The result was that within a few days I was clocking on at Switchgear and Cowans, an electrical firm a few miles from the digs. The idea, at least in theory, was that I would train as an electrical engineer. There would not be the bonus of the free passes that I would have received as a cub reporter for the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, but my feeling was that I would try to keep everybody happy for a year, then get on with the real business of my life.
In practice the job meant that I would spend most of my days filing off the rough edges which are left when hot metal is cut. I was put in the charge of a foreman named Bert Jones, who was one of the contacts of United who helped young players whose parents demanded that they learn at least the rudiments of a trade. Bert understood the reality of my situation. He allowed me to clock off an hour early on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I trained at The Cliff ground in Salford, and if United had an away youth team match he would give me the time to travel. What he or anyone else could not do was persuade me that I wasn’t wasting time. So much of it seemed to be spent on buses travelling to the factory in Broadheath, near Altrincham, and then in the opposite direction to Salford. The bus ride to Broadheath took forty-five minutes, with stops every two hundred yards or so, and it took nearly as long to get to The Cliff.
One of my problems was that I didn’t have a watch, which several times meant that I clocked on late at the factory. When this happened your wages were docked, which seemed to me harsh on someone who was earning only £2 a week. The problem was that in the dark mornings I just couldn’t guess the time and on one occasion I woke up Alan Rhodes to ask him. He was not pleased.
For a while the only solution was to get out of bed when I first woke up, walk down the corridor to the communal bathroom, stand on the toilet and look out of the window. From there I could just see the blue clock on Stretford Town Hall. It is still there and I always have a chuckle when I pass it. Sometimes it would be as early as half past two. Then I would go back to bed and hope that I didn’t oversleep. More often than not there was no danger of that as I lay awake and thought about the future, and anticipated the day when I would be released from the rickety old factory building.
It came, on cue, on my seventeenth birthday in October 1954: Bert Jones thought he was making a news announcement when he said, ‘I’ve got something important to tell you, Bobby. Tomorrow you’re going to be signed by Manchester United.’ Of course, I already knew, but Bert had read it in a newspaper and I didn’t want to spoil his moment. ‘You don’t have to come in tomorrow,’ he added. When he said that, I couldn’t help blurting out, ‘Oh boy!’, but then I was quick to thank him for the way he had looked after me; he knew my dreams had nothing to do with being an electrical engineer and I think he understood my impatience.
When I left the factory in Atlantic Street for the last time I did it with the lightest of steps, but it would be wrong to say that the time I spent there was entirely wasted. It was not where I wanted to be, but Bert and the lads I worked with had always been kind and they also taught me something about real life, about how, if you are not lucky enough to be doing something you love, you cope with the tedium of life in a factory. You try to do it, they seemed to me to be saying, with as much humour as you can and always with a little time for your work-mates.
Later, when Matt Busby talked of the duty of professional footballers to provide a little spark, a little colour, for the men and women who come to Old Trafford at the end of a working week, I thought of those factory days. Busby said the people didn’t want more of the humdrum grind of their working lives. They wanted something to carry them through the drab days of winter. They wanted excitement, and it was a professional footballer’s duty to always produce as much of that as he possibly could.
I also learned a little about trade unions, and the need for them when management wanted to impose new conditions unfairly, on their own terms. There would be echoes of that when I came to know Cliff Lloyd, the secretary of the Professional Footballers’ Association, who worked so hard and brilliantly to lift the maximum wage limit on players as gifted as my old hero Stanley Matthews. On several occasions there had been talk of strikes at the factory, and I listened to the fierce debates at the union meetings. That made me think of my father and the miners back home, and when one of the lads spoke up with anger and passion in his voice I
