My Only Boro: A Walk Through Red & White

By Will Nett

Do you LOVE football, history, war and politics? Then this is the book for you.
Do you HATE football, history, war and politics? Then this is the book for you.

After more than a century of immaculate footballing underachievement Middlesbrough Football Club enjoyed its most successful period beginning with victory in the 2004 League Cup Final and ending on a disastrous night in Eindhoven.
How did we get there? Not just the extraordinary run in that tournament, and not just in sport, but historically, as a town, and as a community.

My Only Boro is not just about Middlesbrough Football Club, it’s not just a history book about the town and it’s not just a social commentary on a town once described as the worst place to live in Britain – it’s all this and more.

“A must read for Boro fans, memories of the good old days that we long to return to, and all you non-footy fans will love it as well. It’s witty and fun to read, a real blast from the past.”
Bernie Slaven, Boro Legend

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sixth Element Publishing
• Release date: Dec 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781908299239

Book preview

MY ONLY BORO

A Walk Through Red & White

by

Will Nett

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SMASHWORDS EDITION

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Published by Sixth Element Publishing

Arthur Robinson House

13-14 The Green

Billingham TS23 1EU

Tel: [phone]

Copyright Will Nett 2011

ePub ISBN 978-1-908299-23-9

Kindle ISBN 978-1-908299-24-6

Will Nett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

•

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Other Smashwords titles from Sixth Element Publishing

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Home Tomorrow edited by Julian Laurence

Screw, God and the Universe by Graeme Wilkinson

Residual Belligerence (Thieves’ Guild: Book One) by C.G. Hatton

Disturbing Bedtime Tales by Dean Wilkinson

Introduction

Chapter 1: The country’s outsiders, even to the outsiders

Chapter 2: A long and distinguished list of influential characters

Chapter 3: A wander through Middlesbrough part 1

Chapter 4: It takes more than heavy snowfall to blunt the belligerence of Middlesbrough folk

Chapter 5: A fine pedigree when it comes to public entertainment

Chapter 6: Fly me to the moon

Chapter 7: A wander through Middlesbrough part 2

Chapter 8: On the subject of unpopular political decisions

Chapter 9: On superstition and religion

Chapter 10: It wasn’t just about football – it was about a town and a people

Epilogue

Whaddya mean, where’s the boxing bit?

Sources and further reading

INTRODUCTION

It was like levitation. He hung in the air for an eternity, just waiting and waiting, until the ball arrived. Then he closed his eyes, as if to sleep and dream of glory as it struck his shiny forehead. When he opened them, he saw the ball drop into the corner of the net. He saw the goalkeeper flailing. He saw the unbridled ecstasy on the faces of his team mates, and he saw an explosion of hysterical joy convulsing through thirty-thousand open-mouthed onlookers that will never be surpassed, or even equalled.

That was the moment. An inanimate object launched from someone’s foot struck the head of a man from a far off land and in doing so, defeated a man from an even further off land, and propelled a town with a population of 142,000 onto the world’s sporting stage.

Massimo Maccarone’s gravity-defying 89th minute goal against Steaua Bucharest capped one of the most remarkable sporting comebacks of all time and planted a tiny North East football club into a major European final. After more than a century of immaculate footballing underachievement the club had enjoyed its most successful period, beginning with victory in the 2004 League Cup Final and ending abruptly on a disastrous night in Eindhoven.

I wanted to know how we’d got there. Not just the extraordinary run in that tournament, and not just in sport, but historically, as a town, and as a community. Who helped us? Who inspired us? Who led us? Who hindered us?

First and foremost, I wanted to know: Where are we?

I’ve lived in Middlesbrough for most of my life, save for a seven month period during that 2005/2006 UEFA Cup Final season when I travelled around the world. In doing so, I discovered the fingerprints of notable Teessiders in every corner of the globe, in one field or another – exploration, engineering and sport, to name but three – and this book begins outside of Middlesbrough, and Teesside, although where Teesside is actually located is a debatable point we’ll come back to. It begins in the disturbingly quaint village of Heighington.

Heighington is a picture postcard spot in Shildon, County Durham, and the birthplace of my mother, or Our Mam, to use local parlance. In fact, it’s so picturesque that in 2006 it was picked by BBC4 as one of Britain’s perfect villages.

I found myself there, in St Michael’s churchyard one damp autumn morning, in an attempt to find out where I came from. I was looking for the grave of my Grandfather, Frederick Wade, whom I’d never met and my mother couldn’t even remember, him having died when she was four. I couldn’t find it, and didn’t even know if it existed, as I tramped around in the soggy golden leaves and bramble bushes. Wherever I stood I couldn’t escape the enormous spectre of the blackened tree by the east wall that had terrified my mother and aunts half a century earlier, its leafless branches giving off an imposing gothic air. I was standing under the tree sheltering from heavy rain when I noticed a small, well-preserved, sandstone war grave, the only one of its kind in the whole cemetery. Well-kept war graves always stand out, as though preference of care is a reward for bravery, and this one was no different. A closer look revealed it was the resting place of one C Wade, an RAF Sergeant and air gunner, killed in action in 1945. He was nineteen when he died. He wasn’t what I was looking for, but he was what I found, a son of Heighington, and who knows, a son of Frederick?

The reason I was looking in the first place was because I was in the very early stages of tracing my family tree. I stumbled upon another grave as I wandered around that struck me for a different reason – it was that of a namesake of a former colleague of mine. I say namesake as the former colleague is still alive, and besides, the dates didn’t match up, but it made for an unusual discovery to say the least as his was not a particularly common name. As I walked past the village hall I noticed opposite the beginnings of the local bonfire, as neatly prepared as everything else in the area, and was reminded of the sinister community of Summerisle in the Wicker Man.

I returned to my car outside the Wesleyan chapel to be greeted by a pair of crows on the front steps, unaffected by my presence. The slamming of my car door and the engine rattling to life didn’t disturb them either. Driving down Darlington Road away from the village I momentarily lost control of my car and could only sit and await my fate as it skidded across the black gravel towards the junction of Coatsay Moor Lane. It ground to a halt right on the give-way line as the No 16 Newton Aycliffe to Darlington trundled past a lot closer than I would have liked.

I recounted all this to a friend the next day – the graves, the crows, the car/bus near-interface.

Probably an omen, he said.

I abandoned the family tree idea right there on the spot, half of it anyway. Dad’s side was much more straightforward. His family history, like that of thousands of others, was a history of Middlesbrough. Trace one and you trace the other – kill two crows with one stone if you like. As it turned out I killed neither crow, the family tree or the town history. Well not quite.

What I did was pick up the red and white thread and ran with it, in the process discovering a mish-mash of contrasting opinions, a wealth of myths and folk tales, and a deluge of downright madness punctuated by a cast of blind clowns, (and I don’t mean the football team), cowboys and indians, haunted cattle, and itinerant chavs.

With the exception of the facts, the following is a work of fiction.

To Mam and Dad

"In Comedy, Tragedy, Drama, or Farce,

In London I’m sure there are none can surpass"

From A Song of Middlesbrough

by Elizabeth Normington (1902)

CHAPTER 1

The country’s outsiders, even to the outsiders

Nobody looked at the clock. Nobody. Some looked at the floor. Others stared into the middle distance. George and Jimmy looked at a copy of the local paper, the Dagblad, that somebody had left. They were the only ones who could understand it but they didn’t really take any of it in.

Some of the lowered heads rolled their eyes up and saw the boss’s midriff, and the tip of his red tie, as he paced slowly around, his blazer pinned back at his waist by his thumbs, calmly making his point. He wasn’t one for histrionics or extravagant gestures, instead preferring measured sensibility and caution. It was 20.15 CET.

Jimmy grinned; he was always smiling, but his eyes were serious. Stewy sat straight-backed against the cold white tiles. Gareth had seen it all before and knew he must lead by example. He knew he had to lead them all – from the youngest to the oldest, the experienced and inexperienced, the good and the bad.

The boss led them away, through a door marked ‘uitgang’.

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We are Yorkshiremen and women – that’s indisputable. And have been since Middlesbrough started its spurt of growth in the 1830s.

Aaah, but no, I hear you chorus, we are North Yorkshire. Yes, we are. Geographically we are indeed in the northern part of Yorkshire, yet few Teessiders – we are Teessiders first, being as we are, beside the River Tees – don’t consider ourselves Yorkshire folk. They like to think of us as a separate body, which is where Cleveland (Land of Cliffs) comes in, although that doesn’t really exist anymore, depending on who you ask. It apparently ceased being as of 1996, yet Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council is proud to carry the name some fifteen years later.

I begin with the default information mine of the 21st century, Wikipedia, which states: Middlesbrough is a town in the Tees Valley conurbation of North East England and sits within the ceremonial county of North Yorkshire.

Apologies if you’ve just wretched/baulked or both, at the term ‘Tees Valley’. It’s the kind of phrase that probably appeals to people who work regularly with flip-charts.

We are certainly a town, and we are certainly in the North East, but it’s the North Yorkshire part that people tend to take issue with.

Reading on, phrases like ‘unitary authority’ and words like ‘agglomeration’ are thrown into an already confusing mix. Did I mention that Middlesbrough is historically part of the North Riding of Yorkshire and became centre of the County Borough of Teesside in 1968, before being absorbed by the non-metropolitan county of Cleveland six years later. We were ‘absorbed’ in 1974? And before that ‘agglomerated’? It’s little wonder we’re so confused.

Okay, so Wikipedia is famously unreliable at times – whilst researching a small Australian town where I once lived, I was amused to discover that the former head of the local secondary school was a shitty arse – but the above serves as an example of the geographical muddle we find ourselves in. Everyone you asked about it, and even those you didn’t, seemed to have a different answer, as proved during a cursory glance over the letters page of the Evening Gazette. Sift through the broadsides of the bickering local councillors and the mundane missives of residents, more of which later – I’ve howled with laughter on many occasions at what Teessiders deem letter-worthy and the letters page deserves more space than I can give it in this section – and you may find a few pointers as to where we are, or at least where we think we are.

On this day of writing for example, ‘A True Stocktonian’ announces that the River Tees is the boundary between Middlesbrough and the towns of Stockton and Hartlepool, which, for the record, we would need to ‘absorb’ in order to become big enough to be recognised as a city, (Middlesbrough still has town status). He goes on to say, much like a member of some extremist militia, that until the River Tees runs dry and no more water flows, it will always be our boundaries. Well, he’s certainly parked his tanks on the lawn there, hasn’t he?

Luckily for us smog-ingesting red infidels south of the Tees, we function reasonably well without the assistance of Stocktonians, (yes, you invented the friction match, well done.) The letter provoked one regular contributor into proudly announcing that, I am and always will be a North Riding of Yorkshire man.

And we’re back where we started.

A Teesside city state, as once touted, would appeal to many people’s republican tendencies but I know just how I’d feel about that if I was from Stockton for example, as it would probably be Middlesbrough that would be the central conceit, leading to surrounding areas taking the rebellious tone that Middlesbrough now does with Yorkshire. In the late 1960s this was a distinct possibility when the Teesplan project was introduced in order to survey public opinion and potential with regards to a superstate of sorts. Its downfall though was the costly improvements necessary to clean up the chemical industry, which unsurprisingly alarmed potential investors.

When these suggestions were made, local councillors – the majority of whom served on the boards of the very chemical companies that were being taken to task – turned their noses up at the thought of anything interfering with their licentious nest-feathering. Chief among them was Stockton Council architect John Poulson, who was eventually imprisoned for corruption. If the city state idea was launched in the early 1970s, as proposed, it would be now, forty years later that we would be seeing the advantages, or indeed the disadvantages. I’m not so optimistic as to think it would be a bed of fragrant red roses, but the idea of it still makes me wonder. It would be as much of an impossibility now as it was then though, for exactly the same reasons – politicians and councillors with ‘conflicts of interest’.

What then, would this mythical City of Teesside look like? If I tried to envisage back in the late 1960s what it would look like now I would have expected all the staples of science fiction – hover cars, people walking around in tin-foil suits, and entire meals in pill form. More likely it would have looked as Middlehaven does – a swathe of bright colours hiding a multitude of sins. Middlesbrough would be its administrative capital and you’d enter the city through an archway of magnificent home-grown steel – and by magnificent I mean one that can be seen as far away as Newcastle – bearing the legend: YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF TEESSIDE.

As the A66, which would be adapted into a ring road, whisks you into the city centre you’d be greeted by an enormous statue of Henry Bolckow. I’ve entertained the idea of a statue of a miner, fine examples of which can currently be found all around East Cleveland, but as a representation of heritage it smacks a little too much of the Soviet Union, that image of a moustachioed Ivan thundering away in a factory with a steel-driving hammer. Something more contemporary would be required I think, but not too contemporary or we’d end up with Temenos. Our regional anthem would be a rousing composition from the pen of Chris Rea and performed in a gravel-voiced duet with Paul Rodgers, and all chavs would be executed on their 21st birthday. That’s not so unreasonable, is it? Actually I seem to have described the beginnings of a totalitarian state there, which we already have. It has its downsides though; we’d have to fight off pockets of rebel resistance from the breakaway states of Stockton and Thornaby and have an amalgamated football team, where all the players are selected from one area. I suppose we already do that but at one point in recent history they were all selected, under the guiding hand of Gordon Strachan, from Scotland which seems to have acted as a farm-club of sorts for Middlesbrough in recent times.

No one really knows where we are up here in Middlesbrough, or down here in Middlesbrough, depending on where you are.

Is it near Newcastle? someone will always ask.

We get annoyed by this, even though when we’re explaining it to someone else we always use Newcastle as a reference point because it’s the nearest big city that anyone’s heard of, and that includes Sunderland. I switch on the television and Anne Robinson is interrogating a contestant from Stockton on the Weakest Link. The contestant announces that she has a degree in forensic science.

Anne Robinson: So it’s like CSI Tyneside up there, is it?

Me, (at the telly): Give yer’ fuckin’ head a shake, yer’ ginger cow.

The further away from England I’ve been, the bigger the frame of reference. Unless the enquirer was from a country that has produced a Middlesbrough player of note, they hadn’t heard of it.

When I lived in Australia, Middlesbrough FC was well represented by a surfeit of Aussies – Mark Viduka, Mark Schwarzer,