‘The brief span of our poor unhappy life to its final hour is hastening on; and while we drink and call for gay wreaths, perfumes and young girls, old age creeps upon us, unperceived’
– first-century Roman poet Juvenal
‘Old age ain’t no place for sissies’
– twentieth-century American writer Henry Mencken
Out of football management and, as usual, out of money, Malcolm Allison remained rich in those willing to offer him support. Veteran journalist Ken Jones had captured the feelings of many when, in 1991, he wrote of Malcolm, ‘He made mistakes, didn’t he just, and a lot of the wounds were self-inflicted. But he had, and indeed still has, the most winning disposition and manner imaginable.’
It meant that, early in 1993, there were many in the football community ready to rally round. A celebration lunch was held to mark Allison’s 50 years in football, initiating a series of testimonial events. Of course, Malcolm had never laid his fedora in one place long enough to be considered for any kind of club testimonial. Among the guests at the first event was George Best, who explained his attendance by saying, ‘I did it for nothing because Malcolm is the most genuine man in football. He deserves everything the testimonial committee can get for him.’
London solicitor Barry Gold headed that committee, setting up a match between Crystal Palace and Tottenham on 28 March, followed by a dinner in Manchester and a golf day in Cheshire in April. ‘Malcolm has been great for football but not always clever for himself,’ said Gold. ‘So now it’s time his friends helped him.’
James Lawton remembers, ‘I went to one of those events. Malcolm was kind of embarrassed and I found it almost unbearable and upsetting, I feel quite moved now when I think about it. I remember thinking, “What a system we have in this country when a man of his ability is reduced to this.” You can say Malcolm made some of his own problems but he was never paid properly.’
There were plenty of friends ready to do their bit. Jeff Powell recorded in the Selhurst Park match programme that among Bobby Moore’s last requests before his death from cancer a month earlier was for ‘everyone he could think of to pitch in and make sure that Malcolm Allison enjoyed a suitably extravagant and appropriately lucrative testimonial’. Many responded, some remembering the contribution he had made to their careers in football, others recalling the numerous rounds of drinks he had stood them on those nights out when no one else was allowed to dip into their pockets. He had worn like a badge of honour the fact that he would pick up the tab, whether or not he could afford it.
‘He was always living way beyond his means,’ says Lawton. ‘If he borrowed 50 pounds off someone, as he often would, he would spend it on someone else. One night he took me and my wife to the Playboy Club in Park Lane and then we went to Tramps and had a fine meal. I remember people like Shirley Bassey being there. I made a feeble attempt to pay the bill, even though it would have been about four weeks’ wages for me. Malcolm kept giving them credit cards but the waiter kept coming back and whispering in his ear, so he produced another with the same result. He got through about four or five. In the end he said, “Can I just sign for it?” The guy just shrugged and let him. Malcolm was pretty much chaos in that respect.’
Bob McNab recalls a tale from the 1980s while he was visiting from his home in California. ‘Barbara and I were having dinner in a restaurant in Chelsea. Malcolm came in and he was absolutely legless. This guy at another table sent over a bottle of champagne because he was an Arsenal fan and I sent one back. Malcolm insisted on paying, but they wouldn’t take his credit card so I slipped out and paid. When I came back to England three or fours years later, he pulled me on it. “Don’t you ever do that again,” he said. “I pay.” He’d remembered, even though he had been falling asleep at the time. He was just silly with money.’
Another scheme was dreamed up on the strength of Malcolm’s wit and easy ability to trot out anecdotes from half a century in football. He and Tommy Docherty, whose tongue was as sharp as Malcolm’s and his managerial career as frenzied, toured around small theatres as ‘The Doc and Big Mal – a frank and outspoken evening crammed with the stories they could not tell on TV’. In The Times, humorist Clement Freud gave the duo a less than sparkling review and left at the interval.
Meanwhile, the Child Support Agency was proving less interested in Allison’s tales from the dressing-room than in his income from the testimonial committee. Little more than a year after his court appearance for failing to support his second wife, Sally, he was now reported to owe £30,000 in unpaid maintenance. Having seen tales of money-making activities, the CSA had approached Sally for an explanation and also stated their intention to question Terry Venables and Francis Lee to get a fuller picture of Allison’s financial status. Sally said, ‘I did warn them Malcolm would be very difficult to pin down as I have had ten years of trying to get money out of him.’
Sally claimed that she had been waiting more than three years for the £20,000 she and her husband had agreed upon and that the CSA were now pursuing him for the additional amounts fixed by the matrimonial courts. Raymond Morris, treasurer of Allison’s testimonial committee, sounded as exasperated as Sally when he pointed out, ‘We run his testimonial, not his domestic affairs. His matrimonial matters are his own business.’
There was another court appearance booked in Allison’s diary for June, when he appeared to give evidence in former Chelsea defender Paul Elliott’s case for compensatory damages after suffering a career-ending knee injury in a challenge with Liverpool striker Dean Saunders. Malcolm’s appearance was far from straightforward. Originally he had been retained as an expert witness on behalf of Saunders, only to end up speaking for Elliott after claiming that Liverpool midfielder Ronnie Whelan had suggested to him that his teammate should be found guilty. A furious Whelan denied strenuously that such a conversation had occurred and threatened legal action against Allison, whose evidence was dismissed by the judge as of no assistance to either side.
Later in the summer, Allison undertook an after-dinner speaking tour in Hong Kong, where he reminded his audience that he was, at heart, a football coach. ‘I am open to offers and I would consider coming to Hong Kong. I think I can still do a good job for an ambitious side with my breadth of knowledge about the game. Perhaps even the Hong Kong national or Olympic side could benefit from me being involved. I may not be as fit as my Manchester City days but I would still have a tracksuit on.’
The opportunity for closer involvement in football than simply helping out with his local pub’s Sunday League team did come Allison’s way, thanks to two of his old boys achieving high office at Maine Road and the Football Association. Francis Lee and Terry Venables both stated an intention to use Malcolm in a scouting capacity after assuming the positions of Manchester City chairman and England manager respectively. One of Allison’s first suggestions to City manager Brian Horton was to sign Sporting Lisbon’s young midfield star Luis Figo, although the move never materialised.
Coaching might have been Malcolm Allison’s natural home, but Big Mal lodged happily in the world of the media. It was only once the job opportunities on the training ground finally dried up in later life that Malcolm devoted himself – out of necessity – more completely to an area in which he could feasibly have carved himself a deep niche. Possessing the footballing insight of an Alan Hansen, the quick wit of Terry Venables and the charm, albeit of a rougher variety, of a Des Lynam, it is interesting to wonder how his life could have changed had he, say in the mid-’70s, opted to capitalise on his profile and personality rather than pursue a procession of short-lived football appointments.
Almost a quarter of a century after his irreverence and insight had illuminated many a late night during the World Cup in Mexico, he was hired in 1994 to bring a touch of colour and controversy to Century, a newly established station in the north-east that was riding the growing wave of ‘talk radio’ by launching a football phone-in show. Malcolm was to be one of the hosts. The somewhat low-key nature of his medium reflected the damage he had managed to inflict upon his footballing reputation over the years. For a burgeoning local station like Century, however, Allison possessed undoubted star quality and when, in 1995, it acquired the live commentary rights for Middlesbrough’s Premier League games, he was the obvious choice to sit in the analyst’s seat.
Meanwhile, Allison had been reported to be close to a return to League football in March 1995 when his name was linked to a consortium trying to buy Gillingham. The head of the group was Ross Hemsworth, the former commercial director of Fisher Athletic, and Malcolm was said to be poised for the role of director of football. The deal never materialised – and nor did the thief by whom Allison claimed he had been head-butted when he was pictured in Peterborough sporting a black eye a couple of months later.
When the 1995–96 season began, Allison threw himself enthusiastically into his new role alongside Century’s recently recruited match commentator, Alistair Brownlee. ‘The club had just moved into the Riverside Stadium, which gave it a big uplift,’ says Brownlee. ‘It was an exciting time and Malcolm, in his role as summariser, established himself as part of the fabric.’
Brownlee laughs at the recollection of his role in the partnership with Allison. ‘Half the time he thought I was his chauffeur. I arrived to pick him up at his home in Yarm and he would come out in his trademark fedora and we would be off around the country. It was a privilege to sit alongside him in the car and listen to stories about his life in football. Wherever he went he would be recognised and there was obviously a lot of affection for him. We went to Manchester United once and he was walking in front of the stands saying, “Boro are coming to beat you”, and the crowd were cheering him.
‘Southampton’s old ground at The Dell had a very small car park and getting a pass was a thankless task. But we simply drove up to the gate and the steward said, “Hi, Malcolm”, and let us park up. One time he walked out of a game at Chelsea with a huge hamper that someone had given him and I remember a chilly night at Crystal Palace, where they had a Malcolm Allison Lounge. Malcolm asked for a brandy and when the barman asked if he wanted a large or small one he replied, “The bottle, please.” And when he said, “Will there be anything else?” Malcolm just answered, “Yes. Make sure you get that ‘A’ put back on my name on the sign outside.”’
For a while, Allison was thriving in his new environment. Brownlee continues, ‘He felt able to chip in any moment with that loud booming voice of his. He had an obvious talent for the role and people responded to him. He was very popular.’
Then came Middlesbrough’s home game against Newcastle early in February. When Boro gave the ball away in a dangerous position, Allison could be heard to mutter ‘fucking hell’ under his breath. In the next seat, Brownlee was still worrying about whether anyone would have heard it as Les Ferdinand scored a winning goal for the visitors. ‘Malcolm said, “Oh, fucking hell”, again in a loud Cockney voice – very loud indeed,’ Brownlee recalls. ‘The listeners heard it and one or two rang the switchboard at the station to complain. It stunned me as much as anyone because I was not used to hearing Malcolm swear even in our normal conversations.’
Allison was suspended by the station for the rest of the season. ‘I did use a bit of bad language on the air, and they had no alternative but to tell me I couldn’t work for them any more,’ he said. ‘People have been kind enough to keep ringing the station asking for me to be reinstated, but I just have to accept it. I have nobody to blame but myself.’
It was not a good time for Allison. In the same month, he had his scouting role with the FA taken away from him following his public criticism of England forwards Andy Cole and Matthew Le Tissier. The News of the World reported that the FA had written to clubs informing them that Allison no longer worked for them.
However, believing he would have learned his lesson, and having been swayed by the considerable support from listeners for his reinstatement, Century restored him to the airwaves for the start of the new season. ‘A lot of people missed Malcolm,’ says Brownlee. ‘It was decided to bring him back for a trial, and to make sure he would be all right on air we introduced the “Big Mal Button”. He was given a microphone to work with, but it was not live at all times. He had to press a switch to make it work and the hope was that if the F-word popped into his head it would have been consigned to the back of his mind by the time he pressed the button.’
Allison soon decided that he was not going to be silenced by a piece of crude technology. ‘His way round it was to simply sit on the thing so that it was always live,’ continues Brownlee, who recalls the day that his partner spoke his last on the station. ‘We had a match at Coventry. The linesman gave a decision and Malcolm said, “That’s a fucking disgrace.” I had a call from the boss at half-time saying he couldn’t continue.’
There was speculation at the time, repeated since, that Allison had been the worse for wear for drink, but Brownlee rejects that suggestion. ‘Certainly he had not been drinking before the Coventry game. I drove him all the way there and we didn’t call in at any restaurants. I wouldn’t have allowed him to drink too much. I travelled thousands of miles with him and never saw him drink too much before a game.’
Following his dismissal by Century, the Daily Mirror took a voyeuristic delight in reporting that Allison, faced with the prospect of being out of meaningful football employment for the rest of his life, was ‘on the breadline’. As well as having to support Lynn and Gina, now six years old, on a total of £104 per week – made up of his state pension plus other family allowances – Malcolm also admitted to a fear of losing his right foot because of an old football injury that had never healed. ‘I’m having an operation in Northallerton Hospital in the next few days,’ he explained. ‘The foot wasn’t operated on when I first broke it, and it has troubled me for years.’
Drastic measures were not required, but money still was. Allison picked up a few quid in 1997 for writing a column in a short-lived retro football magazine called Action Replay, but his working life was finally coming to an end. With no more encores to perform, he faded from the public eye. And without football to help keep his demons at bay, he slipped more deeply into the grip of the drink that had been a companion for so much of his life. As much as he treasured the opportunity to spend more time with his daughter, Gina, he admitted to missing the daily companionship of the football fraternity. ‘When I was working my life was filled with contacts and people,’ he would explain in 2000. ‘But ever since I have been at home, in the past four years, I haven’t really had any friends. Nobody except my lovely little girl.’
Allison claimed to have suffered from manic depression, a condition that went undiagnosed for almost three years until he was prescribed Prozac towards the end of 1999. ‘I started having mood swings,’ he said, describing pains in his chest and head. ‘Loneliness is a thing that’s difficult to explain.’
By 2000, Allison had been with Lynn for 17 years. ‘We were happy. Or I thought we were,’ he said. For Lynn, however, life with the increasingly erratic Malcolm had become an impossible ordeal and she’d had to ask him to leave their home. James Lawton says, ‘Lynn’s feelings towards Malcolm now are of sadness and she still loves him – or what he was. But she said to me that for the sake of her daughter it was impractical to live with him.’
Lynn traces the beginning of a period that she has ‘only just now been able to move on from’ to Allison’s dismissal from Century. ‘Malcolm was his own worst enemy and he would shoot himself in the foot. He had that fantastic job with Century which was ideal for him at that time in his life. He could go to the matches and catch up with friends.
‘But after that he became quite dissatisfied with life and I couldn’t understand that because he had Gina and me and we had a lovely home, yet he couldn’t adapt to a lifestyle like that. It wasn’t Malcolm I suppose. He would miss all of the things connected to football. He would still be watching on television and shouting out what they should be doing and felt he had something to offer. He would see people in certain jobs and realise that he was a lot better than they were.
‘He’d had a fantastic relationship with Gina, which was the saddest thing towards the end. When Gina was tiny I’d gone back to teaching and Malcolm and Gina spent a lot of time together. They would go out for lunch and have walks in the park and I remember [one of his daughters from his first marriage] Dawn saying how lucky Gina was to have had that time with Malcolm because she didn’t have that. That is why it was all the more upsetting when things went wrong when Malcolm was drinking heavily and Gina didn’t want to come home to find him and didn’t want him to meet her at school if he’d had a drink.’
Lurching more deeply into a pit of self-destruction, Allison returned from a three-week stint coaching junior players in Romania, determined to achieve some sort of reconciliation. He broke into Lynn’s home, stayed long enough to drink a bottle of wine and was duly arrested. Lynn subsequently won a court injunction to keep him away from her home. Allison’s lawyer requested of the court, ‘I ask you to view this more in sorrow than anger because it is the story of a once-famous man whose whole personal life has degenerated and spiralled out of control.’
Lynn admits, ‘Even now I don’t know how I did it, but I had to. Malcolm changed personality completely when he was drinking and that was very hard. My friends and family saw what it was doing to me but I still defended him, which you do when you love somebody. But Gina was the reason I did what I did. I had to be quite ruthless and that was hard to come to terms with and live with.’
Malcolm’s companions were becoming more aware of his problems and a group of them hijacked him at the Football Writers’ Association dinner at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London. They made known their concerns but, despite the pep talk, when he travelled home the next day the effects of a liquid lunch made him rowdy to the point of almost being thrown off the train. An acquaintance managed to calm him down, enabling him to complete the journey. But then he took a taxi to Lynn’s home, demanded to enter and was arrested after he attempted to smash down the door with a paving slab. After spending the night in the cells he was found to be in breach of the injunction banning him from going near the house and was ordered to pay £300 and given a 12-month conditional discharge.
Allison’s own loyalty to friends over the years had served him well. Released yet homeless, he found support from Tony Zivanaris, a hotelier and property developer who had briefly been a Middlesbrough director in the 1980s and was among those who fell under the spell of Allison’s personality. He had once ordered his staff at the Baltimore Hotel to tolerate the £11,000 bill Allison had left unpaid upon checking out. Payment had later arrived via a postdated cheque from Kuwait. Now it was Zivanaris whose intervention kept Malcolm off the street, putting him up in his hotel and instructing his staff to take good care of him.
He had a roof but still had problems. At the end of May he told a Daily Mail news reporter that he was ‘on the verge of suicide’ and living on a diet of cognac and Prozac. The article made grim reading, an unpalatable mixture of melodrama and crude, clumsy self-justification from Allison. Having done his best to make his subject’s living quarters appear little more appealing than a student bedsit, the writer’s description of Allison mentioned ‘the faintest of tears now forming and running down his ruddy broken veined cheek’.
The sense when reading Allison’s threat of suicide was of someone eager to give his audience what they wanted, perhaps to increase the monetary value of the access he had granted his inquisitor. ‘We can all choose our way of life and there’s no way I could be here for months,’ he was quoted as saying. ‘I would rather commit suicide. I won’t try it, I’ll do it. All those people who have said they’ve tried it is bollocks. I’ve thought about it. I won’t tell you how I’ll do it, but I’ll do it. It’s not hard to commit suicide.’
Allison’s claims about his relationship with Lynn, intended to paint her as the villain, did him even less credit. He said the end of their relationship had been precipitated by Lynn’s anger at him spending his money on Viagra. ‘She just objects to things like that. You’d have thought she’d be pleased. I mean, we had not had sex for about six months. I asked if she was a lesbian. Of course I don’t think that. But when you get no sex you think: What’s going on? I don’t know whether she was using the Viagra thing as an excuse or whether she just didn’t want to make love to me any more anyway.’ Lynn had too much dignity to respond to such comments.
James Lawton, who wrote that the Mail had paid Allison £600 ‘to ransack what was left of his life’, takes up the story. ‘I was very upset. Malcolm was in a bad way and Lynn had thrown him out after he had behaved pretty badly. I had sent him some money, which wasn’t the smartest thing to do because he was drinking. I drove up to Middlesbrough and found him in Tony’s hotel. I appointed myself as a bit of a liaison between Malcolm and anyone who could help him at all at that point. Franny Lee was magnificent. I said to him, “Obviously the drink is doing him in. From my perspective he needs to go in the Priory or somewhere, but the financial side is high there.” Franny said he would talk to the PFA [Professional Footballers’ Association], but said that in the meantime he would give the hospital his credit card to cover the costs.’
Zivanaris ordered his driver to put Allison in his car and head for the Priory Clinic in Altrincham, sending with him a new dressing gown, pyjamas and slippers. Several of Allison’s old City players were among the visitors, taking fruit and Havana cigars. Lee also carried a warning for his old boss. ‘You made Belly, Mike [Summerbee] and me do a lot of things we didn’t want to do,’ he told him. ‘You made us work so hard we spewed up. You never stopped kicking our arses. You made us achieve things as footballers we never dreamed were possible. You were bloody incredible. I don’t believe there has been a better pure football coach. You changed our lives. Now you have to change your own. We’re here to help, but you have to do the real job.’
Summerbee emerged from one visit to say, ‘Even now, after all he’s been through, I don’t believe there is anyone in football with a sharper brain, a more complete understanding of the game. I’ve told him that it’s a tragedy he’s still not involved. Maybe it is a little bit of the game’s fault, but also Malcolm’s. He’s got to come out of that place in charge of himself, with his pride back and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone doesn’t say, at this late hour, “Wait a minute, this guy could help.”’
Lawton, too, was encouraged to see some of the old Malcolm surfacing at the Priory. ‘For a little while I was hopeful that things were looking up a bit. There was a young lad in treatment there and Malcolm was working with him. He was a footballer, not a professional but quite talented. It was quite a poignant image, this young boy who was addicted to drugs and Malcolm, the old coach, putting him through his paces. Again, the teaching instinct had emerged. He would have been a great teacher. I remember when [journalist] Ken Jones had his accident a few years ago and lost part of his arm. He was in hospital demoralised because it was his good hand. Malcolm brought him some chopsticks and said, “You do realise that the Chinese are the best ping-pong players in the world. One of the reasons is that they use chopsticks to eat with and are so dextrous. The bat is like an extension of their fingers. If you use these for half an hour every day, it will increase a hundred fold your dexterity with the hand.” I thought that showed a particular way of thinking.’1
Lee remembers, ‘In the Priory, he was absolutely the Malcolm of old – everything about him. It had been a good summer and he looked well and had a nice tan. He was lecturing people in there to stop drinking and taking drugs.’
Malcolm himself was soon announcing, ‘I’m going to make a record recovery.’ For a while he suggested he might be able to live up to his boast, teaming up again with Tommy Docherty to host a phone-in show on Manchester’s Piccadilly Magic radio station. Yet, just like the promise of the new start he’d made to Terry Venables during the summer of 1978, it was to prove beyond his fragile willpower.
Lee continues, ‘We got him right back on the straight and narrow. We got him a job on the local radio and everything was going well but all of a sudden, he pressed the self-destruct button and slipped back to his old ways. He was back drinking again and finished up creating his own problems.’ Even Malcolm’s stalwart friends were forced to admit that there was nothing more they could do. ‘Mike and I said to his family, “Look, you have got to get hold of this and sort it out yourselves from now on because it is a family problem.”’
Malcolm’s plight was highlighted in May 2001, by which time he was living in warden-controlled housing. After suffering a fall outside his home, he ended up in Wythenshawe Hospital with a broken collarbone, at which point his son, Mark, said, ‘He is very ill, but he’s accepted for the first time he is an alcoholic. Previously he’s been to Alcoholics Anonymous and has been in the Priory. But he has never actually accepted what his biggest problem is.’
Mark explained the hope that Allison would be admitted to a specialised clinic at Withington Hospital, and added, ‘If he goes in a pub, which he has been doing because of his loneliness, someone there will buy him a drink and then they get one of his great stories. He can’t do anything on the after-dinner circuit because they are drink associated.’
Once again, Allison’s public response to his predicament was to put on a brave face and crack a joke. ‘Just tell people I’m in a bad way but I hope to be out of here sooner rather than later. If anyone could send me £1,000, that would be handy!’
Gradually, however, Malcolm’s problems were growing beyond financial salvation. He was found to be suffering from the onset of dementia – probably triggered, and certainly not helped, by alcohol.2 Looking back, Ian Niven believes he saw an early manifestation of Malcolm’s condition. ‘Malcolm would stay with me some weekends. We had got the brandy out and were reminiscing and as we were chatting he raised his voice, which he had never done in conversation between us. He started shouting, “You were one of the most brilliant directors I have known.” I was embarrassed but eventually his voice subsided. That was the last time he came down and just after that he started having his troubles. I think that might have been the start of his ailment.’
Lynn also recalls that it was difficult to know where the effects of drink and the onset of illness merged. ‘We would laugh about him losing his suitcase or his scarf or falling asleep on the train and missing his stop. The day we moved house he was at a game with Century and I said, “Remember that when you come back we will be in a different house.” We had a house-warming party a few weeks later and some friends bought him a badge with the address on, saying, “If you find me please return me to this address.” I think that was a mixture of the drink and start of the dementia.’
Malcolm’s recent years have been lived out in a residential care home run by Trafford Borough Council in Sale, although in 2007 his family had to make plans to move him because of the closure of the facility. His loyal band of friends, including ex-City players Bell, Lee, Summerbee, Tony Book and Willie Donachie, have continued to visit, often taking him for days out, even though the deterioration of a man who retains such a place in their affections has not been easy to witness. Ian Niven would regularly escort him to lunch at Manchester’s Midland Hotel until the levels of sedation Malcolm had to endure made it too fraught and upsetting an exercise. ‘Malcolm is not instantaneous in his conversation,’ says Niven, ‘if you mention a certain match he doesn’t remember. It is hard when that happens to a man who was never subdued, always outrageously confident and gregarious.’
In December 2001, the News of the World described Allison as ‘frighteningly pale, grossly underweight, unsteady on his feet and needs constant care from kind-hearted nursing staff’. The reporter added, ‘Even the cheeky twinkle in his eyes that once captivated women has gone.’ His home was said to be a small room to which he was not entrusted with the key, being unable to make decisions about his own comings and goings. The décor featured photographs of his parents, of his successful City team and of himself as a player. Many souvenirs and mementoes of his career had been sold over the years for some instant cash. Asked about Malcolm’s condition, his family were said to be ‘too distraught to talk’.
Allison’s son, Mark, offers a less gloomy picture, saying in summer 2007, ‘He is still big and strong. There is nothing wrong with him physically and he has his better days. He goes to quite a few City games but it is difficult because he doesn’t really remember what has happened because of his short-term memory loss. He has lost the ability to read books as well, which he loved.’
Malcolm does, however, retain a sense of humour, as Mark explains. ‘He knows that he can’t really answer people’s questions so he has a set of one-liners that he uses. If someone says hello and asks him how he is, he will answer something like, “I’m better than you”, or, “I am still waiting for that cheque you owe me.”’
And some of the roguish Mal remains. ‘We were in a bar recently,’ says Mark. ‘Dad can’t really remember what the drinks are but he can still read, so he looked at the list and said, “I’ll have that. Champagne.”’
Lynn adds, ‘When I call him I say, “Hi. It’s Lynn here.” And he always says, “Hi, Lynn-here.” He always used to do that so he obviously has little things that he remembers. Malcolm is probably quite happy where he is and it is harder now for his family.’
Ironically, Malcolm’s illness – and the care he requires – has brought him closer to his family than for many years. Mark explains, ‘I never spoke to him for 25 years, until I returned from living abroad and went to spend time with him in Portugal. It was the same for my older brother David, who lived in Hong Kong. Now we take him to watch my son Marcus play football. I don’t think he ever came to see me play. It is sad that at the time of his life when he would finally have had the opportunity to be around his family, he is not well enough to enjoy it.’
In September 2007, the Allison family staged a celebration for Malcolm’s 80th birthday. Included in the festivities was first wife Beth, who has never found a replacement for Malcolm as the man in her life, remaining single since their divorce. ‘She forgave him,’ says Mark.
Similarly, Lynn speaks without a trace of bitterness about the man who, in their final years together, forced her to endure such emotional trauma. ‘I have tried to always think about the positive things and the good times we had together,’ she says. ‘I have no regrets whatsoever.’
The final chapter of any biography written towards the end of its subject’s life is likely to contain a degree of sadness. Yet it has needed Big Mal’s own destructive touch, sprinkled with some simple ill-fortune, to create quite such an anthology of disorder out of the latter years of his own remarkable story. Echoing Francis Lee’s words of mournful acceptance, James Lawton, Malcolm’s friend for four decades, admits, ‘I feel there is nothing left to do for him – but I feel a bit guilty about it. When I last tried to go and see him, I looked through the window of his room and he was sound asleep because of the medication he has to be given, so I left.’
Such feelings of responsibility and loyalty say something for a man whose manner of living has never allowed for compromise. Undoubtedly, he has disappointed and hurt people over the years, yet he has enriched and uplifted the existence of many others. The balancing of those columns in the ledger of life rests with higher authorities than this book. When Lawton penned a tribute for Allison’s testimonial match programme in 1993, his words were intended to relate to those people who had encountered the football man, yet they could have applied equally to those whose lives Malcolm had touched in capacities ranging from friend to media contact, drinking partner to lover.
His years were filled with controversy and only fleeting glory. But his passion, his feel for what was important in the game, has been noted and acted upon with the staging of today’s game. This is where the generosity, and the imagination, lie. It is looking beyond the tyranny of results, seeing the story behind the scoreline. It is saying, ‘Thanks for the memory, Mal. We didn’t win it all when you were around, but we did a few things and saw some new horizons.’
No, Malcolm didn’t win it all in life and those new horizons for which he was constantly striving often seemed to be at the end of a road that led to professional and personal catastrophe. To those close to him, the saddest aspect of his final destination has been the bleak inevitability of the journey. Several times after lunch visits with him in recent years, Lawton has driven away from his friend’s spartan residence with the words of former Manchester City chief scout Harry Godwin echoing back to him over a distance of more than three decades.
‘I used to drive to night matches and I would often take Harry. He loved Malcolm, adored him. But he used to express terrible fears about him. He had a vision of Malcolm as an old man, his friends disappeared and nothing going for him. Saying that about a young man was quite chilling. But he was spot on; that is precisely what has happened.’
Over the years, as that vision loomed larger in the future of one of the great football men, all attempts to divert him from its realisation were doomed to failure. Big Mal made sure of that. And yet, it still seems unfair on Malcolm Allison, unrepresentative of such a personality, to end his story on a note so gloomily downbeat. It is not the way his life will be remembered, even by those who have watched its deterioration.
The final paragraphs of this book, therefore, belong to Colin Bell, whom Allison considered the finest of all his footballers and who has never stopped seeing the inspirational coach behind the fading eyes in front of him, and to Bobby Moore, who, even in the final moments before his own death, chose to honour the man who had befriended and mentored him almost four decades earlier.
Bell remembers, ‘Tony Book and I were chatting to Mal a few years ago and he still had his plans in his mind, breaking down the systems they play nowadays. It was wonderful. We were sat there listening to him for about half an hour.’ The man Allison labelled ‘Nijinsky’ pauses, remembering the effect of those few prized moments when the lively minded coach of old had re-emerged. ‘He made us feel like we were players again.’
The magic of Malcolm lives on in the reverence of Bell’s delivery, as it does in Jeff Powell’s memory of the final time he met with Moore.
‘Malcolm had this long, red leather coat and when Bobby saw it for the first time he’d said, as a joke, “Love the coat.” Typically, Malcolm had given it to him. The last time I saw Bobby we had lunch in the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington. He never went out again and he had come to say goodbye. It was quite a warm day, certainly not one where you needed a jacket, but Bobby had this coat on and he sat and wore it all through a long lunch. I commented, “I see you have got that old coat on again.”
‘Bobby said, “Yes. This might be the last time I ever go out. I wanted to wear the coat Malcolm gave me.”’