by Gary Imlach
I sat talking to his wife while he tried and failed to find some paperwork he wanted to show me. They’d sold their family house to buy a retirement flat overlooking the cricket ground in Urmston – closer to Old Trafford than Bury’s Gigg Lane – and his playing career was temporarily lost to him somewhere in the new drawers and cupboards. But he needed no help recalling John McNeil. ‘He’d come from a Third Division club, Torquay, and the first thing he did was drop all the wages by a pound across the board. That was a lot of money, and about half a dozen of us said we wouldn’t sign – but eventually I was the last one holding out.
‘It must have been the final week before the start of the season and Ruth was in hospital having our daughter Lynn. It was a Friday afternoon, I’d just been to see her and I went into the club. He says, “How’s the wife – all right?” I says, “Fine.” Then he says, “Are you signing this form?” and when I said no he says, “Right, I want the house back in two weeks.” I had a club house on a fortnight’s tenancy agreement. If you weren’t signed on by the club they could have you out in two weeks.
‘What could I do? She was in hospital about to come out with the baby. I told him I was signing under protest and I didn’t speak to him for a fortnight.’
I’d assumed that the part-timers on the Bury playing staff were either youngsters on their way to turning full-time, like my father, or men the club thought weren’t worth a contract. But speaking to Cyril alerted me to the existence of a third group: the substantial minority of players around the league who simply didn’t want to sign away their independence. Tom Daniel was one of them. A versatile inside-forward, who could play alongside my father as well as on the right, he was also a draughtsman, earning a decent salary during the week, then picking up an extra wage on Saturday along with any bonuses.
He trained with my father on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, on the cinder car park in front of the main stand, and used to take Tuesday mornings off from work to play in the weekly practice match. Then he changed jobs and became a travelling salesman, so the practice match had to go. ‘When Dave Russell took over from John McNeil as manager, he said, “Look you’re going to have come full-time,” and I said, “Well in that case I’d rather pack it in.” So we just went on as we were.
‘I remember we were in the coach going somewhere to play and I was sat next to Stewart. And he said straight out to me, “How much are you getting paid?” and I said I was getting £12 or whatever it was, and he said, “Oh, I’m getting £14” – or whatever his figure was. And I thought to myself, that’s a bugger, isn’t it, here I am pulling my bloody guts out and he’s getting another couple of quid more than me.
‘I must confess I was getting a bit niggly about it and I thought I’ll go and see the manager. I said, “Is there any chance?” and he said, “No,” so I said, “What about Stewart,” and he said, “Well, if we want good young players from Scotland we’ve got to pay ’em.” And at the time I accepted this, and it was only when I was going home I thought, well, what the hell’s that got to do with me?
‘Anyway, after a while I thought I’m not going to keep asking for a rise because I might get the other thing – y’know, shown the door.’
Anxiety about being shown the door rose as each season neared its end. It was then that the club produced its retained list, the players they planned to keep under contract for the following season and the terms which they were prepared to offer them. Methods varied from club to club. With some it was a slip in the season’s final wage packet, or a registered letter. Elsewhere a list went up on the noticeboard outside the dressing room, or players were called in to see the manager one by one. Les Bardsley was the Bury captain when my father arrived, a hard wing-half who felt it was his responsibility to look after the young players in the side. He had them back for extra work in the afternoons, and faced down the Makepeaces of the Second Division for them on Saturdays.
At the end of the season he was as vulnerable as anyone in the group gathered at the door to the manager’s office. ‘It was bloody awful because you waited and somebody would come out and say, “What am I going to tell the wife now I’ve got the bloody sack?” Or they’d put you on the transfer list and you’d have to find out how much they wanted for you. They could put £5,000 on you and you’d think who’s going to pay £5,000 for me? So you’d have to wait till they dropped it to nothing. And other clubs knew they would do that, so maybe for a few weeks you’d get no wages, unless you’d got another job.
‘And if you were in a club house, they’d always be coming round with players they were wanting to sign, coming to have a look at your house. I threw them out, I said, “Sod off, I’m still here. Come back when I’m not here.”’
In late 1952, none of this was of any concern to my father. He was starring in the first team on Saturdays and counting the months until the end of his joinery apprenticeship on his twenty-first birthday, when he could put his overalls back in the suitcase he’d travelled south with and start reporting for training on the Gigg Lane car park every day instead of two nights a week. By mid-October the headlines were proclaiming Bury’s third win in a row, and the manager was doing his best to annex the credit for the signing of his star winger with a piece of blatant myth-making. In the versions he started giving to the newspapers, John McNeil had spotted my dad himself while on holiday in Scotland: ‘I count his signing as the best day’s work I ever did.’ Willie Shanks, the diligent scout who’d sent Robbie Campbell for a trial with Bury months before my father and Eddie Archibald months after, wasn’t mentioned.
Reading my way through his first season, my attention was caught by a couple of paragraphs boxed off from one of the match reports and headed ‘BURY WINGER APOLOGISES’:
In the pre-match shooting-in Stewart Imlach, the young Bury outside-left, drove the ball into the crowd behind the goal: unfortunately it struck a young woman causing her some inconvenience. Imlach asks Ranger to express his apologies to the woman.
Ranger was the pen name of the Bury FC beat reporter.
I mentioned this during a weekend phone call to my mother as an amusing little episode. I was becoming, to my slight discomfort, the family authority on my father’s career. Suddenly it was my job to supply historical snippets to the woman he’d lived with for forty-six years. There was an ‘Ooh . . .’ on the other end, then silence.
‘What?’
‘Well – I remember going once and getting hit with the ball.’
Ball meets girl!
‘What, before you met Dad? Were you standing behind the goal?’
‘Yes, I mean that’s where we stood but . . .’ This wasn’t a historical snippet, it was a previously unrecorded sighting of Halley’s Comet. My father had subconsciously picked out his future wife with a crisp half-volley during the warm-up, football’s equivalent of the caveman’s club over the head: there was years of psychoanalysis in this. ‘But, no, no, it can’t have been.’ She was back-pedalling now, turning suddenly emphatic. ‘No, I don’t think I went to any first-team games before I met Dad, I think it was a reserve game.’
Thought? Hoped? Couldn’t face the possibility? Why not? – she’d been convinced that my father had come back as an owl a few months after his death. Actually, I’d been pretty well convinced myself when she showed me the pictures she’d taken: the bird, perched on the kitchen counter by the bread bin, evidently waiting for her to put the camera down and get the kettle on. It had dive-bombed her a couple of times in the garden late at night, then invited itself in. And it did look remarkably like him.
The owl was one thing. The flying football of fate, though, she was distancing herself from. Pity. There was certainly no way of proving it. Perhaps it didn’t need proving, perhaps it was enough not to categorically disprove it. Just to have it there as a pencil entry in the family compendium of coincidence.
They’d met officially at the Palais de Danse. ‘The band was here’ – I’m up in Formby for the weekend and she’s mapping out the romantic battl
efield in the living room – ‘and we used to stand here. The footballers all used to stand across there when they came in, they always used to come in late. And all the girls, all the hangers-on, used to stand across there too. Well, you were common if you stood with the footballers. Common, a hanger-on.
‘Anyway, as soon as the music started up he used to walk straight across the floor and they’d say, “He’s coming!” and I’d say, “Oh God, I can’t understand a word he says.” He was a great dancer though, your dad. The only thing was, he needed the whole floor to himself – I used to get my heel caught in other fellas’ turn-ups.’ Perhaps misunderstanding the question, she said yes to his proposal of marriage.
My mother was a machinist at Bury Feltworks. It was her second job. She’d started at Clitheroe Shirtings when she was fourteen, sewing sleeves and collars onto children’s school shirts. The girls weren’t allowed to sew a whole garment for fear that they’d start making their own and selling them once they knew how. With her colleagues from the feltworks she had sat cross-legged on the floor of the Palais de Danse one week in 1953, hand-sewing the pieces of a giant gold carpet for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
My parents were due to be married in 1954, at the end of my father’s second season. The date had been set for July, but in May he had to travel home suddenly for the funeral of his Grandad Dovey, the skipper of The Snowdrop. One day during his absence, my mother was called off the factory floor at the feltworks. All the women there were on piecework and any time spent away from the bundle of items stacked by the side of their machines was lost money. An interruption could only mean important news.
Waiting for her outside the factory were the Bury manager, Dave Russell, who’d taken over from John McNeil midway through the season, and his assistant Bert Head. They’d had an offer from Derby County for my father that was too good to turn down: £7,500 plus two players. Having decided to cash in on their most valuable asset, the club had quickly identified the most likely obstacle to completing the deal: the local girl looking forward to her July wedding and married life with the town’s star footballer. Hence the emergency call. They wanted to break the news to her before her fiancé got the chance, and cast the prospective move in the best possible light.
‘I remember going and sitting in Dave Russell’s car and the two of them talking to me, and they just kept saying, “Derby’s a lovely place, you know, there’s no slums.” That’s all they kept saying, “There’s no slums in Derby. And you’ll get a hundred pounds when he signs on. Just think, you’re getting married, think what you could do with a hundred pounds.”’ The standard signing-on fee at the time was actually £10. If the Bury manager was trying to persuade my mother with the promise of £100 from Derby either he was talking about an under-the-counter payment, or he was having her on.
‘I remember going back inside and telling the girls, “There’s no slums in Derby,” and they were all saying, “That’s a load of rubbish, there’s slums everywhere.”’
‘Did he get the hundred pounds for signing on?’ I asked her.
‘I can’t remember. I know he promised me a sewing machine when we got married – and he went out and bought a set of golf clubs.’
If Bury were keen to tie up the deal quickly, their Second Division rivals Derby County were even keener. My father agreed to the transfer over the phone from Lossiemouth, but the Derby manager, Jack Barker, insisted that the news be kept secret until his signature was on the contract, worried that if news got out that Bury were willing to sell, he’d have been outbid by a bigger club.
According to the papers there’d been interest in my father that season from teams offering between £15,000 and £20,000, substantial money for a young player who had yet to play two full seasons. Everton were among those that had been turned down; Burnley and Manchester United had both been to watch him. Derby had also made a previous offer of cash plus players. Dr J.S.M. McKay, a Bury board member, had stoked the interest with a livestock owner’s pride: ‘If we transfer that boy we’ll want £10,000 for his heart to begin with. After that we’ll start considering our price for him as a footballer.’ The target of the offers would have known nothing about any of them, save for what he might glean from the occasional paragraph in the Bury Times.
Why Bury were happy to go along with Derby’s request for secrecy instead of testing my father’s value on the open market is a bit of a mystery. Certainly they seemed keen on one of the players Derby were offering in part-exchange, Norman Nielson, a big strong centre-half from South Africa. The makeweight in the deal was another South African, Cyril Law, who would slip conveniently into the left-wing spot vacated by my father.
Whatever the reasons behind it, the fact was that my father hadn’t been offered a transfer so much as a done deal. Once the club had decided to sell he was given no chance to discover who else might be interested. He’d simply been summoned after terms between the two parties had already been agreed. My mother’s parents had no telephone and the only conversation she was able to have with him about the proposed deal was during a call from Dave Russell’s house, with the manager standing beside her. And so he signed. No private discussion with his fiancée, no face-to-face meeting with his manager. No trip to Derby to see the place or his prospective club. He simply signed.
The fact was, my father was no more likely to take on the authority of the Bury board than my mother was to refuse a move across the factory floor from the machine making dipstick-wipers to the one turning out felt covers for Ronson lighters. If he had resisted, Bury could simply have offered unacceptable terms for the following season and put him on the transfer list without the obligation to pay him.
‘I was speaking to Enid about it the other day,’ my mother told me – Enid was the wife of Eddie Gleadall, my father’s inside-left partner and the best man at their wedding. ‘She said Ted had an inkling that they wanted to sell him and he just came home one day and said, “I’ve signed for Scunthorpe.” And she said, “Well, why didn’t you say no?” He said, “You can’t say no, if they want to get rid of you they’ll get rid of you.” So he just signed, without even speaking to Enid. That’s just the way it was, if they wanted to sell you, that was it.’
Chapter Four
Club House:
Derby 1954–55
MY FATHER WOULD HAVE been unlikely to turn down a move to Derby County, even if he’d been given the choice. They may have been in the Second Division but they were a much bigger club than Bury, with a history spent almost entirely in the First.
If anyone had posted him the Derby papers, though, he might have had misgivings. I got there ahead of him and read the warning signs. Two weeks before his transfer, the club’s retained list had been front-page news in the Evening Telegraph: RAMS PLAYERS GET CUTS IN PAY. Practically every man the club had decided to keep for the following season would be on lower wages. There’s no surviving record of whether my father was guaranteed the maximum by Derby to sign for them. But they did promise him a house.
The club house stood solidly in the social tradition of tied-housing for key workers. Mill owners built estates or whole villages to accommodate large workforces; football teams kept a handful of properties for their itinerant employees. With players arriving, often at short notice in parts of the country they knew nothing about, it made sense for their employers to relieve them of the burden of finding somewhere to live so that they could concentrate on the game.
Young single players, like my father had been when he arrived in Bury from Lossiemouth, were put in digs, where landladies would provide them with clean sheets and cooked meals and the club with a steady flow of information on their out-of-hours activities. Houses were for married men.
It was sound business for the clubs – they could assemble a portfolio of property, get a rental return on their investment and help contribute to a stable home life for their key performers. As Cyril Fairclough knew, the eviction clause in the standard tenancy agreement also gave them a handy trump card in
case of any disputes. For plenty of players, though, club houses were perks of the job. When I spoke to Eddie Baily, the great Spurs inside-forward who would later play alongside my father at Nottingham Forest, he remembered Tottenham owning half a dozen in a row on one north London street. ‘There was Ron Burgess, Les Stevens, Ernie Jones . . . six of us all lived together, next door to each other. If we went out to play a match and some of us come home and some didn’t there was a lot of trouble with the wives saying, “Why haven’t you come home with them?” Roedean Avenue in Enfield it was. They’re all still there.’
They used to leave their houses together every morning to catch the same bus to training; teammates already synced to each other’s rhythms and routines before they’d reached the end of the street. I wondered which player had moved into Eddie Baily’s house when he moved out. And who had moved into ours in Nottingham and Coventry, and who’d lived there before us.
The club house is a historical footnote in the social development of the game now. But, like the ones in Roedean Avenue, many of them are still standing, retired from football these days, too small and cheap and close to the ground ever to attract another playing tenant; a network of anonymous family homes that have seen the slowly evolving furniture choices of several generations of a single team’s players. Perhaps we need a plaque scheme to mark them out from their identical neighbours.
In 1954, though, Derby County, on club houses as on wages, seemed to be economising. My mother and father had been married in mid-July, meaning that he hadn’t joined his new teammates for the start of pre-season training. After a week’s honeymoon on the Isle of Man, the newlyweds arrived in Derby to begin married life as lodgers. With the season about to start, they were asked to share with the team’s centre-half and his family while the club found them somewhere permanent to live.
