"When I go, I'm going to be the fittest man ever to die”.
Just one of numerous outlandish claims which sprung from the mouth of the one and only Bill Shankly. Yet such was the legendary Liverpool manager’s compelling ability to convince his devoted followers that was he was saying - even in the face of rational logic - was the truth, there will likely have been many Liverpudlians who would have taken those words as gospel. Indeed there will no doubt have been some who believed the Scot was immortal and that day would never come.
When it inevitably of course did, 41 years ago this week and a little over seven after his shock retirement at the age of 60, it unleashed a wave of grief and emotion across Merseyside as well as the world of football which was testament to a man who lived and breathed the game and expected the same from everyone else he came into contact with.
And one of the most poignant tributes came just days later when, with Liverpool about to play their first league game at Anfield after his passing, one of the Scot’s former chief lieutenants - now in charge of the Reds’ opponents that afternoon - stripped off his club tracksuit ahead of the minute’s silence to reveal the red shirt he once wore with such distinction, a heartfelt gesture which nevertheless divided fans of the club he was now employed by and may even have ultimately cost him the Anfield job he craved most.
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The sudden nature of Shankly’s retirement itself on 12th July 1974 had induced almost a form of bereavement amongst Reds fans, the footage of Granada TV reporter Tony Wilson breaking the news to unsuspecting shoppers in Liverpool city centre having been long woven into folklore. "Retirement is a terrible, silly word”, Shankly stressed soon afterwards. "They should get a new word for it. The only time you retire is when you're in a box and the flowers come out. I’ve retired from football yes, but not from life.”
The Scot admitted it was the hardest decision he ever made, comparing it to like being sent to the electric chair, and there are those who feel it was one he came to bitterly regret particularly in light of the uneasy relationship that existed afterwards between him and the club he vowed to turn into a ‘bastion of invincibility’ and did. Whether that sorrow played a role, as some have suggested, in the premature passing of the 68-year-old who never smoked or drank and still looked as trim as in his playing days remains open to conjecture but there are those - including his former Boot Room ally Joe Fagan - who believed Shankly died of a broken heart.
What cannot ever be disputed is the Ayrshire-born former Preston North End midfielder's influence played in awakening the sleeping giant that was Liverpool FC when he took charge in December 1959. Having seen the prime years of his playing career wiped out by World War Two, Shankly cut his managerial teeth at one of his former clubs Carlisle United and made enough of an impression at the Third Division North club that in early 1951 he was approached by Liverpool - First Division champions only three years earlier in the first official post-war season - after manager George Kay had to step down for health reasons.
"I got a telephone call from Liverpool and was asked if I’d like to be interviewed for the manager’s job”, the Scot wrote in his autobiography. "The big snag cropped up when the Liverpool board had said the manager could put down his team for matches and the directors would scrutinise it and alter it if they wanted to. So I just said, ‘If I don’t pick the team, what am I manager of?’”
Having turned down Anfield, he built up further experience at Grimsby Town, Workington Town and Huddersfield Town before in 1959 Liverpool came calling again. After relegation in 1954, the Reds had become marooned in the Second Division with only the performances of the legendary but ageing Billy Liddell keeping the club out of the Third Division North and league meetings with the likes of Accrington Stanley. Having received the necessary assurances he would have full control over team selection and football matters, Shankly took charge and went about revitalising the club’s fortunes on and off the field.
Anfield and the club’s Melwood training ground were run-down and dilapidated - ‘the biggest toilet in Liverpool’ was the Scot’s initial verdict on the stadium - with directors seemingly content to let the still well-supported club drift along with average attendances holding up at around the 40,000 despite a decade of serial under-achievement following the 1950 FA Cup final defeat to Arsenal. Having long admired the city not just from experiences during his playing days but trips to the city to feed his passion for boxing, Shankly recognised the untapped potential and immediately set about sprucing up both the training ground and the stadium, putting pressure on the club directors to fund improvements but initially rolling his own sleeves up and imploring his coaching staff to help him, a request made easier by one of his first and most crucial decisions after taking over.
Even back then, it was not uncommon for a new manager to bring in his own backroom staff but the Scot immediately reassured Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan and Reuben Bennett their places on the coaching staff were safe as long as that show of loyalty in them was repaid. “I’ll work in cooperation with you”, he told them. “I want one thing. I want loyalty. If you come and tell me a story about someone else.. I'm telling you now you'll go. I want everyone to be loyal to each other and everything you do is for Liverpool Football Club."
It proved a masterstroke as they became key figures of the Boot Room and its simple home-spun philosophies that became the foundations of the dynasty which followed and, once Shankly found another key ally in finance director Eric Sawyer who was appointed to the Liverpool board in 1961 and helped loosen the purse strings, the Reds never looked back. Promotion back to the top flight after eight years in the doldrums of the Second Division followed twelve months later after the transformative signings of Ian St John and Ron Yeats and within two years Liverpool were champions of England, Shankly’s side following it up in 1965 by ending the club’s long and painful 73-year wait for a first FA Cup triumph and coming close to being Britain’s first European Cup winners only to suffer contentious defeat in the semi-finals to Inter Milan.
A second league title in three years followed in 1966 and, while Liverpool would then go seven years without a trophy as Shankly gradually and reluctantly realised he had break his old team up and build a new one, the unshakeable belief he had infused throughout the club meant few in the game were surprised when the league championship returned to Anfield in 1973 along with the Reds’ first European trophy, the Uefa Cup, after two-legged victory over Germans Borussia Moenchengladbach. When the club’s second FA Cup was lifted a year later after a comprehensive triumph over Newcastle United at Wembley with Shankly famously conducting his side’s destruction of the hapless Geordies from the touchline, it seemed a new era of even greater Anfield success was in the offing.
It was but not with Shankly at the helm, the Scot later admitting he remembered sitting down in the dressing room at Wembley feeling "tired from all the years. I knew I was going to finish." His public announcement a little over two months later that he was calling time on close to fifteen years in the LFC hot-seat may have shaken legions of Liverpudlians to their core but it was less of a surprise to the Anfield inner sanctum where the manager threatening to quit had been close to an annual event. He had nearly walked out in rage after the board sold winger Johnny Morrissey to Everton shortly after promotion in 1962 and a resignation letter written five years later after Liverpool missed out on the signing of Preston midfielder Howard Kendall to Merseyside neighbours Everton sat unretracted in club secretary Peter Robinson’s filing cabinet for years.
A form of depression seemingly took over the football-mad Shankly every year during the barren summer months but the return of his players for pre-season training would usually lift the despondency and reignite his enthusiasm. But he could not be talked round in the summer of 1974 and his resignation was eventually accepted ‘with extreme reluctance’ said chairman John Smith when he announced the news to a shocked press pack, adding the departing manager had agreed to give ‘every assistance to the club for as long as necessary’.
But both parties had a very different vision over exactly what that assistance would be. The Liverpool squad returned to pre-season only days later to find Shankly there in his kit waiting for them, with new boss Bob Paisley - who admitted he had only reluctantly stepped up from his assistant manager’s role to help ensure the other Boot Room staff kept their jobs - immediately undermined by the players still addressing the Scot as ‘boss’.
"He started taking the training”, Tommy Smith admitted. "Prior to that, as a manager, he didn't actually take the training, he'd walk around and talk to Reuben Bennett, Joe Fagan and Bob Paisley and tell them what to do. But he started taking the training! In the end, Bob Paisley, purely for his own sanity, had to say to him, 'Bill, you don't work here any more. This is my team here, I've got things I want to do.'"
"It was difficult for Bob, having him hanging around”, John Toshack added. "We're not just talking about any member of the coaching staff who's retired, who just came to Melwood to have a bit of jogging around and a shower and that was it. Shanks was Liverpool; he was an institution. This was a man who inspired us in every way ; his belief in Liverpool Football Club, the standards he set for himself and for the club, the intensity that he went about his job. His quote about football being more important than life or death, he really felt that way. He rammed it into us how important it was to be playing for Liverpool, how privileged we were to be playing for these people. We really believed that."
Shankly was said to have wanted and expected to be offered a place on the board of directors after his retirement - as his friend and former Scotland team-mate Matt Busby had been when he stepped down as Manchester United boss in 1969 - but much to his dismay it never materialised, the Anfield board quite possibly being wary of the prospect after seeing the effect having such a powerful figure in the background could have, the Old Trafford club suffering the indignity of relegation in that same month of May 1974 Shankly won his final Liverpool trophy only six years after the Red Devils became England’s first European Cup winners.
His need for football and the training environment meant Shankly soon started turning up and being welcomed at Everton’s Bellefield training ground, which backed on to his West Derby home, and he could be regularly seen on Sunday mornings watching and encouraging the local kids playing in Sunday league games in a park close to where he lived (which would later be renamed 'The Bill Shankly Playing Fields’.) His way with words meant media work was always likely to come his way and, along with working for local station Radio City as a pundit, he also presented his own chat show for them interviewing such figures as Harold Wilson, Freddie Starr and Lulu and in 1976 wrote a hard-hitting autobiography - which Liverpool initially tied to ban - that provided some insight into his feelings about the club he felt had turned its back on him.
"I wasn't feeling ill or anything like that when I retired”, he wrote. “But felt if I was away from the pressures of Anfield for a while, and rested, it would make me fitter and rejuvenate me. I felt I could contribute more later on. I would never leave the city of Liverpool, and still wanted to be involved in football. I still wanted to help Liverpool, because the club had become my life. But I wasn't given the chance. I have a pension scheme and I had a testimonial, which was marvellous, an unforgettable evening, but I was willing to work for the club for nothing more than my pension. I was willing to help in any capacity, just to advise, if necessary, so that there would be no disruption at all while Bob got run-in.
"I went to the training ground at Melwood for a while. It is only down the road from where I live. But then I got the impression that it would perhaps be better if I stopped going. I felt there was some resentment - 'What the hell is he doing here?' I packed up going to Melwood and I also stopped going into the directors' box at Anfield. I still go to the matches, of course. I sit in the stand. I would have loved to have been invited to away matches, but I waited and waited until I became tired of waiting.
"Finally after twenty months and after Liverpool had won the league championship again, I was invited to travel with the club to Bruges for the second leg of the Uefa Cup Final. I accepted, because I didn't want anybody to think I was petty, but it came too late for my peace of mind. I couldn't help wondering why it had taken them so long. And I was not impressed with the arrangements they had made for me in Bruges, where I was put into a different hotel to the one used by the official party. I found that quite insulting.
“I soon realised that Liverpool preferred me to make my own arrangements, so that's what I started to do. I asked other clubs for tickets, sometimes when Liverpool were the visiting team and sometimes to see other teams play. Tommy Docherty invited me to Old Trafford when Manchester United played Liverpool in a night match. Tommy invited me to have a meal with him in restaurant at Old Trafford and we enjoyed a wonderful hour of banter before the match. Sidney Reakes, the Liverpool director, said to Tommy, 'I see Bill Shankly's here.' 'Aye', said Tommy. 'He's welcome here.'
"I might add that I count Everton amongst the clubs who have welcomed me over the last few seasons. I have been received more warmly by Everton than I have been by Liverpool. It is scandalous and outrageous that I should have to write these things about the club I helped to build into what it is today, because if the situation had been reversed I would have invited people to games. It was never my intention to have a complete break with Liverpool, but at the same time I wasn't going to put my nose in where it wasn't wanted. Maybe I was an embarrassment to some people. It would have been a wonderful honour to have been made a director of Liverpool Football Club, but I don't go round saying, 'I would like to be this and that.' That's begging and I'm not a beggar! No, no, anything I have done and everything I have got, I have worked for."
Tommy Smith’s deep bond with Shankly went right back to his earliest days when he joined Liverpool as a 15-year-old schoolboy who had lost his dad as a youngster, seeing the Scot as a father figure in those formative years, and he felt the board’s ruthless treatment was a case of chickens coming home to roost after the battles they had endured with the former Reds boss whose disdain for directors and administrators was well-known, once saying “At a football club, there's a holy trinity - the players, the manager and the supporters. Directors don't come into it. They are only there to sign the cheques.”
"Shanks was wrong to keep turning up at Melwood, giving advice and acting as if he was still in charge”, Smith recalled. "There's no doubt about that, but the club directors were wrong the way they treated him. When he finished he thought he was going to become a director but they got their own back, it's as simple as that. I don't think they were out to get him, but I think there was an opportunity whereby he retired and they said, 'Right, that's it, we've got rid of him at last.' Shanks had always been difficult and he would have created one or two problems for them. The directors settled some old scores in 1974. They didn't realise that he was a god on Merseyside because they didn't mix with the fans. While Liverpool was an ego trip to them, for Shankly it was his life. They knew nothing about football. They were just businessmen."
Shankly’s innate compulsion to impart his knowledge of the game and life itself saw him act as a mentor and sounding board to promising young managers like Brian Clough and Ron Atkinson and he briefly took up advisory roles at Wrexham and Tranmere Rovers, the latter being to help out his former captain Ron Yeats who had taken over at Prenton Park, and he was also a big help to another of his former Liverpool stars John Toshack when the Welshman began his managerial career with Swansea City in 1978. The Scot even reached into the grassroots game to impart his vast knowledge, Charlie Mills - a PE teacher at an outdoor activity centre on the Wirral - admitting, "He came down to help us for the day, and stood with me on the sidelines, offering me advice. To a young coach, it was an incredible experience. He was a humble man, despite this reputation as a no-nonsense Scot. As an Everton fan, I'd always regarded him as the devil incarnate, but my view changed after meeting him."
But it wasn’t enough to replace the adrenaline and sense of purpose which had become essential to Shankly after a lifetime devoted to the game and, although he would admit regrets in one of his last ever interviews at how his obsession with football had at times affected his family life, the different pace of life after retirement clearly did not suit him.
"My life's changed completely and I've been bored a lot of the time”, he wrote in his book. “Before, I had somewhere to go and didn't have time to be bored. Now I've got time on my hands. I have done quite a few things. I've been to hospitals, made speeches and watched a lot of games. But not being connected with football in some capacity has bored me. I'll always be a Liverpool man. I never resented the club after I left, as some stupid person wrote in the paper. I was so proud of what Bob Paisley achieved after I left because we worked together for so many years and I was part of it."
Shankly had been present in Paris in May 1981 when Paisley’s Reds won their third European Cup in five years, a fitting venue for the man who had referenced Napoleon in his famous quote about wanting to build Liverpool into a bastion of invincibility to see the club he breathed new life into lift a trophy for the final time. Three months later, and only weeks after celebrating his 68th birthday, he suffered what was thought to be a mild heart attack and was taken to Broadgreen Hospital. With well wishes pouring in, he initially appeared to be making good progress with a hospital statement confirming he was not ‘on the danger list’ and was being nursed on a general ward ‘because that is where he wanted to be'. But his condition deteriorated and, with wife Nessie by his side, he suffered a second heart attack in the early hours of Tuesday 29 September 1981 and died.
Coming only nine months after the murder of Beatles legend John Lennon in New York, Merseyside woke up to more devastating news that another of the other key figures who had made the city in the 1960s the epicentre of the cultural universe was gone. Later that day, the ECHO'S leader column read, “Bill Shankly is dead. But his memory will never die. As long as people talk of football and of great deeds and of great men, the name of Bill Shankly will live on. They will speak of him with awe and affection. For Shanks was not just a soccer genius, a charismatic, inspirational force. He won cups and titles, yes. He also won the hearts of men and women and children the world over. He walked with the high and the mighty, but was never deluded by grandeur. His love was rooted deeply among the ordinary folk of Liverpool. He enriched this city immeasurably and today, as we mourn his death, we are also thankful for the life and memory of a splendid man."
With Liverpool’s European Cup first round second leg tie against Finnish side Oulu Palloseura due to take place at Anfield that evening, a stunned Bob Paisley paid tribute to his old friend and colleague saying, “Bill was one of the greatest managers there has ever been. I am deeply, deeply shocked. Although I knew just how seriously ill he was, the news has still come as a great blow.”
On an emotion-filled evening, Liverpool wore black armbands and a minute’s silence was held before kick off with a mournful Kop singing their fallen hero’s name for much of the second half to the customary tune of ‘Amazing Grace’, the Reds following up their 1-0 win from the first leg with a 7-0 triumph on a historic night which saw young Welsh striker Ian Rush score the first of his record-breaking 346 goals for the club.
"Never before can Anfield have been so quiet, so subdued”, the Liverpool Daily Post’s Andy Morgan reported the following day. "For an arena that has created a reputation for its uninhibited raucousness, the sight of more than 20,000 people standing mute had a surreal feel to it. People stand in silence so rarely that it is hard to know what to do. Stare at your shoes, stare at the opposite stand or just look the head in front of you? The thousands at Anfield last night generally did none of these. They seemed to be gazing into the inky Liverpool night, remembering with warmth those magical nights at the shrine when Shankly, the people's man, had applauded them for their loyalty. Now they were silently flicking through their memories."
Three days later Shankly’s funeral took place at St Mary’s Church near his West Derby home with thousands of grieving fans lining the streets to pay their respects. Many of the Scot’s friends from the world of football such as Matt Busby, Denis Law and his favourite player, Tom Finney, were in attendance with Scotland manager Jock Stein holding Nessie Shankly’s hand as the coffin was carried into the church by six of his devoted former Liverpool players - Ron Yeats, Ian St John, John Toshack, Kevin Keegan, Ray Clemence and Emlyn Hughes. Three of the most important people in his football life took to the podium to talk about the attributes Shankly prized the most - Kevin Keegan on integrity, Tom Finney on enthusiasm and Bob Paisley on inspiration - before Ian St John addressed the congregation and told them “We are honoured to have known Bill Shankly. He moulded us from boys into men” before Gerry Marsden concluded proceedings by singing You’ll Never Walk Alone.
The fates of the fixture list determined that Liverpool’s First Division opponents the following day, again at Anfield, would be Swansea City, managed by former Reds hero John Toshack who - aided by Shankly’s guidance in his early months in the job after becoming the Football League’s youngest manager at 28 in 1978 - had taken the Welsh side on a remarkable climb from the Fourth Division to the top flight for the first time in the club’s history. Before kick off, with the Kop displaying a banner which read ‘Shankly Lives Forever’, both sides lined up on the halfway line for a minute’s silence and Toshack removed his Swansea tracksuit top to reveal one of his old red Liverpool shirts in poignant tribute to his former boss.
After an ill-tempered 2-2 draw which saw two Terry McDermott penalties salvage a point for the hosts after their high-flying visitors - third in the league table and six points ahead of the 12th-placed Reds after winning five of their first seven First Division matches - Toshack explained why he felt he had to mark the occasion in the way he did.
"I owe so much to Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley. Shanks has had a part to play in Swansea's success. He taught me to aim for the stars. I'm so grateful the help he gave me over the last three years. I’ve been to other places, supposedly great clubs, and feel a little bit of the warmth has gone out of them from when I knew them but this place - because of the one man and the people within it, the people he brought into it - has retained the warmth it’s had over the last twenty years and I hope it never loses it.”
Despite many at Anfield that day and across the football world being moved by Toshack’s tribute, it divided Swansea supporters and was reportedly not looked upon favourably by members of the Liverpool board at the time who felt Toshack was ‘touting’ himself for the manager’s job further down the line.
The Welshman went to enjoy a highly successful coaching career which saw him twice manage both Real Madrid and the Wales national team but, despite twice looking odds-on to take control at Anfield - initially later that season when he claimed he was approached to be Paisley’s successor and again after Kenny Dalglish’s shock resignation in 1991 - it never happened, with his show of loyalty to his former boss on that emotional September afternoon said to have counted against him, former team-mate Graeme Souness later saying, “I thought nothing of it at the time, but I understand it didn’t go down too well with some of the people who matter at Anfield.”
"I felt I was going to Liverpool, I felt it was done and dusted”, Toshack later admitted. "Liverpool were struggling at the time and Bob had said he wanted to leave at the end of the season. Nothing was agreed and I may have been naive but I left the place feeling it would happen and expecting another call but then they went on a run of 24 or 25 games and won the Championship and Bob turned around and stayed on for another year. It left me devastated. It was a bit embarrassing, to be honest, as I’d told a few people it would be happening and it left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. Part of Liverpool went out of me then. I was invited back there on two occasions afterwards to talk about the job but I didn't go.”
Liverpool paid permanent tribute to Shankly 11 months after his death by unveiling 15-foot high cast-iron gates named after him on Anfield Road inscribed with You’ll Never Walk Alone, although Kevin Keegan was among those who felt renaming the stadium in his honour would be the most fitting gesture, saying in 1995, “That stadium wouldn't be what it is now if it wasn't for Bill Shankly. They might still be a club with no direction as they were when he joined. The gates are not enough, nowhere near enough and the club know that."
Two years later a seven-foot tall bronze statue of Shankly was unveiled outside the Kop, funded by club sponsors Carlsberg, with the simple inscription, “He made the people happy”, but just over a decade later Liverpool fans created the country’s first football supporters union, named the Spirit of Shankly. Given the iconic Scot’s deep reverence for the fans, it is hard not to feel the achievements of the union in the years since their formation - most notably helping see off the destructive Hicks and Gillett ownership and more recently being a key element in ensuring LFC’s commitment to engage meaningfully with fans is now enshrined in the club’s Articles of Association - is the kind of tribute which would have meant the most to the man himself.
