Groundsman Roy finds his diary

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.’

 

 

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