‘John Bond has blackened my name with his insinuations about the private lives of football managers. Both my wives are upset’
– Malcolm Allison
Malcolm Allison had brought more excitement to Home Park than Plymouth Argyle fans had known for a number of years. But when his departure from the club was announced, it had become a sadly inevitable conclusion to a messy final few weeks of the season. As the team slipped towards their eventual position of 15th in Division Two, a series of confrontations with the club’s directors – including the chairman’s public criticism of team selection – appeared to make his position untenable. Less than a week after the final game of the campaign the club issued a statement that Allison had resigned. A decade later, Allison would write that he had been dismissed. Given the circumstances, it appears probable that he was given little choice but to go quietly.
I wasn’t shocked – or really surprised. I had given my support to the chairman, and he was involved in constant, bickering battles with his boardroom colleagues. I became an issue. Some felt my style was too aggressive, too flamboyant for Plymouth. My arrogance offended some of them and I had started to get into trouble with the FA over my onslaught against referees. There was also the fact that I didn’t exactly lead a monkish life.
Unknown to him at the time of his appointment, Allison had walked into the middle of a battle for power in the boardroom. The day after his memorable arrival at Home Park, a group of three directors – vice-chairman and majority shareholder Robert Daniel, supported by Douglas Fletcher and Stafford Williams – declared their intention to make £100,000 available to the team if they were left in control and if Ron Blindell, the man who had opposed Allison, stood down. The money was needed badly after a reported loss of almost £28,000 the previous season. Within a week, Blindell had ended his seven years in office and the new men in charge announced, ‘When the manager wishes to buy there will be made available up to £100,000. He must build his team as he believes to be right and we in turn assure him of every support.’
This state of happy families lasted only a few weeks, until Fletcher and Williams resigned amid claims that Daniel had gone against their agreement by using a casting vote to elect himself as the new club chairman. Meanwhile, the Home Park Shareholders Association called for an independent board to be appointed and there were even the stirrings of a ‘Bring Back Blindell’ campaign.
Some sort of compromise was reached and it was all change again in January when Daniel handed over the chairmanship to Williams, a 57-year-old restaurant owner. Allison, who had developed a rapport with Daniel, threatened to resign when he heard of the change, although he subsequently withdrew the warning, saying, ‘The board meeting and the arguments that followed are over and done with.’
By this time, however, the Argyle directors were getting frequent reminders of the personality they had installed in the manager’s dugout, and it was Allison’s actions in that particular location that were causing concern. In the home game against Manchester City in November, play had been stopped so that the referee could order Allison to desist in his coaching of his players from the sideline – an activity outlawed in those distant times before the manager’s ‘technical area’.
A few days later, the Football Association issued a reminder that coaching from the sideline was banned, adding that managers should sit in the stand if a seat was available. Allison’s response was typically robust. ‘If you have 20,000 people shouting and someone else shouts a bit louder what difference does it make? If I sat in the stand I would inconvenience other people. I sit in the trainers’ box and inconvenience no one. I don’t coach from the touchline. I can’t coach unless I am ten yards from a player and that doesn’t often happen in a match. I’m just an enthusiastic supporter.’
And the postscript that would land him in hot water was, ‘I’m afraid that these amateurs who run professional football are way out with their ideas.’
It didn’t take long for an FA letter to drop on Allison’s doormat asking him to verify the accuracy of the comments attributed to him in the newspapers. He delighted in doing so. That produced a warning from the authorities about his future behaviour and a demand for a written undertaking not to repeat such misconduct. In the meantime, he continued to sit on the touchline, saying, ‘I’m no troublemaker, but nobody tells me where to sit in my own ground. If the FA eventually rule that we must not be on the line I will have a special box built just back from it.’
The FA subsequently clarified their previous statement as having been a ‘recommendation’ as opposed to a ‘directive’ and Allison, given clearance to remain on the touchline, continued to make the most of it. Referee Rex Spittle reported Allison for an ungentlemanly remark after a game at Charlton, and in both legs of the League Cup semi-final against Leicester Malcolm had to be ordered to stop issuing instructions to his players.
It was clearly all becoming something of an embarrassment to the new chairman, for whom the final straw was Allison’s ever-changing selection policy over the final few weeks of the season. Hampered by injuries, Allison chopped and changed the side. He confessed later that his ‘first big tactical mistake’ in football had been to try to reorganise the Argyle team to compensate for striker Frank Lord’s absence instead of replacing him from the reserve team and maintaining continuity of playing style.
With the final week of the season approaching, Allison – much to his disgust – was ordered to explain his team selections to the board the day after a 3–0 defeat at Swansea. Particularly in question was his decision to persist with goalkeeper Noel Dwyer, bought from Swansea for £8,000 early in January. Allison announced eight team changes for a midweek game against Northampton, including the dropping of Dwyer. The match was won 5–2, but when Allison stated his intention to reinstate Dwyer for the last game against Bury, chairman Williams made public his criticism.
Williams claimed that Allison’s constant team changes were driving away the crowds from Home Park. ‘The fans won’t buy programmes these days because they have to make too many alterations,’ was his bizarre argument. ‘Some questions are going to be asked at next Tuesday’s board meeting. The directors are fed up with the manager’s controversial team choices.’ Williams pronounced himself baffled by the decision to drop goalkeeper John Leiper and happily boasted that it had been the directors’ pressure that had led to him playing in the previous game. He also criticised the inclusion of Mike Trebilcock for the season finale. ‘One thing is certain,’ he concluded, ‘the directors have not agreed with many of the manager’s team selections, but we made a pledge to the public at the start of the season that we would not interfere. Now questions have to be asked.’
At the subsequent board meeting, the club’s five directors spent two hours in discussion before summoning their manager. If they had expected him to stand meekly before them tugging his forelock, they knew even less about Allison than he felt they did about football. Dressed in his best suit and pulling on the biggest cigar he could find, he strode confidently into the kangaroo court to defend his methods. Although he retained the support of former chairman Daniel, it is impossible to imagine someone as self-assured as Allison looking with tolerance upon his inquisitors. ‘I laughed at them,’ he said later. It was no surprise, therefore, when Argyle fans read of their manager’s ‘resignation’ on the front page of the local paper.
Once safely away from Plymouth, Allison would revise his public statement to declare unequivocally that he had been sacked by Argyle. But for now – presumably to safeguard any pay-off – he stuck to the agreed formula for his departure, although he didn’t feel obliged to hold back in his criticism of the club. ‘I must stick to my principles,’ he said. ‘If I am manager I want to manage. I am not prepared to be a yes-man for anyone. I have resigned. I have done my best. I tried to create something at Home Park.’
Williams merely added, ‘We are not worried what the public think; they must draw their own conclusions.’ The obvious conclusion being that having a more desirable character than Allison at the helm of their quiet seaside club was of greater importance to the directors than the possible success he could bring them.
Added to the football-related issues identified by the board, the question of Allison’s lifestyle was never too far in the background. ‘Some were scandalised that I wasn’t always home by 10 o’clock,’ Malcolm said of his employers. ‘I was being dismissed for my independence, my indiscretions and my lifestyle.’
Plymouth players fondly recall Allison’s determination to enjoy life to the full away from the training ground, but don’t believe it ever undermined the professionalism of the team. ‘Next day it was, “Right, I am the coach”,’ says Trebilcock. ‘I remember once being out with him and we said, “How long have we got?” He answered, “Be at training at 10 o’clock in the morning.”’
Norman Piper adds, ‘Malcolm was flamboyant on and off the field but he knew that the players knew what to do before a game. He treated them like adults, like professionals. You respected a guy like that. He was flexible and that is why he was successful. If you looked after Malcolm, he looked after you and you wanted to play for someone like that.’
John Newman concludes, ‘He was a socialiser, no doubt about that – nobody can deny that. He probably socialised with the players more than some managers would, but I didn’t see that as a big fault.’
It was a surprise to his team, then, when the arguments with the board escalated into Allison’s departure from Home Park. Newman concludes, ‘We were obviously upset about it, we didn’t have enough time with him. It needed three or four seasons with Malcolm to establish a pattern and build up a side, but there were always rumblings and I know his attitude and approach weren’t always what the board wanted. I remember occasions when the players would say to me, because I was captain, “Go down and see the chairman because we think Malcolm is in trouble again.” I remember telling Stafford Williams that the players were behind Malcolm. I said, “Whatever you are thinking about doing, keep him at the club.” You can see how much influence I had. The feeling was that he could make you a better player. There were an awful lot of young players coming through in that team who became very good players because of Malcolm.’
One of those players, Trebilcock, admits, ‘I can’t imagine that I have admired any man more than Malcolm. He was father, teacher – everything to me. This guy came in and took us to another level of football that we had never seen before. It wasn’t until Malcolm came along that we were taught how to play. I was 18 then and if I had been coached by him when I was 15, I could have played for England.’
Allison never made any attempt to disguise the importance that women held in his life. He was certainly convinced that they played a part in his departure from Plymouth, having, he admitted, been a regular feature of the social escapades to which the Argyle directors took exception. ‘I found the women of Plymouth very aware of the opposite sex,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it was because of the town’s naval background, but whatever the reason it was sometimes a hard job to keep from being entangled with some woman or another.’
Tall and broad-shouldered with a rough charm matched only by his love of the extravagant gesture, Malcolm was a magnetic figure. More than one reporter likened him to a Hollywood character in the mould of Dick Tracey or Sam Spade. Even the men could appreciate why women gravitated towards him. Tony Book recalls, ‘He always had this swagger about him. He was a big, strong, good-looking fellow. In those days we had free-standing weights and once you had done your exercise he would just lift the weight off your shoulder and hand it to the next man. Easy as anything.’
Derek Ufton concurs with those comments, ‘When I was playing cricket at Canterbury, Malcolm used to come down at the weekends and on warm summer days he would walk along the beach at Whitstable, looking like Tarzan in his leopard-skin trunks. He liked the thought that people noticed him.’
Trebilcock states, ‘He was a playboy. He was a James Bond of our time. We just admired the man because he could do things that other people couldn’t do. He could go out and mix with anyone.’
Journalist James Lawton, who would become a close friend and confidant of Malcolm’s, adds, ‘He was such a terrifically handsome man; the women just made a beeline for him. You were always aware of his charisma, particularly as it affected the opposite sex.’
And as Allison’s features became as well known as they were striking, there would even be demand for him among the photographers of the day. Terry O’Neill, the renowned celebrity photographer, took Malcolm into the studio several times in the early ’70s, snapping him in the latest lines of clothing or making the most of his physique by putting him in shirts open to the waist, fancy medallions to the fore.
He might not always have kept his shirt buttoned up while in Plymouth, but Malcolm did abstain from any serious alliances, largely because he was still getting over the break-up of an affair with a girl called Suzy. He had met her in his West End club and she had helped integrate him into the Mayfair set. Allison claimed that he had never been involved with a woman outside of his marriage until after his illness, and that it was Suzy who was the first. The truth of that statement probably depends on liberal interpretation of the world ‘involved’. It was his refusal to take Suzy out to Canada with him that had caused the relationship to fade, although Malcolm confessed, ‘It had been something new in my life and I was reluctant to let it go. It was a long time before I could forget her.’
In Plymouth, therefore, he had not sought a replacement, describing his year there as ‘a period of evasive tactics’ while hinting, ‘Sometimes, after a few drinks, I might not be so evasive.’
However, it was by the Devon coast – shortly after his arrival – that he met a 16-year-old girl called Serena Williams. He casually asked her for a date as she walked past him at a dinner dance in the hotel in which he was staying and he ended up taking her out several times. Allison told her she was too bright and intelligent for such a town. She eventually moved to London to take a job as a bunny girl at the Playboy Club, which seems like a typical piece of career advice from Malcolm. The two would maintain casual contact and in 1972, she became the woman in his life.
Allison had married while at West Ham, at the age of 26 – four years earlier than the time frame he had originally set for himself. He would argue that it was his illness, and the restlessness that it introduced to his life, that prevented him leading a ‘conventional married life’ with his wife, Beth, whom he had met in a Bexleyheath dance hall.
The phrase ‘long suffering’ could have been conceived for Beth. Early in their marriage, it was football that was Malcolm’s mistress. Later, according to one of Allison’s former players, she was forced to ‘turn a blind eye’ to Malcolm’s escapades, while an ex-West Ham colleague said, ‘He was a womaniser. He had a beautiful wife, beautiful kids, but he still fancied the birds. That was his biggest downfall.’
Former Hammers teammate Eddie Lewis says, ‘He had a lovely wife. Beth was a gorgeous-looking girl but I think he treated her badly. I felt he didn’t give her a fair crack of the whip.’
It is a view expressed by other West Ham wives of that era in Brian Belton’s book, Days of Iron. Jimmy Andrews’s wife, Dot, said that ‘he treated Beth like dirt’, while the wife of Bert Hawkins, Katherine, said, ‘[Malcolm] was an awful man. He didn’t get his wife a bit of clothing. He was out with all these women and she didn’t have two ha’pennies to bless herself with.’
One of Malcolm’s Bath City players, Ron Walker, recalls, ‘Malcolm loved to socialise and I had one or two nights out drinking with him. Without going into it, you could say he was a ladies’ man. When Malcolm got going us married people left him to it.’ It was obviously easy for Allison to forget that he was supposed to have been one of ‘us married people’.
The Allisons’ marriage hardly got off to the most auspicious of starts. On the eve of the wedding, Malcolm gambled away £80 – all the money he had. He turned up at church with two shillings in his pocket and had to force Derek Ufton to pay up the £26 he owed him. He also managed to make an impact on the beginning of Bobby Moore’s married life in 1962. Moore’s bride, Tina, heard through her mother that Allison and his pal Noel Cantwell were due to be in Majorca at the same time as the Moores’ honeymoon. Tina dreaded their arrival because she knew how easily they could lead her new husband astray. A week into their honeymoon, the duo arrived and promptly got Moore horribly drunk. He threw up and spent the night in Cantwell’s room while a tearful Tina sought refuge with Noel’s wife, Maggie.
Malcolm and Beth had four children – two boys, David and Mark, and two girls, Dawn and Michelle. Allison would admit that the eventual, inevitable, break-up of their marriage ‘has everything to do with my nature, which is a bit wild’. His failure to be the conventional father figure was something with which he struggled, although when his children grew he felt confident that they understood that not all people are programmed for the same mode of behaviour. He wrote:
I believe, for instance, that a man will ultimately do what is right for him. He will live in the best way he can. That may be selfish, but it is realistic. Perhaps all I can really say is that I have never lost my respect for a woman who has borne me fine children and proved an excellent wife.
While Malcolm chose his own lifestyle and rarely looked to excuse his wayward nature, it would be unfair to assume that he had an emotional shallowness that numbed him to the pain it could cause. Through working with him on numerous newspaper columns and on his 1975 autobiography, Colours of My Life, James Lawton was offered as much insight as anyone into Allison’s emotional disarray. ‘He felt badly about things with Beth, but it didn’t work because they were different animals. Beth wanted a normal orthodox life. Malcolm loved his wife and he loved his family but he was drawn to a different kind of life. He used to convey to me the pain that you acquire if you get into these situations. I think he felt a bit guilty about not seeing so much of his children. But I remember once that Bill Friar, a reporter of the old school, was assigned with me to a piece about Malcolm. He and Bill were on different planets. Bill was chipping in with questions and he said, “Now, Malcolm, it is fair to say you are a family man.” Malcolm looked at him with glazed eyes and said, “No, Bill, I love my family, but I don’t think you could fairly describe me as a family man.”’
Life on the racetracks and in the post-twilight world of the West End had offered Malcolm plenty of opportunity to indulge his weakness for women – a pattern that would continue wherever his career took him. Some of Allison’s conquests were far from anonymous strangers passing in the night. The singer Dorothy Squires, the former wife of actor Roger Moore, was someone with whom Allison spent several nights, and in future years there were the inevitable beauty queens.
Having moved to Manchester, Malcolm embarked on an affair with a model called Jeanette. The relationship had been sparked by her initial rejection of his advances, which he admitted was ‘a real challenge’ and ‘rather turned me on’. When he eventually got her to invite him back to her flat for coffee he discovered that she had not yet got round to buying a bed. Allison made his intentions known the next day by calling a furniture store and asking them to deliver, as a matter of urgency, the biggest one they had. They shared good times, mostly based around Allison’s timetable, and Malcolm would leave tickets for her at Maine Road under the name of ‘Lady B’.
A year later, Allison was approached at a party by Jennifer Lowe, a contestant in the forthcoming Miss United Kingdom contest, and asked if he would give her some fitness training. ‘It was an offer that was difficult to refuse,’ is Allison’s wry explanation of his acceptance of the invitation. The two would spend long Thursday afternoons locked in the City gymnasium. While players nudged each other about what was going on behind the bolted doors, other members of the staff strained to peer through a fanlight opening. Allison ordered them away, telling them they were distracting him from what he described as ‘a small, pleasant affair’.
He was soon embarking on a different kind of relationship with a Miss United Kingdom winner, Jennifer Gurley, with whom he admitted to nearly falling in love. The physical aspect that dominated most of Malcolm’s relationships with women was missing, by mutual choice. Instead, she would visit the flat he had moved into after he and Beth decided to separate, and acted as housekeeper, tidying and cooking. Allison even suggested that if he had taken the job offered to him by Juventus in the summer of 1969 he would have asked her to live in Italy with him. His son, Mark, relates, ‘I asked him once why he turned down the Juventus job and he said it was because he had a girlfriend back home, which was more important to him.’
Perhaps, the most notorious of Allison’s lovers was Christine Keeler, a former call girl who had made national headlines in 1963 by admitting having an affair with Defence Secretary John Profumo at the same time as she was sharing a bed with a Soviet military attaché – an act that, at the height of the Cold War, caused the kind of ripples Rebecca Loos would set in motion when claiming to have bedded David Beckham four decades later, by which time celebrity gossip had taken the place of political espionage in the public’s imagination. Even without the reality TV circuit to sustain her public profile, Keeler was, according to Malcolm, ‘a bit of a challenge to my ego’. He confessed that it was her notoriety that made her so attractive when she walked into the club in which he was drinking. When he took her to a restaurant on their first date, a waiter dropped a plate upon seeing her. ‘I recall that we made love,’ is Allison’s understated description of the denouement of their liaison.
Other partners over the years included, according to Malcolm, the wife of a club director who doggedly wore him down with her advances and then boasted of it on the telephone to her husband while Allison was listening. Claiming to be no expert on women – finding their ‘moods and thoughts elusive’ – Malcolm was openly addicted to them, the more so as he got older, he confessed. At the same time, though, he strove to ensure that such exploits did not define him and that his image as a womaniser was kept in some sort of check. ‘The impression may be of a Casanova-like series of bedroom romps,’ he conceded. ‘But it is a false one. I could never claim to be monkish, but the deceits, the elaborate, sneaky planning involved in a series of affairs has always struck me as absurd.’
Allison’s year in Plymouth, then, appears to have been no more charged with sexual activity than any other of his ports of call – possibly even less so. Promiscuity was part of Malcolm’s well-established lifestyle and always would be. The delicate souls of Home Park would not be the last ones to take umbrage at Allison’s antics, but their sensitivity was about to propel him towards the most professionally successful period of his life.