I’d been on another visit to see Roy and he had delved into his cupboards to find more of his small collection of memorabilia. The rain was still coming down in buckets. I’d driven through Mytholmroyd and Hebden Bridge where the River Calder had wreaked havoc and destroyed two town centres with waters that rose five feet high into the interiors of shops and houses. It was a chastening sight, seeing people’s possessions piled high in sodden heaps on the pavements waiting for collection and disposal.

‘There’ll be groundsmen up and down the land in the lower leagues tearing their hair out,’ I said to him. ‘Maybe even some with Championship teams that don’t have Desso pitches.’ Ironically, the Blackburn game was postponed the following day because of a waterlogged pitch at Newport. The Cup game at Eastleigh against Bolton Wanderers was played on a surface that looked like a cabbage patch.

The groundsman we both felt sorry for was Dave Mitchell at Carlisle United. The December rains and floods up in Cumbria had completely submerged the Brunton Park pitch and not for the first time. It had already happened once in 2005 and aerial views of the devastated club had featured in most national newspapers. When the floods subsided and the muddied rubbish-strewn pitch emerged, a goldfish was found floundering in the remains of a puddle in one of the goalmouths.

This time the water had been even deeper, but on the day I met Roy again it had at last receded, the debris and filth had been cleared by supporters and volunteers and the levelled mud was ready for new turf to arrive. Meanwhile the team was playing its home games at the nearest grounds that could accommodate them with the next game due to be played at Blackpool. Roy certainly had his problems to contend with, but nothing was ever as bad as this.

‘My glass is always half empty,’ said Mitchell in an interview.

It made me wonder if this was the standard creed of most groundsmen. Roy said not; but when Mitchell added that, ‘there’s only one winner where the weather is concerned,’ it was an echo of Roy’s own experience who agreed with it totally.  Mitchell was still lacking power for the irrigation pumps and was hoping to stage the first game of the year at the end of January. This time it wasn’t one flopping goldfish they found in a remaining shrinking pond, but three Koi Carp that were astonishingly re-united with their owner.

Roy had found an old Press picture of himself, Jimmy Adamson, John Jameson and assistant Ian Rawson standing together at Gawthorpe laughing and chatting. Bob Lord was passing by when the picture was taken and as he walked by turned his head and muttered with the faintest of smiles, ‘They could grow grass in concrete, these lads.’

On his first day alone and in charge, he remembered how nervous he had been.  If anything went wrong it would be his fault and him alone to blame, but from his seat on the bench by the players’ tunnel he saw a remarkable season unfold in 1972/73.

‘Some refs were just so fussy,’ he recalled. ‘Some were bossy and officious. Had I done this, had I done that, was this measurement correct, were the nets secure, was the penalty spot correct, had I checked this, had I checked that? Some of them were a pleasure to talk to and they were the ones that always came in for a brew and a chat. Some of them you were glad to see the back of. But it was part of my job. I was a bag of nerves the first time I was ever in charge on my own.’

Other than  those Saturday pre-match worries he could pinch himself and say what a wonderful job this was especially on a warm, summer’s day with the sun and blue sky overhead. On Gawthorpe days in his T-shirt, shorts and trainers was there any better job than driving the tractor with the warm sun on his back. He preferred not to think about the cold days when there was incessant drizzle and grey skies with the rain running down the back of his neck as he worked outdoors.

In fine weather Gawthorpe was a beautiful area. Harry Potts used to rub his hands together and tell the players there was no finer place to be.  Little Switzerland he used to call it when the snow had fallen.

‘Gawthorpe Hall is something like 400 years old,’ he explained, ‘and had belonged to the Shuttleworth family and now belongs to the National trust and they run it with Lancashire County Council. Close by is the river and the other side of the river is the training ground. Around all of that is a mass of wild life and birdlife. There was one time I remember and a party of Germans arrived to see the Hall but they came into the wrong entrance and ended up in the training area.

“Where is the Hall,” they asked. “We come to see the Hall and the Lord and Lady.”

‘Somewhere we made ourselves understood, I managed to show them where the Hall was and told them it was where I lived.’

‘There was always a bit of fun at Gawthorpe as well when the livestock from the neighbouring farm used to break in through the fencing. All the apprentices were summoned to help round them up and I’d get up on the tractor and ride round like John Wayne shouting and hollering to get them back to where they belonged.’

It was maybe when Roy was trying to grow normal grass, not in concrete, that one day quite out of the blue Brian Clough turned up on the pitch whilst Roy was working and mowing. It was the sound of the mower that had attracted Clough because he could find no-one else in the offices under the Stand. He had simply walked in, searched for the secretary Albert Maddox, looked around several empty rooms, gone out onto the pitch; called out to Roy who turned round, stopped the mower and was then quite amazed to see none other than the illustrious, instantly recognisable Brian Clough striding out bold as brass approaching him.

By this time, in ‘72/73 Clough had left Derby County where he had been for six years. His TV work had made him into a household name and a real celebrity; in fact he never seemed to be off the TV screens. But after a major confrontation about all his TV appearances with Sam Longson the chairman of Derby County, he had left the club and joined Brighton and Hove Albion with his assistant, Peter Taylor. Brighton were a lowly club but their chairman, Mike Bamber, was ambitious and in Clough saw a chance to establish his club in the bigtime. Bamber promised Clough complete freedom and it was this that appealed to Clough. For his first game in charge an extra 10,000 people crowded into the ground.

He was there for just nine months, during that short time making all kinds of promises, but then upped and left in July 1974 to take the Leeds United job. But in the meantime he called in on Burnley and took Roy by surprise.

He wanted two Burnley players, Harry Wilson and Ronnie Welch and had come to see Adamson and Lord about them. That was the Clough style, just call in unannounced if he wanted someone’s player but neither the secretary Albert Maddox, Adamson or Lord, was anywhere to be found.

‘Where is everybody?’ Clough asked in his inimitable voice, clearly exasperated only to learn from Roy that they were probably all out having some lunch.

‘Lunch… I don’t get any bloody lunch,’ Clough announced. ‘What time does this bloody office open? Ah’ll wait ‘til they open.’

‘Anyway, I calmed him down, took Clough under my wing and offered him the inevitable brew in my little room. While he sat sipping that I went across the road to the nearby chippy and got us a pie and some chips each.  We sat in there and chatted away about football and life until Clough went off once again to search for anyone who could sell him Wilson and Welch.’

Whether or not Clough found anyone to talk to that particular day, Roy has no recollection, but eventually a deal was done for the two of them at a reported fee of £70,000 which was a good figure for those days; they weren’t exactly established, big-name players. Lord was no doubt delighted and Adamson clearly had no firm plans for either of them.

The two players arrived at the Goldstone in December ’73 with Wilson making the most appearances in the number 3 shirt. He had played only had a handful of games at Burnley but played 146 times for Brighton and scored four goals. Welch made just 40 appearances for Brighton and just one for Burnley.

For the new season there would be no Big Steve Kindon to drive Roy mad. Manager Adamson sold him to Wolves. Kindon was devastated if not furious at the time, maintaining ever since that it came out of the blue and that Adamson had continually assured him he was building a team around his power.  Since then he has always joked: ‘I was so mad I just wanted to finish with football, so I signed for Wolves.’

‘But at least my pitch was safer,’ joked Roy. ‘Nobody slid on it like Steve or slid as far. Nobody made ruts as big as he did. In those days they wore longer studs, in fact I used to ask him did he wear stilts under his boots; he made so much a mess of the pitch.

‘Bloody hell Steve,’ I’d say to him, ‘just look at the mess you’ve made on my pitch again, just look what you’re doing.’ But he’d just laugh and walk away.’ Poor Roy had no idea that a few years later Steve would return to the club.

Another one to leave was winger Dave Thomas a huge crowd favourite who would go on to have a glittering career at QPR and then Everton and England.

‘He was brilliant,’ said Roy, ‘and we loved to see him flying down the wing. A lot of us still wonder why he had to be sold.’

He was sold in fact because he and Jimmy Adamson did not see eye to eye. He was a terrifically exciting player and could beat a full-back and cross a ball a dozen times and more in a game; but Adamson wanted him to work and tackle as well and this was not his natural game. He piled up a number of appearances but then fell out of favour just before the ‘72/73 season. He was brought back and played half a dozen games but growing more and more disillusioned at the club he went on the transfer list. It didn’t help that he had lost his place following a two-game suspension and was unable to get back in the side. Whilst Thomas has always blamed Adamson for unsettling him, Adamson blamed Don Revie for turning his head with the praise he showered on him.

It was during this memorable season that a complaint from QPR immediately after a game nearly caused Roy huge problems. Ironically both clubs would win promotion that season but when QPR came to Turf Moor there were accusations of theft from the QPR dressing room. The doors of each dressing room were always locked after the teams and management had come out. Roy had the key.

The accusation after the game was that money had been stolen from one of the players. Roy was baffled, how could it have been, he had the key in his pocket. But how anyone could have broken in is baffling, he said to the QPR manager, to the police who arrived and to himself. It looked like this was going to escalate into something nasty with accusations flying back and forth until one of the QPR players came out of the dressing room.

‘It’s not been stolen,’ he told them all, and explained that the player in question had been gambling heavily on the coach. He had lost a huge amount of money so that now he was trying to cover this up and recoup his money by saying it had been stolen.

‘The QPR manager was aghast,’ Roy continued, ‘and said he’d sort it back at the club. Not long after that we received a letter of apology.’

‘Every now and then in the summer months I was still doing a bit of work for Bob Lord up at his house. The Alsatians were still there, the ones that terrified me, but his daughter Barbara with just one word of command made them sit with her instant control. I was getting a fair wage at the club but if I worked at the house Bob would slip me a few extra bob into my coat pocket. One day he came out and pulled a little wage packet out of his back pocket.

‘Just a minute,’ he said, ‘this is for you,’ and handed it to me.

‘But Mr. Chairman I’m fine. Things are quiet at the moment; you’ve already paid me for working at the club,’ I said genuinely surprised.

‘Never mind, just put this in thi pocket and say nowt,’ he replied.

I can’t say it too often, I had such a lot of respect for him; he was good to me, including getting me extra tickets for some of the big games when I needed them. He knew he could always ring me before a game if he needed anything doing or a group of his guests taken for a tour of the ground. On one such occasion it was a group of people before a game against Chelsea.

‘Yes Mr. Lord I’ll take them round,’ I answered him. ‘At the end of the tour one of them stepped forward and thanked me immensely for the tour. It was Seb Coe.’

Someone who worked alongside Roy was maintenance man Allen Rycroft and it was the smell of silage that Allen remembers even today. Grass cuttings from mowing the pitch were simply heaped up across from the back of the Longside Stand. Eventually the pile had got to huge proportions and the decision was made to shovel and barrow it all into skips to be disposed of. The apprentices were brought in and the job began. The ghastly, stomach-churning smell, however, was horrendous as much of it had turned to silage.

Allen’s job was more to do with general maintenance than work on the pitch although at times when there were tons of soil and sand to be brought in for pitch re-seeding, he was brought in to spend hours with shovels and wheelbarrows.  But his work was more to do with repairs, barrier work, joinery and painting. Today, professionals and specialist lifts would be brought in to repaint the iron girders and stanchions of the stands, but in those days it was long and hazardous triple-ladders and the apprentices some of whom were clearly terrified of the heights were the ones who climbed up them.

Leave your box of sandwiches lying around and they were fair game for the apprentices to lark about with. A favourite trick if you found a dead mouse was to flatten it with a spade and then put it inside someone’s sandwich. It was very easy if you were working on the pitch to casually leave your lunchbox in the dugout. That was when it was an easy target for the dead mouse treatment.

‘And Bob Lord watched us like a hawk,’ said Allen. Like Roy he can still picture him standing at the top of the stairs in the new stand, spending more and more time at the club, arms folded, just standing and watching what everyone was doing.

‘He rarely spoke to you and you were always wary of where he might be or when he might appear, or even who he was watching. If you thought he was watching you, you got your head down and worked. He once saw me leaving early because I was going to an away game and I knew he was watching me and wondering why I was leaving. But I’d arranged to finish early and I don’t doubt he made enquiries and found out it was all above board.

‘You’d just be so careful. At Gawthorpe there was the Great Barn and before it was handed to the National Trust, it was used by the players for changing. One part of it was filled with timber and logs and I was told to take a load of it up to his house one day. As I worked unloading it all, I knew he was in the house watching, sitting in his armchair with a view of his garden. Obviously I got paid for all the work I did at the ground but Mrs. Lord came out and thanked me and handed me a decent tip, and said I’d earned it. Now immediately it occurred to me that this was perhaps some kind of test and politely refused it saying that I was already paid for the work that I did and surely this was just part of that work. If I took it would Bob Lord reprimand me perhaps?  But no: Mrs. Lord insisted I took it and told me her husband had watched me working hard and wanted me to have it.

What better view of a promotion season could anyone have than from a bench by the players’ tunnel, seeing them run out before the start of a game, and then triumphantly walk back in after a winning game all smiles and joy? Such was the privilege afforded to Roy as a result of his job. There he was, up close and personal, seeing the elation of victory, the sweat of effort, the pride of brilliant performances, as well as the occasional dejection of the rare defeats.

Roy could remember a number of things. The local paper, The Burnley Express, provided a half term report on the season that was glowing in its praise. After 20 games they had only lost once. The whole town was on a high as the wins piled up. People had a smile on their faces and there was always the old story that after a win on a Saturday, production in the factories went up on a Monday morning. His old pals working at Scott’s Park had stopped grumbling and worrying. Outsiders were asking how Burnley still managed to produce such talent; Gawthorpe was a name constantly written about in the Press.

As for the players Roy could see the camaraderie, the closeness and how they enjoyed each other’s company. Fletcher and Waldron continued to be the jokers sparing no-one, be it the physio Jimmy Holland, the commercial guy Jack Butterfield or Roy himself. All of them had to watch out for the dreaded bucket of water placed over a half-open door. Equipment was frequently hidden.

Local reporter Peter Higgs wrote of the faith the players had in each other, the confidence that came with the wins, and the sheer class of the team. It was a strong and consistent team with players that had got better and better as the season progressed despite the surprise home defeat to Leyton Orient.

There was a worry that at Christmas it could all go pear-shaped with two tough away games, the first at Blackpool ironically now managed by Harry Potts and then away at Villa. Both were wins and if there was one win all season that announced that Burnley were the real deal it was the 3-0 away win at Villa. At Turf Moor Burnley had won 4-1 but after the away win the newspaper headline simply asked, Who Can Stop Burnley Now?

The Press reported that the game at Villa Park was promotion rival Villa’s big chance to catch up on Burnley, but then described that all they could hope for was to hang on to Burnley’s coat-tails, an all-conquering side that had now notched up five wins on the trot. It was a defining game with Burnley smooth yet powerful, bristling with enthusiasm and team spirit. There were crisp moves, slick skills, powerful defending and a competitive attitude to every 50:50 ball that carried all before it. And, as the last line of defence, there was goalkeeper Alan Stevenson who showed his sheer class when Villa had an occasional shot.

But Roy was like Adamson and remembered that not much more than 10 years earlier Burnley had amassed a big lead at the top of the table by April of ’62 and were clear favourites to win the title. He had been there and seen many of the games that season at the end of which they also lost a Cup Final against Spurs.  Inexplicably they let the lead dwindle; they had games in hand and wasted them. Roy and thousands of supporters could only watch in disbelief as Ipswich had pipped them to the title. Adamson preached caution. Roy agreed.

Roy now saw his job as simply to help produce the best possible surface to help the team and its brilliant passing game; a surface that was acknowledged as one of the better ones in the division. The daily chores continued, spiking, rolling, mowing, replacing divots, repairing slide marks and gouges, and worrying; worrying about rain, worrying about snow and frozen surfaces; worrying when it was a particularly fussy referee that was due.  And not just worrying; by the end of ’73 irritation was in its very earliest stages, irritations caused by one or two directors who began to think they could tell him to do this and mend that, or fix this and paint that in other parts of the ground. It wasn’t a huge concern at first; it was in its embryonic stage but would certainly develop further over the coming months. His workload had increased when Jeff Haley one of the groundsmen he worked with suddenly left.

Promotion was clinched in a Monday evening home game when Burnley beat Sunderland 2-0 with both goals from Paul Fletcher.  ‘There were some marvellous and astonishing scenes that night,’ said Roy.

‘Bob Lord strutted around Turf Moor like he was the king of the castle. He made sure he told as many people as possible that he had always had faith in Adamson and the team,’ Roy went on. ‘And he had every right to do. He smiled and beamed and puffed his chest out and right from then until the end of the season he was just so proud. He was proud of everyone from the players, to the groundstaff right down to the laundry ladies.

‘He’d been on the board at Burnley for 21 years and he said this is the best present I could have had. On one occasion when he came into my room to see what was going on we just got to talking and told me the story that when he first got on the board the rest of them had said, “there is nowt we can do, we’ll just have to put up with him.” ‘

‘“Some people hate me,’ Bob Lord once said to me. “I tread on people’s corns,” ’

‘But you’ll never hear me saying anything like that about him. I’ll say it again. He was good to me.’

Burnley faced Liverpool in the FA Cup in ‘72/73. Roy’s loyalties were tested since he still felt an allegiance to the city where he had been born. It was a game he was looking forward to and went round the ground singing Liverpool songs that he knew.

‘Er Roy,’ said Jimmy Adamson one day with the slightest of grins when he heard him in one of the corridors singing away about Liverpool, ‘er I don’t think we want you singing those songs.’

Burnley drew the first game 0-0 but lost the replay 3-0 at Anfield.

In the League, Burnley kept going but couldn’t shake QPR off who maintained their dogged pursuit right until the final game when Burnley needed just one point away at Preston North End to win the Division Two title. Saturday, April 28, was sunny and warm, a fitting day on which to celebrate a championship. It was the day Manchester United gave Denis Law a free transfer and Bobby Charlton played his last game at Chelsea.

Burnley still needed a point from the Preston game to secure the Championship and for added spice Preston needed a point to escape relegation. As it turned out no-one was disappointed and there have always been allegations that the game whilst not quite fixed ended with a result that had everyone happy and there were moments when anyone watching could have genuinely wondered did either side really want to win the game.

Preston took the lead when Alex Bruce shot past goalkeeper Stevenson. Burnley had most of the possession passing the ball around content with the 0-0 scoreline but then Bruce forgot the script and scored for Preston. Nobody needed to worry, however, since Colin Waldron, an unlikely centre-half scorer, let fly from 25 yards and equalised 10 minutes after half-time. From that point on it was quite clear that neither side was the slightest bit interested in scoring again and the game was played out at a snail’s pace with players timidly passing the ball around in midfield for long spells. At times it was quite embarrassing with players sometimes just standing still with the ball whilst opposition players simply stood and let them, none more obvious than when Leighton James dallied by the corner flag in the final minutes with a posse of Preston players simply letting him stand with his foot on the ball. Then, it was as if the referee simply got bored of waiting for something to happen and blew the final whistle. What might also have swayed him to ignore any possible extra time were the hordes of Burnley fans along the touchlines just waiting to rush on.

‘Fix’ is certainly too strong a word; it was a boiling hot day and with half an hour to go both teams had what they needed. Perhaps we could simply say that at that point, the players quietly decided to take it easy for the rest of the afternoon but Jimmy Adamson afterwards emphatically denied that the result was pre-determined.

‘The celebrations took place four days later in a testimonial for that great full-back John Angus,’ Roy reminisced. ‘More people turned up for that game than the average for all the others. It was a real party mood with The Old Stars team playing The Young Clarets, and then the title winners took on The Millionaires, a team of players most of whom had once been at Burnley but had been sold. Willie Irvine turned up as well. He was at Halifax at the time but defied his manager’s orders not to play. Jimmy Adamson was named manager-of-the-year. Only a few months earlier in the previous season fans had been booing and jeering him. Sometimes it’s just a real pleasure and a privilege to prepare the pitch even with all the work it involves. This was one of those games.’

Bob Lord was known for his lavish dinners that he put on regularly for players, staff and special guests. The Imperial Hotel in Blackpool was his favourite location and once again he selected it to celebrate winning promotion back to the First Division.

He certainly know how lay on ‘a good do,’ said Roy. ‘He did everything with style and class at these events, from the stylish invitations sent to us all, the immaculate arrangements, the travel that was organised for you if needed, to the beautifully produced glossy 8-page programme for the evening with the claret tassel.

‘I still have mine today, Roy said.  ‘The picture of Bob Lord and Jimmy Adamson holding the trophy is the first thing you see when you open it. The menu is on the first of the centre pages. Looking at it brings back such memories, the strongest of which is being there with my wife, who sadly passed away some time ago. I miss her still. I can see us at our table marvelling at the splendour of the evening and the wonderful food. Melon with Port, Scottish Smoked Salmon with lemon, Potee Bourguignonne, Grilled Fillet of Plaice, Lemon Sorbet, and still the main course was still to come. Roast Ribs of English Beef and Yorkshire Pudding with mountains of vegetables and all finished off with ice cream, fruit salad and double cream.

‘There were grand speeches and toasts and Bob Lord in his tuxedo, by then the Vice-President of the Football League, was in his element holding centre stage telling us that we were just a little village team but had won the prize. Burnley were back where they belonged he said. Then there was dancing and cabaret and believe it or not even after all that food we could have a breakfast of bacon and eggs in the Dining Room.

‘I can close my eyes,’ Roy went on, ‘and can still see us there.’

The two local newspapers, The Burnley Express and the Evening Star, both produced commemorative supplements to mark the promotion and return to Division One. The players, the chairman, the manager and his staff, the Commercial Manager Jack Butterfield, the physio Jimmy Holland, the trainer George Bray, everybody received an honourable mention, and just for once, the groundstaff members.

The role of the groundsman is to work hard and prepare the stage for the artists and the entertainers, whilst they themselves remain in the background, largely unknown, almost anonymous. Their minute in the spotlight was just one small paragraph tucked away at the bottom of a page. Such is the lot of the groundsman.

 

 

 

 

5: A grand season, said Roy

I’d been on another visit to see Roy and he had delved into his cupboards to find more of his small collection of memorabilia. The rain was still coming down in buckets. I’d driven through Mytholmroyd and Hebden Bridge where the River Calder had wreaked havoc and destroyed two town centres with waters that rose five feet high into the interiors of shops and houses. It was a chastening sight, seeing people’s possessions piled high in sodden heaps on the pavements waiting for collection and disposal.

‘There’ll be groundsmen up and down the land in the lower leagues tearing their hair out,’ I said to him. ‘Maybe even some with Championship teams that don’t have Desso pitches.’ Ironically, the Blackburn game was postponed the following day because of a waterlogged pitch at Newport. The Cup game at Eastleigh against Bolton Wanderers was played on a surface that looked like a cabbage patch.

The groundsman we both felt sorry for was Dave Mitchell at Carlisle United. The December rains and floods up in Cumbria had completely submerged the Brunton Park pitch and not for the first time. It had already happened once in 2005 and aerial views of the devastated club had featured in most national newspapers. When the floods subsided and the muddied rubbish-strewn pitch emerged, a goldfish was found floundering in the remains of a puddle in one of the goalmouths.

This time the water had been even deeper, but on the day I met Roy again it had at last receded, the debris and filth had been cleared by supporters and volunteers and the levelled mud was ready for new turf to arrive. Meanwhile the team was playing its home games at the nearest grounds that could accommodate them with the next game due to be played at Blackpool. Roy certainly had his problems to contend with, but nothing was ever as bad as this.

‘My glass is always half empty,’ said Mitchell in an interview.

It made me wonder if this was the standard creed of most groundsmen. Roy said not; but when Mitchell added that, ‘there’s only one winner where the weather is concerned,’ it was an echo of Roy’s own experience who agreed with it totally.  Mitchell was still lacking power for the irrigation pumps and was hoping to stage the first game of the year at the end of January. This time it wasn’t one flopping goldfish they found in a remaining shrinking pond, but three Koi Carp that were astonishingly re-united with their owner.

Roy had found an old Press picture of himself, Jimmy Adamson, John Jameson and assistant Ian Rawson standing together at Gawthorpe laughing and chatting. Bob Lord was passing by when the picture was taken and as he walked by turned his head and muttered with the faintest of smiles, ‘They could grow grass in concrete, these lads.’

On his first day alone and in charge, he remembered how nervous he had been.  If anything went wrong it would be his fault and him alone to blame, but from his seat on the bench by the players’ tunnel he saw a remarkable season unfold in 1972/73.

‘Some refs were just so fussy,’ he recalled. ‘Some were bossy and officious. Had I done this, had I done that, was this measurement correct, were the nets secure, was the penalty spot correct, had I checked this, had I checked that? Some of them were a pleasure to talk to and they were the ones that always came in for a brew and a chat. Some of them you were glad to see the back of. But it was part of my job. I was a bag of nerves the first time I was ever in charge on my own.’

Other than  those Saturday pre-match worries he could pinch himself and say what a wonderful job this was especially on a warm, summer’s day with the sun and blue sky overhead. On Gawthorpe days in his T-shirt, shorts and trainers was there any better job than driving the tractor with the warm sun on his back. He preferred not to think about the cold days when there was incessant drizzle and grey skies with the rain running down the back of his neck as he worked outdoors.

In fine weather Gawthorpe was a beautiful area. Harry Potts used to rub his hands together and tell the players there was no finer place to be.  Little Switzerland he used to call it when the snow had fallen.

‘Gawthorpe Hall is something like 400 years old,’ he explained, ‘and had belonged to the Shuttleworth family and now belongs to the National trust and they run it with Lancashire County Council. Close by is the river and the other side of the river is the training ground. Around all of that is a mass of wild life and birdlife. There was one time I remember and a party of Germans arrived to see the Hall but they came into the wrong entrance and ended up in the training area.

“Where is the Hall,” they asked. “We come to see the Hall and the Lord and Lady.”

‘Somewhere we made ourselves understood, I managed to show them where the Hall was and told them it was where I lived.’

‘There was always a bit of fun at Gawthorpe as well when the livestock from the neighbouring farm used to break in through the fencing. All the apprentices were summoned to help round them up and I’d get up on the tractor and ride round like John Wayne shouting and hollering to get them back to where they belonged.’

It was maybe when Roy was trying to grow normal grass, not in concrete, that one day quite out of the blue Brian Clough turned up on the pitch whilst Roy was working and mowing. It was the sound of the mower that had attracted Clough because he could find no-one else in the offices under the Stand. He had simply walked in, searched for the secretary Albert Maddox, looked around several empty rooms, gone out onto the pitch; called out to Roy who turned round, stopped the mower and was then quite amazed to see none other than the illustrious, instantly recognisable Brian Clough striding out bold as brass approaching him.

By this time, in ‘72/73 Clough had left Derby County where he had been for six years. His TV work had made him into a household name and a real celebrity; in fact he never seemed to be off the TV screens. But after a major confrontation about all his TV appearances with Sam Longson the chairman of Derby County, he had left the club and joined Brighton and Hove Albion with his assistant, Peter Taylor. Brighton were a lowly club but their chairman, Mike Bamber, was ambitious and in Clough saw a chance to establish his club in the bigtime. Bamber promised Clough complete freedom and it was this that appealed to Clough. For his first game in charge an extra 10,000 people crowded into the ground.

He was there for just nine months, during that short time making all kinds of promises, but then upped and left in July 1974 to take the Leeds United job. But in the meantime he called in on Burnley and took Roy by surprise.

He wanted two Burnley players, Harry Wilson and Ronnie Welch and had come to see Adamson and Lord about them. That was the Clough style, just call in unannounced if he wanted someone’s player but neither the secretary Albert Maddox, Adamson or Lord, was anywhere to be found.

‘Where is everybody?’ Clough asked in his inimitable voice, clearly exasperated only to learn from Roy that they were probably all out having some lunch.

‘Lunch… I don’t get any bloody lunch,’ Clough announced. ‘What time does this bloody office open? Ah’ll wait ‘til they open.’

‘Anyway, I calmed him down, took Clough under my wing and offered him the inevitable brew in my little room. While he sat sipping that I went across the road to the nearby chippy and got us a pie and some chips each.  We sat in there and chatted away about football and life until Clough went off once again to search for anyone who could sell him Wilson and Welch.’

Whether or not Clough found anyone to talk to that particular day, Roy has no recollection, but eventually a deal was done for the two of them at a reported fee of £70,000 which was a good figure for those days; they weren’t exactly established, big-name players. Lord was no doubt delighted and Adamson clearly had no firm plans for either of them.

The two players arrived at the Goldstone in December ’73 with Wilson making the most appearances in the number 3 shirt. He had played only had a handful of games at Burnley but played 146 times for Brighton and scored four goals. Welch made just 40 appearances for Brighton and just one for Burnley.

For the new season there would be no Big Steve Kindon to drive Roy mad. Manager Adamson sold him to Wolves. Kindon was devastated if not furious at the time, maintaining ever since that it came out of the blue and that Adamson had continually assured him he was building a team around his power.  Since then he has always joked: ‘I was so mad I just wanted to finish with football, so I signed for Wolves.’

‘But at least my pitch was safer,’ joked Roy. ‘Nobody slid on it like Steve or slid as far. Nobody made ruts as big as he did. In those days they wore longer studs, in fact I used to ask him did he wear stilts under his boots; he made so much a mess of the pitch.

‘Bloody hell Steve,’ I’d say to him, ‘just look at the mess you’ve made on my pitch again, just look what you’re doing.’ But he’d just laugh and walk away.’ Poor Roy had no idea that a few years later Steve would return to the club.

Another one to leave was winger Dave Thomas a huge crowd favourite who would go on to have a glittering career at QPR and then Everton and England.

‘He was brilliant,’ said Roy, ‘and we loved to see him flying down the wing. A lot of us still wonder why he had to be sold.’

He was sold in fact because he and Jimmy Adamson did not see eye to eye. He was a terrifically exciting player and could beat a full-back and cross a ball a dozen times and more in a game; but Adamson wanted him to work and tackle as well and this was not his natural game. He piled up a number of appearances but then fell out of favour just before the ‘72/73 season. He was brought back and played half a dozen games but growing more and more disillusioned at the club he went on the transfer list. It didn’t help that he had lost his place following a two-game suspension and was unable to get back in the side. Whilst Thomas has always blamed Adamson for unsettling him, Adamson blamed Don Revie for turning his head with the praise he showered on him.

It was during this memorable season that a complaint from QPR immediately after a game nearly caused Roy huge problems. Ironically both clubs would win promotion that season but when QPR came to Turf Moor there were accusations of theft from the QPR dressing room. The doors of each dressing room were always locked after the teams and management had come out. Roy had the key.

The accusation after the game was that money had been stolen from one of the players. Roy was baffled, how could it have been, he had the key in his pocket. But how anyone could have broken in is baffling, he said to the QPR manager, to the police who arrived and to himself. It looked like this was going to escalate into something nasty with accusations flying back and forth until one of the QPR players came out of the dressing room.

‘It’s not been stolen,’ he told them all, and explained that the player in question had been gambling heavily on the coach. He had lost a huge amount of money so that now he was trying to cover this up and recoup his money by saying it had been stolen.

‘The QPR manager was aghast,’ Roy continued, ‘and said he’d sort it back at the club. Not long after that we received a letter of apology.’

‘Every now and then in the summer months I was still doing a bit of work for Bob Lord up at his house. The Alsatians were still there, the ones that terrified me, but his daughter Barbara with just one word of command made them sit with her instant control. I was getting a fair wage at the club but if I worked at the house Bob would slip me a few extra bob into my coat pocket. One day he came out and pulled a little wage packet out of his back pocket.

‘Just a minute,’ he said, ‘this is for you,’ and handed it to me.

‘But Mr. Chairman I’m fine. Things are quiet at the moment; you’ve already paid me for working at the club,’ I said genuinely surprised.

‘Never mind, just put this in thi pocket and say nowt,’ he replied.

I can’t say it too often, I had such a lot of respect for him; he was good to me, including getting me extra tickets for some of the big games when I needed them. He knew he could always ring me before a game if he needed anything doing or a group of his guests taken for a tour of the ground. On one such occasion it was a group of people before a game against Chelsea.

‘Yes Mr. Lord I’ll take them round,’ I answered him. ‘At the end of the tour one of them stepped forward and thanked me immensely for the tour. It was Seb Coe.’

Someone who worked alongside Roy was maintenance man Allen Rycroft and it was the smell of silage that Allen remembers even today. Grass cuttings from mowing the pitch were simply heaped up across from the back of the Longside Stand. Eventually the pile had got to huge proportions and the decision was made to shovel and barrow it all into skips to be disposed of. The apprentices were brought in and the job began. The ghastly, stomach-churning smell, however, was horrendous as much of it had turned to silage.

Allen’s job was more to do with general maintenance than work on the pitch although at times when there were tons of soil and sand to be brought in for pitch re-seeding, he was brought in to spend hours with shovels and wheelbarrows.  But his work was more to do with repairs, barrier work, joinery and painting. Today, professionals and specialist lifts would be brought in to repaint the iron girders and stanchions of the stands, but in those days it was long and hazardous triple-ladders and the apprentices some of whom were clearly terrified of the heights were the ones who climbed up them.

Leave your box of sandwiches lying around and they were fair game for the apprentices to lark about with. A favourite trick if you found a dead mouse was to flatten it with a spade and then put it inside someone’s sandwich. It was very easy if you were working on the pitch to casually leave your lunchbox in the dugout. That was when it was an easy target for the dead mouse treatment.

‘And Bob Lord watched us like a hawk,’ said Allen. Like Roy he can still picture him standing at the top of the stairs in the new stand, spending more and more time at the club, arms folded, just standing and watching what everyone was doing.

‘He rarely spoke to you and you were always wary of where he might be or when he might appear, or even who he was watching. If you thought he was watching you, you got your head down and worked. He once saw me leaving early because I was going to an away game and I knew he was watching me and wondering why I was leaving. But I’d arranged to finish early and I don’t doubt he made enquiries and found out it was all above board.

‘You’d just be so careful. At Gawthorpe there was the Great Barn and before it was handed to the National Trust, it was used by the players for changing. One part of it was filled with timber and logs and I was told to take a load of it up to his house one day. As I worked unloading it all, I knew he was in the house watching, sitting in his armchair with a view of his garden. Obviously I got paid for all the work I did at the ground but Mrs. Lord came out and thanked me and handed me a decent tip, and said I’d earned it. Now immediately it occurred to me that this was perhaps some kind of test and politely refused it saying that I was already paid for the work that I did and surely this was just part of that work. If I took it would Bob Lord reprimand me perhaps?  But no: Mrs. Lord insisted I took it and told me her husband had watched me working hard and wanted me to have it.

What better view of a promotion season could anyone have than from a bench by the players’ tunnel, seeing them run out before the start of a game, and then triumphantly walk back in after a winning game all smiles and joy? Such was the privilege afforded to Roy as a result of his job. There he was, up close and personal, seeing the elation of victory, the sweat of effort, the pride of brilliant performances, as well as the occasional dejection of the rare defeats.

Roy could remember a number of things. The local paper, The Burnley Express, provided a half term report on the season that was glowing in its praise. After 20 games they had only lost once. The whole town was on a high as the wins piled up. People had a smile on their faces and there was always the old story that after a win on a Saturday, production in the factories went up on a Monday morning. His old pals working at Scott’s Park had stopped grumbling and worrying. Outsiders were asking how Burnley still managed to produce such talent; Gawthorpe was a name constantly written about in the Press.

As for the players Roy could see the camaraderie, the closeness and how they enjoyed each other’s company. Fletcher and Waldron continued to be the jokers sparing no-one, be it the physio Jimmy Holland, the commercial guy Jack Butterfield or Roy himself. All of them had to watch out for the dreaded bucket of water placed over a half-open door. Equipment was frequently hidden.

Local reporter Peter Higgs wrote of the faith the players had in each other, the confidence that came with the wins, and the sheer class of the team. It was a strong and consistent team with players that had got better and better as the season progressed despite the surprise home defeat to Leyton Orient.

There was a worry that at Christmas it could all go pear-shaped with two tough away games, the first at Blackpool ironically now managed by Harry Potts and then away at Villa. Both were wins and if there was one win all season that announced that Burnley were the real deal it was the 3-0 away win at Villa. At Turf Moor Burnley had won 4-1 but after the away win the newspaper headline simply asked, Who Can Stop Burnley Now?

The Press reported that the game at Villa Park was promotion rival Villa’s big chance to catch up on Burnley, but then described that all they could hope for was to hang on to Burnley’s coat-tails, an all-conquering side that had now notched up five wins on the trot. It was a defining game with Burnley smooth yet powerful, bristling with enthusiasm and team spirit. There were crisp moves, slick skills, powerful defending and a competitive attitude to every 50:50 ball that carried all before it. And, as the last line of defence, there was goalkeeper Alan Stevenson who showed his sheer class when Villa had an occasional shot.

But Roy was like Adamson and remembered that not much more than 10 years earlier Burnley had amassed a big lead at the top of the table by April of ’62 and were clear favourites to win the title. He had been there and seen many of the games that season at the end of which they also lost a Cup Final against Spurs.  Inexplicably they let the lead dwindle; they had games in hand and wasted them. Roy and thousands of supporters could only watch in disbelief as Ipswich had pipped them to the title. Adamson preached caution. Roy agreed.

Roy now saw his job as simply to help produce the best possible surface to help the team and its brilliant passing game; a surface that was acknowledged as one of the better ones in the division. The daily chores continued, spiking, rolling, mowing, replacing divots, repairing slide marks and gouges, and worrying; worrying about rain, worrying about snow and frozen surfaces; worrying when it was a particularly fussy referee that was due.  And not just worrying; by the end of ’73 irritation was in its very earliest stages, irritations caused by one or two directors who began to think they could tell him to do this and mend that, or fix this and paint that in other parts of the ground. It wasn’t a huge concern at first; it was in its embryonic stage but would certainly develop further over the coming months. His workload had increased when Jeff Haley one of the groundsmen he worked with suddenly left.

Promotion was clinched in a Monday evening home game when Burnley beat Sunderland 2-0 with both goals from Paul Fletcher.  ‘There were some marvellous and astonishing scenes that night,’ said Roy.

‘Bob Lord strutted around Turf Moor like he was the king of the castle. He made sure he told as many people as possible that he had always had faith in Adamson and the team,’ Roy went on. ‘And he had every right to do. He smiled and beamed and puffed his chest out and right from then until the end of the season he was just so proud. He was proud of everyone from the players, to the groundstaff right down to the laundry ladies.

‘He’d been on the board at Burnley for 21 years and he said this is the best present I could have had. On one occasion when he came into my room to see what was going on we just got to talking and told me the story that when he first got on the board the rest of them had said, “there is nowt we can do, we’ll just have to put up with him.” ‘

‘“Some people hate me,’ Bob Lord once said to me. “I tread on people’s corns,” ’

‘But you’ll never hear me saying anything like that about him. I’ll say it again. He was good to me.’

Burnley faced Liverpool in the FA Cup in ‘72/73. Roy’s loyalties were tested since he still felt an allegiance to the city where he had been born. It was a game he was looking forward to and went round the ground singing Liverpool songs that he knew.

‘Er Roy,’ said Jimmy Adamson one day with the slightest of grins when he heard him in one of the corridors singing away about Liverpool, ‘er I don’t think we want you singing those songs.’

Burnley drew the first game 0-0 but lost the replay 3-0 at Anfield.

In the League, Burnley kept going but couldn’t shake QPR off who maintained their dogged pursuit right until the final game when Burnley needed just one point away at Preston North End to win the Division Two title. Saturday, April 28, was sunny and warm, a fitting day on which to celebrate a championship. It was the day Manchester United gave Denis Law a free transfer and Bobby Charlton played his last game at Chelsea.

Burnley still needed a point from the Preston game to secure the Championship and for added spice Preston needed a point to escape relegation. As it turned out no-one was disappointed and there have always been allegations that the game whilst not quite fixed ended with a result that had everyone happy and there were moments when anyone watching could have genuinely wondered did either side really want to win the game.

Preston took the lead when Alex Bruce shot past goalkeeper Stevenson. Burnley had most of the possession passing the ball around content with the 0-0 scoreline but then Bruce forgot the script and scored for Preston. Nobody needed to worry, however, since Colin Waldron, an unlikely centre-half scorer, let fly from 25 yards and equalised 10 minutes after half-time. From that point on it was quite clear that neither side was the slightest bit interested in scoring again and the game was played out at a snail’s pace with players timidly passing the ball around in midfield for long spells. At times it was quite embarrassing with players sometimes just standing still with the ball whilst opposition players simply stood and let them, none more obvious than when Leighton James dallied by the corner flag in the final minutes with a posse of Preston players simply letting him stand with his foot on the ball. Then, it was as if the referee simply got bored of waiting for something to happen and blew the final whistle. What might also have swayed him to ignore any possible extra time were the hordes of Burnley fans along the touchlines just waiting to rush on.

‘Fix’ is certainly too strong a word; it was a boiling hot day and with half an hour to go both teams had what they needed. Perhaps we could simply say that at that point, the players quietly decided to take it easy for the rest of the afternoon but Jimmy Adamson afterwards emphatically denied that the result was pre-determined.

‘The celebrations took place four days later in a testimonial for that great full-back John Angus,’ Roy reminisced. ‘More people turned up for that game than the average for all the others. It was a real party mood with The Old Stars team playing The Young Clarets, and then the title winners took on The Millionaires, a team of players most of whom had once been at Burnley but had been sold. Willie Irvine turned up as well. He was at Halifax at the time but defied his manager’s orders not to play. Jimmy Adamson was named manager-of-the-year. Only a few months earlier in the previous season fans had been booing and jeering him. Sometimes it’s just a real pleasure and a privilege to prepare the pitch even with all the work it involves. This was one of those games.’

Bob Lord was known for his lavish dinners that he put on regularly for players, staff and special guests. The Imperial Hotel in Blackpool was his favourite location and once again he selected it to celebrate winning promotion back to the First Division.

He certainly know how lay on ‘a good do,’ said Roy. ‘He did everything with style and class at these events, from the stylish invitations sent to us all, the immaculate arrangements, the travel that was organised for you if needed, to the beautifully produced glossy 8-page programme for the evening with the claret tassel.

‘I still have mine today, Roy said.  ‘The picture of Bob Lord and Jimmy Adamson holding the trophy is the first thing you see when you open it. The menu is on the first of the centre pages. Looking at it brings back such memories, the strongest of which is being there with my wife, who sadly passed away some time ago. I miss her still. I can see us at our table marvelling at the splendour of the evening and the wonderful food. Melon with Port, Scottish Smoked Salmon with lemon, Potee Bourguignonne, Grilled Fillet of Plaice, Lemon Sorbet, and still the main course was still to come. Roast Ribs of English Beef and Yorkshire Pudding with mountains of vegetables and all finished off with ice cream, fruit salad and double cream.

‘There were grand speeches and toasts and Bob Lord in his tuxedo, by then the Vice-President of the Football League, was in his element holding centre stage telling us that we were just a little village team but had won the prize. Burnley were back where they belonged he said. Then there was dancing and cabaret and believe it or not even after all that food we could have a breakfast of bacon and eggs in the Dining Room.

‘I can close my eyes,’ Roy went on, ‘and can still see us there.’

The two local newspapers, The Burnley Express and the Evening Star, both produced commemorative supplements to mark the promotion and return to Division One. The players, the chairman, the manager and his staff, the Commercial Manager Jack Butterfield, the physio Jimmy Holland, the trainer George Bray, everybody received an honourable mention, and just for once, the groundstaff members.

The role of the groundsman is to work hard and prepare the stage for the artists and the entertainers, whilst they themselves remain in the background, largely unknown, almost anonymous. Their minute in the spotlight was just one small paragraph tucked away at the bottom of a page. Such is the lot of the groundsman.

The 1970s: Hot Pants and Top of the Pops, Maxi Skirts, the Osmonds and Bay City Rollers, the Sex Pistols, Space Hoppers, Chopper Bikes, decimalisation, the first woman PM Margaret Thatcher, Bovver Boots and Bovver Boys, platform shoes, Pans people, Lulu and Maurice Gibb, Skinheads, Triumph Stags and Concorde.

The Parkinson Show, Jackson 5, Band on the Run, playboy George Best, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, striking miners and Saltley Colliery, Hippies and Rock festivals, Ronnie Wood joins the Stones, Mastermind, Mick Jagger and Bianca, John Conteh and David Bedford, Simon Dee, Bob Stokoe and dancing at Wembley, Kevin Keegan and Alf Ramsey, Jackie Stewart, Donny Osmond, Mark Bolan and T Rex.

Princess Anne and Mark Philips, James Hunt, Elton John, David Cassidy, Ford Capris, Joe Bugner and Muhammed Ali, The Goodies and Tiswas, Labour and Harold Wilson, Chris Evert, Jimmy Connors, Nastase and Borg, Liverpool win the European Cup, Nottingham Forest win the European Cup, Punk and rebellious youth, striking firemen, test tube babies, The Sweeney, Seve Ballesteros.

Morecambe and Wise, Christmas Specials, Abba and Johnny Rotten, N Ireland troubles, Mountbatten murdered, Fawlty Towers, Coronation Street and Hilda Ogden, President Nixon, Watergate, Barbie Dolls, NASA space journeys, Hurricane Agnes, Vietnam war, Cod Wars, Uganda and Idi Amin.

1972 and how soon we forget the things that were happening then: Monty Python, Dad’s Army, The Benny Hill Show, Sesame Street, The Brady Bunch, Hawaii Five-0, The Godfather, Fiddler on the Roof, Diamonds Are Forever, Dirty Harry and A Clockwork Orange; The Eagles, Supertramp and Led Zeppelin.

It was possibly the worst ever year in the story of the conflict in Northern Ireland. A total of 467 people including 103 British soldiers lost their lives. The year had opened with ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Derry when 13 civilians were shot dead and the repercussions were huge especially as it happened in full view of the media. July 21 became known as Bloody Friday when 19 bombs exploded in Belfast killing nine and injuring 130. Little by little the British regained control and by the end of this horrendous year the violence had been halved.

1972 and Britain entered Europe. The six became ten when the UK was one of four more countries to sign up to the Treaty of Brussels although one of them, Norway, almost immediately, opted out. Many people in Britain believed that they too like the Norwegians should have had a referendum to vote on membership. Joining the EU was a triumph for Prime Minister Edward Heath who had advocated membership since 1963. A referendum in 1975 confirmed membership following a lavishly funded pro-membership campaign. Since then the EU has grown and grown, has assumed huge powers, hugely altered our daily lives, bombarded us with rules and regulations, and has cost the UK billions.

Space travel continued. The heroic age of the 1960’s was over and there was now cooperation between the two space superpowers. The last moon landing took place in 1972 and from then on the Soviets and the US turned their attention to investigating the solar system with unmanned but more cost-effective missions. NASA launched Pioneer 10 an unmanned mission to Jupiter.

The 1972 Olympics saw terror and mayhem when masked Palestinian gunmen entered the building where the Israeli team were staying. Two Israelis were killed immediately in the struggle and nine others were taken hostage. The rescue plan was an unmitigated disaster when it was agreed that the gunmen and hostages would be taken to a military airport to be flown out of the country. The plan was that marksmen would kill the Palestinians as they boarded the ‘plane. Only three were killed, however, and the rest engaged in a gunfight during which a grenade was lobbed into the helicopter where the Israelis hostages were trussed up. All of them were killed whilst two more terrorists were killed and three were captured. All of this totally overshadowed the Games and the winners that included Mark Spitz and his seven gold medals in the swimming, Britain’s Mary Peters and her gold in the Pentathlon, and Olga Korbut the winner of three gymnastic golds.

In the USA the World Trade Centre was opened in New York; The Waltons and M*A*S*H made their debut on US television. Five intruders were arrested in the Democratic Party HQ in Washington and this became the beginning of the Watergate Scandal and the eventual resignation of President Nixon.

The appalling Vietnam War continued. US B52s bombed Hanoi and North Vietnamese planes bombed US ships. The US then blockaded North Vietnamese ports. A final attempt by the North Vietnamese to invade South Vietnam was repulsed and the North Vietnamese proposed peace talks and a cease-fire. By August the last US combat troops had left Vietnam and President Nixon finally agreed to the end of the Vietnam War so that a peace agreement was signed in Paris in January 1973.

In the UK there were over 1,000,000 unemployed.

The beginning of the year saw the miners on strike. As we were writing this book in December of 2015, the last deep mine colliery in the UK closed at Kellingley. Miners wept as the final shift ended and they reached the surface. You could argue that coal-mining as an industry began its final path to disappearance when the miners triumphed against Edward Heath in 1972 and Margaret Thatcher probably decided then that should they ever take on the Government again, it would be the Government that would be the winners.

The belief has grown that it was Thatcher alone that destroyed the coal industry but pits had already been closing through the 50’s and early 60’s, over 300 pits closed between 1951 and 1964. The Labour Government closed more between ’64 and 1970 so it was never true that it was solely due to Margaret Thatcher. But what she probably did take heed of was the picketing of the Saltley Coke Depot that resulted in Heath’s surrender. Thatcher considered it a big mistake by Heath and was determined that she would not make any similar error and in so doing she hammered the final nails into the coffin of the industry.

It was a rock-solid strike that shook the un-prepared Tory Government and was instrumental in the defeat of the Tories in the ’74 general Election. It was a period of high inflation and miners’ pay was falling behind that of other workers so that the mood was militant amongst rank and file miners. They were asking for a £9 a week rise to add to the basic wage of £25 a week.

Prior to the strike there had been a two-month overtime ban but a near 60% yes-vote called for a full strike. The Yorkshire coalfield workers were the most militant and flying pickets became a big feature so that these were extended nationally when it became clear how effective they were. The movement of coal was stopped to already under-stocked power stations, and other trade unionists refused to cross the picket lines.  Heath considered using troops to undermine the pickets but realised that this would inflame workers everywhere and the initiative remained with the miners.

By mid-February the situation was critical and the BBC reported that homes and businesses could be without power for up to nine hours a day following warnings of coal shortages from the Central Electricity Generating Board.  By now the miners were in the sixth week of their strike and were picketing power stations as well as their own collieries. The shortage of electricity forced more and more businesses and factories to close; the Government had already imposed a three-day week and a Times report suggested that 1.2million workers had been laid off as a result. It was also reported that many gasworks were within a week of closing down.

On February 9 a state of emergency was declared and two days later a committee of enquiry was set up under Lord Wilberforce. On February 19 a deal was finally reached although the £95million package was less than the reported £120million the miners were claiming. The miners returned to work on February 25 with claims that they had won an overwhelming victory. It would be 1984 when the NUM was ultimately destroyed when strikes led by Arthur Scargill were crushed and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dominated proceedings.

Because it had closed the year before, Bank Hall Colliery where Roy had worked was unaffected by the strike; but he well remembers the events in Burnley, especially the 571 jobs lost at just this one pit. The men who worked at Bank Hall would see other pits closing and say, ‘It’ll not be long before we close too.’

The Hapton Colliery disaster was a number of years prior to this and it was a pit that Roy had been down as an apprentice miner. The impact on the town was enormous and Roy had made a conscious decision that this was not a pit he wanted to work in. Whereas Bank Hall was dry and dusty, Hapton was always wet and smelled with some miners claiming that it was because the water seeped from a cemetery somewhere above. As a trainee he had been down several mines and it was a time when you could choose the one you wanted to work in. It was a fortunate decision for the disaster killed 19 miners 750 feet below the surface where 170 men were working that day in 1962. It was never called Happy Valley again. The mine closed in 1982.

1972 and things at Turf Moor weren’t exactly rosy. Burnley had been relegated the season before Roy commenced work and there was discontent with both manager Jimmy Adamson and Bob Lord. Promises by Adamson that this would be the ‘Team of the Seventies’ had been hollow; Adamson had been mocked for this wild claim. On the strength of the big expectations, the club had demolished the old stand along Brunshaw Road in readiness for a new one. Burnley had been through a dreadful season and had been hugely criticised for the poor play. Adamson in particular bore the brunt of it, to such an extent that the players had written to the local paper to express their solidarity and support for the manager. There was no win until the fifteenth game of the season. Roy, during this period, was still working for the Council Parks and Gardens Department and the workforce there talked constantly of the plight that the club was in whilst it struggled to win one single game.

The local Press announced that this was a side and a season with relegation written all over it in ‘large, ugly, black letters.’ In 16 games they had scored just eight goals. Nevertheless with 15 games remaining they were only one point away from safety and there was still time to stage a comeback. But it was not to be and Roy who went to many of the games watched them floundering further so that with a defeat at Arsenal the relegation was confirmed.

‘I accept the whole blame,’ said Adamson but Bob Lord stood by him, adding that the sale of star player Ralph Coates at the end of the season had been one of the finest pieces of business ever conducted by the club. Supporters simply saw it as another nail in the coffin.

You could argue that injuries  (Martin Dobson had broken a leg), and the sale of crowd favourite Brian O Neil to Southampton were key factors in the relegation but Bob Lord had refused to ‘panic buy’ although with 12 games to go he did sanction the purchase of centre forward Paul Fletcher from Bolton Wanderers. It made no difference. Roy, like so many others, watched the inexorable slide into the Second Division. The final relegation was a constant topic of conversation amongst his disgruntled workmates. Many of the staff there were passionate supporters and it was hard coming to terms with the club’s fall from the top table. It was difficult for all supporters, this was the club that had won the title in 1959/60, competed in the European Cup, reached Wembley, had almost won the title again in 1965/66 until the team faded at the end of the season. There had been a procession of wonderful players and when the Youth team won the FA Youth Cup in 1968 on a night of pouring rain and thick, glutinous mud, the future seemed assured when those supremely talented youngsters trooped off a sodden field at the end.

But reality decided otherwise and to add to the general gloom of relegation, at the end of the season it was Tottenham that bought Ralph Coates in a cloak and dagger deal that would have made a wonderful ‘Carry On’ script. It was a defining moment. He was the talisman and everybody’s favourite player but the club was losing money. Gates had shrunk, but the wage bill (and Bob Lord paid well), had stayed the same. Burnley had been in the top flight for 24 seasons and now it was over.

By the time Roy joined the Burnley FC groundstaff there were still regular cries of ‘Adamson out.’ Nobody at the start of the season had assumed that Burnley would automatically return to the First Division. There had been a £27,000 loss over the relegation season. The plan for a new entertainment centre was put on hold whilst a new incentivised wage structure swallowed up all available finance.

Behind the scenes Roy learned his new trade from John Jameson with one side of the ground where the old stand had been screened off by the huge wooden boards. Few people knew that a structural report had condemned this stand and according to his daughter Barbara, Bob Lord had spent sleepless nights worrying about the state of the twisted iron girders and supports. Accusations that the new stand when it was eventually built was simply a vanity project were far from the truth.

John Jameson had no car and travelled into work on the bus every day from Accrington for as long he worked at Turf Moor and Roy can still clearly remember the first words he ever said to him on his first day:

‘If you’ve got any college books you can throw ‘em away. He then pointed to the sky and said that’s what decides everything and it’s been perfectly true ever since. No college book prepares you for when two hours before kick-off it pours down relentlessly, the ref has just arrived and the fans are on their way. What did I do? I just prayed a lot.’

‘John’s simple philosophy was, “keep it porous, the ground needs to breathe.”’

‘Once I knew what I was doing John tended to work at Gawthorpe until he retired and I looked after the Turf Moor pitch. A guy I spoke to a lot was Arthur Riley, the groundsman at Anfield. I’d never met him, but because I’d originated from Liverpool I still had feelings for the city so I just thought I’d ring him up one day to talk. He was the third generation to be groundsman there and his heart and soul was in the place. We spoke regularly for years and yet I never ever got to meet him face to face. He was a typical, droll, funny Scouser and worshipped Bill Shankly. When Shankly arrived at the club he had vowed to give Arthur all the help he needed because he realised that a good football team needed a good football pitch. Arthur told me that he well remembered walking out onto the pitch with him when Shankly arrived at Liverpool and Shankly had said to him that no-one could play football on a pitch that looked like a ploughed field.

‘It was Arthur who told me all about Central Park in New York where the grass got such a hammering from constant use from people playing all kinds of sports 12 months of the year. Arthur had heard about this and that the tough grass they had withstood constant use in all weathers. So, someone brought him some of the grass seed back and they called it Manhattan Seed. Whether it was actually called Manhattan Seed I don’t know but that’s what Arthur labelled it.  But the problem with it was it was always such a poor colour. Now if there’s one thing chairmen want, especially Bob Lord, it’s a bright green pitch so Arthur experimented at the Liverpool training ground and mixed Manhattan Seed with the regular seed he got from Fissons. And what it produced, he told me, was a good, tough, hard wearing playing surface with a nice colour.

‘Well, he told me all about this and I decided it sounded just the job for me as well. At that time the director in charge of the ground was quite good with me so I explained all this to him and he said he would bring it up at the next Board meeting. The answer came from Bob Lord:

‘“Tell ‘im it’s too expensive, we can’t afford it.” So that was the end of that.’’

On a matchday Roy watched from a bench that was positioned just to the left of the players’ tunnel. He sat with Jeff Haley and the club electrician, Fred Shaw.  He was within easy reach for any referee who needed a net mending or a penalty spot re-marking. If it was the latter he always carried tape to get the distance right and a bucket of lime until it was banned. That in fact posed a problem if he now had to use white marker on wet mud it either disappeared in the rain again or spread to make a white spot that was far too big. Eventually a plasticised paint was used that could be used on wet ground and the rain just ran off it.

There was one occasion when the game was played on snow and Roy used blue paint to mark out the pitch.

‘George Courtney was referee and we had to hand-paint all the lines literally on our hands and knees because we couldn’t use the line markers with it. We went out on the morning of the game and bought blue emulsion paint from a shop in town. It was a slow, painstaking job mostly done by the apprentices, following the faint outline of the old white lines that we uncovered beneath the thin layer of rolled snow. Courtney went out to test the pitch rolling and bouncing the ball and then had a few of the apprentices don their boots and show him they could pass, run, twist and turn safely.’

Ice was always a problem and Roy remembers it was the manager of Birmingham City who came one day and asked him to his disbelief would it melt the snow quicker if the floodlights were switched on early and help thaw the hard surface.

It was Harry Potts, when Roy came back for his second spell at the club that organised a line of apprentices to ferry buckets of hot water out onto the frozen side of the pitch, then to lob it on the ground in an attempt to thaw things out. Harry then realised that this was clearly not the best thing to do as it immediately froze on impact.

One thing that makes him laugh to this day was when he suspects it was the Everton fans that smuggled a little dog into the ground and let it loose on the pitch whereupon it chased the footballs in the goalmouth during the warm-up and in so doing chewed through a small section of the netting.

At reserve games with fewer support staff present one of his jobs was to help with the stretcher if there was any serious injury and when the occasion arose that centre-half Vince Overson went down at the far end of the ground the stretcher was needed, or so Roy thought. Puffing away on a Woodbine cigarette still in his mouth he sprinted the whole length of the field carrying the stretcher and arrived puffing and panting and wheezing. By the time he got there he was fully aware of how unfit he was and that running whilst gasping on a fag is not the most sensible thing to do. When Overson then got up and pronounced himself OK – ‘God did I curse him,’ said Roy.

In his little room come office, Roy entertained most of the referees that came with a brew. Jack Taylor, George Courtney and Keith Hackett were three of the bigger names that he met. There was a story at the time that Taylor always liked a little nip of whisky with his officials before a game and would then take the bottle home that had been left for him by Bob Lord. But Roy had no recollection of the bottle being removed before full-time one game because Taylor had not best pleased Lord with some of his decisions. A similar story concerned a basket of meat that was left for one referee, but was then removed by half-time because the referee in question had been having such a poor game.

There were two rooms in fact, one for tools and equipment and machinery at the end of the stand, and then the little ‘rest’ room deeper inside the stand near the laundry. There were just four plastered walls without windows, but Roy eventually covered them with player pictures, mostly of Liverpool players, John Barnes a great favourite of his, Kevin Keegan and Mark Lawrenson but none of Burnley. It was hardly luxurious with a lino covered floor that was grimy and muddy from years of being trampled on by players in boots. A table and three chairs were the only furniture. On the table there were packets of tea, the teapot, mugs, and sugar and on a good day, biscuits.

Back then in the early 70s the big day was FA Cup draw day and if any players were at the ground they would troop in and listen to the draw on the radio with him crowding round the wooden table. A whole group came in one January, Paul Fletcher, Frank Casper, Alan Stevenson and a host of others. Fletcher, always the joker, the extrovert, pulled one of Roy’s hats off the peg, stuck it on his head, walked off with it, and Roy has never seen it since.

‘Standing round that table with them waiting for the draw was always special. There was something magical about the Cup back then. Now it’s just not the same with games spread over the whole weekend and managers playing weakened teams like Liverpool playing a team of kids at Exeter. The draw is on The One Show at 7 o’ clock on Monday night. It’s just not the same and I think back to when we squeezed into that little room full of excitement and anticipation. They were different times.’

There was a constant procession of people in and out of that little room coming in for a warm and a brew, although the warmest room in fact was the laundry so they would often make a brew and then go into the laundry to drink it with laundry lady Violet Thompson. Anybody looking for somebody would inevitably head for Roy’s room assuming that Roy would know where they were. Bob Lord wandered in every now and then, but never had a brew.

It was Denis Law who joined Roy one Saturday after the game in the brew-room when he was working for Granada TV.  It was an occasion when Roy was featured on the TV slot the next day because it was one of the few games that had escaped the weather and so was a featured game. He had a mike fixed to his jacket, an earpiece in his ear, a battery round his waist and he had to talk into the mike as he came down the tunnel to describe how he had got the game on. From somewhere in the stands Elton Welsby asked him the questions.

Law approached him after the game: ‘Are we having a brew then?’ he asked in his rich Scottish accent. The tea made, Law took out a little flask of brandy from his pocket and offered a nip to Roy. ‘Ey no I’m working,’ said Roy and thanked him very much.

Afterwards someone slipped him £15 into his pocket. ‘Hey very nice,’ he said,’ I could do with that every week.’ A week later a cheque for £15 arrived from Granada TV.

Having arrived in October ’72 from his place on the bench by the tunnel, Roy never heard the cries of ‘Adamson out, Adamson out,’ ringing round the ground especially after Burnley lost to Hull City at Turf Moor. But he did recall the abusive treatment dished out to a young full back, Harry Wilson and Jimmy Adamson’s angry reaction. The Turf Moor crowd could be unforgiving, said Roy and goalkeeper Peter Mellor was sold to Fulham with Adamson saying that this was because the crowd were so critical of him.

With Bob Lord continuing to support Adamson publicly during the relegation season there was certainly no chance that large swathes of supporters would get their wish and see him dismissed.  Adamson persevered and at last there were signs at the end of the season that he might have a succeeded in developing a team that could go on to better things. The final six games of the season were all wins but these were tempered by the news that Steve Kindon was the next to be sold. He was a huge favourite with ex-manager Harry Potts and the Burnley crowd. But Potts had been shunted ‘upstairs’ to a position that was hazy and almost inconsequential in order to clear the way for Adamson. He had no influence whatsoever and was now marginalised by Jimmy Adamson who even asked him not to visit Gawthorpe, the training ground.

Potts departed to take up the managerial job at Blackpool just before Roy took up his new post but Roy knew of the position that Potts had been placed in and found it hard to comprehend. Here was the man who had done so much for the club and now no-one mentioned his name. In his final few months at Turf Moor Potts led a thoroughly lonely and dejected existence without any clear role and with few if any people that he now felt comfortable with, or could even trust. In Roy he would have found a sympathetic friend with whom he could have talked.

They had in fact already met but this had been many, many years earlier when Roy was just a boy at Rose Grove School and in those days there were regular nit inspections when the school nurse would come in and look at everyone’s hair. At Rose Grove the boys called her Nitty Nora and this was none other than Nurse Margaret Hollinrake who at that time was courting with Burnley’s golden-haired, favourite player, Harry Potts. They would marry in 1948 and she would become Mrs Margaret Potts. To their astonishment Harry Potts was actually with her in the school waiting for her to finish so just about every boy was quite awe-struck, so much so that those that were football mad, including Roy, when they had been seen by Margaret went to the back of the queue to be seen a second time so they could have a better look at their idol, Harry.

‘Once we knew she was Harry Potts’s girlfriend we treated her with new respect and never again called her, Nitty Nora the bug explorer,’ Roy recalled.

Roy remembers Steve Kindon fondly.  Kindon was big, brave and bullish with just one thought in mind whenever he had the ball; punt it and chase, using his bulk and speed to brush aside any defender. For a big man he was extraordinarily fast with terrific acceleration and for any defender or goalkeeper facing him, the sight of this huge man approaching at pace could be quite nerve-wracking. Harry Potts had a simple tactic to make best use of him while he was still manager. Along the perimeter of the ground were various advertising boards one of them for a local building society.

‘Aim for the ‘B’ in Building Society with the ball,’ he would tell other players so it could be met by Kindon steaming down the wing at full speed and then taking the ball in his stride. Or at least that was the theory. Centre-half Colin Waldron, no great admirer of Potts, remembers making huge fun of this crude tactical advice, yet in essence it was brilliantly simple.

Ask Roy how many top players and managers and referees came in to his little room over the ensuing years for a mug of tea during the time he was at Burnley and he will say he has no idea there were so many. But what he will say is that this was a time when Burnley was a family club and Roy is just one of those people who are welcoming, friendly and approachable with a rich Burnley accent that exudes warmth. The players were always in and out, you could talk to them any time back in those simpler times. His room was one of those open places to which people seem to gravitate.

‘Happy days,’ he said with a gentle smile on his face as we sat and chatted in the front-room of his cosy bungalow with the rain outside hammering on the window, ‘And just so nice to be able to talk about them all.’

 

Groundsman Roy finds his diary.

It was on the second visit I made that Roy Oldfield remembered that somewhere in the house he still had his old diary of the years he was at Turf Moor.

‘I don’t know quite where it is,’ he said, ‘but it’s here somewhere. I’ll find it for the next visit.’

I was optimistic; he doesn’t live in a huge, rambling mansion, just a small cosy bungalow where I imagined it would be really difficult to lose anything. And he did find it and telephoned with the news because he was so pleased.

‘But you might find it boring Dave,’ he said. ‘It’s just page after page of a lot of the same kind of things that I did each day.’

But no: once Roy had passed it over to me and I had it at home, I flicked through the pages, initially just a quick appraisal. Much of it was the weather, the conditions, the jobs he’d done each day but on closer inspection every now and then there’d be an entry such as ‘Chairman Resigns.’ I stopped at that. Just two words but they conveyed something far greater. This was Chairman Bob Lord in 1981, possibly the greatest figure in the club’s history. The results of Lord’s work still permeate the bricks and mortar of the club, a stand is still named after him, the Gawthorpe training area is one of his legacies. Those who admired him still speak of him with awe; those that he upset speak badly of him of course.

Old brown covers, worn and creased, it was a 1976 page-a-day diary with daily entries, jottings and notes from July 1977 up until the summer of 1989. Each page had at least a dozen entries. 12 years of Roy’s life are in those stained, yellowing and worn pages.

And angst: times were hard at the club in the mid to late 80s and more and more work was piled on his shoulders. From one or two directors interference was frequent and some of them were low on personal skills and courtesy. Roy was the one with whom they could be condescending, patronising, bossy and sometimes just downright rude. One in particular viewed him and spoke to him as ‘the hired hand’ that could be treated with disrespect, rather than as a highly skilled, knowledgeable specialist.

I love diaries; they are not just a record of what a person does, but from the way it is written you learn about a person. When I wrote the Jimmy Adamson book I had access to three of the notebooks that he kept. They helped to show the pressure he was under and revealed his innermost thoughts, frustrations and anxiety. Roy’s diaries reveal an organised man, fastidious, and determined to fight his corner when directors interfered. A sense of injustice emerges when he learns that Secretary Albert Maddox receives petrol allowances and his car tax is paid. Roy who uses his car to go backwards and forwards between Turf Moor and Gawthorpe receives nothing. He has to drive to Bury one day to collect something, for example, at his own expense. There are times when he cannot get the parts he needs for machine maintenance sanctioned at office level. He is appalled to be asked to sweep Brunshaw Road outside the ground.

On the very first page there is an insight into the simple, basic requirements when he lists his needs for 1979: two hand forks, two metal rakes, one marking machine, new sprinklers, topsoil and sand, 16 tons of top dressing, and one 5cwt truck. He needed 4 cwt of grass seed, 12cwt of spring and summer granular fertiliser, and 12cwt of autumn and winter mini-crumb fertiliser. What strikes you is just how basic it is.

When he returned to the club in 1977 the first diary entry, like all the rest, is brief and neatly written in capital letters. The second entry states that this is his official start day. It was overcast and showery; he cuts the pitch ready for application of fertiliser. It is typical of so many of the entries some with details such as using 7 bags of fertiliser at 56lbs per bag.

He had just the one petrol driven mower, a manual roller, and a spiking machine. With a pitch measuring 115 x 73 yards it was almost a 5-mile walk to get the pitch cut with just the one machine. It would take him about 5 hours to complete. The light manual roller was used for levelling when the ground was soft. Roy says it wasn’t too heavy but whereas the apprentices were never allowed to mow the grass, Roy was happy to have them pulling the roller up and down the pitch. A heavy roller in fact would have compacted the soil too much and harmed the drainage. After rolling it was spiked with the Isis petrol powered spiking machine, a process that helped drainage and allowed air to get to the roots.

Fertilising took place three times a year; mid-April, late spring and then summer.

‘After ten days or so you could see the colour change and turn a better green,’ said Roy. ‘And at the end of September I’d give it a root feed to act as a tonic to help the grass get through the winter. It was Bob Lord especially who loved to see the rich, green colour; he really appreciated it and it gave him real pleasure. He was just so proud of the club and wanted to see it at its best. Club image was his priority so that he could stick his chest out and say we’re just as good as anybody else.

‘I can still remember,’ continued Roy,’ he’d come out and look over the pitch and then go back into the boardroom for a brandy well pleased at what he’d seen.’

‘Come November, the first bare patches were appearing in the centre of the pitch and the goalmouths. When the rains came that was where the mud appeared. There was nothing you could do, not all the grass seed or fertiliser in the world was any good, nothing germinates after October. All you could do was level it, adding a bit of topsoil and sand, then roll it ready for the next game. We added very fine sea-washed sand that was more like a powder. The sand would drizzle into the holes made by the spiking and forking and aid drainage. ’

Working on a Christmas day was nothing unusual and this he did every year if there was a home game on Boxing Day. ‘I’d go in for a couple of hours in the morning and check everything was OK. The players would be in there too for a light training session usually just jogging round the perimeter. It was my job to fill the bath for when they’d finished. Jimmy Holland the physio was there as well and he always gave me the bath salts to add. It was a joke with everybody that he guarded the bath salts so zealously and almost counted the spoonfuls. While the players bathed he and I would have a brew and a natter. Then it was my job to lock up but in truth anybody could get in if they really wanted.

Alas by 1977 when Roy arrived for his second spell at the club, it was in real decline and proud as old Bob might still have been, the good years were well and truly over. By the time of his death in 1981 it might well have been that his brandy bottle had been emptied several times as he contemplated the wreckage of this once great club that was now in financial disarray.

‘But Bob Lord was so good,’ said Roy. ‘I’d been having trouble with people going from one part of the ground to the other, using the corner of the pitch as a short cut so they didn’t have to walk all the way round the perimeter.  Walk across a bit of grass 30 or 40 times and it begins to make a visible track. It used to really annoy me but anything I said to them was just ignored. But Bob Lord stopped it when he learned about it. He had a sign made KEEP OFF THE GRASS and added his own name at the bottom.’

Roy laughed. ‘That stopped ‘em,’ he said. ‘Bob was good like that. If he noticed something, or anything was brought to his attention he acted on it. There was a later time when I was asked to put barbed wire around the floodlight pylons about ten feet up, to stop young kids climbing up.  Security was poor and anybody could get into the ground. So I was asked to put this barbed wire up and I got someone in to do it. Before the next game it had to come down. Health and Safety had done a ground inspection, seen the barbed wire and immediately said that we couldn’t put it up, said it’ll have to come down, it’s a safety hazard. Now there’s the difference; Bob Lord would have known that.’

‘The apprentices were essential at the club helping with maintenance and pitch duties. Today I don’t think they go anywhere near; if they’re not training, they’re at college. In my day they reported to me at 2 o clock every day after their morning training and lunch. Today, there’s a dining room for them at Gawthorpe. Back then they either brought their own sandwiches and they came in and sat with me and had a brew in my little room, or they’d go to the chip shop, or manage to get into town to a coffee shop. Before lunch some of them would have collected all the training kit at Gawthorpe and brought it to the Turf to the laundry. Back with me at 2 they’d be given their jobs for the afternoon. There’d usually be at least a dozen of them and basically there were two jobs they had to do. They had to clean out all the latrines and toilets and this they hated, or they could sweep the terraces. The latter was the one they preferred but only because they had the chance to find any money that had been dropped and there was always quite a bit. The chance of finding money meant they’d do a proper job as well.

‘It was always my job to check up on what they’d done especially the toilets and what used to happen in there was that pickpockets would often leave the empty wallets they’d stolen up in the cistern. I used to find a lot of wallets and hand them in to the office.

‘Some of them grumbled of course and said, “I’m here to play football not be a cleaner,” and I’d just reply well go and tell the manager. But they were never really any bother. Over the years I met no end of them and some of them still keep in touch and send cards.

‘The one I remember best was a lad called Phil Cavener, a lovely lad and a real likeable rogue. He and a lad called David Tait lodged with us so I got to know them well. There was a 10 o clock curfew but as often as not they were late in. I was always telling them if the manager calls or phones to check up on things I can’t cover for you, I’d have to tell him you’re not in. It’s what the managers used to do, check up on if the apprentices were back in their lodgings on time. But they never got caught out.

‘Phil was a lightweight winger, very fast and skilful, played something around 60 games, although he never really made the bigtime. Having said that he wasn’t at the club at the best of times; it was a relegation season when he played his first game in ‘79/80 but I’ll not forget the 2 goals he scored in only his second game in a 3-2 win. He was good enough to have once nutmegged Mick McCarthy a frightening centre-half and now manager at Ipswich. The gist of what McCarthy said to Phil was basically don’t ever do that again but of course his language and terrifying manner meant that Phil never went anywhere near him again that day.

‘Phil and another lad called Kevin Young were inseparable and real jokers. They’d had the job of terrace-sweeping one afternoon and as I went round to check up on all the different jobs the lads were doing I found a bag of rubbish, brushes and a shovel just abandoned by one of the barriers and I thought straightaway it belonged to them. Phil and Kev were nowhere to be seen. Unknown to me they’d climbed halfway up one of the floodlights to sit and watch all the other lads doing their jobs and to have a good laugh at me looking for them.  I looked all over for them but never thought to look upwards. I was always instructed by any manager to report any lads that were troublesome but this was one time I was laughing so much myself that I said nothing.

‘Without those apprentices through the years half the ground work would never have been done and when they had a chance to actually work on the pitch and the grass they were always much happier. They’d do the labouring and the manual work, fetching, carrying, rolling, forking, replacing divots and I’d never miss a chance to have them, not me, pulling the roller up and down. They’d use the wooden rakes on the pitch that weren’t as rough as the metal ones. They’d fork the areas that were waterlogged.

‘But they never used the mower or the Flymo that I used for the perimeters, except one day a lad called Mickey Wardrobe.  Mickey was exceptionally sensible unlike many of the others and one day begged me to let him use the Flymo round the edges. Thinking what a good lad he was I agreed even though the lads weren’t supposed to touch anything like this. All went well until he stopped and I went to look. The blade had hit one of his trainers and nearly sliced it in two. Luckily his foot was undamaged but had he been injured both of us would have been in serious trouble and for me it was maybe even a sacking offence. Never again did I ever let any apprentice near any of the machinery.

‘One of the continuous jobs was filling and levelling and it was a mystery to me why one area of the pitch between the centre area and the Beehole end always needed filling. It was Harry Potts that explained why this slight depression in the pitch existed. It was the very slightest of subsidence, almost unnoticeable unless of course you were the groundsman working on the pitch day after day, caused by the old Beehole Mine tunnels way below and underneath it. It was certainly imperceptible to spectators.

‘I was grateful to those young apprentices over the years for making my job easier even though some of them did lead me a merry dance and most of them at one time or another would try to avoid any hard work. All these years later, I can still picture Phil and Kevin halfway up the floodlight pylon and laugh about it. But then, on the other hand, you’d get individuals who clearly took a pride in any task they did and always did a good job and never had to be chided or chased.

‘So once a year we had them round to the house near Christmas. They didn’t all come but many of them did and I think they saw in me and my wife Eva two friendly people they could relate to, almost surrogate parents if you like. Eva was just so lovely with them. We’d have a bit of supper, play cards or dominoes and chat and they’d open up to us and it was then that you could see how homesick some of them were. They’d talk about their homes, families and girlfriends; tell us the things they missed. Eva would butter them up and tell them how she sympathised with them for having to work with me especially when I had them pulling the roller up and down the pitch for half a day. She’d tell them not to let me over-work them. She’d tell me that they were only little lads and I shouldn’t be wearing them out. And of course they loved it.

‘Brian Laws was one who used to come round and we got to know quite well. He was a terrific player and went on to play for Brian Clough at Nottingham Forest; he eventually became a manager, including at Burnley for a short spell when Owen Coyle left and the club had to find a new manager in mid-season when they were in the Premiership. It just didn’t work out for him though.

‘As a young lad he was very quiet and unusually he was in digs on his own not far from us. All the others were either in twos and threes somewhere; some of the digs were not good at all. But Brian always seemed a bit of a loner and subdued whenever we met him. He’d sometimes come here just for a chat and a sandwich and the longer he was here the more he would visibly cheer up. Maybe it was just that we could offer a bit of homeliness just for an hour or two and it was clear they saw a sort of mum figure in Eva. She just understood how young they were and how far away from home.’

For years apprentices were an essential part of the ground staff. If Roy’s lads thought they had it bad they could have done with knowing that 20 years earlier star centre-forward Willie Irvine had to do just the same but worse. Back in his day the toilets were little better than farmyard middens and the apprentices had to get in there and shovel everything out. It was enough to make some of them ill.

Dave Thomas who became an England winger was an apprentice in the late 60’s and was at Burnley until the 1972/73 season when Roy was in his first stint at the club. ‘We had such fun,’ he remembers. ‘Put a load of lads together and let them loose and you’re bound to have a few laughs. Of course we tried to skive off a few times; there were always duckers and divers. And we were always playing pranks. We always changed for work somewhere down near the old laundry room and there was always the old classic trick of putting a bucket of water above a just-open door. If we were painting we’d have paint fights but on this particular day it was the bucket of water routine. It was carefully placed and then we waited for a result. Trouble is, it was the club’s commercial manager, Jack Butterfield, who walked by and came in. He was soaked from head to foot when the bucket landed on him and he just stood there with a bundle of mail in his hand all ruined. It was Mick Docherty who got the blame but the rest of us just killed ourselves laughing.

‘Then there was the day we nailed Keith Newton’s shoes to the floor under a wooden bench in the changing room at Gawthorpe. Keith wore drainpipe trousers and winkle-picker shoes and to this day no-one knows who nailed them down. It was a classic. Keith, lovely bloke, bent down to pull them from under the bench and they were stuck. They just wouldn’t budge because there were two great nails hammed into the toe-end.

‘Hey my shoes are stuck,’ he said. Then he saw the nails and went absolutely ballistic.

A player that Roy in his final couple of years came to know was Roger Eli, whom, suffice it to say, is a Burnley cult hero. Before his time at Burnley however, he was an apprentice at Leeds United. His sentiments probably echo those of any footballer who was once an apprentice years ago regardless of what club he was at. They all went through the same process.

‘As an apprentice, if there was any dirty job to do, we did it; unlike today where spending half the day at college is part of being a trainee. The old style apprentice is a thing of the past and at the bigger clubs today with their luxurious academies they are well and truly cosseted and wrapped in cotton wool. You won’t see them today painting the metal barriers on the terraces, sweeping the stands, cleaning out the toilets and mopping the dressing rooms. But we did these things proudly. It was the best job in the world.

‘Then there was the work on the pitch with the groundsman, weeding and forking, grass-cutting and more forking. Then there were the days when all we seemed to do was paint, paint and then paint some more. Even if it was just painting a wall I did it as best I could.

‘There was one time I was painting and I heard a well-known voice coming down the corridor. Hell, it was only Don Revie and he had come to wish manager Eddie Gray good luck for the weekend game. Both of them were coming down the corridor towards me; I was kind of mesmerised and suddenly my foot slipped. Off the ladder I came but somehow even though I ended up on the floor the tin was still in my hand and unspilt.   I was in a heap and feeling thoroughly embarrassed and awkward but Don Revie just winked at me and gave me a grin. Have you any idea just how it felt to be given a wink and a smile by the legend that was Don Revie. Meanwhile, Eddie Gray looked at me as if I was just an idiot.

‘Six of us could well have got into big trouble one day when we jumped on the training ground tractor and took turns driving it round the field as fast as it would go. It was something we’d done before but this time we didn’t notice that the blades were still lowered and with six of us piled on it was cutting the grass shorter and shorter until a couple of patches were quite bald. At last someone saw what was happening and horrified we jumped off that tractor and legged it leaving it parked in the middle of the field.

‘If any of the lads did a job badly, then we all paid for it and a court case would follow. You learned not to let your mates down. A lad called Wayne Roebuck had cleaned the boots but there was still mud underneath so when this was discovered he was in real bother. In fact we all were. It was a day of snow and bitter cold with the running track round the pitch inches deep in snow. Wayne was the guilt one but we were all ordered to get onto the track for 30 minutes running. Our protestations that it was under 6 inches of snow were ignored and any thoughts of getting away with it, vanished. We weren’t even allowed to wear our tracksuits. It was only 30 minutes but we came off numbed with cold and legs and arms turning blue.

‘As a result we set up a court to put Wayne Roebuck on trial. This was how any apprentice was dealt with by his mates if he got us all into trouble. A judge was appointed and wore a towel over his head in mock seriousness. I was a member of the jury. Wayne protested his innocence claiming he didn’t know he had to clean under the boots as well.

‘Of course he was found guilty and was given a choice of two punishments. He could have his private bits covered in boot polish and Vaseline; or he could be stripped and hosed down with cold water. He chose the lesser of the two evils but it was no joke punishment; it was a high power hose and really hurt and if it was turned on full could easily slam you against a wall. After that those boots were always cleaned until they shone by anybody whose job it was.

These sorts of things went on at clubs and grounds everywhere and by far the majority of young lads with any airs and graces soon lost them and learned among their own apprentice pals that this was a team game and they were all in it together. Today, the ground jobs that youth players have to do at a club are few and far between but the players of yesterday have a common response to criticism of that old, frequently tough system that sometimes bordered on the cruel:

‘Well it never did me any harm.’

 

 

Let’s ‘ave a brew, tales from the groundstaff at Burnley Football Club

2 Bob Lord makes a brew

1972 and Roy Oldfield remembers it like it was yesterday when Burnley manager Jimmy Adamson walking in Scott’s Park asked him would he like to come up to the house to talk about doing some work. Roy was a gardener there much preferring the outdoors to the pit where he had once worked long, backbreaking hours.

Born in 1934, he left school when he was 15 in 1949 and in the last few months at school the lads due to leave visited various places to look at possible work on offer. One such place was Bank Hall Pit at a time when there were still plenty of job opportunities down the mines. He went with a group of lads like him all due to leave school and signed on at Bank Hall for a 16-week introductory period during which the lads could see if they fancied this work or not. Roy remembers it was the wages he fancied and being underground seemed like a big adventure. Half of the 16 weeks were spent underground and the other half on the surface. At the end of it he signed on quite happily.

The first task he was involved with was driving a tunnel through from Bank Hall to the pit at Towneley, a 2-mile stretch with the job being sub-contracted to Wimpey and it was to ease coal extraction from the Towneley end.

Back then there were something like 1200 men employed at Bank Hall but only a small number were directly involved at the actual coal face.  He was there for 16 years and eventually his chance came to earn more at the coal face and he was given the number 99. It was good money he remembers, actually earning more than the footballers at Turf Moor.

‘Bit different now,’ he says and cites the case of Lee Dixon who was an apprentice while Roy was at Turf Moor, and went on to Arsenal, England and TV fame.

‘When you are young you either don’t see or you ignore the dangers and for several years there was no thought or worry of pit closures. Those worries emerged later but whilst he was at the pit he married and bought a little two up and two down in Burnley and got himself an old car.

Eventually the stories of impending pit closures grew and working in a job when some weeks if he was on the nightshift he never saw daylight for days on end when he slept in the daytime, thoughts of finding other work began to grow. After 16 years he left and still at a time when it was possible to find other work quite easily he applied to Burnley Council for employment and was taken on by the Parks and Gardens department.

He laughs now. At the time he was taken on he knew absolutely nothing about gardening, didn’t know a peony from a pansy; didn’t know his ash from his elbow. But what a relief it was to have got away from pit work and he learned as he went along from men more experienced than himself and picked things up easily; so much so that his boss suggested to him that he should sit a few exams and gain a few qualifications and thereby increase his wage as well.

He learned more and more, took to the outdoor life, be it summer or winter when there would be maintenance work, repairs, path laying, clearing, fencing and painting. And all the time Jimmy Adamson was walking his dog round the park every day before he went to the club from his house just opposite Scott Park.

Gardening could be backbreaking too, but in glorious weather under the sun and blue skies there was no comparison with the stooped, dusty, choking and claustrophobic life underground, if a life is what it was. Down the mines he dug coal in the semi-dark. At Scott Park he dug flower beds in the fresh air, looked after the rose and shrub beds, trended the herbaceous borders and the lawns. It was the best swap he ever made. Roy Oldfield did a good job there and this was quietly noticed by the Burnley manager.

Scott Park was one of Burnley’s four flagship parks, the second biggest and had been gifted to the town by businessman Alderman John Hargreaves Scott who willed a sufficient sum of money to develop a park for the benefit of the people. When Burnley Corporation acquired the Hood House Estate it was decided that this would be the place where a park could be created that complied with Scott’s wishes. It opened in 1893 but the official opening was two years later when it was dedicated to the people of Burnley. And how they needed these green spaces as somewhere to find escape from the grimy back-to-back streets in which they lived and the endless, low-paid toil in factories and mines.

In 1972 things weren’t too good at Turf Moor and the team had been relegated to Division Two but as Jimmy Adamson walked his dog, a Scottish Terrier, in the park, Roy and the other gardeners would call out, not always good-naturedly, and chat away with Jimmy about the team and football in general.

‘We’d pull his leg about the results,’ remembered Roy. ‘When results weren’t too good, the banter could sometimes be a bit harsh but then as results improved the tone changed. But one morning Jimmy asked me could I come and see him about a little job.’

Burnley had been relegated at the end of season 1970/71 and Adamson was none too popular. Season 1971/72 was transitional but a run of several consecutive wins at the end of the season gave cause for hope; indeed the next season was one of triumph and celebration when Burnley got back to the top division.

Adamson said nothing about the precise nature of the work he wanted doing so that Roy simply assumed it would be some work in Jimmy’s garden, ‘a little job,’ Jimmy had said.  At 5 that day he downed his tools, cleaned up and set off for Jimmy’s house.

‘But what he said astonished me,’ said Roy. ‘How’d you like to work at Turf Moor as groundsman,’ he asked me.’ It was totally out of the blue, the last thing I expected to be asked.’

‘But I know nowt about being a groundsman,’ he answered almost lost for words and completely taken aback, whereupon Adamson assured him he’d learn all there was to know from the guy about to retire, John Jameson.

The next step was to meet Bob Lord for his approval and to sort out a wage.

‘Jimmy collected me in his big Ford Granada to go and meet Lord. Jimmy did his best to put me at ease but of course I was on edge at the prospect of meeting Lord and still in two minds about talking the job; Lord had a big reputation and at his meat factory had no hesitation sacking anyone who wasn’t up to scratch.  He was up in the boardroom sat behind a huge polished desk, probably worth a fortune today on Antique Roadshow, smartly dressed and I noticed the hearing aid in his ear, the one that he would take out if he didn’t want to listen to someone. The one question he asked me that I still remember to this day was:

‘Av you even bin in any trouble? And I hadn’t.’

‘I made it absolutely clear I had a lot of experience of working on the land, as I put it, but none whatsoever of being a football groundsman.’

Roy remembers thinking he was being crafty when he took his wage slips that included overtime spreading them on the desk and showing them to Bob Lord so that it looked like he was on a good wage that he wanted Lord to at least match. If he worked on Saturday he got time and a half; if he worked on Sundays he got double time.

‘I’d put the wage slips on the big table and it was only at the end of the interview that he gave them what looked like just a careless and cursory glance which left me thinking ey oop, he won’t have noticed that they include the overtime.’

He remembers Bob Lord’s words as he finally sat back in his resplendent pomp. ‘Right then we’ll give thee a do,’ he said, ‘ay then we’ll give thee a do.’

But old Bob was as shrewd as they come and had of course spotted that the wage slips included overtime and were more than just a basic wage. Lord called out to him as he left: ‘And by the way, I saw them wage slips included overtime.’

‘But we’ll see thee right,’ he added and matched the wage.

‘He missed nothing,’ Roy said, ‘and in all the time I knew him he never missed anything, always had his facts right.  In all the years I knew him he was good to me. If you worked hard, you had nothing to worry about and I worked hard. If you slacked then he was on to you.’

It was agreed he would start work as assistant groundsman learning the job from John Jameson and Roy repeated with huge amusement Bob Lord’s words that he’d called out to him ‘And by the way them wage slips as got overtime on ‘em – but we’ll see thee right,’ Roy repeated. He thought it was funny then, and still does.

And Bob Lord did see him right and Roy Oldfield has nothing but good memories of him – except for the mug of tea he once made him the first time he ever went to do some work at Lord’s house in Read.

‘He had this huge bungalow and two fiercesome Alsatians. The first time I went I was terrified. Most people were that met them but his daughter Barbara had them under control instantly so in I went. Bob showed me round, told me what he wanted doing and then asked, “Does thee want a brew? Ah’ll mek thee a brew.”

‘That’ll be grand I said and watched him make this mug of tea. There were no tea bags, he used tea leaves and spooned them out of a grey packet, Typhoo probably, and spoon after spoon went in. It was the worst mug of tea I have ever tasted, so strong you could have stood a shovel in it never mind a spoon. I managed to drink half of it whereupon Bob asked me, “how was that then, alright for thee?” I could hardly say it was terrible so I mumbled that it was really good and managed to get rid of the other half. After that it was always Barbara who made the tea thank goodness.’

‘The story that Bob sacked me for not watering his tomatoes at his bungalow is a bit fanciful. I think Jimmy Adamson told that story after he and Burnley parted company. It was at Gawthorpe that there was a big greenhouse in which we grew them. Lord spent more and more of his time at the club and Gawthorpe once he retired and loved to have a carnation in his buttonhole if we were growing any. If he could he’d pick one and something else we had down there was a Eucalyptus Tree. He’d pick a leaf and rub it under his nose and smell it and say, “Tha’ll never need medicine if you smell this.”’

‘Maybe it was a lad called Ian Rawson that was in trouble for the tomatoes. I do know that Bob eventually sacked him when he caught him at Turf Moor cutting the grass and the lines weren’t straight and Ian had been larking about mowing zig zag lines. I think Bob had been watching him for a while and if you didn’t work or do the job right, then that was it, you were sacked. Once the new stand was built Bob could stand at the top of the steps near the directors’ seats and many a time when I was working on the pitch I’d see him there just standing, arms folded, watching us work.’

‘I only helped out at Gawthorpe perhaps a day a week and always remember setting mole traps down in the bottom fields with Arthur Bellamy. I don’t think we ever caught one. But we had a lot of laughs that’s for sure. Lovely man was Arthur. He’d been a player at the club and a coach and then somehow found himself on the Gawthorpe groundstaff when John Bond arrived. Bond was just one of the many people I worked with.’

‘What wonderful times I had over the years thanks to Jimmy Adamson and that surprise request he made. There were years of drama and excitement meeting some of the great football people, Bill Shankly, Brian Clough and Kevin Keegan among them, and of course a procession of Burnley managers one of them being Harry Potts. I can honestly say they were some of the best years of my life – but some of the worst as well when events like the emotional Orient game and the violent Celtic game took place. There were promotions and relegations with emotions ranging from celebrations to despondency.

‘There were so many varied things but on the very first day at Turf Moor to start the new job with little more than a mower and a spade and fork, I looked at the chaos and rubble of the old Brunshaw Road Stand being demolished and thought: ‘what the heck am I doing here?’

Bob Lord in fact had nightmares about the old stand when a report condemned it and found various structural weaknesses. Work began in front of the stand at the end of the 1968/69 season and demolition work began round about the middle of October 1969 well before Roy began work there. It dragged on and on, one reason certainly being the relegation of season ‘70/71 and work on the new stand didn’t begin until May 1973 coinciding with promotion back to the First Division.

‘So I was confronted with this unbuilt stand and still plenty of rubble clearing to do with Jimmy Adamson frequently driving the little dumper truck up and down filled with old bricks and debris. Jimmy was no fool and uncovered a bit of a scam that was taking place when the pitch was relayed and the top soil was supposed to be taken to Gawthorpe to use as filler and for levelling. Trouble is, a lot of it was never getting there. So: Jimmy one day followed one of the lorries and ended up in Rawtenstall where the drivers were selling off the topsoil. Jimmy made sure they were sacked.

‘There was an ancient Atco petrol mower with a 3-feet cut. You started it pulling sharply on the drawstring and prayed it would behave. It was just that one mower for cutting the grass on the huge football pitch. There was a wheelbarrow as well. Contrast that with all the specialist gear they have today for these Desso pitches. In the early days we used lime for marking the lines but that had to stop when a player got lime in a cut on his leg and turned really serious. That was when players like Paul Fletcher weren’t actually hiding the line marker when we needed it even on a matchday once when I decided to freshen up the lines. He hid it and sat laughing as we had to get to Gawthorpe to bring up another one. Fletcher and Colin Waldron were like Morecambe and Wise they were that daft. There was a trainer called Jimmy Holland they made fun of mercilessly including one day locking him out of the dressing room in just his underwear. ‘

‘At Gawthorpe there was an ailing and temperamental Ferguson tractor. On one occasion I thought right, I’ll take it down to Turf Moor for a job that needed doing. The only problem was that this thing was on its last legs and it was a few miles from Gawthorpe to Turf Moor on the main roads. It was barely roadworthy and neither was it taxed.  I was on pins driving it along and said a prayer when I reached Turf Moor and another prayer when I got it back to Gawthorpe again.’

‘If I needed anything I either went to Jimmy Adamson or Albert Maddox.  Albert was a lovely man, short, round and with a smiley face. He worked in an office that was deep underneath the Cricket Field Stand. There were no windows and off one wall was a huge walk-in safe that must have been 8 feet tall and big enough to have converted into a decent sized kitchen. Whenever I went to see him he was always puffing on a cigarette. You could go in his little room sometimes and there’d be one cigarette behind his ear, one burning in the ash tray and one in his mouth. It would not be unkind to say that he was in absolute awe of Bob Lord, a mixture of fear and pure admiration. A lot of people were fearful of Bob Lord. Albert was one of those people who had things in his head, rather than in any organised filed kind of way. You’d go in there and his desk would be heaped with papers, envelopes, bills, letters and documents of all description. If he needed something he’d root through them all and find what he wanted usually buried at the bottom of one of the piles. As he looked, sorted and sifted all of it would be scattered from one side of the desk to the other as he created new piles out of the old ones. He worked like some kind of a mole in this windowless room as it slowly filled up with cigarette smoke.’

‘One day he received a letter from a chap in Morecambe, a supporter that because of his age never got to any more games. Somehow he had got wind of the pitch being relayed and the old turf being stripped off. Could he have the old penalty spot, he wrote, where Jimmy McIlroy used to take all his wonderful penalties, where the ball went one way and the goalie went the other time and time again? And, he asked, could he have the white spot as well.

‘By this time of course all of the turf had gone and was heaped up somewhere in a mountainous pile. Never mind, I thought, I can sort something so I cut another square of turf and painted a penalty spot on it and then Albert and I parcelled it up in a strong white box and sent it off to the chap from Morecambe.

‘A few weeks later we received the most wonderful letter from him thanking us for this precious bit of turf that meant so much to him and he could still see Jimmy Mac hitting perfect penalties from this little square of turf. It was a truly heart-warming letter and when I showed it to Jimmy Adamson I’m sure he actually had a little tear in his eye.

‘What I remember so much is how it was a family club. Over the years it’s a description that’s been used many times. Whether the same feeling is there now I don’t know but back then when I was there we were all as one; there was no gap between us and players. They didn’t shut themselves off, they were approachable and many a time came over for a brew in my little room. Can you imagine today a player hiding the groundsman’s white line marker? But that’s the sort of thing they got up to.