Although he will ‘be’ Huddersfield Town until he dies, David Peace brought his son along to watch Manchester United’s open training session when they visited Yokahama in late July.
The Peaces live in Tokyo, where the former teacher dreams up his phantasmagorical fictions revolving around his enduring passion: life in the north of England in the 1970s and 1980s. Football has evolved but even so, you rarely get to see Huddersfield on Japanese satellite and Peace begrudgingly admitted to himself that it was a treat to see the champions of England in the next city over.
“Of course, being Manchester United you had to pay in to watch them train,” he scoffed down the telephone. “But I was intrigued, you know with Moyes coming in and to see what is left of United.
“So we sat there and the rain was pissing down on us. The training went on for two hours! I kept saying to my son: ‘can we go? Please?’ But the interesting thing was that the first person on the pitch, 20 minutes before training started, was Ryan Giggs. Out there doing his keepy-uppys. And I was thinking: you are 38, 39. And there you are, still doing that. It was incredible to watch.
“And people rail against modern footballers, but it still takes that kind of commitment to achieve what he has achieved.”
And as Peaces sat in the rain, he thought again about the life of his latest subject: William Shankly, the revered Liverpool manager who died in 1981. Peace found himself miserable after just 90 minutes of watching an elite football team train in the rain. Shankly, he knew from forensic research, spent a good portion of his life doing that very thing.
“And I thought: how did he do this? Over and over? This was his life.”
Red or Dead is a natural comrade to The Damned United, the riveting fictional account which Peace wrote of Brian Clough's disastrous 44 days in charge of Leeds United.
In a curious way, the origins of both ideas can be traced to Huddersfield. The first ever match Peace attended was 40 years ago this summer, when his father brought him to see Clough’s new Leeds side playing against the Town in a friendly. And it was from Huddersfield that the directors of Liverpool lured Shankly in 1959.
“But I spoke with my grandfather and father about this and Shankly didn’t make a huge impression on them when he was there. There was no great wailing when he left. Even when he went to Liverpool, he wasn’t a big media presence.
“Growing up, I was aware of the mythology that he was a great man but can’t ever remember him being on television. So when I went to research his life, a lot of it was new to me. And yeah, it was humbling and inspirational to read about the bond he created with the people of Liverpool.”
Red or Dead is an unabashed ode to Shankly. Peace holds his hands up and admits he can think of few figures in 20th century England whose moral energy spread through the streets in such an obvious way.
Shankly was an avowed socialist –he was downright fearful of the idea of any one individual having so much money – and fiercely championed the notion that Liverpool Football Club belonged primarily to the people.
Was fastidious
His relationship with Liverpudlians seems fabulous in retrospect, from fans calling around to the house enquiring about FA Cup tickets to sitting in the livingroom while Ness brought in tea to Shankly kicking ball on the streets with schoolboys even after he retired. He was fastidious about everything he did; obsessive-compulsive, as Peace presents him.
He worked through the summer, he neither drank nor smoked, he was superstitious, he was devoted to his family. He was both a showman –“he would rehearse one-liners in the mirror of his bedroom” – and remote: it is hard to see from the book that he had any true friendships beyond that with his wife, Ness.
If he had a cold streak, it was with players in their declining years with Liverpool. He was sometimes brutally clinical in the way he jilted them. His parsimony affected their pay scales – although he was completely pragmatic and even extravagant when it came to buying players for the club, he was mistrustful of extravagant pay packets.
“There were a lot of contradictions then,” Peace says.
“Shankly , along with Busby, Revie and Bertie Mee had an agreement between them about how much they would pay players. And a few players have spoken about the fact that Shankly stopped them getting more. But his work ethic and life was informed by an idea of basic equality – that you have to earn whatever you get.”
It was a ideal which, Peace argues, served English society well in years after World War Two. Shankly was Liverpool manager from 1959-1974, a period of profound social change. When he moved to the city, it was still a post-war shipyard city, albeit in slow decline.
By the final summer of Shankly’s life, Thatcher’s government was two years in power and Toxteth was in flames. But Liverpool were champions of Europe!
The social turmoil sweeping through English cities in those years is what draws Peace to the period.
In The Damned United, the Clough he imagines is caught in the paranoia and unease of managing the very team he loathed when he was with Derby County. The idea of the book was to reflect his state of mind. Peace was completely taken aback by the success of his book on Clough.
It generated considerable controversy and while he regrets the fact that his fictional portrayal upset the Clough family, he was completely bamboozled by John Giles’s objections and a subsequent legal wrangling.
"All I will say is I had written about police corruption in the 1970s and the Yorkshire Ripper and the miners strike...I never thought in a million years that a book about Leeds United would be the most controversial. I never intended that book to be 'against' Brian Clough. . . I wish, in retrospect, I'd gone to the Clough family before the book was published and spoken to them but I just didn't think they would be interested. And the reaction of John Giles . . . .the irony is that a lot of the things he came out and said are not true.
Was paranoid
"We never went to the High Court and I have never met him. It was resolved between him and the publisher in a much less dramatic fashion than was portrayed. It was not my intention to besmirch his character. I just tried to imagine it from Clough's point of view. And in Clough's biography he says repeatedly that he felt that Giles tried to undermine him. So I tried to show that Clough was paranoid and believed that...not that Giles actually did it. And I was happy to change the sentences that John wanted changed."
There is likely to be likely to be less acrimony over his portrayal of Shankly, who walks through Peace’s fictional world like a celestial figure. But Peace is clear as to why he feels it is important to resurrect the career of a football man who retired almost 40 years ago.
“You have to be careful....sat in Japan pontificating about England. But the battles and arguments of that time – we are living with the consequences now. Just to take the state of education and health in the UK. The election of the Thatcher government and that idea of turning your back on many of the things that men such as Shankly, Busby and Jock Stein represented; people who had brought them themselves up from nothing and were part of a society that created the welfare state in 1945 and who really believed in the idea that there should be equality of opportunity.
“I lived back in Britain for two years between 2009 and 2011 and felt people are not willing to engage in the conversation of whether this is worth fighting for. The Labour Party is as culpable as anyone for what has happened to the NHS over the last 15 years: why turn your back on the thing that built the party?
Shankly had the skill and the popular means to do that. And yet by the end, Shankly felt unwanted and rejected by the institution he revered in the early years of his retirement.
This is supposed to be Peace’s happy book but he wasn’t t surprised when an editor at Faber told him he was working on the retirement section, when Shankly kept showing up for work. The editor felt that he couldn’t go on. “He said it was too painful.”
The first half of the book – entitled Everyday is Saturday – is a deliberately detailed and largely triumphant account of the 15 seasons that Shankly – referred to as 'Bill' throughout – spent as the boss. Football fans of the period will swoon as they are rushed back to their Shoot Annual days. Casual readers will probably scream at Peace's use of repetition – he repeats the Liverpool teams, the scoreline, lists the attendance at every home game, describes how Bill stands in the dressing room looking at every player, how he gets dressed into his trademark tangerine shirt and red tie and what he thinks about. It weighs in a hefty 715 pages.
The repetition is testing but the rewards are manifold, from Shankly’s transcribed radio interviews – including one he conducted with one of his heroes, Harold Wilson – to an hilarious address he gave to a golf society to his strange and lonely habit of calling other managers late at night. The enduring mystery about Shankly – about why he retired – is one that Peace cannot throw any new light on.
He just did and spent the remaining years of his life trying to accept that. For the many in despair of the monetisation which has transformed the English game, Red or Dead will read like a parable; a wistful lament for more simple and honourable days.
Peace once read and loved the fact that when Alex Ferguson was at Aberdeen, he used to drive his players to distraction by playing cassettes of Shankly speaking on the team coach. The influence of what might loosely be called the coalmining generation of managers echoed through the modern game.
He has no doubt Shankly would be appalled by many aspects of the modern game.
“Even before he died he was”. In the second half, he is already railing about the state of the game in 1981, which is based on comments he made in the Liverpool press at the time. This quote about people with swimming pools and cars who never won anything. And that sums up the modern game. So I do think he would have been appalled by all that. But I don’t think he would have turned his back on it.”
No, by the end, there had been a reconciliation with the club brought about mainly by the fact that the fans refused to allow Shankly to drift into irrelevance. During his research, Peace trawled through the LFC message boards and came across one story that thrilled him. A fan present in Paris on the night in 1981 when Liverpool beat Real Madrid in the European Cup final posted his reminiscences of a scene that evening in the team hotel. Bob Paisley and Bill Shankly were at the bar, perfectly alone and deep in conversation.
"And I felt that is how it should end. Some people said Shankly died of a broken heart. I feel that is an exaggeration. But he wasn't under any illusion that he wasn't loved and revered. And I think that is what sustained him."
*David Peace will be in discussion with Paul Howard in Eason's, O'Connell Street on Tuesday August 20th at 6.30pm.
