“Surely you know enough footballers and enough stories about them to put them all together to write an eye-popping sizzler,” she says. Hmmm true enough I think, a saucy football novel, there’s the thing, about all the naughty things our heroes get up to and the temptations on offer. I could tell you a few tales – and then some.
A sports novel I have read is This Sporting Life by David Storey. For sure it’s no light-hearted bedroom romp. It’s rugby based not football, all grit, and northern darkness and gloom. You can fair taste the fogs and smell the mud. Storey makes it work because the actual clubs involved are left to your imagination. They’re never named. It’s all about people. There’s such power in the writing, it’s a stark and unhappy book with the weariness of the central character and the brutality of the game he plays brought home time and again.
So, anyway, I jotted down a few of the characters that you could have in a football novel. What about throwing in one each of the following: a superb footballer, a gifted athlete, a strong leader of men, a tough Yorkshire miner, a war hero, a publican, a bereaved father, a deserted husband, a drunkard, a brawler, a vagrant, and finally a lunatic. Surely if you put all of these characters into the mix, set it in a northern milltown in the depressed 20s and 30s, using the local football club, unemployment and poverty as the background – surely you’d have the foundations for a convincing work of fiction.
Next: think up a few scenes that are real tear jerkers; a doting father seeing his beloved daughter die, a husband returning home one day to find his wife has left him, the once famous hero pawning all his medals and trophies for 50 quid, and then the final piece de resistance the shuffling, bewildered lunatic being undressed in the hospital by the orderlies and out of his grubby coat falls a torn and tattered envelope and inside it is a collection of faded cuttings, torn clippings and dog-eared postcards of better times; the last sad remnants of a once glittering career.
Or failing all that, you could just write the true story of Tommy Boyle and you have all the above in one ultimately sad character who spends the last 8 years of his life in Whittingham Hospital, a place where society in those bygone days put not just those who really were insane, but more or less anyone who was deemed unfit or incapable of looking after themselves, or who were simply unwanted. There was no Care in the Community when Tommy Boyle needed it. It’s arguable as to whether he was in fact truly insane, even though his death certificate says he died of “general paralysis of the insane.” Asylums were used very often years ago simply to lock away those who were a nuisance to society and, or, to their families.
Mike Smith begins the story with a stark and graphic chapter that takes you straight into his eventual degradation and humiliation. What an opener it is. It draws you into the story, sucks you in and has you glued to the pages. The succeeding pages take you through Boyle’s youth, his life down the mines, his athletic prowess, the early football years, next Barnsley FC and a losing Cup Finalist. Then came the move to Burnley, the creation of a truly great team, a Cup Final winners medal, the war years and service; then the championship side of 1920/21; marriage, a spell as a publican, an unsuccessful time at Wrexham, the death of his young daughter, coaching in Germany, his wife’s desertion. And then the sad, sad decline of a once great man and footballer, a true hero becoming aimless, jobless, without any purpose, all self-esteem gone, and the descent into drunken disorderliness and violence in Burnley; finally the final placement at Whittingham when doctors deemed him unfit to live in the world outside it. It was an age of lock ‘em up and throw away the key. In truth the word harrowing would not go amiss. How mentally unwell he actually was will not really come to light perhaps until 2032 when the hospital records become available. Mike will be 77 then but I have it on good authority that all being well he’ll be waiting at the office door. His most difficult task was to find out what happened to Tommy’s wife Annie after she left him.
Students of Burnley FC history might say that the real tradition and history of the club begins with this great, great captain and leader Tommy Boyle, and manager John Haworth. Boyle arrived in 1911. Ten years later there had been a war, but a promotion, a Cup Final triumph and a Division One title. John Haworth (whose name should really be up there with Cliff Britton, Alan Brown and Harry Potts) assembled the players, skipper Tommy Boyle galvanised them, inspired them and made them tick. The names of Halley, Boyle and Watson were as revered then as are Adamson and McIlroy now. Jerry Dawson was the iconic goalkeeper, Bob Kelly the magical, twinkle-toed magician who some said was better than Jimmy Mac. Then there was Billy Nesbitt who fascinates me because both of us come from Todmorden, and Billy was almost deaf as a post and couldn’t hear the whistle. Just how do you play football if you’re deaf? Then there was Bert Freeman who scored the winning cup final goal at Crystal Palace goal.
In Mike Smith’s book we hear their names time and again so that they become real people not just names from a distant past. We also see just what a tough and brutal game it was then. Here’s something to try. Go out into the garden and shoulder charge the biggest thickest tree several times (or biggest thickest neighbour if you want a reaction). Get the wife to kick you on the shins as hard as she can, wearing a pair of clogs, or endlessly hit you on the back of the head with a handbag. Go and headbang the garage door. Do all of those whilst kicking a ball that can give you concussion its so heavy when wet, or the laces can cut your forehead. And do all that for 90 minutes. And when you feel dizzy and bruised pour ice-cold water over yourself with a giant sponge. That I suspect was what football was like in Tommy Boyle’s day in all weathers and on mudbath pitches. In one game he missed one good scoring chance because his sight was almost nil because of the blood pouring from a headwound. Those players were hard as nails and played on with the most appalling injuries. Vendettas were ongoing. The word gentlemanly was unknown.
They really were heroes and they brought pride and light into the lives of people who faced poverty, hunger, unemployment, and mill closures. Bob Lord wrote about it and how he felt, in his book, that as a little lad he’d seen Tommy Boyle lift the Cup so that Burnley folk could share in the glory and the triumph. Think how the town felt when Caldwell and Co returned from Wembley in 2009 and toured the town. Multiply that by 10 and that’s what Burnley winning the Cup did in 1914.
All Tommy Boyle wanted to do was play football. When that skill declined he had little else to turn to. He hung on as long as he could. “Like an ageing fighter Tommy Boyle wanted one more fight.” When manager Haworth died it was thought by some that Boyle would have been the next manager of Burnley FC but it didn’t happen. He had money at the end of his career but it was all frittered away on betting and drinking. He won good money in bowls tournaments in Blackpool but that too didn’t last. He worked as a labourer when he could but those jobs became fewer. The man who shook hands with the king was reduced to sleeping rough, cadging a roof for a night, or living in a hostel. His public behaviour became more and more unacceptable.
He’d suffered the hammer blows of shell shock in the war, the trauma of losing his only daughter and the after effects of heading a heavy ball in a football life that had lasted for years. All these must have contributed to his mental deterioration. And to add to his depression and meloncholy, he was alone.
What makes Mike Smith’s book all the more remarkable is that he had no way of talking to the immediate main characters although living relatives that he tracked down provided pictures and stories of Uncle Tommy. I confess to having had an easy time with the books I’ve written. The people I write about, or have written about are there to talk to, or if not, there are people who knew them well, that I can talk to. How easy it was to write the Jimmy Mac books. All I had to do was sit and talk to him and listen to his stories. How pleasant was that? In the No Nay Never books I sat and talked to a whole host of people; Stan Ternent, Martin Dobson, Dave Thomas, John Connelly, and Colin Waldron and Bob Lord’s daughters, amongst them. For the last book Entertainment Heroes and Villains I spent several hours with Barry Kilby, Brendan Flood and Clarke Carlisle. They were there face to face. How easy was that? Roger Eli and I currently meet every week and talk football. What could be more enjoyable?
But in writing about Tommy Boyle and packing the book with details, Mike Smith had no such easy time. For him it was three years of research, painstaking slog, detective work, trawling through the archives, reading obscure documents, tracing them, following leads, ploughing through old newspapers in Burnley library. Then there were the Barnsley, Wrexham and Germany connections to delve into. The bibliography is exhaustive covering social history, mining, the Great War, mental illness, local history, hospitals and asylums, as well as the inevitable football documents and books. Ironically Boyle’s pub ‘The Pedestrian’ is now the site of Burnley library where Mike Smith spent countless hours as it became an “obsession.”
His book sits nicely alongside The Jimmy Hogan story in terms of painting a picture of a different world. With its detail and lengthy stories of the FA Cup success, and the title win along with the 30 game unbeaten run, it fleshes out The Clarets Chronicles. But above all it brings into the spotlight one man who was an absolute hero and one of the foundation stones of club history. Alas when he died in Whittingham on January 2, 1940, he was a forgotten man. Now thanks to Mike Smith he is properly remembered.
Tommy Boyle Broken Hero - The Story of a Football Legend
by Mike Smith
Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd
Available in Burnley from the club shop and Badger Books, Standish St.