Copyright

Harper Non-Fiction

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First published in 2000 by CollinsWillow

First published in paperback 2001

© Barry Fry Promotions Ltd 2001

Barry Fry and Phil Rostron asserts the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780002189491

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2016 ISBN: 9780007483297

Version: 2016-09-09

Dedication

To my wife Kirstine,

and my children Jane, Mark, Adam,

Amber, Frank and Anna-Marie.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Sir Alex Ferguson

ONE Who’d be a football manager?

TWO ‘Practice son, practice’

THREE New boy at Old Trafford

FOUR Bankruptcy and on the scrapheap

FIVE Cheeseman and the frilly knickers

SIX Backs to the wall at Barnet

SEVEN Stan the Main Man

EIGHT ‘You won’t be alive to pick the team’

NINE Fry in, Collymore out

TEN Brady blues

ELEVEN ‘How many caps does that woman wear here?’

TWELVE Over to you, Trevor

THIRTEEN Posh but pricey

FOURTEEN A small matter of £3.1 million

FIFTEEN Saved by the Pizzaman

SIXTEEN Play-offs, promotion and ponces

SEVENTEEN Competing with the Big Boys

EIGHTEEN Small Fry

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible but for the support of my family. To my late mum Dora and dad Frank, thanks for all the sacrifices you made for me and your encouragement and understanding in trying to help me fulfil my dream. My wife Kirstine has been a rock, my best ever signing, while her mum Gisela and dad Andy have always been there for me.

I was fortunate enough to be at the birth of each of my six children Jane, Mark, Adam, Amber, Frank and Anna-Marie, and I can honestly say that the experience is better than scoring at Wembley! Since the days they were born they have all, in different ways, brought so much pleasure and enjoyment into my life. As have my three grand-children Keeley-Anne, Yasmin and Louis and the best son-in-law anybody could wish for in Steve. I count my lucky stars that I have been surrounded by such a wonderful group of family and friends through my rollercoaster career in football.

Finally, thanks to my publishers HarperCollins and the man who helped me put my thoughts down in writing, Phil Rostron. It’s been a privilege working with such professionals.

FOREWORD

Sir Alex Ferguson

I am privileged to have been asked to write the foreword to the autobiography of a man whom I cannot bring to mind without the thought prompting a smile. This is not because Barry Fry is a figure of fun, but because of his larger-than-life character, happy-go-lucky nature and reliance upon humour to soften the blows which a life in football can inflict with uncomfortable regularity.

Barry is a man for whom football is a blinding passion, displayed in his every thought, word and deed. He is one of the rare birds in the game in that he is highly respected by almost all of his fellow professionals for his vast knowledge, unquenchable enthusiasm and unflinching adherence to the ideals in which he believes.

He is a very popular manager among managers. Barry may not have been at the helm of a Premiership club but that, in itself, is surprising in many ways because he has achieved success in one way or another at each of the many he has managed both in non-league football and in the lower divisions of the Football League.

A staunch member of the League Managers’ Association, he shows as much enthusiasm for its affairs as he does in his day-to-day club involvement. We operate in an industry which all too often does not meet its obligations when there is a parting of the ways between clubs and managers, and there is a real need for voices as powerful as Barry’s to be heard if an equilibrium is to be achieved. Some managers are fortunate enough to walk straight into another job once they have been shown the door, but there are many others who do not enjoy the same fortune for one reason or another. They need protection, with due and full severance pay a priority, and Barry, who knows a thing or two about such matters, works tirelessly towards these goals.

Thoughts for the welfare of others are typical of the man and his self-deprecation is very endearing. Having walked into Old Trafford as a young boy to become one of the original Busby Babes, he says that the only reason Barry Fry did not make it as a player was Barry Fry. He is perhaps being a little hard on himself with this observation. The fact is that the crop of youngsters with whom he was competing for places at the time was exceptional, as has regularly been the case at Manchester United, and it is no disgrace that he failed to break through into the big time.

There is no disputing that he was a smashing little player – you don’t get schoolboy international caps and headhunted by Manchester United if you are no good – but Barry didn’t get the breaks. Simple as that.

An incongruity in football is the number of great players who do not aspire to be, nor become, top managers and a corresponding number of distinctly average players who achieve tremendous managerial success. In my own case I was never anything more than a run-of-the-mill player and the same could be said of the likes of Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley, but playing is one thing and managing entirely another. Barry is in the category of people who have done better as the man in charge than he did as the one taking the orders and his feats in winning championships and cup competitions are not to be underestimated. In any walk of life you have to be special to achieve success and there is no doubt that Barry Fry is a very special man.

He takes us here on a roller-coaster ride which reflects his colourful life. Hold on to your hats and enjoy the journey. Then, when you think about Barry Fry in the future, I defy you to do so without a smile on your face.

CHAPTER ONE

Who’d be a football manager?

Raindrops trickled down the window of the prefabricated building that was my office on the winter’s day that a familiar red Lamborghini drew to a halt in the parking bay outside. The magnificent machine was just one of the success symbols flaunted by the highly charismatic Keith Cheeseman, who had recently assumed control of the Southern League club Dunstable Town. This was my first managerial position in football and I felt privileged to be the individual charged with the task of transforming the fortunes of a club which, for eight successive seasons, had finished stone cold bottom of the league. I was in a fairly strong position in that things could hardly have got worse. Or so it seemed.

I was just a few months into the job and the chairman’s arrival on this dank Tuesday was the signal that this was to be no ordinary day. Up until now he had never been near the ground in midweek unless we had a game. And even then he did not come to all the games because he got bored with them.

My first thought as he got out of the car was ‘What the hell is he doing here?’

As he came into my office I offered him a warm greeting.

‘Hello mate, what brings you here?’

He replied that he had come to meet somebody and seemed disappointed when I said that nobody had arrived.

I offered him a cup of tea, which he rejected, and he waved aside my invitation to sit down. He was on edge and started to prowl the room. Even though he was always naturally on the go, there was something different about his demeanour.

After a while a Jaguar pulled up alongside the Lamborghini, giving this dilapidated little outreach in Bedfordshire the incongruous appearance of a classic car showroom. We watched as the driver emerged and walked to my office. His polite knock on the door was answered by Cheeseman.

‘Ah, I’ve been waiting for you.’

‘I’m Keith Cheeseman. Please come in.’

And with that greeting the chairman slammed the door shut. In a lightning-fast move he had his visitor pinned back against the door with his forearm tight against his throat. He hastily frisked this hapless man and, as I recoiled in horror, Cheeseman tried to make light of the situation.

‘Just checking that you aren’t bugged or carrying a gun,’ he laughed.

Now I’m just a silly football manager and I feared something approaching a siege might be developing, but Cheeseman just said: ‘Barry, I’ve got to speak privately to this man. Have you got the keys to the boardroom?’

Confirming that they were in my car, I went to get them as they made their way to the boardroom at the other side of the ground. I caught up with them and as they stood on the halfway line they surveyed an advertising hoarding belonging to a particular finance company.

I was never introduced to the visitor, who boomed at the chairman: ‘You can take that board down straight away. That goes for starters.’

Cheeseman put his arm round him and smiled.

‘My boy, that’s just cost you three quarters of a million. I’d leave it there if I were you.’

And with that I let them into the boardroom where, I presumed, they concluded whatever business they were up to. None of what had happened and been said made any sense to me but I was left with the distinct impression that something was amiss.

A few days later I was given a much bigger indication of the type of man I was working for. We had a home game on the Tuesday night and in the afternoon I took a call from Cheeseman in which he said that he would not be going to the match. I said that was fair enough, but there was more. He said that after the game he wanted me to do him a favour and go to meet him.

‘I’m only in the country for five minutes,’ he said ‘but I want to see you before I go. I’ll ring you when the match is over and let you know the location.’

I didn’t raise an eyebrow because it was not unusual for him to be abroad on business. I often went to his office in Luton before one of these trips for him to hand over some cash or to sign some cheques.

When his telephone call came there was something quite sinister about it.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘I want you to leave and bring with you a case that somebody has dropped at the ground during the game. When you get to the roundabout at Houghton Regis go round it two or three times and make absolutely sure that you are not being followed. Then shoot off all the way down the A5, get on the M1 at the end and come off at Scratchwood Services. I will meet you there.’

‘Keith, what the hell …’

‘I’ll explain it all when you get here,’ he interjected. ‘Just make sure you have got the bag.’

I asked the secretary, Harold Stew, whether someone had dropped off a bag from the chairman’s office and he confirmed that it was in one of the other offices. So I picked up this big bag, a briefcase, and put it in the boot of my car.

It was with a very nervous look into my rear mirror that I pulled away from the ground and onto my unscheduled journey. I approached the Houghton Regis roundabout with his words ringing in my ears, but I just thought how ridiculous it would be to keep going round and round it and completed the manoeuvre normally. From there, though, I could hardly keep my eyes on the road ahead because I was looking so many times into the mirrors. It was frightening how often I thought one car, then another, then another was tailing me. Paranoia was sweeping over me.

I was overcome with a sense of relief as I arrived unscathed at Scratchwood, yet there was still a feeling of foreboding about the contents of the case and what kind of situation I might soon be walking in to.

Cheeseman answered my knock at the door and welcomed me into a room inhabited by two other members of the finance company and three other people who acted as legal representatives and advisers.

As well as being a member of the Dunstable Football Club board, one was also the manager of the finance house. I hadn’t seen him for some time and greeted him warmly. But when I asked if he was well he answered: ‘Oh, I’m terrible. I’ve been out to Keith’s place in Spain and all hell has broken loose.’

Cheeseman broke in here and asked me, ‘Have you got the case?’

‘Oh yes, I forgot. It’s in the boot of my car.’ He asked for the keys and off he went to get it.

His exit allowed a resumption of my chat with the pale-faced money manager.

‘We’ve got some problems. I’ve got to get out of the country.’

I pointed out that he had just been abroad.

‘I know,’ he replied, ‘but I’ve got to go again and for longer this time.’

Cheeseman returned with the case, put it on one of the beds and threw it open. Well, I have never seen such money in all my life. It was crammed full of foreign notes amounting to goodness knows how much.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ I asked the chairman nervously.

‘I’ll tell you later. We have just got to look after him now.’

Trying to lift the atmosphere I asked if anyone was having tea or coffee or a beer, but Cheeseman said abruptly: ‘No. You can go back now.’

‘But I thought you wanted to see me?’

‘No, I only wanted this,’ he said pointing to the money.

I left more than a little concerned. I was 28 years old, terribly naive in the ways of the business world, desperate to make an impression in my first job in football management as a player-manager and here I was, witnessing twice within the space of a week, some very suspicious activities involving the very person I should be able to rely upon for all kinds of things, my chairman.

I drove home stony-faced and with my head swimming. I thought about what had gone before with Cheeseman and things slowly began to add up.

There was, for instance, the Jeff Astle fiasco. This man had been a legend in his time at West Bromwich Albion and it was considered a fantastic coup when I signed him for Dunstable. The ultimate professional, he had been working for Cheeseman’s building firm in the Mid-lands and after two months he came to me and said that he didn’t like the situation of living and working such a distance from the club.

Keith urged him to move south, pointing out that he was selling his home in Clophill and moving to a mansion in Houghton Regis. It might be an agreeable solution if Astle were to buy his house.

It was an amicable arrangement for Jeff, too, and he moved in. It was not long, though, before he started to come to see me and say: ‘I still haven’t got the deeds to that house, Baz. What am I going to do?’

At the end of that season and the beginning of the next campaign – Jeff had scored 34 goals for me – I had had my first blazing row with the chairman. Jeff found out that on the property in Clophill there were no fewer than 35 mortgages that had never been paid. He didn’t get the deeds because they were never Cheeseman’s to give. There had been this second mortgage and that second mortgage. How the hell Keith managed it, I don’t know.

Jeff told me this and I said that if that were the case then he could go. Graham Carr, the Weymouth manager, had wanted to buy him and offered £15,000, but I said that if Cheeseman had done him out of any money, then as far as I was concerned he could go for nothing and get himself looked after in terms of a signing-on fee and any other inducements.

The mortgages totalled £200,000 on a house Jeff thought he had bought for £14,000. I let Jeff and his wife Larraine go to Weymouth for talks with the intention of trying to sort out the mortgage situation. But when I mentioned it to Cheeseman he just huffed and puffed and bluffed and blamed it on anybody and everybody else. He told Jeff everything would be all right but the player himself was far from convinced and I sold Jeff to Weymouth so that he could get back at least some of the money that he had forked out. Nowhere near the full amount, but some of it at least.

He went reluctantly because he was happy playing for Dunstable and was a great hero with the fans. No doubt prompted by Jeff’s displeasure at the house situation Cheeseman came to see me one day.

‘This Astle … he ain’t doing this, he ain’t doing that, he ain’t doing f**k all,’ he blasted.

But I stopped him in his tracks.

‘Keith, I’ve sold him.’

‘You’ve what?’ he screamed.

We were on the pitch and he’s a bloody big geezer and we were face-to-face snarling. I’ve never seen a man so consumed with anger. Knowing what I know now, I was bloody lucky to get away with what I said to him next.

‘You don’t f***ing treat my players like that. You’d better treat my players right because if you f**k them up like that, mate, I’m no longer with you. My loyalty is to my players. I’ve sold him, he’s gone and there’s f**k all you can do about it.’

I was sure he would sack me after this tirade, but he didn’t. Yet Jeff had gone, which was heartbreaking. This episode had brought on further inclinations that things were not quite right at the club. Yet Keith was never around. He was always in Australia, America, Tenerife, London, the West Midlands. So rarely in his office in Luton and even more infrequently at the club.

From another perspective, it was great. He would ring every now and then but, by and large, he didn’t bother me. As long as the club was ticking over he remained in the background. He just paid the bills and if I saw him and needed money he would leave me readies, otherwise he would leave a sheaf of cheques, sign the lot and leave it to me to pay what had to be paid. This, at least, was on the playing side. All the other bills went to Betty and Harold in the general office and I never saw them.

It was a deeply worrying time and what I was considering more and more to be the inevitable happened one day when the police arrived on the scene.

I was full time on my own at Dunstable, even running the lotteries. Jeff used to help me sell the tickets and he became a great PR man for the club, but I faced the police alone as one officer began to ask questions like ‘Have you got a second mortgage on your property?’ and ‘Have you ever dealt with this finance company?’

As their line of questioning unfolded I began to put two and two together.

I remembered the last Christmas party. Cheeseman had the generosity to invite not only the players, but their wives, girlfriends, parents, family, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. I could not fathom this, nor his wanting all their names and addresses. It was almost on the scale of the party he threw at Caesar’s Palace, Luton – for the entire Southern League!

All the players had loans. All their parents had loans. The names and addresses were not to be invited to a party, they were to be the subjects of loans. It was a genius idea. Brilliant. A great scam, and it would have worked. Keith had all the money coming in, but he was greedy, always wanting to go off at tangents and bring in this, that and the other. He wanted to go out and buy a nightclub with George Best, for instance. All hell broke loose and he was arrested. I couldn’t find him. Nobody could find him. We didn’t know what was going on, but then everything came out of the woodwork. Every five minutes it seemed there was a knock at the club door.

‘You owe me ten grand.’

‘You owe me fifteen grand …’

‘I did that building work and I haven’t been paid.’

‘I did the floodlight work. You haven’t paid me.’

‘You owe Caesar’s Palace for that big party.’

All of a sudden, a club going along nicely, top of the Southern League, are in deep trouble. Our man, whom we can’t find, owns the club lock, stock and barrel. The only thing I can do is to sell players. I had to sell Lou Adams, George Cleary, Terry Mortimer; Astle had already gone. I had to sell anybody I could. The lads didn’t have any wages and we didn’t have a penny in the bank. Cheeseman always paid us in readies. So in my second year as a manager I had gone from top of the tree to an absolute nightmare. I started with a crowd of 34 people – we used to announce the crowd changes to the team – but with Cheeseman’s arrival in the summer and putting up the money to buy players and us getting promotion, the average gate went up to 1,000. Now we were facing disaster. The taxman was after us, the VAT man was after us, everybody was after us …

All the players and I had to give statements to the police. Cheeseman said to me once: ‘Barry, this was a good thing gone wrong. We were just unlucky. I’ll get out of it, no problem. The finance manager did nothing wrong, he couldn’t get out of it. I blackmailed him. I had him by the bollocks.’

When he got arrested he changed his story. He said that he knew nothing about it. It was the finance manager’s idea and it was down to him. The police came to see me and told me that and I said I had to go with the finance manager because I was once in a room with Cheeseman and he admitted he had done it all. I told them that he wasn’t turning it round like that and I would go to court and say that.

I was in court and Keith came in. It was the first time I had seen him for six months and he threw his arms around me.

‘Hello Basil,’ he greeted me affectionately. ‘How are you doing?’

I told him I was there to give evidence against him.

‘You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do in this world, ain’t you boy!’

He was unbelievable. Never ever down, the geezer.

The police, when interviewing me, had said: ‘Well, you took these loans out and unless you confess you’re in big trouble.’ I said: ‘I can’t confess. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

And I really didn’t, but because everybody thought Keith and I were so close, it appeared to them that I was in on the whole scam. Socially we saw each other now and then at big functions and that’s all. There was never a one-to-one. We were not close – I hardly ever saw him. He was always running down the stairs to jump in his car to go to the airport.

‘You, you bastard,’ he’d say. ‘I didn’t want to see you.’

‘Keith, I’ve got no money,’ I would plead.

With that he’d open his briefcase and pull out a wad of notes.

‘That will do you for now. Stop pestering me.’

He was a dream chairman at first. Then he went inside and you can imagine what happened then. Because I was having to sell all my players before the transfer deadline, we tumbled from top of the league to eventually finish fifth. We would have won it if we had all been able to keep together, but a different issue altogether had emerged. It was no longer about winning. It was about surviving.

I couldn’t pay the players any wages. Because we owed the players so much money, I had to turn to my old mate George Best. I told him that we had floodlights, hadn’t paid for them, were in the shit, the chairman was going to prison and Harry Haslam, manager down the road at Luton, had said he would provide us with opposition in a friendly.

Bestie, good as gold that he is, came and guested for us and pulled such a big crowd that we were able to pay the players the six weeks wages they were owed. George never got a pound note for his friendship, loyalty and generosity and it’s rewarding for me to reveal the other side to his character when all he took for so long was so much criticism.

At the end of the season we were kicked out of the league. We broke our necks to get out of trouble but because our guv’nor, who had all the shares, was inside, and we had debts that we could not possibly honour, we were sent down a division. From there Dunstable Town went into liquidation. They formed a new company but after Cheeseman went I had five or six different chairmen who came in to try to save the club but none of them succeeded.

In the end Bill Kitt, a local man who had made a few bob and who was the latest in the line of possible saviours, said he was going to give all the players a tenner – only the ones who played, not the substitutes – and after this, his first match, away at Bletchley, I was asked by the press what I thought about his generous gesture.

I went up to the boardroom where Bill was having a drink.

‘Do you want a whisky, Barry?’

‘Whisky?’ I huffed and threw it all over him – what a waste of a drink – but I was Jack The Lad and raving, mocked his offer of a tenner and then, I’m afraid, I got hold of him. I should not have. Next morning the club called an emergency board meeting and sacked me. But what was I to do? After all I had been through I could not stand idly by and be told that my players were going to be paid a measley £10 for their efforts. It was a sick joke. Bill and I are the best of friends now but, at the time, I could have knocked his lights out …

There had been a long period of uncertainty before Cheeseman and his crew were all arrested. What Cheeseman had done was this. When he was at the football club he used all the names and addresses of players, officials and supporters – as many names as he could gather – to fund his other businesses to get loans out.

He was paid by the council every month a substantial amount of money. He was a director of a construction company with many contracts, and the beauty of these contracts was that he was being paid by the council so that it was rock solid, gilt-edged money paid on the button. The trouble with Cheeseman was that he was never happy with just a good, going concern like his construction company. He always wanted something else.

He got the finance manager to do a few straight loans and then they became fictitious. The guy just got him the money the next day. It wasn’t a problem. The monthly debits were coming in regularly on a standing order for the straight ones but as the invented ones got bigger and bigger in number, alarm bells must have started to ring everywhere.

At one point the man in the respectable position tried to get out of the mess but Cheeseman told him that if he turned his back on the scam he would stitch him up by saying that it was he, and he alone, who was responsible. Poor bloke. One minute he was getting record sales and pats on the back for doing great business; the next he’s in the deepest shit.

He was a nice guy who simply got in over his head. He couldn’t get out of it. His assistant manager obviously knew about it and it was clear to him and everybody else who knew the fall guy that he was heading for a nervous breakdown.

Cheeseman got him out of the country and into his place in Spain where, after a week, he called to say that he was enjoying it. So Cheeseman would tell him to stay another week, and another week, and of course the manager’s absence from the office meant that paperwork was piling up.

The managing director, the man Cheeseman had had by the throat in my office, arrived at the office one day to find a lot of accounts which had not been paid. So he began telephoning a few people to tell them that they had missed out on the current month’s repayment instalment on their £2,000 loans. A typical conversation would follow.

‘What £2,000 loan?’

‘Well, that £2,000 loan you have had for the past seven months.’

‘But I haven’t got one.’

‘But you must have. You’ve been paying it.’

‘I haven’t been paying it. Not me.’

There were more than a few too many of these. I lived in Tiverton Road, Bedford then and was to discover that there were eight loans in variations of my name, Fry, Friar, Frier and so on.

The beans were spilled when the assistant manager broke down in tears and told his managing director precisely what had been going on.

In 1977 Cheeseman stood trial at Bedford Crown Court for having made bogus loan applications totalling nearly £300,000, using the names of the club’s players and others he got from the phone book. He was jailed for six years.

Soon after his release he was jailed for three years for blackmailing a bank manager into advancing him £38,000 against fraudulent US bonds, an Old Bailey case in which the Duke Of Manchester, Lord Angus Montagu, stood in the dock with him on criminal charges. The Duke was acquitted and left court with the judge’s admonishment that he had been ‘absurdly stupid’ ringing in his ears.

In 1992 Spanish police raided Cheeseman’s villa in Tenerife and arrested him. He was wanted for extradition on charges of laundering £292 million worth of bonds stolen from a City of London messenger in the biggest robbery in history. At the time it was thought the bonds were unusable, but Cheeseman was arrested at the request of the FBI, who were investigating attempts to launder them.

He jumped bail a few days after an associate of his was shot dead in Texas and, two months later, when a headless body was found near a layby in Sussex, it was suspected that Cheeseman might have met a similar fate.

It was at this point – I was by then manager of Maidstone – that I received a bizarre telephone call from the police. The conversation went like this:

‘Barry Fry?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you used to be manager at Dunstable?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was Keith Cheeseman your chairman?’

‘Yes.’

‘Could you recognise Mr Cheeseman?’

‘Of course I f***ing could.’

‘Could you recognise Mr Cheeseman with no arms?’

‘Yes.’

‘Could you recognise Mr Cheeseman with no legs?’

‘Yes.’

‘But could you recognise Mr Cheeseman without his head on?’

I checked that the calendar was not showing 1 April before replying: ‘Sorry, mate. I didn’t know him that bloody well.’

About a month later I got a call from the same officer.

‘Mr Fry, I am pleased to report that the body we found is not that of Mr Cheeseman. It is of somebody else.’

I obviously had not seen him for ages and I could not resist asking what Mr Cheeseman had been up to. The officer told me: ‘He deals with the wrong kind of people.’

I hadn’t heard from him for years until, three months into my tenure at Peterborough in 1996, I picked up the telephone.

‘Hello my old son,’ came a familiar voice on the other end. ‘How are you doing? You’re in a bit of trouble aren’t you?’

It was Cheeseman again. I said that we hadn’t got any money, if that was what he was referring to.

‘I’ve got plenty for the both of us, Barry.’

I asked what he was doing at that point in time.

‘A bit of this and a bit of that but I won’t talk over the phone, I’ll come and see you.’

We arranged that he should come to our home match the following Saturday and that he would bring his lady for lunch. He looked good, but always had done. He was invariably immaculately dressed in a designer suit, crisp shirt and eye-catching tie and always wore shades.

He said he had been in America and last weekend had been with Gloria.

‘Gloria who?

‘Estefan, of course.’

Then they had gone on to a party and Frank said this and Frank said that.

‘Frank who?’

‘Sinatra.’

Of course. Now he had become a great namedropper. He gave me his business card, which prompted me to ask what he was currently doing. He said that he was making fortunes through setting up venues for pop concerts and that was why he had been anxious to meet up with me at Peterborough.

‘You want some money, don’t you?’ he asked, rather needlessly.

I told him that we were desperate for cash.

‘We’ll hire out the ground. I’ll bring some top people over,’ he said.

‘Keith, I’m not being funny but it might be a flop.’

He assured me that everything would be all right because he would pay the money up front and he proceeded to stay in Peterborough for two months. He made it clear that he wanted to buy the club and I arranged meetings with all the directors. He came to league games and youth games and talked to this person and that within the club. He liked the fact that we owned the freehold on the ground and that we had several promising young players who would ensure progression on the playing side.

He got really into it, bringing his accountant into things and acting as though it was a foregone conclusion that he would own the place. One or two people were getting a bit hot under the collar and then one night he invited us all out for a meal. He talked freely and openly about the City of London heist, asserting that he got on with all the coppers because he knew them so well, claiming kinship with the mafia bosses and asking if we had seen the television documentary about him.

Nobody had seen it, but I later viewed a video copy that he had given to me. I, in turn, showed it to all the directors of the club and to anybody who is squeamish or a bit nervous it is very frightening. It centres on the world’s biggest robbery and, after they had seen it, there was no way the board wanted him in their club.

The round-up to the piece is an interview with him in which he is asked: ‘Well, that’s the world’s biggest robbery. Is that you finished with crime now?’ He smirks and says: ‘No. I want to top that.’

Well how do you top it?

The atmosphere in the boardroom when they came to discuss the proposal was icy. It was dead in the water and Keith knew that. He had had his card marked and when he called me to ask what had happened I told him.

‘Keith, you frightened them to death.’

He said that he had to go to Luton and would pay a social visit to me at home on the way back to his hotel before I set off for my day’s work at the club.

As he was nearing my place he called on his mobile phone to check my exact location and I asked my great pal Gordon Ogbourne, who has been with me for 20 years as kit manager at various clubs and whom I trust implicitly, to go to the end of the drive and just wave him in.

We had tea and sandwiches and he said that he was not prepared just to accept what had happened. He was not giving it up that easily. He wanted the club and was going to get it.

After half an hour of reinforcing his ambition we both decided that it was time to go our separate ways for the day ahead and I said that I would follow him out. We reach the main road from my drive and he turns left, I turn left. We get to the lights and he goes straight on, I go straight on. At the next lights he turns left, I turn left. Then as he goes straight on to pick up the A6 to Luton, I turn left to get on the A421 to Northampton. I had no sooner reached this main highway through a little village than my mobile phone rang. It was my wife, Kirstine.

‘Stop at the nearest phone box and ring me back at the neighbour’s house over the road,’ she said with some urgency.

I protested and said that whatever she had to say she should just say it.

But she insisted. ‘Barry, I ain’t being funny. Stop at the nearest phone box and ring me back. Immediately.’

Realising that something strange was happening, I did as she said.

What’s going on?’ I asked from the phone booth.

‘You ain’t going to believe this, Barry. I’ve got our neighbour over here. I think you’d better come home. She has had people with guns with telescopic sights in her garden. They are following you.’

‘Following me? I’m in a phone box. There’s nobody here.’

‘I don’t mean you,’ she said. ‘I mean Keith.’

So I put the phone down on Kirstine and called Keith on his mobile. I relayed the message that when he pulled into my driveway a white van turned up in the drive of the house opposite and that there were men with guns.

Understandably, the neighbour was petrified because she could see what they were tackled up with. They even knocked on the door and she didn’t know whether to answer it or not. She decided not to, but they said they were police and that she should ring the station to verify their presence.

She did this and the officer who answered the phone said that he knew nothing about it. Well, she was in a panic now and didn’t know what to do. Thankfully, with two men with rifles on the other side of the door and her quivering, her phone rang and it was a return call from the police to say that, contrary to the information previously given to her, they did know about the situation. It was nothing to do with them, said the caller, it was Interpol.

Armed with this information, she opened the door to them and they presented their badges with the reassurance that they were just observing somebody.

In my conversation with Cheeseman I continued.

‘They’re following you.’

‘Not me, mate,’ he replied with typical bravado. ‘You must have been up to no good Barry.’

That’s the way he plays it. So bloody cool.

I met him the next night at the home of Rinaldo, an Italian gentleman who lived in Peterborough and owned a night club of the same name. Cheeseman wanted to buy his property which was on the market for £750,000. That was the last I saw of him for some time.

A couple of months after that I had a phone call, again from the police in London, to ask if I had a phone number at which they could get hold of him, but I could not help them. The officer said there had been a few complaints about Keith and they were searching for his whereabouts. Did I have a previous address for him? All I could tell them was that he had stayed at The Butterfly Hotel, and that I had a mobile phone number for him which was no longer applicable.

Then I had the manager of The Butterfly phone up.

‘You know Keith Cheeseman, don’t you?’

I said I did (only too well, by now).

‘He’s left an unpaid bill of £3,500 here.’

I could not help but laugh. Uncontrollably. Then a finance company (ho-ho) called with an all-too-familiar opening line. ‘Do you know Keith Cheeseman?’ Apparently he hadn’t paid the last five instalments on a car loan.

Keith Cheeseman is the greatest conman I have ever known; possibly the world has ever known. When you were out with him he always had loads of readies and he was the most generous man with tips you could wish to meet. One day at The Dorchester Hotel in London he gave the porter £20 just for taking the bags to his room. A waiter brought an ice bucket and he gave him £20. Then he gave a taxi driver a £20 tip when he took us less than a mile round the corner.

He was such good company that you would have thought butter would not melt in his mouth. Yet in a roll-call of 20th Century villains he would have to be near the top of the league.

If my first job in management was a roller-coaster ride, it could hardly have prepared me better for the long and winding road ahead.

CHAPTER TWO

‘Practice son, practice’

Pilgrims Way, Bedford, was part of a council estate of prefab housing originally designed to last for 10 years, though they must have been made of strong stuff because my father actually lived there for 49 years and 11 months before they finally brought in the bulldozers. For me, it was wonderful to be resident there as the most popular kid in the block, entirely due to our being the only household to possess a proper football. My dad worked as a Post Office engineer for 40 years while mum was employed at a television rental company called Robinsons and also for, as I called it, the ‘knicker’ factory. This was, in fact, a lingerie outlet called Hallwins.

I went to Pearcey Road School from the age of five and it was here that my lifelong obsession with the wonderful game of football began. I got into the school team when I was eight and in those days I used to wait for dad after coming home from school, looking anxiously over our little fence in readiness for him to appear on his way home from work. Football quickly consumed my entire young life. I would say to dad, ‘Will you play football with me?’ almost before he could get to the front door.

There were plenty of fields down at the bottom of the street and it was greatly pleasing that dad encouraged me and all the kids round our estate to kick around with a football. We were the first to have a posh ball with laces and it was amusing at Christmas time and when the kids had birthdays. They would all come round to our house and ask, ‘Can Mr Fry pump our ball up?’ They didn’t know how to lace it up, either, and dad was an expert on that.

I was an only child and it must have been comical for the neighbours to see dad and I emerge from our front door. He was like the Pied Piper. As we walked down the street, bouncing the ball, the other kids would emerge, one by one, and by the time we had reached the fields there were enough bodies for a 12-a-side game. We would use milk bottles or jackets for goalposts and the games were never-ending. Dennis Brisley, who was a bit older, was one of the boys I was friendly with. He just used to love football and played until he was 45. He was a super-fit man. Ken Stocker, another one of the knockabout boys, was in my school team and it’s a coincidence that two of my best pals, he and Dennis, were right wingers. Tommy McGaul was another one of the crowd. He had two brothers and they all used to come down to the green to play.

Dad was trainer for the Post Office side as well as playing for them and whenever the GPO had a game I would take the day off school and go and support him. He was obliged to wear glasses because a bomb in the war had sent him flying, but it was frightening and almost farcical to see him playing in those spectacles. Born in Dover, he had been a navy man. Mum was from Jarrow and there was as much a contrast in their personalities as there was in their geographical roots. Dad was always the serious one, a stalwart of the school of rigorous discipline, whereas mum liked a joke a minute. Both had big families.

There had been no football on television in the days of my early youth and, anyway, we did not possess a television set. But in 1954 Wolves were to be shown on television playing Spartak Moscow in a friendly and I went to the house of a neighbour, Terry Mayhew, whose mother was Irish, to watch it. I was spellbound, mesmerised. Tilly Mayhew later told my mother: ‘I asked Barry if he wanted a drink and he was just oblivious to the question. He just kept staring at the screen.’ I became a mad Wolves fan, so much so that mum knitted me a scarf with all the players’ names on. I’ve still got it all these years later! I was besotted just through watching them on television. Billy Wright was my idol. Not only was he captain, but he was a gentleman and conducted himself correctly. Everything about him was pure magic. I kept a scrapbook on Wolves and a separate one dedicated entirely to Billy Wright. Among the team there was Swinbourne, Clamp, Deeley, Flowers, Delaney, Hancocks, Mullen, Murray and Broadbent. Peter Broadbent was another one of my favourite players. He had such grace about him. Their names were all on my scarf, but when it came to the captain he was given his full name. The stitching says ‘Billy Wright’. I don’t know why I loved him so much because he played in that unexciting position of centre-half. He was, however, the England captain and that may have had something to do with my boyhood admiration. I was also incredulous at how high he could jump for a little man. Dad was later to take me to London to see Wolves play whenever they came south.

You can imagine the scene then, years later, when I’m in a garage at Barnet, filling up my car. Another man pulls in, jumps out and he comes over to me and I instantly recognise him.

‘Hello Barry,’ he says. ‘You’re doing a wonderful job down at Barnet.’

It was none other than Billy Wright. Imagine, my hero says that to me! I was so awestruck that I nearly squirted him with all this petrol.

‘You wouldn’t believe this mate, but you’re my idol.’

He smiled. ‘I’ve been watching your progress down at Barnet at close quarters and you have done fantastic.’

I asked how he knew about what, to him, must have been such a rudimentary matter.

‘I only live down the road,’ he said.

So Billy and his wife Joy were living so close without my ever knowing, even though at the time I knew he was working for Central Television. I was further able to indulge my hero worship because, on occasions, I used to get to sit in the Royal Box at Wembley alongside Billy, who was a director at Wolves. He always looked after me in those circumstances.

My favourite carpet game as a kid was tiddlywinks, though I played it in a manner which can hardly be said to have been traditional. I turned the tiddlywinks into massive football matches – red tiddlywinks versus blue tiddlywinks; black tiddlywinks versus yellow tiddlywinks. I would put two Subbuteo goals at either end and this massive tournament would start and go on all day.

One of my earliest memories of football is of the so-called ‘Matthews Final’ in 1953, the FA Cup Final at Wembley between Blackpool and Bolton Wanderers. Dad’s football connections with Elstow Abbey and the GPO allowed him access to one ticket to stand behind the goal and he gave me a tremendous thrill when he announced that he was taking me. After our journey by train and tube he put me on his shoulders as we mixed with the thronging crowd and walked down Wembley Way. I was to remain in this elevated position – even though I must have felt like a sack of potatoes by half-time – right through the match. Dad wanted Blackpool to win it; everybody wanted Blackpool to win it because of Stanley Matthews. They may have called it the Matthews Final but I have never understood why because Stan Mortensen scored three goals.

I was the envy of all my schoolmates and, indeed, I have been at every Cup Final since. I was always very keen to collect autographs and after the matches I used to stand outside Wembley and try to figure out a way to get to the team coaches. I couldn’t get in because of those big doors. Then I discovered that if you went down one of the long tunnels from inside the stadium and avoided being stopped you would eventually get to the buses. So it became my practice to do this. Dad would be looking everywhere for me and it would not be until both buses pulled out, and I had got all the autographs, that we were reunited.

Another of my indulgences was to jump the perimeter fence and get a bit of turf which would then be in a bowl in the garden for ages.

Throughout my school years I was never interested in any of the lessons, only in sport. I used to get the slipper a lot. When I was aged 11, and in my first year at Silver Jubilee, one particular teacher who hated my disregard for education would say, ‘Come out here Fry!’ and I would say, ‘No.’ In those days the desks had ink wells in them and in one of this gentleman’s lessons I threw one at him. But this prank rebounded horribly when he sent me to see the headmaster.

‘Right Fry,’ he said. ‘You’re not playing for the school team on Friday.’

He could not have taken a worse course of action. Six of the best with the slipper would have been preferable. I begged him and cried my eyes out, but all to no avail.

That slaughtered me. I was captain of the school team and became a prefect, to be identified by the red and white braid on the black jacket of the uniform, later on in life. I was urged by the headmaster, Jack Voice, to put as much effort into education as I did into football and I determined to at least try during lessons. I began to get a prize a year for English, not because I was ever going to raise a challenge to William Shakespeare, but because I tried. It was made clear to me that if I didn’t concentrate and I became a pain in the arse I wouldn’t be allowed to play football. There could have been no greater incentive. Really, I had no interest in school whatsoever but if they had told me to jump over the moon in order for me to play football I would have jumped over the moon.

I missed the one solitary game and that was it. It taught me a lesson. It was ‘three bags full, sir’ after that.

Jack Voice was the one who put me on the straight and narrow. He certainly knew my Achilles heel and he had no trouble with me after that. He said he was aware that I didn’t like school but emphasised that while there were lads who succeeded at football there were a lot more who did not and therefore I should try because you would never know when you needed to fall back on education. As I am only too well aware now, for all the stars such as the Beckhams and Owens of today, there are a million who get released and hit the scrapheap.

All the teachers encouraged me in the sporting arena because, after all, it was good for the school to have one of their pupils representing them outside. Whether it was cricket or football, whoever was in charge just gave me my head.

As a boy I once had a conversation with Stan Matthews. I managed to get onto his team bus and asked him to sign his autograph.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

‘I’m watching you. It’s fantastic.’

He asked how old I was and I told him I was 10.

‘You shouldn’t be here, you should be playing. Practice son, practice.’ Stan has since passed away and I joined the rest of the football world in mourning over his death.

It soon became apparent to me that you can’t be a softie and be a good footballer but I remember being frightened to death at Pearcey Road one day. I was going home for dinner and suddenly became aware that a bloke was following me. I was convinced he was chasing me and wanted to murder me so I ran into the house of a couple who fortunately were in at the time. I didn’t want to go back to school. They had to get a kid called Brian ‘Trotter’ Foulkes to look after me, get me across the road and make sure I was all right. I must have been the youngest kid in the country with a minder. But eventually you had to look after yourself. As I got older and a bit more successful football wise, people who were not so interested in football thought I was cocky and big headed and all that. You always get bullies trying to pick a fight or sort you out and I fought like everybody else though with me it was an instinct, a reaction. I was always a scrapper, really, because you had to be to survive. The alternative was that people would walk all over you. I was as placid a kid as I am a man but when too much gets too much you hit out at people. I never went looking for a fight but I certainly wouldn’t run away from one.

Football being my only interest in life, I always got hot-off-the-press copies of Roy of the Rovers and Charlie Buchan’s Football Monthly. I would get up in the morning and hope that I was early enough to play Wolves v Manchester United at tiddlywinks and when I got home I couldn’t wait for dad to come round the corner. Now my kids do the same to me but I say, ‘No, I can’t. I’m mentally and physically drained.’ Dad must have had such patience. There are days for most people when you have been to work and you simply can’t be bothered playing head tennis. My little 10-year-old, Frank, will say, ‘Well just give me a few headers, dad.’ I tell him to kick it against a wall instead.

I used to say to my dad that I wanted a wall to kick a ball against and we didn’t have one. He got me this magic thing with a ball on the end of some elastic and you’d kick it this way and that and it would always come back to you. Mind you I broke a lot of things in the house. Mum went mad and dad would tell her to leave me alone. They had World War III and I would sneak off.

I never knew the meaning of being bored. I either played football and when I came back it was time for bed, or I played a full league table of tiddlywinks. There would be a goal scored and me making an almighty racket, while mum and dad sat there listening to the radio in the other room. The decoration in our front room was rosettes and other football memorabilia. Normally parents wouldn’t allow those things in the room where guests were entertained, but my mum and dad were very understanding. The front-room carpet would be covered with all my ‘players’ and my parents were so considerate that if they wanted to go to the toilet they would walk all the way round the house to avoid the living room so that they would not disturb my game. The sacrifices they made – you don’t appreciate it at the time. My bedroom was also full of Wolves momentos.

When I was 12 there was a brilliant article in the local paper. Because I’d been to Wembley so many times since turning eight, the only thing I ever dreamed about was actually playing there. In this feature my dad was quoted as saying, ‘It’s Wembley or bust, isn’t it son?’ Dad had taken me to internationals, FA Cup Finals and amateur cup finals between the likes of Crook Town and Bishop Auckland, so by that time I had gained a real feel for the place. There were the old songsheets and such like and I just loved going to that magical place.

Mum and dad were bringing up their only child in a sublime area for sporting activity. The local hamlet of Elstow was proud of its pristine village green and I would play cricket as well as football there. Dad was also trainer of Elstow Abbey, a men’s team in the Bedfordshire and District League. I played for them at the age of 14 against all the village sides and I would have to look after myself although some of the lads, particularly our centre-half Maurice Lane, and Charlie Bailey, would not allow the opposition to take liberties with me. They didn’t mind me being kicked, because that was all part of the game, but if there was any sign of a rough house they would look after me. If you were in the trenches you certainly wanted Maurice with you. I appeared for them in a cup final at Bedford Town’s ground. At school at Pearcey Road I had played in a cup and league-winning team, scoring 60 goals in one season, and was in the Bedford and District team when I was eight. When I moved up to Silver Jubilee School I was soon into the Beds and District Under-13 and then Under-15 teams. It was a period in my life when I walked to school and ran home!

Dad, as always, encouraged me in my football passion. He would come and park outside school in his lorry and watch me play and he was even known to have climbed up a GPO pole to get a good vantage point. These were Friday afternoon matches, after the last lesson in school, and in my playing days in the Bedford and District side we played on Saturdays and went all over the country together.

At 14 I was picked for London Schoolboys. I know the saying that Big Brother is watching, but how the hell a boy 56 miles away in Bedford is selected to play for London is beyond me. Then, in what was a wonderful year for me, I had trials for England Schoolboys. They were organised as Southern Possibles v Probables and Northern Possibles v Probables and then South v North and for the first of these I was down as a reserve. As luck would have it, somebody didn’t turn up and I got a game. I must have impressed the right people because I was called up for the next trial and then the other. As a kid you never know how these things come about, but it was announced in school assembly one day that I had been picked to trial for England. I went on to play for England schoolboys six times and the most memorable of these was in front of a 93,000 crowd at Wembley against Scotland on Saturday 30 April 1960. Among my England team-mates were Len Badger, the Sheffield United full back, Ron Harris and David Pleat, while George Graham played for the opposition. My international selection was terrific for Silver Jubilee school because I was the only Bedford boy ever to have been picked for England. A convoy of buses left the school for Wembley and later the headmaster insisted on a photograph being taken of the entire school with me wearing my England cap.

I used to wonder what it was all about when the other kids would say they were going to Blackpool for the week or Great Yarmouth for a fortnight, for we never had a holiday. Never once. Aunts, uncles and mates all had cars and forever seemed to be darting here, there and everywhere, but for me it appeared that the Bedfordshire boundary lines indicated some kind of electrified fencing to keep us in there, with the rest of the world a no-go zone. I never knew why this was the case but it has since become clear. After all the years dad worked he was allowed four weeks’ holiday, then five, then six but never used to take them. What he did instead was to build them up, because he felt that at one time he might have to pack up work, or take a long period of time off, to look after mum. He had to look after his family and do the best he could for them. When retirement came upon him it became apparent that he could have finished a year earlier because of all the time due to him that he had in the bank.

Mum, Dora, died a month after my son Mark was born and it was very sudden. It was as though she had been clinging on to life just so that she might see him. I was at Bedford Town as a player and I worked for the chairman, George Senior, in the mornings. He had a cafe down the London Road and had all these breakfast rolls to get out for a lot of local companies. I couldn’t cook, so I was just serving or cutting rolls and putting cheese and ham in them. About 7.30am dad came in with Maurice Lane. He and Maurice often popped in but this day he came in the back way. He never did that. He said he’d been up all night with mum and she was in pain and at the hospital in Kempston, where I lived at the time. Dad said mum had said that I was to get on with work, but I wanted to go to the hospital to see her. He said there was nothing to worry about, but it did concern me. After half an hour I said I wanted to go. At Bedford I used to go round in a van collecting from the sale of lottery tickets. This night I went to hospital with dad, a week before Christmas on a Friday, and mum was obviously in a lot of pain. She had her face screwed up and complained of feeling cold.

I was in the room alone with her for a while and she kept saying that I had to go to work. I felt very uncomfortable. When dad came back I asked if he’d seen the nurse to sort out her coldness and he just said: ‘No’. The bell ending visiting hour was going in no time, so I kissed her and she said: ‘Go to work.’ Dad had to pick up her mate from Hallwins. She was a Scottish lady called Jenny Denton who was getting the bus to Biggleswade from where she would catch the train to Scotland for New Year, so mum was on about dad not forgetting the passenger and me not forgetting to go to work. I went first. Dad had a car then, which I bought for him. I just wanted to go home and not go to people’s houses. My house was only five minutes away. I walked in the front door and Anne, my first wife, said the hospital had just rung to say my mum had died. My reaction was to turn round and put my fist through a pain of glass in the window.

‘You’ve got it wrong,’ I said.

My dad wasn’t on the phone. He worked for the company for 40 years and never had a phone. Can you believe that?

I was 26. I didn’t even know mum was ill. My first thought was about dad taking this lady to Biggleswade, so I jumped in the car, got there taking one route to find the bus for Scotland had gone and coming back another route without seeing my dad. I stopped at a club, run by my mum’s sister, Alice, which my dad sometimes popped into for a drink. I saw Auntie Alice and asked if she had seen my dad and she said: ‘No, why?’ I said: ‘My mum’s dead.’ She screamed. I was in a daze. ‘Our Dora’ was all she could say. I was trying to find my dad and couldn’t. I called at a couple of pubs in which he would usually be having a drink with his mates but nobody had seen him. They all knew he was going to take this woman to Biggleswade. I just went home. I was telling Anne the story when there was a knock on the door and it was my dad.

‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Mum’s dead.’

‘Yeah, I’ve been expecting that,’ he said.

Just like that.

We went back to the hospital. Upstairs the curtains were drawn and by this time it was 10 o’clock at night. I could hear people near mum breathing and you didn’t know she was dead. I went a bit crazy. Dad calmed me down and took me to the pub opposite the hospital. He said there was nothing I could have done. That was the way she wanted it. She knew she was bad but just tried to forget about it. She had being going to London for years for chemotherapy treatment and there was no way you could have known this unless you had been told. She was always as white as a freshly-starched tablecloth so there was no reason to suspect that anything was wrong.

I was due to play for Bedford the following day and I said to dad that I would have to pull out of it. He fixed me with a stare and said: ‘You won’t. The last thing your mother said to you was to go to work. That’s your work. Now go to work.’ I did, but I may as well have been on Mars for all I could remember about the game. I didn’t know whether I had had a touch, scored or not scored; whether we won, drew or lost. I was in a daze. It had been important to dad that I carried out her last wish and, in retrospect, I can understand his attitude to the whole situation. Whatever you give to your parents should come naturally and not because they are dying and you want to tell them again that you love them.

For 25 years I just blanked mum’s death from my mind. I broke down terribly at her funeral. She is buried in Elstow and, even though I think about her a lot, I don’t go to her grave. I can’t explain the reason. People deal with the loss of somebody close in different ways and I have my own way. Dad, Frank, still lives in Bedford. He comes to all the games, with my son-in-law, Steve, taking him along. Though I live in Bedford I don’t see him as much as I’d like to. He’s a great father like that because where a lot of old people moan that you should go and see them, he never makes reference to it. He knows that I’m very busy both at work and with my family.

I’m afraid that I do not possess any of his qualities and I wish I did. He is a lot better a man than I will ever be. He has got principles, I have none. He has respect, I have none. He is disciplined, I am not. And, talking of discipline, he is responsible for having made me such a good runner. Whenever I crossed him as a youngster he would take off his belt and threaten me with it. He never used it. The threat was always enough and I would be off like greased lightning.

I heard him swear only once, and that was when I had the audacity to laugh when those dreadful glasses of his fell off when he went up for a header one time. I got a clip round the ear for that for good measure.

It will be a source of some amusement to those who know me that I grew up never once hearing a swear word in the house. I have no other vocabulary and I cannot offer an explanation for this. When I was at school everybody thought I was a cockney. The teachers used to tell me that I was uncouth, whatever that means. I didn’t even know what a cockney was. Now that I do, I am happy to issue an invitation to those of that breed who wish to learn from the Fry Academy of Blasphemy.

CHAPTER THREE

New boy at Old Trafford

During that 12-month spell when I was playing for England Schoolboys I could have signed for any club in the country except, perversely, Wolverhampton Wanderers. The Molineux management was just about the only one not to make an approach of any kind, and had they done so I would have found myself in something of a dilemma.

I trained with Bedford Town and their manager Ronnie Rook, the old Arsenal centre-forward, wanted me to sign for them, though I soon had reason to fix my sights much higher. During the holidays, as a 14-year-old about to leave school in the summer, Manchester United’s chief scout Joe Armstrong invited mum, dad and me up to Old Trafford for four days. They wanted to sign me as an apprentice professional and took me up there to show me the kind of digs in which I would be resident. At this stage in life I had, of course, never been away from home and it was important that my parents were happy with the projected arrangements.

On the particular day of our arrival United had a youth game. Joe introduced us to the assistant manager, Jimmy Murphy, and the boss, Matt Busby. They looked after my parents while Joe took me along to Davyhulme Park Golf Club, where the lads were having a pre-match meal before the game. Such meals in those days consisted of a steak with an egg on top and I duly sat down to enjoy the fare. You dare not have a steak these days – it’s pasta now, but back then the menu was different. I sat next to Nobby Stiles, who was captain of the youth team, and in less time than it took to eat the meal he had sold Manchester United to me. He had so much enthusiasm for the club, with dedication and loyalty gift-wrapping his every word in praise of Joe, Jimmy and Matt. I joined the lads on the coach back to Old Trafford, was introduced to everybody and just wished that I was playing that night. I could not have been looked after any better. I was in the dressing room and then behind the dugout and was made to feel part of the set-up from the word go. I was to discover that this was the way they always did things at Old Trafford. The following night we were taken to the top show in town in Manchester and in the middle of the third day my parents took one look at their starry-eyed son and asked what I wanted to do. I was due at Chelsea and West Ham the following week just to have a look around, but I said: ‘I don’t want to do anything else. I want to come here.’

Mum broke down in tears. My parents were brilliant. They never offered unwanted advice like taking some time to think about it, nor cajoled me into joining a London club much closer to home. They made me feel that the decision was mine and mine alone but, in fact, Manchester United had made my mind up for me. Their public-relations exercise was first class. I had watched that youth team match among a crowd of 35,000 and a three-quarters full Old Trafford was more than enough to impress any aspiring youngster. I had Jimmy Murphy telling me that I would be out there playing the following year and the package was sold lock, stock and barrel without me even having kicked a ball during our stay. When Joe Armstrong came to our house with the invitation to Manchester, he might as well have issued the same invitation to Mars. I didn’t know where Manchester was – I was never very good at geography at school. It may have been a foreign land as far as I was concerned. Joe had watched me playing for England Schoolboys and, after the games, would always come over and shake hands and tell me that I had played well. But he was just one of many influential people who used to hang around and I was offered many things. My family had never been used to having money and it was something I didn’t care much for at that stage. That was a good thing because it meant that a purely footballing decision was to be made.

Afterwards the lads would ask how much you had got for going there, saying they had received this, that and the other, but I literally did it for nothing other than the privilege. Dad later told me that after I had agreed to sign they sent down railway tickets so that he could watch me in whichever match I played.

My last few months at school felt interminable as I savoured the prospect of going to Old Trafford. What I have never understood is the ‘local boy done good’ factor didn’t register with the Bedford newspapers. I’d lived there all my life and yet there was never a mention of a move which had to reflect well on the town. I have since been involved a lot with the press and so I know the way it works. For instance when I was at non-league Hillingdon, I was God. I could walk on water. I saved them from relegation and we beat Torquay in the FA Cup and hardly a day went by without there being some mention of me in the paper there. But for some reason, the locals in Bedford missed out on the good news.

Anyway, northbound I went. My first digs were with Mrs Scott at Sale Moor, a lovely district of Manchester. She lived there with her sister and both were absolutely nuts about Manchester United. A lad who had played for Scotland Schoolboys called Mike Lorimer also resided there. We would get the bus in to training every day and the whole thing was the complete opposite of what I had expected. We would arrive at the ground at nine o’clock having had a breakfast of a raw egg in milk. This would come up more often than it stayed down, but the club insisted on starting the day with this concoction and to make sure the rule was adhered to the landlady would stand over you while you drank it. I thought we would be playing football morning, afternoon and night. But the first task of the day was to help the groundsman sweep the terracing. Then you would clean all the baths and toilets before moving on to clean the boots. You did everything, it seemed, except play football. We moved on to training in the afternoons but I hated those morning chores. Of course it was all part of the education process, but in those days I never cleaned my own shoes, never mind someone else’s boots. It was something of a disappointment. You leave school and think ‘Great, I’m going to be a professional footballer with Manchester United’ but the reality is that you’re like some old cleaning lady with mops, buckets and brushes. Any small consolation I was able to take from this unexpected facet of the occupation was that I was at least cleaning the boots of two immortals in Nobby Stiles and Johnny Giles. For the first couple of years they looked after me wonderfully. The routine was that the new kid on the block would have two more senior players assigned to him and I was fortunate to have this pair.

United had a reserve team, A team, B team and youth team and I went straight into the youths, whose only games were in the Youth Cup, and the A team, having virtually bypassed the B team. At the end of those first two seasons we went to Switzerland for a tournament in Zurich which featured all the big European teams. I was 15 and 16 and, suddenly, a whole new world had opened up to this former Bedford ‘inmate’.

Travelling to that first tournament entailed me getting onto an aeroplane for the first time in my life and it was not until some time after that I was able to get my feet back onto the ground, because we won the tournament and I scored the winning goal against Juventus. I was through on goal and smashed the ball into the net and when, in celebration, I went to retrieve the ball out of the back of the net to take it back to the centre circle, it caused an affray. Half of the Italian team jumped on me and I emerged with half of my shirt missing and my number eight floating away on the breeze. This was my first bitter experience of Italians and there were to be more in later life. We won the tournament the following year, too.

Another dream was fulfilled when, at the age of 16, I was picked for Manchester United reserves. The fixture list could not have been kinder if I had compiled it myself, because I made my debut at no other venue than Molineux, home of Wolverhampton Wanderers. I don’t know whether my failure to score was down to nerves, inability or a lack of desire to hurt my favourite club, but we won anyway. Before I was 17 I had played a dozen reserve games which, at that time at Manchester United, was almost an achievement of the impossible. One of the games in which I played was a night match at Anfield, where I was given the friendly greeting as I stepped off the team coach of spit in my face accompanied by someone shouting, ‘Piss off, Fry!’ It was a daunting experience for one so young. I wondered how the agitant even knew my name. At the time it slaughtered me, yet it taught me what to expect. First the Italians, then the Scousers … there is another side to football. So often there are examples of abnormal behaviour brought on by the passion which the game engenders. In no other sphere of life can there be such a collective will to win.

One March day in 1962, a month before my 17th birthday, Matt Busby called me into his office.

‘You have done brilliant, son. The whole staff are very pleased with your progress at Old Trafford and I have decided to offer you a two-year professional contract.’

He added that he did not want me to worry over whether or not I would be taken on and that he wished to give me advance notice of his intentions. This was a lovely stroke and, to an extent, a relief because so many kids, myself included, were wondering what might become of them. The signing of this contract did not mean much in monetary terms. There was a few quid more, but the maximum wage of £20 a week was in place then and I was to receive £12 8s 0d (£12.40) and £8 in the summer. At the time Matt was writing a column for the Manchester Evening News Pink and when we returned from Zurich after winning that second tournament trophy he wrote that, in Barry Fry, United had on their playing staff the northern Jimmy Greaves. I had been scoring a lot of goals, right enough, and I had made the most progress of all the apprentices who had joined at the same time. My big moment had arrived.

United were still in the process of rebuilding after the devastation and heartbreak of the 1958 Munich air disaster. On that dreadful day I had gone home from school to hear the breaking of the news of the tragedy on the radio. The newscaster had barely got the words out of his mouth before I burst into tears. Like many others, I cried all day and night and for days afterwards. Before United had travelled to Germany they played in London on the Saturday and won by a big margin with a sensational performance. Having been to Wembley so many times I had been privileged to see Duncan Edwards, Tommy Taylor and Roger Byrne and I had all their autographs. It was almost as if I knew this trio who lost their lives personally. I was not a Manchester United supporter then, but I have always passionately supported England and those who played for England. The crash had a profound effect upon me.

Everybody in the country, and a lot of countries throughout the world, felt very sorry for Manchester United. When they played Bolton Wanderers in the FA Cup Final that year, there was almost universal support for them. I was in the crowd at Wembley and watched as they lost 2–0 to a couple of Nat Lofthouse strikes. Jimmy Murphy had done a brilliant job in getting them there. Matt Busby was practically at death’s door in hospital and Jimmy had everything to sort out, not least the immediate rebuilding of the team. It was an achievement in itself just to have got them to Wembley.

When, two years later, I walked into Old Trafford the pall of Munich was still hanging over the place. Jimmy, Joe Armstrong and John Aston were always speaking with warmth about the players who were lost out there; how genuine and wonderful they were as people as well as footballers. They always emphasised that. The older players like Bobby Charlton, Harry Gregg and Bill Foulkes simply would not talk about Munich. It was too painful. A funny atmosphere was created whenever Munich was mentioned and it became almost a taboo subject within the club. The hurt was just too deep. In Jimmy Murphy’s dealings with the older apprentices and the first-year kids, however, he would use Munich as an illustration of how triumph could overcome adversity. He was great for Manchester United. With his aloofness and the tremendous respect he was shown by everybody, the manager, Matt Busby, was always the boss while Jimmy was the one filled with fire and passion. They were a terrific team. Busby didn’t hand out many roastings but when he did you knew full well that you had been told off. Jimmy, on the other hand, was always sounding off. He would pack the skip for an away trip and there would always be a bottle of scotch stashed in between the freshly-laundered shirts, shorts and socks. I once witnessed him take a swig during his half-time team talk and shower all the players as he tried to emphasize a point he was making. Jimmy was the Welsh team manager at this time and he spoke in glowing terms about the country and his admiration for the players, particularly Cliff Jones and John Charles. Cliff was the greatest winger out there, known and universally admired for his spectacular diving headers. I played with him later at Bedford Town and I could relate to him because I had heard so many stories about him. Two of us would converge upon him in training as he flew in from the wing and he would simply and effectively knock us both out of the way as he went through in barnstorming fashion. He was only little, but very strong. He would have made a great jockey.

When I had played 15 or so games for Manchester United reserves I thought I had truly arrived. I was a professional now, and instead of going in at nine o’clock, I sauntered in at ten o’clock or half past. There would be training for an hour and a half and, after 12.30, you would have nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon. The routine for the older lads was to go to the races at Haydock, the now-defunct Manchester, York or Chester and, unfortunately, it became a regular occurrence for me to jump into their cars and go along with them.

My first-year digs, in which Mike Lorimer had a room to himself and I shared with Eamon Dunphy, were with Mrs Scott, but when I returned from my home in Bedford to renew the arrangement, having failed to write to her or telephone in the summer, I knocked on the door expecting to be greeted with open arms. This was far from the case. Unfortunately I had forgotten my manners. She rasped: ‘What are you doing here?’ I told her that I was back and ready for the new season only to be informed that someone had taken my place. I rang Joe Armstrong, who ticked me off big time. I was a bit naive about the ways of the world and, apparently, I should have sent her a cheque. As far as I was concerned, though, the club paid for the accommodation; I had never dealt with money. It was all a bit strange.

My room-mate Eamon, who had played for the Republic of Ireland schoolboys when I played for England schoolboys in a 2–2 draw in Dublin, was everything I wasn’t. For a start, he was intelligent. He had a healthy understanding of religion and politics and showed me a facet of life which I never knew existed when he came home with me to Bedford one weekend. On the Sunday morning he was up at the crack of dawn to attend mass at 7am. Eamon was able to talk authoritatively on a whole spectrum of subjects about which I knew nothing, yet his cerebral dexterity got him into a lot of trouble at Old Trafford. He would get on people’s nerves and, small though he was, he ended up in many a fight. All hell broke loose one day when he made a snide comment to the goalkeeper Harry Gregg, who was from Northern Ireland. Harry, a huge man, lifted him eight feet into the air and was clearly going to punch his lights out. Now, I see this and go running over from the five-a-side game in which I am involved to rescue the situation. King Kong could not be humoured. This time he lifted us both to the same height, one in each hand, and crashed our heads together with such force that we both saw stars.

Eamon’s trouble was that he had an opinion on everything and almost always expressed it. There are at least some things I think which I like to keep to myself, but not him. What he believed he could not hold back and this led to further confrontation with Wilf McGuinness. Worse, it led me into confrontation with Wilf McGuinness. He and I must have had four fights, and each time they had nothing to do with the combatants and everything to do with Eamon Dunphy. It was always a case of him sending McGuinness, who was a tough guy, smashing into the advertising boards around the five-a-side pitch or uttering some obscenity in his direction. I would go in to sort out the ensuing altercation and it would go up between the two innocent parties. It got to a stage where McGuinness said: ‘I want to see you, Fry. Upstairs.’ Off we went, just the two of us, and we proceeded to batter hell out of each other. When it was over we wondered where it had all started in the first place. We both said that neither of us had a problem with the other, determined that Dunphy was the root cause and shook hands at the very moment that we espied the culprit walking over the bridge with his arm around a tasty-looking bird.

Myself and Wilf, a great character who had the misfortune to suffer one of the worst broken legs the game has ever seen, became mates. He was another with a real passion for the club.

Saddled with the problem of being housed for my second season, I became aware that Dunphy had been as ignorant as I and was in the same situation. Joe Armstrong said that Bobby Charlton, who lived in Stretford, was getting married and was leaving his digs with Mr and Mrs Jim Davenport. I would take his place there in a fortnight’s time but, meanwhile, was to share temporary accommodation with Dunphy next door to another Irish lad, Hugh Curran. At the Davenports I was joined by Ken Morton, who had played for England schoolboys, and Denis Walker, an older pro who knew everything. They were good days. I had my first car from Jim, who worked on the railways and who I always called ‘The Governor’. Now we were within five minutes’ walking distance of Old Trafford, just down the back alley and over the bridge. You didn’t have to get up so early. I had had lots of driving lessons and the day dawned when Jim came to change his car for a better one. He said that he wasn’t getting much from the garage for his, a cream Hillman Hunter, and that I could buy it if I fancied it. We did a deal on the never-never and he was so kind that I don’t think I ever paid for the car and he never mentioned it. I passed my driving test – at just the ninth attempt. Every time I failed it was for a different reason and I could never understand it. I hadn’t killed anybody; nobody had even suffered a life-threatening injury. I drove the car to Bedford and back many times without incident and, in those pre-motorway days, it would take ages all the way down the A6. Mrs Davenport took a keen interest in my progress and every time the car pulled up outside her house after a test she would look out of the window and question whether I had passed by means of a thumb’s up and an expectant look on her beaming face. I would return the thumb’s up sign and slowly turn it into a thumb’s down and she would say: ‘Oh no, not again. Why this time?’ She would be more disappointed than I was.

As the time was approaching when I would take my test for the sixth time I was very anxious and I asked the lads for some general tips and hints. Bobby Charlton came up with what sounded like a bright idea. ‘You know what you should do Baz,’ he said, ‘you should wear your Manchester United blazer.’ To impress the examiner further, I even put on my club tie. There was no way I could fail. I drove well and after 20 minutes we pulled into a layby and I was oozing confidence when he began asking questions about the Highway Code. I felt that I had got them all right and was crestfallen when he uttered those immortal words: ‘Mr Fry, I am afraid that you have failed to reach the required standard.’ With that, he got out of the car and as he was closing the door he bent down and added: ‘By the way, I’m a Manchester City supporter.’ It caused a riot of laughter when I related this at The Cliff training ground the following day with Bobby saying to me, ‘Barry, you must be the unluckiest guy walking.’

In the early hours of one morning I was awakened by a severe bout of coughing followed by a heavy thud. Mrs Davenport was on the floor, covered in blood, and she could not be attended by Jim, who was working a night shift. I called the doctor and her daughter, Sylvia, and she was diagnosed as having cancer. Her death soon afterwards was the first I had to cope with and it was very difficult. You become very close to those with whom you live and while Sylvia was kind enough to offer alternative accommodation to Ken Morton and myself, I did not like leaving The Governor on his own. Some time later I read that he had been killed, hit by a train on the railway for which he had worked for over 40 years.

It has been a lifetime regret that, as a footballer, I never fulfilled my promise – the has-been that never was. Although I had this great ability and started at the top with England schoolboys and Manchester United, I did not have a career. As soon as I signed professional forms, I went the wrong way. Those trips to the racecourse would be followed by a meal, then an outing to one of the local dog tracks at Salford, White City and Belle Vue. I was bitten deeply by the gambling bug and a further distraction was the Manchester night life. The next port of call after the greyhounds would be one of the night clubs and life became a merry-go-round of these glamorous playgrounds.

Noel Cantwell, who had joined Manchester United from West Ham in time for the 1963 FA Cup Final, arrived as the kind of philosopher and deep thinker about the game which was the trademark of players brought up in the Upton Park academy. He could not believe how off-the-cuff things were at Old Trafford. The essence, and often the sum total, of Matt Busby’s team talks would be: ‘We are better than them, go and express yourselves,’ whereas Noel had been accustomed to long tactical debates. United went into this Wembley final against Leicester City, with Cantwell the captain, as underdogs, yet emerged emphatic 3–1 winners. I was with the party, enjoying the sumptuous five-star hotel treatment before the game, and the atmosphere on the return train journey to Manchester was electric. A big card school was soon convened by Maurice Setters and others and my penchant for gambling, which by now was almost compulsive, was very much to the fore. We were playing brag, a game in which money is won and lost in the blink of an eye, and my stake was a fiver blind. Anybody who knows the game will tell you that it takes either nerves of steel or a suicidal tendency to strike so big a wager in that fashion. It was neither to me. I was 18 and had plenty of money with nothing to spend it on. I had saved everything for a couple of years, my digs were paid for, I never went out. For two years I dedicated myself to becoming a professional footballer; for the next two years I came dangerously close to careering off the rails. The warning signs were there. Instead of reading the national newspaper back pages and all the football coverage as I had so far done, I began taking the Sporting Life every day instead. It was not long before I was interested not only in what was running that day but what was running the following day as well. You don’t realise it at the time, but it soon becomes an obsession. At The Cliff you only had to look over the wall and you could see the horses at Manchester racecourse. One of the problems as a professional footballer is that you have too much time on your hands and you have to do something. I did gambling. At the time it was something I enjoyed greatly. I had no responsibilities and it didn’t matter if I did my bollocks. There would be two carloads of players going to the races and from there the rest would go home whereas I would head for the dogs, perhaps seeing Alan Ball, who was a regular at the Salford track.

One day I was waiting at the bus stop outside Old Trafford and Matt Busby drew up in his car. He asked me where I was going and when I told him that my destination was Manchester races he said: ‘Jump in.’ I had been having treatment for an injury and the other lads had gone on ahead of me.

‘Do you like racing?’ he asked me.

I told him I loved it.

‘Listen, son,’ he said, ‘it’s like women and it’s like drink. It is fine in moderation, but don’t ever let it get to grips with you.’

It was the best bit of advice anyone had ever given to me … and I took no notice whatsoever.

Since then I have seen so many players who have been paid millions of pounds end up without a pot to piss in. I never had a million pounds to start with, but all through my life gambling has cost me to some extent. Gus Demmy was the top bookmaker in Manchester and I would see him at all the various meetings. I got to know him quite well and in the end he gave me a job chalking up the prices in his main betting office in the afternoons. I never made any wages because I used to do them all behind the counter, but I was in my element. In those days I had a Post Office account from which I was making withdrawals on a regular basis to fund my gambling. It soon whittled down from a few thousand to nothing and it was a frightening experience to look at the opening and closing balances. Even if I won, it was a case of loaning the money from the bookmakers for just a couple of days before I gave it back to them. But I got a great buzz out of it.

When we were abroad with United we used to get a daily allowance of £10, so you only needed to be away for 10 days to have a tidy sum to look forward to. They were in a different league with that kind of perk. The trouble is that once you leave, everything is an anticlimax. Looking back, it is true to say that I stopped working at my game. I ceased to focus. I still played in the reserves, but other, younger players were leapfrogging me. One such player was Willie Anderson. Another was George Best, who went straight from the A team into the first team.

George and I got along great and still do to this day. There have been various occasions on which he has come to my rescue in times of strife and who would have thought that would be the case when as a slight, shy boy he walked into Old Trafford a year behind me? The omens were not very good for George when he became homesick after a day, went back to Belfast and Joe Armstrong pursued him and dragged him back, yet he was the most naturally gifted footballer I had ever laid eyes upon. Despite his lack of size and weight he would beat people for fun in training, which infuriated some players. They would shout: ‘Cross it, get the ball across …’ and they would moan and groan when he didn’t. The boss and Jimmy Murphy would tell them to leave him alone, adding that he would learn with time when to cross. More fuel would be poured onto the fires of his detractors when he would beat four men in a spellbinding mazy dribble, go back for more and then lose the ball. What was clear from the outset was that George had the heart of a lion. For a wiry little kid he had this great strength and determination. He tackled like a full-back. There were some real full-blooded full-backs around in those days, like Roy Hartle and Tommy Banks, but even they would have been proud of the challenges delivered by George. It was like being hit by a double-decker bus. He was a genius. I loved him. His terrible shyness meant that he needed a bit more looking after than most and I was more than happy to help in that direction.

I had been going out with a girl called Judith Fish, which was something of a laugh in itself. Fish meets Fry! If we had got married I don’t think that either of us could have resisted the temptation for her to carry a double-barrelled surname, which is the current vogue for women. Judith’s father Tom, a local big businessman, was a rabid Manchester United fan and I got Denis Law to go along and cut the tape when he opened a garage. All the apprentices were given two complimentary tickets for matches and those not required for friends and family were sold to Tom. It was a few extra quid for the lads and no harm was done. I would buy George’s complimentaries and pass them on to Tom. As everyone knows, George became a star overnight and rightly so. The beauty about George is that he has had so many bad things written and said about him – he can do 99 good things for people and one bad thing will have him on the front, back and middle pages of every newspaper – that while the temptation must have been to lay low he has kept smiling through. He has been brilliant to me, always keeping in touch despite his having reached the dizzy heights and me having never got off the ground in terms of playing careers. The only sad thing about him is his having packed up at the age of 27.

George’s career did not really start to blossom until after I had left Old Trafford in the 1964/65 season. It was to be three more years until their famous victory in the European Cup and he entered the realms of superstardom as ‘El Beatle’. By this time I had gone into management and he was in that surreal world of agents, advisers and hangers-on which was brought about as much by his inability to say no to anyone as people wanting to be associated with him.

To demonstrate just how different class he was, my cousins Karen and Pauline Miller were obsessed, like thousands of other girls, with George and wanted to meet him. Manchester United were playing a night match at Luton at the height of his popularity and, even though I hadn’t seen him for a few years, he greeted me warmly when I went into their dressing room and agreed to see the girls after the game. The lads, meanwhile, were saying: ‘Hey Barry, you still backing those f***ing losers?’ and having a laugh. That’s football for you. George emerged later and greeted Karen and Pauline, who haven’t washed their hands since.

The parting of the ways for me at Old Trafford was, indeed, a sad moment. Just as he had done in much happier circumstances a couple of years previously, Matt Busby called me into his office at the end of April 1965, with my contract due to expire at the end of June. I was 19 and I honestly thought he was going to offer me another contract. All players do. One of the strange things about football is that even if you are a crap player, or even a decent player whose game has turned to crap, you cannot see it yourself. You always think you are better than you are in reality.

‘Barry,’ he said. ‘You haven’t progressed as much as we would have liked you to have done. Other players who were not as advanced as you have now overtaken you.’

He added that Bolton Wanderers had made an approach for me.

‘We won’t charge any money,’ Matt said. ‘We will give you a free transfer so that you can get yourself looked after.’

He urged me to go home and think about it for a day or two, putting me under no pressure, and the following day I went to see Noel Cantwell, the club captain. I told him what had happened and he said: ‘Don’t go to Bolton, go to Southend. I know the manager there, Ted Fenton, who used to be my boss at West Ham. I’ll get in touch with him and give you a glowing report.’ This confused me even more and for a few days I was in a daze. For the first time in my life I felt a failure. Although Matt had not said as much, I felt that Manchester United no longer wanted me and the fact that he was allowing me to talk to other clubs only reinforced this viewpoint.

George Martin, the chief scout at Bolton, came round to my digs and told me that they had permission to talk to me with a view to joining them. United, he said, were going to release me anyway. They were words which felt like daggers through my heart.

On many occasions I have been offered big money by the media to criticise Matt Busby, but there is no way I would ever do that. Matt Busby is not the reason I failed. Barry Fry is the reason I failed. All Matt did was to give me good advice and the opportunity to join the biggest club in the world. Lots of players have got chips on their shoulders when they leave clubs, because they feel they have more ability than those they have left behind. Many are right to hold that view. But those who remain are invariably more dedicated, more focused. Such players are often bitter and twisted. Not me. I look in the mirror and see a man who let himself down, not one who was let down by others.

As George Martin spoke I reflected upon the two appearances I had made for United as a first team reserve – there were no substitutes then and you only got to play as a reserve if someone went down ill just before the match. The first of these was at Ipswich, where all sorts of things were running through my mind in the dressing room. One thought was that, as 12th man, if I had accidentally trodden on someone’s toes, breaking a couple in the process, I would get to make my debut through his misfortune. I thought better of it. Ipswich won the game 4–2, with Ray Crawford and Ted Phillips sharing their goals and Bobby Charlton scoring both for United.

The second match was at Sheffield United and this was most memorable for the police bursting into the Manchester United dressing room after the game. ‘You can’t come in here, mate,’ I shouted to one of them, but they brushed me aside and made straight for Dave Gaskell, who was our goalkeeper at the time. He had been taking some stick from the home fans during the game and responded by pulling his shorts down and showing them his arse.

You know, I would have kissed Gaskell’s arse for a first-team debut for Manchester United. But it was never to be.

CHAPTER FOUR

Bankruptcy and on the scrapheap

The massive shock to my system caused by my departure from Old Trafford was compounded when it became clear that I had upset Noel Cantwell and, for the first and only time in my life, I had a falling-out with my father. I telephoned my dad to give him the news that I had signed for Bolton Wanderers and to say that he was stunned is something of an understatement.

‘Who did you talk to about this?’ he asked, clearly upset.

I told him that it was my own decision and that I had consulted no one.

‘I thought you might have had the decency to discuss it with me.’

My protestations that I had received a £5000 signing-on fee seemed to irk him even more.

‘What good is money?’ he demanded. ‘Money has never meant anything to you. What are you doing? You should have come home to mull this over.’

And with that, he bashed the telephone down on me.

Noel, meanwhile, had been true to his word and gone to the trouble of contacting Ted Fenton, who had apparently been happy to discuss the situation. But my mind was swimming and I just didn’t bother to follow up Noel’s lead. He let it be known that he thought I should have acted more responsibly.

So it was against that very negative background that I embarked upon the next step in my career. I bought myself a brand new Datsun and everything went very well in a pre-season build-up in which I was a member of the Bolton senior squad, though I failed to make the team for the first couple of league games. They got off to an inauspicious start, with results going against them, and then they dropped Francis Lee for me. My debut was in a home match against Coventry City, who were managed by Jimmy Hill, and unfortunately I was unable to stop the bad run of results as we were beaten. My third consecutive game was at Cardiff, who had that marvellous team which included Ivor Allchurch, John Charles and Mel Charles. In our team were Freddie Hill, Wyn Davies, Gordon Taylor, Roy Hartle and Eddie Hopkinson in goal – a strong side and one in which I was to score my one and only league goal in a 3–1 victory. It was a headed goal in which I beat the mountainous John Charles to the ball. I ask you, men like him and Davies, as big as houses, and I score with a header!

We flew back to Manchester after the game and as I walked down the aeroplane steps I began to feel the after-effects of a crunching tackle I had received from Mel Charles. Suddenly, I could hardly walk. The pain was terrible. Forty-eight hours later we were due to play away at Middlesbrough. I still lived at Mrs Davenport’s and on the Sunday morning I walked round the corner to get some treatment from Jack Crompton, the United physio. He said there was no chance of my being fit enough to play. We were leaving Bolton at 11 o’clock the following day and by nine I was on the treatment table at Burnden Park. Then I tried to run round the track and it was hopeless. I couldn’t walk, never mind run. The physio told me to go and take a bath and as I soaked, feeling sorry for myself, the door opened and in walked the manager, Bill Ridding.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ he inquired sternly.

I told him that I had done my groin.

‘I used to use that excuse to get out of things when I was in the Army,’ he replied, and walked out.

Fuming, I jumped out of the bath and set off in the nude in pursuit of Ridding. Of course, the floor was slippery and I doubled or trebled the damage that had already been done to my groin, but there was no stopping me.

‘Oi, what did you say? What the f**k are you talking about? Excuse? I don’t need any excuse. I’ve only just got into the f***ing team. I don’t want to be left out of it. I’ve just scored on Saturday. What are you on about?’

It was the worst thing I could have done. He never picked me again. It had been, I suppose, an unseemly event. As I reached screaming pitch, people were emerging from every door in the building to see what was going on and the manager being bawled out by a new player without a stitch on was not what they might have expected.

Franny Lee was back in the team at Middlesbrough and Bolton lost 4–0. It remained, however, a great dressing room. Nat Lofthouse was in charge of the reserves, to whom I had now been consigned. He kept telling me that I was doing well and then they would have Franny being picked for England and Wyn being called up by Wales and I thought I must get my first-team place back. It never happened. Instead they would draft in big Eric Redrobe, then Brian Bromley, then somebody else and somebody else, but not me. In the end I got fed up with the situation, so I decided to knock on Bill Ridding’s door.

‘What’s going on?’ Nat keeps saying I’m playing well, there are people away on international duty, you are short of players and I’m not getting a look in.’

‘I’ve been told you’re crap,’ he responded.

With this, silly Basil goes to see Nat Lofthouse.

‘You’re a f***ing two-faced bastard, you are,’ I screamed at him.

In life you realise sooner or later that there are some people you say that to and some you don’t. Nat was in the latter category. At least he asked for an explanation.

‘You keep saying that I’m doing well in the reserves,’ I said, ‘and now Bill’s just told me that your reports on me say that I’m crap.’

Before I could flinch he had me in a vice-like grip around my throat, dragged me into the manager’s office, and threw me to the floor.

‘What’s this about my reports saying …’ He was stopped short by Ridding entering the room.

‘Barry,’ Ridding intervened, ‘leave us, will you. Leave us, please.’

I got up, dusted myself down and listened behind the closed door as a huge row sparked up. Nat had a right go.

‘Don’t use me as an excuse!’ he thundered. ‘You tell him you don’t like him. You tell him he isn’t good enough. You tell him anything, but don’t tell him that I have been giving him bad reports when I have not.’

Those fights at Manchester United which were not my fault and those two incidents at Bolton were to have a positive effect on me in my subsequent managerial career. It has always been the case with me that if I have the occasion to say to a player that he is playing crap or has been an empty shirt, and he turns round and has a real go back, I never take offence. They can throw cups of water in my face, they can call me a f***ing c**t, they can even punch me. I would still pick them for the next match. So much is done and said in the heat of the moment in normal life. In football, every moment is heated. For instance at Barnet, where in all probability I first came to the attention of the modern-day football fan, I had in our non-league days a very good player called Robert Codner, whom I got for nothing from Dagenham and later sold to Brighton for £115,000. I had been telling England’s non-league representative Adrian Titcombe for some time that he was worthy of an international place and Adrian came along to watch him in a match against Weymouth. In muddy conditions we were 2–0 down and came back to win 3–2, getting out of jail courtesy of two great goals by Steve Parsons with the winner a 30-yard screamer in the last minute. As the players came off the pitch I was shouting from the dugout.

‘Well done, Frank. Brilliant. Phil, Brilliant. Well done. Robert, f***ing empty shirt. You’re a f***ing waste of time.’

‘What did you say?’ Codner demanded as he stopped in his tracks.

‘You, you c**t. F***ing waste of time.’

He nutted me, there and then, flush on the nose and I was sent sprawling flat on my back in a foot of mud. I got up and as I entered the dressing room I went straight over to Codner and gave him a full-blooded smack across the face. All the lads jumped in, but it soon calmed down and within minutes I got into the bath and sat next to Codner.

‘F***ing hell, boss,’ he said. ‘That hurt.’

‘Your head-butt didn’t do me a lot of favours either.’

I got dressed and walked down the corridor into the boardroom, where the chairman, Stan Flashman, greeted me.

‘Are you all right?’ he said. ‘I’m banning that c**t.’

‘Who?’

‘Rob Codner, of course.’

‘No you ain’t, Stan.’

At this point we were joined by Adrian Titcombe.

‘Well, that’s buggered that boy’s chance for England. He will never play for his country.’

‘What are you talking about, Adrian?’ I said.

‘Codner. He head-butted you.’

‘Bollocks,’ I replied. ‘What makes you think that?’

He said he had seen the incident from the stand, but I countered.

‘Look. I had plimsolls on. I shouted something to him which he didn’t hear, so he came back to see what I had said. At that moment I slipped. It’s knee-deep in mud out there. You can see for yourself. There’s nothing wrong with me. Head-butted me – that’s a laugh!’

‘Oh, all right then,’ Adrian said. ‘He can play for England.’

And play for England he did.

I never see the point in allowing situations to fester and what happened at Bolton taught me that lesson. Two spats with the manager completely finished me. I have often wondered what would have happened if I had just sat in the bath that day and said nothing to Bill Ridding, but the fact remains that after just a year I was on my way again, this time to my most local league club, Second Division Luton Town.

They had wanted me as a boy, when George Martin was the manager. He was still in charge and he telephoned me to say that it had come to his attention that Bolton were letting me go on a free transfer and he would like me to go along for a chat. The fact was that I was going home anyway. There was nowhere else to go. When we came face to face all George could say was: ‘When you left school you should have come here.’ I signed a one-year contract and that season Luton finished within 0.046 goal average of being promoted. Again, though, I didn’t play much. I was in and out of the team and I left the club having played a career total of fewer than 20 league games while at three clubs, which was disgraceful for what I had to offer.

At the age of 21, six short years after walking into Old Trafford with the world at my feet, I was on the scrapheap. Finished. Caput. Not a single league club wanted me.

The only club of any description to show even the remotest interest was Southern League Gravesend & Northfleet, who were managed by Walter Ricketts. They had a lot of experienced players like Jim Towers, formerly of Brentford and Tosh Chamberlain, who had been at Fulham, while John Dick, the ex-West Ham stalwart, was the coach. So here I was, living in Bedford and set to join Gravesend, which was almost the other side of the world. And part-time football into the bargain. I joined them purely because I wanted to play football, but it was clear from the outset that I would have to get a job in the Bedford area to make ends meet. A firm called Advance Linen in the nearby village of Kempston required a driver to make deliveries of those pull-down towels which you see in the ladies and gents toilets at pubs and restaurants and I was successful with my application. I had to do my rounds in quick time because on Tuesday and Thursday nights I had to be at Gravesend for training sessions.

I was inhabiting a totally different world. While in Manchester I had met at a dance the girl, Anne, who was to become my first wife and she was no small part of the equation at this time and in these new circumstances. She had no interest in football, even though she lived in Salford right next to The Cliff, and I told her on the dance floor that I was a bricklayer. It was the kind of lie that only a woman could spot and she asked how I could be a bricklayer with such soft hands. Three years on we married in Salford but set up home in a flat in Bedford. It was a very difficult time. My life had been turned upside down. Instead of getting up and looking forward to work because I loved the running around and the training, followed by the afternoon off and going to the races, I was reporting for duty in a mundane job at 7.45am and rushing to allow time for the two-and-a-half-hour journey to Gravesend. Also, I was newly-married.

Even though they had players who were far more experienced than I, Gravesend made me captain. I had been there for just six months when Walter Ricketts was appointed as assistant manager to Dick Graham at Leyton Orient. He told me straight away that he would be taking me with him and, presto, I was back with a league club. I was buzzing. Dick looked after me, giving us a club house at Gants Hill. By this time we had Jane, our first daughter, but the move wasn’t really of any concern to Anne because of her apathy towards football. It would not have mattered to her where we lived. She never came to any of the games and, consequently, didn’t mix with football people.

I was never a regular in the Orient team, and in one of my periods on the sidelines something was to happen which would change the course of my life. The players arrived for one game to find that the trainer, the man with the magic sponge, had done a moonlight flit. No explanation. He just didn’t turn up. Dick was naturally concerned, but I volunteered to do the job. I allayed his misgivings about my qualification to take on the role by telling him that any silly bugger could apply cold water where it was needed and, anyway, we had a doctor on hand to deal with any serious injuries.

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