Quiet Genius

by Ian Herbert

  It was now that Paisley gradually began taking over Albert Shelley’s role as physiotherapist. When staff arrived for work one day in 1957, they were amused to find him sitting there in Shelley’s white coat. It was the only time in his life that he would be unabashed about taking someone else’s job. He felt that his own hold on a profession in football depended on it.

  Liverpool’s fruitless struggles to get promoted, however, made Anfield a far less secure place. One of Scotland’s most celebrated coaches, Reuben Bennett, was head-hunted by T. V. Williams and also appointed ‘chief coach’ in December 1958, after a role working for Bill Shankly’s brother, Bob, at Third Lanark, north of the Scottish border. This must have created insecurity for Paisley, whose role carried the same title.

  But none of that uncertainty matched December 1959 when Taylor was sacked and Bill Shankly walked through the door as manager. Paisley submitted a letter to the Liverpool board, asking for a clarification of his position. Fatefully, Shankly concluded that the backroom team would remain intact. He could work with Paisley, Bennett and Joe Fagan, recruited from Rochdale as reserve team trainer in 1958.

  Four glorious years passed, crowned by Shankly restoring Liverpool to the First Division in 1962, before Paisley provided the white-coat moment so many always remembered. He was applying electrodes to the left leg of Jimmy Melia, Liverpool’s midfielder, and trying to put him at ease. ‘Right, Jimmy, if you feel anything untoward just give us a shout and I’ll turn it off right away . . .’ the players remember him telling Melia as he walked a few yards towards a battery of dials near the window. Could he feel anything? Paisley then asked.

  ‘No, Bob,’ said Melia.

  ‘Now?’ asked Paisley.

  ‘Nothing, Bob,’ said Melia.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Bob. Haven’t you read the instructions?’ asked Shankly, pacing around impatiently in the background.

  ‘The instructions are in German,’ Paisley replied.

  ‘Weren’t you in the war, for God’s sake? Don’t you understand German?’

  ‘This one must need turning up,’ said Paisley, fiddling with the dials.

  ‘Bob. The plug . . . it’s not on at the wall,’ said Chris Lawler, the full-back who was one of the quieter ones but often compensated for lack of noise with quality of observation. A look of anxiety began to spread across Melia’s face. Paisley reached down to introduce electricity into the equation and Melia’s leg shot up in the air.

  ‘Turn the bloody thing off,’ shouted Shankly. The players who were not doubled up by now joined in his plea.

  Liverpool trod boldly, if sometimes comically, across new sports science frontiers and the episode demonstrated how Paisley’s relationship with Shankly had started to form. Shankly was the visionary who would get a scent of how Liverpool could be different – and any obstacle in his way, be damned. Paisley was the details man – left to put the idea, or machine, into effect. A feature in the Liverpool Echo’s Football Pink a few years later pictured Paisley standing in front of a bank of technology, including three models of interferential machine, a short-wave Diatherm machine, massaging vibrator and a galaxy of ointments.

  The subject of attention on the day of the Melia incident was what had become known as ‘the German treatment machine’ – an electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) device – which Shankly had heard about through his brother. He had become convinced it could eradicate injuries and keep his players out of the treatment room – ‘the Bastards’ Club’ as he called it – because he was always so intensely suspicious of players who were not fit. The search for the machine became Shankly’s obsession. The devices were virtually unknown in British sport and were most used by Russian athletes at the time. But Shankly tracked down an early advocate – an Austrian pioneer, Dr Hans Nemec – to a clinic in Liechtenstein. Nemec referred him on to ‘a man in Birmingham’ and so it was that Liverpool took delivery of the portable EMS machine. It was then left to Paisley to make what he deemed to be the correct connections from the battery to the dial with wires which ‘were poking out from at least half a dozen places’, as forward Ian St John remembers.

  The machine and Melia survived the plug problem. Shankly and Paisley both concluded that it had an effect and Shankly, in his overseeing role, soon became so enthused by it that he wanted the people of Liverpool to benefit. On one occasion he ran out onto the street outside Anfield, found a couple of pensioners with aches and pains and brought them in – one limping, the other with backache. ‘Put them on the machine, Bob,’ he instructed, and Paisley obliged. Legend also has it that one day Shankly arrived at the door with an old man and a whippet and they had concocted a plan to try it out on the dog. ‘Bugger off,’ Paisley replied. ‘I’m not working on a bloody whippet.’

  By 1964, when Shankly had delivered a First Division title to Liverpool, Paisley was the long-suffering and, as the players saw it, sometimes hapless assistant: the driver, fixer, arranger, smoother-over and general factotum who would see Shankly’s ideas through and solve problems before they arrived at his door. It was Paisley who reached for his car keys on the night that Shankly – or ‘Shank’ as he always called him when discussing the manager with others – decided that the two of them would drive to Winsford in Cheshire to scout a player. The evening had not started well. It transpired that the player in question was actually on Witton Albion’s books, leaving Paisley to calm a fulminating Shankly with the assurance that, ‘I’ve got an AA map.’ Then they reached a petrol station to find no one emerging to help them on the forecourt as Paisley scrabbled around for some money – this being the year in which self-service pumps appeared. ‘You’ve got to serve yourself now, boss,’ Paisley declared. ‘Jesus Christ,’ shouted Shankly. ‘Another blow against the state of this country.’

  Shankly was entitled to adopt this regal position. He bestrode Liverpool so hugely by the mid-1960s – having rebuilt the club and reinstated its lost pride – that you could tell within an instant of arriving at Anfield or Melwood whether he was in the building or not. Ian St John had the measure of conversations between the boss and Bob: ‘Shankly and Paisley walked on, deep in conversation. Well, Bob was deep in Bill’s conversation,’ he said, describing the pair of them, walking outside London’s Hendon Hall Hotel before a League Cup tie with Watford, as the players waited to give them the slip and head out for the night. ‘Isn’t that so, Bob?’ was Shankly’s very frequent refrain. ‘Yes, boss,’ was Paisley’s very frequent reply.

  Paisley had no complaints about that. Shankly had also turned the meaning of a training session on its head – replacing the dull, utilitarian fitness routines virtually all Liverpool players had previously known with 90 minutes of work which almost always involved the ball. He had players thinking they could move mountains, and they searched his face for the slightest sign of his approval. Ian Ross, signed by Shankly in 1966 and released six years later, speaks of the Shankly ‘wink’ – his sign you had done your job well: ‘That’s what we lived for. That wink off him. You’d do anything for one of those winks.’

  Trevor Birch, a 16-year-old striker in 1974, remembers Shankly shuffling over to mark him at a corner in one of the coaching staff versus apprentices’ games which always wrapped up each morning session. ‘I’m going to mark you, son, because you can head the ball,’ Shankly told Birch. Nearly four decades on, Birch still remembers the thrill those few words gave him. ‘It seems ridiculous to say it, because it was just a throwaway remark, but that’s how he made you feel,’ he says.

  Back in the early days of the Shankly reign, when the players looked at Paisley in those sessions, they laughed. His playing days had ended only five or so years earlier but he was not the most mobile of individuals. His style of football and the ferocity of his tackling had left him with a pronounced limp, caused by an old injury to his left ankle. He would bandage it up in a figure of eight before leaving the family home on South Manor Way each morning but it contributed to the faintly comical gait on those days when it was playing up.
He put on some weight, which can have consequences when you stand little more than 5 feet 7 inches tall.

  At the end of the morning training session, Paisley would waddle out across the Melwood pitches to take up his customary position – goalkeeper – in the daily staff versus apprentices match: the ritual which ‘Shank’ had instituted. Sporting a pair of little black boxing gloves, he kept goal because it meant he did not have to run, though the games would still have to be stopped on occasions as Paisley yelped in agony because what he called his ‘wandering cartilage’ had gone again. That was another old injury: a piece of floating loose tissue which caused his left knee joint to jam. Someone had to push it back into place then the game could continue. When a well-struck shot once caught Paisley in the most painful place, the assembled players and staff were reduced to hysterics. ‘He’s squealing like a pig!’ someone shouted.

  His lack of objections to this stemmed from the fact that he was engrained in the football culture which dictated that you took the ridicule that was dished out. And, in any case, he had some perspective about his role at Liverpool. He’d made himself invaluable but he didn’t consider himself to be management, as such. He didn’t ask himself how he might lead this group of men one day, when to many of them he was often a figure of fun.

  Paisley became assistant to Shankly in 1971, as part of a reshuffle which saw Joe Fagan become first-team coach and Reuben Bennett – who had been above Paisley in the chain of command through the 1960s – assigned ‘special duties’ which would ‘probably include assessing opponents and reporting on recommended players’ according to the Liverpool Daily Post.

  None of this kept Paisley from busying himself building stud partition walls at home around this time. His sons shared the back bedroom but there would be arguments between them so Paisley built a partition straight down the middle of the room. It was an eccentric and inelegant construction which bisected the window and, rather like ‘the conservatory’, looked slightly Heath Robinson from garden level. But it did the job and the boys were happy. Robert’s radio no longer kept Graham awake late at night.

  Paisley also removed the fireplace from the front room of the semi-detached house with his leg still in plaster, when recovering from the removal of the troublesome cartilage. Shankly would also have viewed that with astonishment. His own mind was so one-track football that when he headed off to Blackpool for a few days away each close season with his wife, Nessie, he would regularly call up a member of the local First Division team for a game of ‘one-a-side.’ Liverpool’s young club secretary Peter Robinson, who had been appointed in 1965, would also get a call within a few days of the Shanklys decamping to Blackpool in which Bill would say, ‘It’s wonderful here, you’ve got to come and see me.’ Nessie would retreat from the promenade, out of the bitter wind, but Shankly would tell Robinson they should stay. (‘We won’t go in. This’ll do us good.’) He would then proceed to talk Liverpool with him. Shankly didn’t know what to do with himself when there were no players around.

  In contrast, Paisley didn’t feel the need to call the club when he disappeared for the summer. The young family enjoyed drives out to North Wales with Jessie and the children in their black Morris 10. The car was a 1936 model, already 20 years old when Paisley bought it from Liverpool’s reserve goalkeeper Dave Underwood, but it was novelty since the club discouraged players from driving at all. The children would always recall how they squealed with delight when their father drove at speed down the inclines, to ensure he got up the other side of a hill. They stayed at a boarding house in Rhyl on one occasion, Caerwys Castle on another. There was no petrol gauge, so he would park up before heading through the Mersey Tunnel on the way back and poke a stick in the tank to ensure he would not run out halfway through.

  Jessie resumed her teaching career. Only a narrow window of her school holidays intersected with her husband’s close-season break so they were limited to spring Bank Holiday weekends together most years. In 1964, it was a long weekend at the Cotswold House Hotel in Chipping Campden. The Paisleys stayed in the annexe and had nylon sheets, which were thought the height of modernity. When they got home Jessie bought a set. They visited Stratford and laughed at Paisley’s lame joke about Shakespeare. ‘It’s no wonder he died young, with the prices here,’ he said. There was a long weekend in Edinburgh, a trip to Blackpool and Morecambe, with all five of them crammed into a ‘holiday room’.

  It was the summer of 1966, as England prepared for Sir Alf Ramsey’s glory, when the Paisleys branched out into a boating holiday on the Thames. As usual, dovetailing with Liverpool’s pre-season international trips was complicated. Paisley had to be collected from Heathrow airport before the 45-minute or so drive on to Henley to collect the boat. Christine, 12 by then, sunbathed, Jessie cooked in the galley, the boys hopped on and off at locks. Paisley took the tiller and would also disappear off across the fields for some solitude just after dawn, to empty the toilet, reconnoitre and fetch back some milk. Family life suited him.

  The overseas tours continued, though Paisley was accustomed to them by the mid-1960s: more so than Shankly, who skipped many of those trips. It was in 1965, during a tour to Canada, that news reached Paisley of his mother Emily’s death. He returned home early and was in Hetton when they buried her.

  He loved to return to the town, where his father reconciled himself to life as a widower. Father and son would sometimes turn up at the dog track together. Samuel would visit Liverpool, too, enjoying the simple pleasures of a trip on the New Brighton ferry from Liverpool to the Wirral peninsula, and the cigars which his son would procure for him. He would drive him halfway home – to the town square in Skipton, North Yorkshire – where Paisley’s younger brother, Hughie, would be waiting to collect their father and take him the rest of the way.

  If the children were in the car, Paisley would feign taking bends sharply as if on a motorbike and drive over bumps in the road so they could bounce up and down. Christine would be on Jessie’s knee with the boys and grandfather in the back and she would touch the roof of the car with her head as they bounced on their way. His daughter was the apple of Bob’s eye. An 11-week bus strike in 1967 meant Paisley had to take over the school run, much to his delight. The two of them would just talk, and when the strike came to an end Paisley remained her chauffeur. The joke in the South Manor Way household was that Christine had not realised the strike had finished. Soon her schoolfriend, Lesley, was being collected en route by Paisley too. She would often be late, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  Years earlier, it had been Jessie who would take Christine to the Santa’s grotto, with the Christmas football schedule generally rendering Paisley absent. It was in one of the years he was around to take her, with a ‘dancing waters’ feature part of the attraction, that she always remembered. She had been nine when she became the owner of the resident family budgie, Pip, who would sit on Paisley’s shoulder and on the hearth when he cleared the ashes from the fireplace.

  As working life under Shankly reached its tenth year and progressed beyond, football could be put into a compartment at times. The club seemed to have its limits for Paisley. ‘More often than not, after putting us on the [EMS] machine he would say, “Right, I’m off to the betting shop,” remembers Ian St John. ‘If he was having a good day, he might not return.’ For Shankly, there was next to nothing beyond the world of Anfield, while for Paisley football was not always a matter of life and death. Horse racing was almost as important. In South Manor Way, he would slip into the hall from where his family would hear him dialling up and going through the usual routine. ‘P for Peter, A for apple, I for indigo . . .’ It was Paisley spelling out his name to access his telephone betting account.

  His choice of friends reflected both his priorities and his discomfort in the company of those who might be considered sophisticates. They generally all loved horse racing or participated in it, though their lack of airs and graces made them unintimidating. Bob Paisley didn’t want the challenge of cutting-edge
conversation, about football or anything else.

  His closest friend was Ray Peers, a brash, rotund boxing promoter who helped see to it that Paisley got tickets to see bouts at the Liverpool Empire in the 1960s. Peers also ran a sandwich shop on Liverpool’s Dock Road and liked to say that he served a thousand cups of coffee before 8 a.m. He was a racing enthusiast, too. He lived at a hotel in Birkenhead, the Central, where he and Paisley would often drive for a drink after a Liverpool home game to talk racing, football and boxing: three of the manager’s favourite topics. Paisley’s disappearance there after games tested Jessie’s patience at times.

  In the summer, cricket became a part of his landscape. He played friendlies for Wirral XI Oxton and annotated with his teammates’ names a photograph of the side he played in before what looked like a substantial crowd in 1948. As ever, Paisley was in the corner of the group shot but took his batting seriously. Though naturally right-handed, there was an ambidexterity about his cricket: he batted left-handed and bowled right-handed. (He kept a set of left-handed golf clubs, too, though the family never knew him use them.) Jessie took pictures of him during an innings on a sunlit evening, several years later. It had been an energy-sapping one, judging by the photograph of him leaving the field, dripping in sweat, when dismissed.

  Racing was his passion, though. When Liverpool’s trip to Ireland to play a friendly game in 1963 brought a chance encounter with the Irish trainer Frank Carr at Dublin’s Gresham Hotel, the beginnings of a friendship were laid. The Liverpudlian jockey turned trainer Frankie Durr – an established St Leger and 2000 Guineas-winning jockey – became another close friend. Paisley would travel to his favourite racecourses – Haydock Park in Lancashire, York, and Newmarket in East Anglia – to see Durr race.