those who perished that day, he was killed by carbon dioxide poisoning. Paisley found Walker’s gravestone in Hetton cemetery, where he’d been buried like all the rest.

  2

  Isn’t That So, Bob?

  It was not so much an arrival as an earthquake when Bill Shankly first walked into Anfield as manager. The club was ‘a shambles of a place’, he later said, and the 40-year-old Bob Paisley must have looked a very small figure in the background.

  It was 1959 and Liverpool Football Club had become moribund, marooned in football’s second tier for five years, and showing little material sign of getting out. There was not even a means to water the pitch when the new manager took his first look around the place: just a pipe from the visitors’ dressing-room and a tap. The £3,000 needed to put that right was one of his first investments. The Melwood training ground consisted of an old wooden pavilion with a veranda and an air-raid shelter. Instilling new life into this barren landscape needed noise, drive and monumental powers of inspiration. Shankly had them all. His appointment at Liverpool’s helm was the most significant landmark in Paisley’s football life because without Shankly there would have been none of what was to follow in his own career.

  Paisley was still there at Anfield because, whatever it took, he had made himself indispensable. The former captain and league championship winner had certainly not been too proud to furnish Liverpool with his old bricklaying skills. He built the new manager’s dugout that Shankly would sit in, as well as a section of terrace known as the ‘bandbox’, where the squad’s unused players would stand. He plumbed the toilets at the back of the Kemlyn Road terrace and then painted them. ‘Come on, you look a strong lad,’ he told Tommy Smith, a trainee defender, one day in 1960. They ended up going under the Kop roof, cutting out a girder that had become an obstruction and cementing a new one in its place. He devised a system for putting up the half-time scores. The old slots which took the numbers had gone rusty. Yet Paisley also knew that being the odd-job man was not enough. He needed to find some relevance.

  It was in football’s fledgling science of physiotherapy that he saw it. He was aware from his playing experiences of the prehistoric way players were dealt with. Liverpool’s resident sponge man, Albert Shelley, was a practitioner of the ‘hot and cold towels’ treatment. That entailed brandishing tweezers to withdraw a towel from a bucket of red-hot water, slapping it on a player’s offending injury, then repeating the process with an ice-cold towel.

  Paisley had been particularly alarmed by a game in which his old friend Billy Liddell was knocked unconscious in a collision, prompting Shelley, known for the distinctive white coat in which he carried out his duties, simply to ask the striker to run around on the sidelines. Shelley pushed Liddell back out onto the field, just before the half-time interval, to complete the game. Even by Paisley’s standards of forbearance, this was extreme. He asked Liddell after the game how he was feeling.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Liddell asked him.

  ‘The knock you took . . .?’ replied Paisley.

  Liddell remembered no ‘knock’. He had been severely concussed at best, half conscious at worst.

  Paisley had been struck as early as 1950, the year he was left out of the FA Cup final side, that this area of work might offer him a way of staying in football. By then, he had already taken up a correspondence course which would qualify him to be a physiotherapist and masseur when his playing days were over. ‘We married men have to look to the future, you know,’ he told the Liverpool Evening Express that year.

  Medical practices were becoming more common in football by the mid-1950s. Some clubs had hired trained physiotherapists, and the Pinderfields Hospital in Wakefield, Yorkshire, provid
ed a course for footballer trainers in remedial gymnastics. But Paisley found himself to be surplus to playing requirement at a newly relegated second-tier team in 1954 and needed to be imaginative if he was to catch the wave. He asked the club’s board member Thomas Valentine (T. V.) Williams, a wealthy cotton broker, if he could begin spending time in the accident departments of some of the Liverpool hospitals to watch basic injuries – sprains and muscle tears – being treated. Williams, who had been enlightened enough to buy the land in Liverpool’s West Derby district which would become the Melwood training ground, was a close friend of the Liverpool retail entrepreneur John Moores, who had connections in the city. Williams obtained a signed letter from Moores, asking that Paisley be granted access to the hospitals where he might pick up medical knowledge, supplementing his correspondence course.

  Paisley’s zeal evidently impressed the management. Williams offered him the role of reserve team trainer, allowing him to stay on after his failure to make the retained player list. The reserves were a vehicle for players recovering from injury, or young players requiring a game – winning or losing was immaterial. Paisley wanted to begin making the side competitive, and Liverpool agreed. He pasted up a note on the notice board stating that from now on he wanted a reserve team that went into every match with the objective of winning. Within a year, he had led the team to the runners-up position in the Central League, behind a Manchester United side that included many of the young players who would go on to play for Matt Busby. His second-string team were champions the following year.

  From fixing toilets to running the reserve side, Paisley had made himself part of Liverpool’s fixtures and fittings and, in May 1957, the club announced that he was to become ‘chief coach’ to manager Phil Taylor, his former Liverpool teammate, who had been dropped from the retained player list at the same time. Taylor had made manager following a year as caretaker, after the dismissal of Don Welsh.