Bob Paisley
Robert Paisley was an English professional football manager and player who played as a wing-half. He spent almost 50 years with Liverpool and is regarded as one of the greatest managers of all time. Reluctantly taking the job in 1974, he built on the foundations laid by his predecessor Bill Shankly and went on to become the most successful English manager in history. Paisley is the first of four managers to have won the European Cup three times. He is also one of five managers to have won the English top-flight championship as both a player and manager at the same club.
Paisley came from a small County Durham mining community and, in his youth, played for Bishop Auckland, before he signed for Liverpool in 1939. During the Second World War he served in the British Army, and could not make his Liverpool debut until 1946. In the 1946–47 season, he was a member of the Liverpool team that won the First Division title for the first time in 24 years. He was made club captain in 1951, and remained with Liverpool until he retired from playing in 1954.
He stayed with the club, and took on the two roles of reserve team coach and club physiotherapist. By this time, Liverpool had been relegated to the Second Division and its facilities were in decline. Shankly was appointed Liverpool manager in December 1959, and he promoted Paisley to work alongside him as his assistant in a management/coaching team that included Joe Fagan and Reuben Bennett. Under their leadership, the fortunes of Liverpool turned around dramatically and, in the 1961–62 season, the team gained promotion back to the First Division. Paisley filled an important role as tactician under Shankly's leadership, and the team won numerous honours during the next twelve seasons.
In 1974, Shankly retired as manager and, despite Paisley's own initial reluctance, he was appointed as Shankly's successor. He went on to lead Liverpool through a period of domestic and European dominance, winning twenty honours in nine seasons: six League Championships, three League Cups, six Charity Shields, three European Cups, one UEFA Cup and one UEFA Super Cup. He won honours at a rate of 2.2 per season, a rate surpassed only by Pep Guardiola. At the time of his retirement he had won the Manager of the Year Award a record six times. He retired from management in 1983 and was succeeded by Joe Fagan. He died in 1996, aged 77, after having Alzheimer's disease for several years.
Early life
Bob Paisley was born on Thursday 23 January 1919, in the small County Durham coal mining village of Hetton-le-Hole. Paisley described it as "a close-knit community where coal was king and football was religion". His father Sam was a miner and his mother Emily a housewife. They had four sons: Willie, Bob, Hugh and Alan in age order. On the day Paisley was born, 150,000 miners nationwide went on strike for a shorter working week. Paisley attended a local school until he was thirteen and, like his friends there, had to rely on soup kitchens to supplement a meagre diet. In 1926, during the General Strike when he was seven, he had to scramble over slag heaps to collect coal dust that his parents could mix with water to create a crude fuel. Life was difficult for working-class families and, as Paisley recalled: "We lived in a small terraced house, and although we never went short of life's essentials, there was never much money left over by the end of the week".Paisley was an outstanding footballer at Eppleton Primary School and helped his team win seventeen trophies in a four-year period. Throughout his playing career, he was a left half. After leaving school at the age of 14, Paisley initially worked alongside his father at the pit and was there when his father had an underground accident which rendered him unable to work for five years. The mine was closed down and he trained to become a bricklayer.
Paisley had joined Hetton Football Club after leaving school in 1933 and continued to attract notice as a member of their junior team. He had a boyhood dream of playing for Sunderland but when he was recommended to them by Hetton he was rejected as being "too small". Instead, he signed for Bishop Auckland before the 1937–38 season for three shillings and sixpence per match.
Bishop Auckland and arrival at Liverpool
Paisley played for "the Bishops" for two seasons until he was signed by Liverpool in May 1939, a few months after his twentieth birthday. The Bishops were one of the top non-league teams in England and Paisley called them "the Kings of Amateur Football". In Paisley's second season with them, they achieved a treble by winning the Northern League championship, the FA Amateur Cup and the Durham County Challenge Cup. The FA Amateur Cup final was played in nearby Sunderland at Roker Park where the Bishops defeated Willington 3–0 after extra time. During the season, Paisley was approached by Liverpool manager George Kay and promised that he would sign for Liverpool at the end of the season. He kept his promise even though Sunderland reconsidered and made another approach.Paisley's last match for the Bishops was on Saturday, 6 May 1939 in the Durham County Challenge Cup final against South Shields, also played at Roker Park. The following Monday, Paisley travelled by train to Liverpool where he was met at Exchange station by Andy McGuigan who accompanied him to Anfield. He signed his contract and began an association that would last half a century. His signing on fee was £25 and his wages were £8 a week in the season and £6 a week during the summer. He recalled: "I was full of beans that day, but it was very quiet really. I was met at the station and after that long trek up Scotland Road in a tramcar, I found there were only one or two youngsters at the ground – Billy Liddell, Eddie Spicer and Ray Lambert. The rest had been recruited for the territorials".
Following pre-season training, Paisley took part in two reserve team games at the start of the 1939–40 season but all competitions were cancelled after war was declared on 3 September. Paisley had got to know Matt Busby, who was then Liverpool's club captain and was grateful for the advice and encouragement which Busby gave him. Paisley said that Busby was "a man you could look up to and respect".
On 8 September 1939, the British Government advised The Football Association that clubs could stage friendly matches outside evacuation areas and Liverpool were able to take part in such matches, constrained by unavailability of players in the services, throughout the war. Liverpool's first wartime friendly was at Sealand Road against Chester on 16 September. Paisley took part in 34 of these matches between 1939 and 1941, scoring ten goals.
Second World War
Paisley was twenty when the Second World War began and in October he was called up into the Army who assigned him to the Royal Artillery in which he was a gunner in the 73rd Medium Regiment. This regiment was a war-formed battery unit utilising medium range artillery that saw service in the United Kingdom until August 1941, North Africa until 1944 and finally Italy until 1945.Paisley was stationed at several camps throughout Great Britain including one at Rhyl. For a long time, he was stationed at a camp near Tarporley in Cheshire which was about thirty miles from Anfield. Stan Liversedge describes one occasion when Paisley was given clearance by the Army to play for Liverpool against Everton in the 1940 Liverpool Senior Cup final. To get there, he had to use his bicycle and cycle nearly the whole way. He left the bike in Birkenhead and hitched a lift through the Mersey Tunnel. After the match, he had to do the same journey in reverse to return to camp. Although it was a relatively unimportant match of local interest only, Paisley recalled that "an estimated 30,000 turned up". Everton, the reigning league champions, won the match 4–2. That was Paisley's first encounter with Everton. He got his revenge soon afterwards on 1 April 1940 when he played alongside Matt Busby and Billy Liddell in a depleted Liverpool team who "sprang a surprise" by defeating Everton 3–1 at Goodison Park.
John Keith recounts that Paisley's football skills saved him from a posting to the Far East which would inevitably have resulted in his becoming a prisoner of war of the Japanese. He was captain of the 73rd's team and, when his battery was due to be posted, his commanding officer transferred him to another battery so that he could remain in Britain and lead the regimental team. His old unit was subsequently overrun by the Japanese.
At the end of August 1941, on the bank holiday, Paisley was posted overseas and did not return to England until 1945. He went in a troopship to Egypt, the voyage lasting ten weeks because they had to sail around South Africa. He spent Christmas in Egypt and then received his first mail from England which turned out to be a postcard from George Kay asking him if he would be available to play for Liverpool against Preston North End in the season opener three months earlier. While he was in Egypt, Paisley became interested in horse racing through friendship with jockey Reg Stretton and trainer Frank Carr. Paisley learned to ride himself and he retained this interest after the war, often studying form in his spare moments.
He was stationed south of Cairo and learned to drive a 15 cwt. truck. More importantly, he had a month's training on firing anti-tank guns, a skill he needed in the desert as a member of the Eighth Army in Operation Crusader which relieved the Siege of Tobruk. During periods of leave from the conflict, Paisley returned to Cairo where he was mostly involved in team sports, not only football but also cricket and hockey. He represented the Combined Services football team as well as playing for his regiment. Paisley was involved in the Second Battle of El Alamein and subsequently fought his way across North Africa until the final defeat of the Afrika Korps in 1943. He only suffered an injury once when he was temporarily blinded by sand sprayed into his face by explosive bullets fired from an aircraft during a Luftwaffe attack on his unit.
In 1943, Paisley went with the Eighth Army into Sicily and then into Italy. Whilst he was on active service in Italy he received the news that his younger brother Alan, aged fifteen, had died at home from scarlet fever and diphtheria. In June 1944, Paisley took part in the liberation of Rome and rode into the city on top of a tank, an event he recalled 33 years later when Liverpool won the 1977 European Cup final in Rome's Stadio Olimpico. Paisley's regiment moved on to Florence where they encamped at ACF Fiorentina's Stadio Artemio Franchi. In Florence, Paisley saw boxing exhibitions by Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson which generated another sporting interest and one for which he and Bill Shankly shared a passion while they worked together.
Paisley finally returned to England in 1945 and was stationed at Woolwich Arsenal until he was demobbed. Shortly before that, he met his future wife Jessie, a schoolteacher, on a train at Maghull. She recalled her father being unimpressed that she had met a soldier who was a professional footballer in civilian life so she added that Paisley had worked as a bricklayer too. Her father said: "Oh, that's a proper job so that's alright then". On 17 July 1946, Bob and Jessie were married in Liverpool at All Souls Church, Springwood. They raised a family of two sons and one daughter: Robert, Graham and Christine. The family always lived in Liverpool and Jessie outlived Bob by sixteen years until she died in the early hours of 8 February 2012 as the result of a heart infection, aged 96.