Tim Quelch - Never Had it So Good: Burnleys Incredible 1959/60 League Title Triumph

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2015

Pitch Publishing

A2 Yeoman Gate

Yeoman Way

Durrington

BN 13 3QZ

www.pitchpublishing.co.uk

Tim Quelch, 2015

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

Print ISBN 9781909626546

eBook ISBN: 9781785310928

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I WOULD like to thank the large number of people who helped me so much in writing this book. If I have overlooked anyone inadvertently please accept my apology. I am deeply grateful to the members of Burnleys title-winning side who gave me generous amounts of their time. These were: John Angus, Adam Blacklaw, Trevor Meredith, Jimmy McIlroy, Brian Pilkington, Ray Pointer, Jimmy Robson, and Bob Seith. Sheila Blacklaw and Jean Seith also kindly told me about their lives as footballers wives, while Ella Heap and her son, John told me so much about their father and grandfather, Billy Dougall. Bob and Jean Seith went well beyond the call of duty in reading an early draft of the book as did long-standing supporter and writer, Geoff Crambie, and local historian, Roger Frost. Burnley authors, Dave Thomas and Phil Whalley kindly gave their permission to use extracts of interviews they conducted with players I was unable to meet. A number of long-standing Burnley supporters came to my aid splendidly.

Thank you to Frank Bailey, Stuart Barnes, Gerard Bradley, Peter Burch, Dave Cooper, Geoff Crambie, Lester Davidson, Frank Hill, David and Sandy Hird, Brian Hollinrake, former Burnley MP, Peter Pike, Gary Roberts, Donald Speak, Dave Thomas, Rev. David Wiseman and Rob Woodmore. I am greatly indebted to Ray Simpson, Burnley FC historian, for access to his vast and brilliant array of historical and statistical information, to Tony Scholes of the Clarets Mad website, Tom Morton (Foreverclaret) at www.thelongside.co.uk and Phil Whalley at the Clarets Archive website for access to their excellent archive material. Thanks go to Burnley FC and to other league clubs for use of their programmes and to other fans websites. Rival supporters came to my aid, too, including Dave Harris, Rod Robbins, Dave Wellbelove and Nigel Woodcock. National and local newspapers provided rich sources of material. Thanks go to the Burnley Express, Daily Mirror, Daily Sketch, Sunday Pictorial, News of the World, The Times and Sunday Times. I would like to thank Edward Lee formerly of Burnley Express, Anthony Fairclough at Burnley Football Club and the staff at Burnley Central Library for their great help accessing archive material and current and past photographs. Howard Talbot and Geoff Bannister provided me with some wonderfully atmospheric photographs of the period.

Thanks are also due to mirrorpix, premier pictures and PA Photos who kindly granted permission for their superb team and action shots to be printed in this book. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my publishers for their experienced guidance throughout and to everyone who has supported me during the writing of this book. Great thanks go to fellow author, Dave Thomas for his invaluable advice and assistance.

All of my royalties from this re-printed version will be donated to Cancer Research UK. While great care has been taken to avoid any infringement of copyright, should there be any inadvertent breach please notify my publisher in the first instance.

Tim Quelch
April 2015

Back to the Future

P ROFESSIONAL footballs major prizes are now the monopoly of a select few. If the biggest are not always the best, then the exceptions are few and far between. But in what now seems a faraway place in time, the smallest could still aspire to be great.

Join me now as we spin backwards in our rickety time machine. We are returning to a time when the recently-opened Preston by-pass (now part of the M6) heralded the start of the motorway age. But only a sparse parade of vehicles Ford Anglias, Triumph Heralds and Morris Minors among them can be seen on its three-lane blacktop. It is also a time when Cliff Richard, our Elvis copyist, has just enjoyed his first number one hit with Living Doll.

So take note now as our machine emerges from the sulphurous mists, juddering to a halt in a cobbled, terraced street, its Pennine stone houses blackened by the fumes of so many mill chimneys. The place is Burnley. The time is August 1959. Its bright and hot. The sun is so strong it easily pierces the thin, yellowed industrial haze. Theres hardly a breath of air. Craig Douglas is on the radio and the weeks washing is on the clothes lines. Sheets and shirts hang limply from the pleated ropes that criss-cross the street. Young girls are playing hopscotch, others are clattering around in oversized shoes and their mothers cast-off dresses and hats a grotesque sense of theatre. There are boys here, too, dressed in aertex shirts and short grey trousers that are held up by twisted elastic belts with snake clasps. Their twin-hooped grey socks have fallen carelessly, bunching around their ankles. One starts a card game, tossing a Chix bubblegum card onto the ground. A portrait of Jimmy Greaves stares up at them from the cobbles as another boy tries to claim the card by flicking one of his own, a picture of Tom Finney, in its direction, trying to cover it. He fails. Yet another boy joins the game sucking on a liquorice straw, thrust into his sherbet fountain.

Footballers are their icons. But it is the Clarets who monopolise local reverence. The boys all have portraits of their favourites pasted into their sugar paper scrapbooks or taped to their bedroom walls Ray Pointer, Jimmy McIlroy, Jimmy Adamson and others cut from their copies of Charles Buchans Football Monthly, Soccer Star or Reynolds News. They have their league ladders as well free gifts from the Tiger comic. As the new Football League season is about to be unveiled, all four divisions have their t-cards in place, primed for the first round of results. The boys have dug out their flip flop autograph books, too, ready for when the first visiting team coach pulls up outside the club entrance in Brunshaw Road. Their Ian Allan ABC locospotter guides will then become of secondary importance.

Very soon now, these boys will resume their place among Turf Moors 27,000 throng; a crowd that amounts to a third of the local population. This staggering proportion is twice that found at an average First Division club of the time. For these boys, the club is a barometer of their towns importance. They reason that because their team is a force in the land so must their town be also. They are unaware that no town as small as theirs now is has ever won the First Division. They are oblivious of the fact that Burnley has lost a fifth of the population it had when it previously won the First Division championship. That was back in 1921 before the inter-war recession undermined the prosperity of the towns traditional industries cotton and coal. They are unconcerned that the local mills and mines are continuing to decline. Their older brothers have already moved away in search of better job prospects, but they are happy with their lot. They know their team is among the best in Britain and maybe in Europe, too. With the clubs totemic floodlight pylons shimmering in the glare of the days sun, they are confident, perhaps complacent, too, that their club is forever blessed, destined always to be giants. This season they will be rewarded with a rare triumph, an incredible victory but these boys will take this herculean performance slightly for granted. Only when they become much, much older will they realise the enormity of what was achieved.