‘Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?’ Personally, I’m taking the Fifth, but I’ll tell you who was: my dad. We were a working-class family, but with my dad’s job as an electrical engineer, we were now high-end working class. Not quite lower-middle-class, though, because they were paid a salary each month whereas the workers on a wage were paid weekly – ‘very weakly’, as my dad would have said. Nevertheless, his work was highly skilled and it wasn’t going to be automated any time soon.
He didn’t share the general public’s dim view of the late Joseph Stalin. It should be remembered that engineers were the blood royal of the proletariat, and enjoyed a life of comparative privilege in the Soviet Union. I don’t want to paint my dad as any kind of political activist, he certainly wasn’t that: if push came to shove and politics came into it, George Clarke’s concerns didn’t go far beyond wages, working hours and conditions, paid holidays and sick leave.
He was live and let live, within reason, but never a Liberal. In the Thirties he had fought Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in pitched battles in Ancoats and Collyhurst, where a typical weapon was a raw King Edward studded with razor blades. Even so, he thought that people who went on demonstrations were troublemakers. ‘Get ’em in the army,’ would have been Dad’s recommendation. ‘What, the one you were never in?’ being my unuttered cheeky riposte.
To be fair, my dad, a premature anti-fascist, would have done his bit had his work not been so vital to the war effort. As I’ve said, he was enlisted in Dad’s Army, 45th Lancashire (Trafford Park) Battalion. Occasionally, they would show footage of the Home Guard on a programme called All Our Yesterdays that dealt with life as it was in the recent past. There they would be, each with a mop, broom, or a billiard cue in lieu of his yet-to-be-issued rifle, to which my dad would come on like the traumatised vet with all that, ‘Yeah, we had it rough. You weren’t there, man. My God, we had it rough,’ kind of thing.
You didn’t have to do much to be left wing then, and a great many working-class people were in the Communist Party, or at the least sympathetic to it, and would certainly have been in a trade union: it was simply a default position that was more to do with economic fairness than reinventing humanity. As I’ve mentioned, Dad bought the Daily Worker, or the Morning Star as it became in 1966, but also the Daily Express for its superior sports coverage and the racing pages.
He was a tall guy, six foot three, bad posture: I inherited his slouch. A full head of iron-grey hair worn in an American-style buzz cut. If I were to call Dad to memory, he would be wearing a charcoal-grey suit, and a three-quarter-length mackintosh three hundred and sixty-five days per year. This was Manchester, remember. He looked like he was in the upper echelons of Scotland Yard – or a gangster. I used to tell all my school pals he was a detective.
I thought the world of my dad and vice versa. Not that we were ever in each other’s pockets, because he wasn’t in the house much, and when he was home for the weekend he spent a lot of time in any one or other of several all-male environments: the boozer, the bookie’s, and the barber’s.
He was a sociable fellow who genuinely didn’t understand any guy who didn’t drink; that’s why he fucking hated Wales. He couldn’t understand why miners would sacrifice a whole day of their precious weekend not having a pint. For that reason he thought the Welsh were beyond the pale – sneaky, shifty, and snide. And worst of all, miserable. That’s why he cried off any holidays in Rhyl. All this because the pubs shut on a Sunday.
On a weekend my dad and his pal Wilf would go to the Devonshire Sporting Club, run by Bill ‘Man Mountain’ Benny, a twenty-stone wrestler and borderline gangster. Mr Benny had done well for himself; well enough to own, in partnership with fellow ‘businessman’ Dougie Flood,* three gentlemen’s nightclubs: the Dev, the Levenshulme Sporting Club, and the Cabaret Club on Oxford Road. He was also in possession of three state-of-the-art American cars – a Chevrolet Impala, a Ford Fairlane, and a Cadillac Eldorado. That’s nothing, though. The fucker had actually met Elvis. Bill Benny had tried unsuccessfully to get him over here for a charity concert. He flew to the States with a million pounds, organised a meeting with Colonel Parker, who said, ‘That’s fine for me. What about for Elvis?’
Back in those days, most clubs had their own signature song. Until his ill-timed demise in 1963,* at some point in the evening Bill himself would get up on stage with his bull neck, bald head, and big cigar, then he’d get a grip of the microphone. The guv’nor was in the house, so what could possibly go wrong? An evening of top-flight entertainment awaited. Then he’d burst into the club anthem:
The friends you will meet there,
The stars you will greet there,
You know that Bill Benny is always at his best.
So why not come and join him and be one of his guests
At the Devonshire Sporting,
Married or courting,
The Devonshire Sporting Club.
My dad would often come back from a night out at the Devonshire singing the club song and enthusing about the great acts he’d seen that evening, people like Shirley Bassey, Lena Horne, Lena Martell, Toni Dalli, Dennis Lotis, Buddy Greco, and Sugar Pie DeSanto. What the . . .? Huh? I never expected to hear those three words coming out of my dad; it was like he’d invaded my turf. I was all like, ‘What do you know from Sugar Pie DeSanto all of a sudden? Stick to Bing Crosby, old man, and leave this stuff to us newer fellows.’
Dad also became a member of the Albion Casino, which was attached to Salford Dog Track and run by a guy called Gus Demmy, the William Hill of his day. Christ knows what my dad was playing at in there, but he was punching above his weight with those hot shot high rollers and he got in over his head. Thanks to just one unlucky night at the tables, he had to cough up a whole week’s wages, which meant that we couldn’t pay the electricity bill and were consequently cut off. The irony wasn’t lost on my mum; Dad was away all year, wiring up the country, and there we were in the pre-electric gloom, cooking on an open fire.
I wasn’t as perturbed about this as my mother. In fact, I thought it was quite funny. I enjoyed the cowboy ambience of heating up a can of beans on the fire. Then we got one of those paraffin lamps like they had out on the prairie, so it didn’t interfere with my reading habit. It was quite an adventure.
After Dad’s Albion Casino wipeout, it would take my parents nearly a year to get back on track financially. He learned his lesson early. It never happened again and henceforth his gambling was confined to the horses.
Where I lived, people didn’t ask, ‘Do you like football?’ The only question was: ‘United or City?’ My dad supported United, so naturally, me too. On match days, Salford City Transport provided a fleet of Football Specials, destination: Old Trafford. Dad took me to all the home games, plus the occasional not-too-distant away game, and on Wednesdays we went over to the Cliff to watch the reserves.
Going to the match at Old Trafford with my dad was a hot date, not least because of the railroad in the middle of the street. Buses and normal traffic ran down either side of the road, while rumbling right down the middle, a fucking great steam train carried coal, sheets of steel, and what have you from one part of Trafford Park to the other.
For us kids, this railroad was almost as much an attraction as the football match because of its role in the manufacture of daggers. Instructions as follows: you got a nine-inch steel nail, placed it on the track, and waited for the next train to come along and completely flatten it out into a blade, the shape of which made it easy to attach to the wooden shaft of an old hammer. You then soaked this under a tap, and as the wood dried it would contract and tighten to grip the dagger shaft. A real class act for the price of a nine-inch nail. Everybody did that. Again, we made our own entertainment in those days.
Our skills didn’t stop at bladesmithery. We were also self-taught fletchers. When the rag-and-bone men came round on a horse and cart, blowing a trumpet, people would emerge with various tattered remnants, redundant coats, pullovers, and so on. These could be exchanged for either a goldfish in a plastic bag which died within a week, a balloon on a string, or a bow and arrow, the last being the most popular. In the summer months, we would take the melted tar from the road and use it to attach our Trafford Park-sharpened panel pins to the ends of the arrows. This, and the application of cardboard flights on the other ends, resulted in deadly missiles – if you fired them at a wooden door they would actually stick. What larks . . . until somebody loses an eye.
The main thing about going to the football then was the unique opportunity to use profane language at a very high volume. There were very few other situations where that would have been allowed. Profane language, even in pubs, was confined to a particular room called the vault, where the beer was a penny cheaper and there was no carpet on the floor. If you swore in any other part of the pub, they’d say, ‘Eh, we’ve got a room for that language.’ The vault was strictly men only; there would have been uproar if a woman had gone in there.
Barber shops were another all-male ‘safe space’. Sid and Aubrey Silverstein used to have the woman from the chip shop come round with their pies at 12.30 every day. She would just stand on the doorstep with the pies; she never crossed the threshold.
The other comparable situation was a factory in which the machinery was very loud. But even in a factory, if a woman came onto the shop floor with the tea, the language of the male workforce would be regulated accordingly.
The football, therefore, was the one situation where you could actually shout out the worst profanities available, as loud as you possibly could without fear of arrest. A social safety valve? Perhaps, but a very enjoyable one.
It was all a bit of a thrill, but when they replaced the terraces with seats and the ladies started joining in, that’s when the rot set in, in my opinion. Of course, there had always been women at football matches – I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was an equal-opportunities situation, and I’d better not go into this too much or I’ll get death threats – but they weren’t the kind of women that you’d worry about swearing in front of. Some of them were worse than blokes, sample conversation: ‘Fucking blind cunt.’
I was extremely young when I started going to Old Trafford with my dad. There was invariably a brass band from some mill or other, or as was often the case, the Manchester Metropolitan Police Silver Band, doing a medley of tunes before the game and later at half-time. While the match was in progress, the band members occupied a special bench on the edge of the pitch. Before kick-off, Dad would lift me over the picket fence (it was about three feet high!!!) so I could sit alongside the band members. There was a limited amount of space on the band’s bench for us kids, so the trick was to get there early. Now I had an uninterrupted view of the action, but because I was on the same level as the players, it meant that I could only really see what was going on right in front of me. You needed to be up higher in the terraces to properly see the sweep of the pitch. Luckily, to my mum’s bewilderment, Dad and I would watch the highlights again later on Sports Special anyway.
On the way back home, occasionally, if my dad met someone he knew, they’d break the journey for a pint, parking me outside on the pub doorstep with a packet of crisps and a bottle of pop along with all the other kids whose dads were inside. Once in a while, the dads would stick their heads round the door to ask if we needed any crisp reinforcements. Usually, though, we got on the special bus and Dad would drop me off home, then go to the pub.
The main deal on our outings to the football was pies. At some point in the early Sixties, they introduced hot dogs, but for my dad and me it was always pies. The pie stall at Old Trafford offered a choice of meat and potato, meat, steak and kidney, or cheese and onion. I was a meat and potato pie* guy all the way. A sustaining winter snack, the meat and potato pie is the more portable choice and, in my opinion, the ideal outdoor hand pie: mainly potato done in stock, just a threat of meat (i.e. one flake of mince), onions, and, the big secret, white pepper – all packed in there, no gravy about it. Gravy can be troublesome if you’re standing up and walking about: that’s why the steak pie – with its hot, wet, loose contents – never really made it as a hand pie.
When I first started going to see United, it was the Matt Busby pre-Munich 1958 air-disaster side, the Busby Babes: David Pegg, Dennis Viollet, Bill Foulkes, Johnny Berry, Geoff Bent, Roger Byrne, Eddie Colman, Duncan Edwards, Bobby Charlton, Jackie Blanchflower, Tommy Taylor. The goalie was either Ray Wood or Harry Gregg.
They were a glamorous, world-class club even then, with a bestselling calypso record dedicated to them, ‘Manchester United Calypso’, that was often played on the aforementioned Two-Way Family Favourites radio programme:
Manchester,
Manchester United.
A bunch of bouncing “Busby Babes”,
They deserve to be knighted.
If ever they’re playing in your town,
You must get to that football ground.
Take a look and you will see,
Football taught by Matt Busby.
It was the full production, a steel band going on behind the singer Edric Connor, who sounded a lot like Edmundo Ros. Many of my readers will remember him.
My favourite player was the twenty-one-year-old centre forward Duncan Edwards. He was a prodigious talent, a fantastic player with a very promising career ahead of him, but he died in the Munich air crash. This was a tragedy that went beyond Manchester. The grief seemed universal.
That evening the Manchester Evening News issued a Late Final edition with the devastating news. It was the lead item on the national news, and throughout the evening the scheduled programmes were interrupted with reports of another death, or about the condition of the few known survivors, including Bobby Charlton, Bill Foulkes, Dennis Viollet, Johnny Berry, and Matt Busby himself.
The following morning, just before I left for school, the Daily Mirror arrived with photographs of the wreckage on the front page. A pall of doom hung over the whole neighbourhood. At school all the priests, nuns, and teachers were very concerned about the recovery of the injured passengers. Entire masses and church services were dedicated to the wellbeing of the surviving team members. In the cinema, the Movietone News carried regular reports. It was a very gloomy time.
The human interest element of manager Matt Busby’s eventual recovery coupled with the resurrection of the team seemed to be of national importance. How do you rebuild a side after something like that? It wasn’t until the mid-Sixties, with the reign of Georgie ‘El Beatle’ Best, Denis Law, et al., that United started climbing back up to the top.
Some people are a tough act to follow. Matt Busby was one of them; Alex Ferguson is another. After Busby’s departure in the early Seventies, and before Ferguson’s reign, United laboured under a succession of muppets under the collective title Frank O’Farrell. We had great hopes for Tommy ‘The Doc’ Docherty, but he wasn’t there long enough to make any difference, to be fair.
This miserable period culminated in the relegation of Manchester United.* Match days were often upsetting, especially since arch-rivals Manchester City were enjoying quite a moment with players like Colin Bell, Francis Lee, Mike Summerbee, and Rodney Marsh.
City were the worst, although Liverpool and Leeds United were in the same bag. While United was in the khazi, Leeds were also in their heyday under Don Revie. I’d like to say for them it was the days of wine and roses, but knowing the house style of Leeds United it was more brown ale and pork scratchings. Revie had this anti-glamour policy – none of the Leeds side were allowed to get their suits from anywhere other than Burton’s, or to drive a car beyond a mid-range Vauxhall Viva. His rigour extended onto the pitch, too. Revie’s boys played that kind of tactical European game: get an early goal and then play it safe. It was unexciting: nobody got their money’s worth, but in spite of their no-thrills game, they were winning everything. Where are they now, though? Leeds haven’t been in the top division since 2004 and I’d like them to put that right. Like Sir Alex, I miss those Trans-Pennine skirmishes.
Enemy No. 3 – I mean Liverpool obviously, although to be honest, I liked Bill Shankly. After Matt Busby, he was the ideal manager. I had a sneaking regard for Shankly’s dedication to his Liverpool side and his utter conviction – he simply couldn’t see the point of any other team. He would go to the ends of the earth for his squad and defend them to the hilt: ‘That wasnae a goal!’ In Shankly’s eyes, any booking of a Liverpool player was unjust; every penalty against his side was a mistake – the referee was either blind or an idiot, but his boys never put a foot wrong. I admired his steadfast defence of his players, in the face of all evidence, and thought every manager should be like that. My team, right or wrong.
The football terrace chant, as it was then, was the last repository of true folk music. It’s amazing how quickly snippets of topical import would make their way into the baying derogatory chorus, but it was usually inflammatory insults aimed at the opposing fans and indeed the town they lived in. One ghetto having a go at another. Take this favourite anti-Liverpool chant of mine, the classic ‘Kop Twats’, to the tune of ‘Top Cat’:
Kop Twats,
You thieving bastards
Kop Twats,
You thieving bastards
We all know you sign on the dole,
And you live in a fucking shit ’ole.
It was all about how they were worse off than us – an accusation, largely, that could equally be levelled at ourselves. As well as everything else, days out at Old Trafford were an invaluable introduction to the delights of crowd-poisoning.
Having been a sick child with a short life expectancy had its downside. My mum refused to get me a bike, for example. I begged and pleaded, but she was steadfast in her refusal. I can understand her reticence; it was very sweet and I belatedly thank her for caring enough to want to prolong what little time she thought I had left – mothers are like that – but it was a serious deprivation for me.
As I’ve said, I had learned to ride on a rented pushbike on Rhyl’s off-peak promenade and my mother would point this out, indicating the busiest crossroads in the entire North-West just outside our window.
In the end, when I was about ten or eleven, my dad helped me out and talked my mum into letting me get a bike. ‘Well, I’m not buying it,’ she said. ‘I’m not subscribing to your early death.’ I had to buy it myself. To this day, I can’t think of anything else I have ever saved up for. After so much self-denial, odd jobs, hard work, and opposition, my first bike was a big event. It was a Phillips lightweight racer, dull gold with drop handlebars.* * It cost me £4.50, which was quite a prohibitive sum back then, but it made a big difference to my lifestyle.
The deal was that I stick to the backstreets, suburban avenues and parks, avoiding the terraced streets with their haemorrhoid-inducing cobblestones. But, of course, I craved the main road and in no time at all I had broken my promise. Turning right outside the front door, I headed north towards Prestwich, Whitefield, and beyond. I had prepared a halfway snack of my own design – a pork-pie doorstep. Here’s the recipe: take one white loaf (unsliced), hollow it out, place three pork pies and eight pickled onions into the vacant space, then flatten the whole thing out. Thus sustained, I explored the austere stone streets and the Pennine slopes of various mill towns where the shops all had strange names: Hardcastle, Arkwright, Holroyd, Hollerenshaw, Ackroyd, Shufflebottom, Eckerslike, and such. Through the forty-watt gloom of the interior I could discern that the shops themselves seemed poorly stocked with brands I’d never heard of. There wasn’t a movie theatre anywhere in sight, and the chip shops didn’t even sell meat and potato pies. ‘Thank God, I don’t live here,’ I thought, as I headed homeward.
Since moving to Essex, I have recently rediscovered the joy of cycling thanks to the flat topography of the area and the acquisition of a classic 1959 Hercules Roadster in an attractive shade of British racing green.