But then, according to Jimmy, Busby said, ‘No, this is not right. He has to have a proper wage.’
Now, when I recall that Haynes, though he was a player I always admired deeply for his wonderful passing skill and his vision, was on more than three times my salary while playing for Fulham, a club famous for being charming and friendly but no great claimant for the highest honours, I see that my attitude to such a basic matter as my wage packet was maybe a little too passive.
Comparisons with today are certainly laughable. My generation played at a time when the Football League and its member clubs saw players as workers to pamper in their travel and even their recreation, but not to be granted the employee rights that were common in other walks of life. It was like saying that football operated in a cocoon, both unique and frozen in time.
This couldn’t go on, of course, and as I began to move away from adolescence, still believing football would be at or near the centre of my life, I came to recognise another world was going on outside its borders. It was something I had to acknowledge sooner rather than later if I was to offer Norma a good life, after rebuilding a relationship with her that, maybe because of the distractions of football, and a touch of celebrity, I had allowed to drift from what it could and should have been.
However, in all the highs and lows and complications of the life I was making, and briefly unmaking, there was one constant, a character which revealed itself a little more each day: the dark but vital sprawl of Manchester. Its power and its energy pressed against Old Trafford, reminding me always of that purpose of football to bring a little light to those who worked in the soot and the clanging noise. There were two huge black warehouses next to the ground and two enormous chimneys, one off-white and the other dark coloured. It was one of the great advantages of playing at home, the familiarity of it and the fact that whenever you looked up you saw one of the great chimneys and you knew precisely where you were. For visiting players it was, I always thought, another part of the intimidation of the place.
Because The Cliff was needed for junior matches, the pitch wasn’t really good enough for the first team to work on, so sometimes we trained on a field set in the middle of the rugged, man-made landscape, beside the big Ship Canal – and when that was not available we had another works pitch next to a smaller canal. The sounds of the factories were all around us, and at the approach of lunch-time we knew what was on the canteen menu at the massive Metro-Vics plant – you could smell the spotted dick or the rice pudding.
When it was snowing or frosty we worked wherever we could around the ground, beneath the part cover of the stands at the back of the stadium and the nearby greyhound track, and wherever you looked there was steam and smoke and industry. Part of our working background was formed by Glovers, a factory which produced huge coils of cable which were carried across the canal on a pulley and then lowered into the ships which would take them to all parts of the world, where they would go under the sea. It was exciting to see the power at work that generated the city’s wealth, and deep down I felt great pride that I was representing such a place on the football fields of England and, maybe soon, Europe.
Some years later I saw a picture by my friend Harold Riley, the fine Salford painter who learned his art as a protégé of the great L.S. Lowry, which moved me so much that I bought it for a friend. It rekindled all the emotion which came to me when I looked at that great scene of industry, with the prows of the ships poking into a dark and gritty sky framed by cranes and chimneys and warehouses. The art of Lowry and Riley is very important to me now because I believe it is interwoven with the roots of so much of my life. When I first saw Lowry’s depiction of fans walking down to the Bolton Wanderers’ ground it took my breath away; it seemed to capture all that I had seen and felt as a boy, and then as a youth at the Broadheath factory; it described the lives of the workers and the lure of that patch of green at the football stadium. I was always reminded of that Lowry pitch when going to the ground. So many people walked to see a game, often straight from the factory after clocking off on Saturday lunch-time. It was so uplifting to see them striding out, laughing and talking and, it seemed to me, in a way coming alive.
In this, my everyday life at Old Trafford kept strong my attachment to the North East. Up there were the mines and the shipyards, here was a massive workplace, the home of the industrial revolution, smelly but also glorious. Down the years I made extraordinary discoveries. The atom was split in Manchester University, and they also developed the first computer there. It was apparently as big as a room. Manchester had the first railway station, a hub for the nation’s industry, and the great plant of MetroVics, employing 25,000, sending out trains and viaducts into every corner of the world. When, years later, I came to act as an ambassador for the city, in an Olympic or Commonwealth Games bid, or in speaking for industry and business, I would never feel I was performing a chore, and I’m sure this was rooted in those days when I felt myself being drawn into something wider than
