My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes

by Gary Imlach

  After two years back in Nottingham he took the offer to step down to youth coach and up to the First Division with Everton. In 1969 the final wishes of lifelong fans had yet to overwhelm the groundstaff and, despite the Jags in the players’ parking spaces, Everton’s famously authoritarian manager Harry Catterick ran the kind of regime that hadn’t changed since my father’s playing days, or possibly Catterick’s own.

  Everyone – from the England internationals to the apprentices coming by bus – had to sign in each morning in a massive blue ledger at the entrance to Bellefield, Everton’s training ground. When the deadline passed, the pencil was replaced by a red pen. It wasn’t quite the time-clock at Cammell Laird, but there were fines for anyone whose name the manager could read in Biro. He weighed them every Friday. There was a lock on the television in the lounge. If Alan Ball and Howard Kendall wanted to play table tennis, they had to go to Jean, the manager’s secretary, to ask for the ball just like we did. And take it back afterwards.

  Catterick’s brilliance lay in buying and blending. Once he had the people in place he let them get on with it – obliged them to get on with it. He rarely materialised at training-ground level, but from his corner office on the first floor he could see all the parts of Bellefield that mattered; the slightest change in the angle of the blinds in his window was enough to quicken the pace down below. This was the evolutionary shuffle by which football clubs moved forward, half behind the times, half ahead; the generation that could no longer play working to stamp its values on the next, and competing vicariously through fresh legs. Methods were handed down, amended, rejected, diluted, and eventually the pimply apprentices became the grizzled occupants of the boot room or the upstairs office. Depending on their status, the supplanted generation moved into venerated retirement, slipped back into the mass of fans, or returned to the ground to lay turf and scatter ashes.

  Ronnie Goodlass and my father went through the ranks together, player and coach, from the youth team to the first team, both of them wingers. Long after my father had left the club his relentless disciplinarian enthusiasm was still echoing off the gym walls at Bellefield, channelled through Goodlass’s own experience, and influencing a generation of apprentices who wouldn’t have known the man if they’d walked past him. Which, of course, they did. My father’s final job before retirement was looking after Littlewoods’ Recreation Grounds in Bootle; a bleak corner plot of football pitches and tennis courts that the traffic largely ignores on its way to Aintree Racecourse, or the match.

  Everton began to use it as an occasional overspill from Bellefield for the youth teams. The teenagers didn’t know him, but their coaches did and would stop to talk. He and Colin Harvey might compare notes on the state of their hips – my father was already one replacement joint down the road that Colin was limping along. The PFA had helped him pay for it.

  Relentlessly practical, he had refused a general anaesthetic, preferring to remain conscious while they hacked the crumbling joint away and replaced it with titanium and polythene. He’d heard that this was the best way to shorten your recovery time, because a surgeon was always gentler on patients who could keep their eye on proceedings. As he told the joke against himself afterwards, he’d dozed off anyway only to be disturbed some time later by a terrible racket, some workmen in the distance: ‘Christ, I thought, what’s that bloody hammering?’ It was the surgeon taking a chisel to his pelvis.

  It didn’t stop him chasing the local kids, who would make holes in the fence at Littlewoods and commit whatever acts of petty vandalism they could get away with before they were spotted. Inevitably, when he finally caught one and administered the summary justice he’d felt round the ear himself from the local bobby in Lossiemouth, he was the one in the wrong. He couldn’t see it, but the boy’s family called the police and in the end he had to go and apologise to avoid going to court.

  This old-fashioned, small-town outlook was the face he presented to the world regardless of who was watching. It had been sketched for readers of the Liverpool Daily Post in 1973, when he was still the first-team coach at Everton. It was a period of relatively easy journalistic access; after football’s original Victorian rules of privacy had been lifted and before the later corporate regimes had brought them slamming back down again. The previous year Hunter Davies had published his classic inside story of a season with Spurs, The Glory Game. To start the new season, the Daily Post sent in their man Erlend Clouston to do something similar over a few weeks with Everton for a string of features:

  Imlach, a dark-haired wiry little Scot, is a humorous, sympathetic man, mysteriously obliged by fate to show the world the worried, affronted expression of a man who has been caught with nothing less than 50p when the collecting plate came round.

  Stewart . . . still preserves the countryman’s quaint vision of the universe. I came from the Shetland Islands did I? Well I must have known Peter Walterson, a policeman in Lerwick.

  ‘Aye, well he did,’ was my father’s only comment on the piece. Erlend Clouston would never have got near pre-season training when Harry Catterick was there, but Catterick had just been replaced by the slick and media-conscious Billy Bingham, who immediately set about his predecessor’s fixtures and fittings. The lock came off the television, ping-pong balls abounded and the signing-in book was decommissioned. My dad brought it home: probably one of the largest collections of Everton autographs in existence, all adding up to the giant signature of the one name not in the book.

  It’s a record of Harry Catterick’s last twelve months in the job, starting in April 1972 with the words NURSING HOME printed across a week’s worth of the spaces reserved for the signatures of Joe Royle and Alan Whittle – he was two strikers down. Whittle’s sequence resumes, only to end abruptly on Saturday 9 December. On Monday the 11th the box next to his squad number has a diagonal line through it, under which my father has written C. Palace. The space for David Johnson’s signature goes blank for a month and then the surname changes; Johnson had been sold to Ipswich, Joe Harper had arrived from Aberdeen to take his place in the team and the book.

  The changing entries for squad number 26 chart the peaks and troughs of Joe Royle’s season, and his battle with chronic back pain: ENGLAND one week, HOSPITAL the next. When he’s late he signs himself Joseph, letting the boss know how 4th Form he thinks the system is, but not so blatantly as to get his fine doubled. He’s a future occupant of the upstairs office. Along with the red-pen entries of the honestly late, there are some suspicious-looking efforts in pencil, where an apprentice has been bribed or threatened into forging a senior player’s name.

  The strength of Catterick’s personality is underlined by how long the book survives him. He was ‘moved to administrative duties’ on 12 April 1973, but the pages are full well into the off-season when attendance would have been voluntary anyway except for the injured. Howard Kendall and Tommy Wright are among those still signing in towards the end of June. Fittingly, the final, lone entry on 5 July belongs to Mick Lyons, a fanatical throwback who had to be ordered home to prevent him from training round the clock.

  My father would have approved of Catterick’s emphasis on punctuality. Being kept waiting was the one thing guaranteed to set him twitching. He shared the drive into training with two of the other coaches who lived in Formby. He was never a minute late collecting them, and would be standing in the bay window jingling his change well in advance of his own scheduled pick-up time. In his book, poor timekeeping was the tip of an iceberg’s worth of disrespect, and his response was usually in proportion to the invisible four-fifths. Not long before his illness was diagnosed, my mother had turned round as she prepared tea to see him standing with his hands on the back of his chair at the dining table, trembling with suppressed irritation as the second hand on his watch edged past his designated mealtime.

  ‘Stewart, you’re retired, what does it matter?’

  ‘Time’s all I’ve got.’

  It had stuck in her mind as an unusually cryptic, not t
o say philosophical, thing for my father to come out with. As though he’d sensed the onset of his cancer. Perhaps he was just giving voice, and probably for the first time in his life, to the shapeless fear of being an ex-something. Football had structured his life into seasons and weeks and forty-five-minute parcels of purpose. Now, tee-times and mealtimes were his only points of reference. I imagine anyone in his foursome who kept him waiting on the first at Formby got the same treatment.

  Towards the end of his life he seemed to be in the service of his watch. It was a chunky stainless-steel Seiko that had no battery, but stored and used the kinetic energy of the wearer, the perfect model for my father. Even sitting watching television he was never still, his legs shooting out every so often like a jumpy driving instructor going for the dual controls. But eventually it became too heavy for him to wear. And in any case he’d fallen below the threshold of movement required to keep the hands turning. So once or twice a day he’d gather what energy he had and transfer it to the watch – picking it up by the strap and swinging his arm slowly back and forth by the side of his chair. When he was satisfied that he had enough time in the bank, enough for another twelve or fourteen hours, he’d place it on the coffee table again and sit back to recover from the effort.

  Timekeeping was one of the few responsibilities Billy Bingham left him with. Harry Catterick’s tracksuit had come out exactly as often as the team photographer did; Bingham wore his every day. He did the coaching, my father did the training and kept the players organised. He was the one who went round to check they were all in their rooms during away trips, on the pretext of handing out sleeping pills. Plenty of managers would have brought an entire staff with them, so perhaps he felt lucky not to have been cleared out altogether, along with the signing-in book. And since it fell into the category of things he could do nothing about, he seems simply to have got on with what was left of his job. His training books are careful and thorough. Should Martin Dobson or Bob Latchford ever want to check their mid-1970s bodyweights, bench-press performances or distances for the twelve-minute run, I’d be able to help them.

  His entry for Saturday 3 January 1976 records the Everton line-up for the 3rd Round FA Cup tie away at Derby, notes John Connolly’s appearance as a substitute for the last fifteen minutes and Gary Jones’s goal in a 2–1 defeat. There’s a two-line summary: Gave away silly goal early on and took time to settle. Great second half and did everything but score. The next page is headed: 12th July, Pre-Season Training Blackpool, ’76/77.

  My father wouldn’t have appreciated it and the manager wouldn’t have admitted to it, but there’s no avoiding the irony of his sacking by Bingham: first being stripped of responsibility for the way the team played, then being made to carry the can for it. Two weeks later Bingham survived the dreaded vote of confidence from the Everton chairman, and hung on into the following season before being sacked himself.

  January 3 and July 12 1976 are consecutive days in my dad’s book, as though the intervening six months had been cancelled through lack of football. He’d been sacked the day before his forty-fourth birthday, the age I am now, writing about him. I’m trying – unsuccessfully – to put myself in a similar position, and imagine how I’d react and what I’d do. He signed on at Liverpool docks as a joiner and started work at the Pier Head – not closeted away in a workshop, but in full view of the passengers filing on and off the Mersey ferries. Inevitably he was spotted.

  THE MAN WITH THE HAMMER, was the headline in the Daily Post, and there he was next to it, knocking a nail into a piece of wood. It was the companion shot to the one of him sawing at his workbench published in the Bury Times nearly a quarter of a century earlier. The first depicted a young man on the verge of leaving his apprenticed trade for a life in football, the second marked the return journey. I seem to remember the photograph being taken at the house. It’s certainly framed to keep the background neutral, and doesn’t really stand up to the ‘thousands-of-commuters-cast-hardly-a-glance/how-the-mighty-are-fallen’ line of the piece.

  My dad would have been happy to oblige the photographer, but I’m not sure he’d really have been able to fathom the reason for the Post’s interest in the first place. Times had changed, but he hadn’t. The papers had never bothered in Nottingham when he was putting up Wall’s Ice Cream signs or working at the Co-op depot in the off-season – why were they making all this fuss now?

  According to the story, he’d turned down several offers to sell his side of it. In fact, none of his quotes in the papers around the time of the sacking stray much beyond ‘That’s football’. Which it was. The game hadn’t taken over the feature sections and the showbiz pages then – not that either of them would have been interested in this particular episode. But scandal stories were pretty easily contained because clubs, for the most part, had only the football writers to worry about. And the football writers, although they now had proper bylines instead of careers disguised as Ranger or Free Forester, still operated under essentially the same agreement: a free run in return for a blind eye.

  There are much more salacious examples from that period than the exploits of Bernie Wright – players summarily shipped off to other clubs to avoid the scandalous whiff of rumours about sex with underage girls – but Bernie had a direct impact on my dad. He was one of Harry Catterick’s rare mistakes, signed after scoring at Goodison for Third Division Walsall in a cup tie in 1972. A strong, crude centre-forward – Bernie the Bolt – he was nineteen years old and had played only fifteen games as a professional. He managed ten more in eleven months at Everton before being released for ‘serious misconduct’. That, from the ex-players I’ve talked to, consisted of going on a bender with the contents of the annual Christmas hamper that the chairman, John Moores, gave to every player, and trying to confront a rattled Catterick, who escaped out of the back door. The signing-in book shows his name dissolving from legibility into a nonsensical squiggle over the course of a couple of months, before disappearing for good on 21 December.

  Before then, though, he’d already laid my father out in training. The reserves and the first team did their warm-up jogs in opposite directions around Bellefield. Catterick decided who was in which group, and told his coaches before the morning began. My father, having announced who was training where, set off one way with the first-teamers. Gordon West, who’d lost his place in goal but was still the club’s top mischief-maker, was in the reserve group with Bernie Wright, relentlessly winding him up about how disgraceful it was that a player like him should be down with the dead men, what an insult it was to his talent and ability. Bernie couldn’t help but agree, and became more agitated with every step. As the two groups completed a circuit and passed each other, Wright went for my father, felling him with a meaty fist to the face. Gordon West was the first player in to pull him off. But the papers didn’t get my father’s side of that story, or any side of it. Which isn’t to say that their staff writers didn’t.

  Having been sacked by one of the Luton team he had helped defeat at Wembley in 1959, it was odd that my father should be thrown a lifeline by another. But Allan Brown, his union rep at Luton and fellow Scottish international, was a friend, and their first season together as manager and assistant at Blackpool was a successful one. Agonisingly so, in fact, although you wouldn’t know from the deadpan entry in his book for Saturday 14 May, the final day of the 1976–77 season: Missed promotion by a point, due mainly to our failure to win enough home games. Away record was very good. We were better equipped to defend and punish teams on the break. Not enough flair to beat defensive teams at home. Badly needed a winger.

  Blackpool were in the Second Division when my dad joined forces with Allan Brown. The fans must have had high hopes that they could go a point better by the end of the following season, but the partnership didn’t survive that long.

  All his playing life, club directors had decided where he should live and work, sending him pinballing from the north-west through the Midlands down to the Home Counties and back
up again. Formby to Blackpool was an easy commute – you could see the Tower from Formby beach on a half-decent day – but the Blackpool board wanted him to move. Perhaps it had been an implicit part of the deal when he first signed. My parents went through the motions of looking at houses without much enthusiasm. None of us wanted to go. My father tried to placate the club by living with Allan Brown and his family during the week, returning on Saturday nights after the match for half a weekend at home. But they insisted, and he refused. He got a job installing double-glazing.

  The following summer he asked me to help him out for a couple of days on a job at a house in Litherland, along the route we used to take to Goodison Park. I had an A-level exam on one of the days and should have been revising on the other, but he didn’t know that. His role in my education was that of enforcer, wheeled in to mete out the punishment when my mother found undelivered school reports at the back of the wardrobe. In any case, I was pretty sure I was going to fail, so this at least was a way to avoid two hours in the school gym failing in person.

  He didn’t really need me, except for a couple of very large panes in upstairs windows. We had to edge up gently with them on parallel ladders and ease the heavy rectangles into place, then he’d scuttle down his ladder leaving me swaying slightly at the top of mine, both hands pressing flat on the pane, while he got the rubber beading to secure it. The rest of the time, I fetched or handed him things, and went for the KitKats for our break. I couldn’t picture myself ever having this kind of confidence or competence. When we’d pulled the old windows out, frames and all, to leave nothing but a gaping hole of jagged brickwork in the living-room bay, I had been terrified. How the hell were we going to fill this? But he’d measured the job weeks earlier, and where the factory had made a mistake or forgotten to send some small part of the kit, he’d improvise, just get on with it, like he got on with things in general.