Adding colour to the beautiful game

Nov 22 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

Then, they were just articles about Liverpool in a boys’ football magazine. Now, they have been compiled into an evocative social history. David Charters reports

SOMETHING changed and much was lost in those years. It was as though a sad-eyed, old man in a cloth cap had been sitting in the theatre of his own life, nodding into sleep, as the grey curtain slowly fell.

Behind it were meat and potato pies soaked in mud-brown gravy, coughs, the smoke from untipped cigarettes, footballers clipping their trousers before bicycling to the ground, shuddering buses and singing trams, web-faced wirelesses, the wobbling arms of barmaids pulling pints into beer mugs to be laid on wrought-iron tables by the fans – who have just piled into the pub, eager to dissect that afternoon’s match.

And then he awakes to see a bright curtain rising. Behind it are colour TVs, Ford Cortinas, swish houses in the suburbs, kipper ties, stack-heeled shoes, rock stars, dieticians, flared trousers, lager, lacquered hair, hooligans, agents, PR officers, boutiques and beauty queens.

Of course, when one era goes, another must come.

And an evocative new book, based on articles and photographs published in Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly magazine, tells of the revolution in football, as experienced by Liverpool FC between 1951 and 1973. This one shows Ron Yeats leading the players out in 1963/64.

The club spent five of the earlier years in the old Second Division, living under the shadow of Everton. But, by the end of the period, Liverpool were the strongest team in England and one of the best in Europe.

It was the beginning of the modern game, opening the way to massive wages, TV deals, corporate hospitality, foreign owners, teams with players from every part of the world except the home town; and those wives and girlfriends, usually money-spinning celebrities on their own terms.

AT ITS peak in the late 1960s, the magazine sold 254,000 copies. Each would be read by several other schoolboys and their dads, giving it a huge readership. To speak only of fathers and sons here is not sexist. The game was male-dominated, though, by the 1970s, photographs of footballers had joined movie stars and pop singers on the walls of girls’ bedrooms.

Perhaps anticipating this, the October, 1968, edition carried an interview with Cilla Black under the headline, “Everton or Liverpool?”.

“Me dad and me eldest brother, George, were raving Everton fans and still are,” she told the reporter, scrupulously avoiding the use of “my”.

“So as a child, I followed their lead. But our John and our Alan plumped for Liverpool at an early age, which left me stuck right in the middle between four men.”

The problem was solved by the late Bobby Willis, a devoted Red, who became her manager and husband.

“I like football chiefly because I understand the game. It isn’t as complicated as some sports,” she continued. “Cricket bores me, but I like football even on TV.” Ken Dodd wrote an article for the Monthly, which he admitted to buying “every week” – a rare example of our beloved comedian overspending.

These were rare forays into populist journalism. Most articles were long and written in robust prose.

In April, 1963, Geoffrey Green considered the Everton/Liverpool derbies. “It is a birthright. Just as the two great clubs – Everton and Liverpool – of this teeming, powerful waterfront, decorated by ocean liners, giant shipyards and a striving industrial community, unite to withstand the onset of others, so they easily split in personal rivalry, a family divided against itself in implacable enmity . . . At one end were the red rattles of Liverpool, at the other the blue of Everton. They swirled incessantly and, though they looked like butterfly wings glittering in the sunlight, they sounded like the deafening machine-guns of a battle on the Somme.”

The book is also a social history, reflecting the brief cultural dominance of Merseyside. Liverpool rose with The Beatles, the Mersey poets and the numerous comedians – many of whom stood on the Kop, unknown outside their own circle, but as witty as Ken Dodd or Jimmy Tarbuck. Gerry and the Pacemakers’ version of You’ll Never Walk Alone was adopted by the club.

Most footballers were working-class, many Scots, as exemplified by Bill Shankly, the vinegar-voiced manager stubbled with street wisdom, who guided the Reds into their glory years in the 1960s and 70s.

But it was not unknown for educated men to become footballers. Liverpool’s great Billy Liddell (1922-2001) was an accountant, a Sunday school teacher, youth worker and a JP. He featured regularly in the Monthly during his 534 Liverpool appearances (238 goals).

But, on arrival at Anfield, Steve Heighway and Brian Hall, both graduates, were nicknamed big Bamber and little Bamber after Bamber Gascoigne, then presenter of TV’s University Challenge. They were at the border between the old and the new game, which would be crossed by Kevin Keegan with his permed hair, pop songs and flared trousers.

In this transitional time, Heighway, naked from the waist up, advertised an anti-bacterial skin cleanser called pHisoHex.

The book was compiled by Simon Inglis, editor of the Played in Britain series. It has introductory notes by Steve Done, author and curator of the Liverpool FC museum at Anfield.

“The whole aura that emanates from the Charles Buchan archives is that football was like belonging to a big family,” says Simon. “The magazine was an outlet for intelligent articles about football. In that transitional period, footballers were beginning to turn into rock stars. To me, it is not just about football. It is very much a commentary on changing fashion, printing techniques and graphic design.

“Charlie Buchan, an avuncular and principled man, really loved Billy Liddell and all he stood for. He thought that all footballers should be like him.” But there was only one Billy Liddell.

THE Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly Liverpool Gift Book is published by Played in Britain, at £14.99.

FOR your chance to win a new book on the best of 80s football, see Wednesday’s Daily Post

davidcharters