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‘A bit of this and a bit of that but I won’t talk over the phone, I’ll come and see you.’
We arranged that he should come to our home match the following Saturday and that he would bring his lady for lunch. He looked good, but always had done. He was invariably immaculately dressed in a designer suit, crisp shirt and eye-catching tie and always wore shades.
He said he had been in America and last weekend had been with Gloria.
‘Gloria who?
‘Estefan, of course.’
Then they had gone on to a party and Frank said this and Frank said that.
‘Frank who?’
‘Sinatra.’
Of course. Now he had become a great namedropper. He gave me his business card, which prompted me to ask what he was currently doing. He said that he was making fortunes through setting up venues for pop concerts and that was why he had been anxious to meet up with me at Peterborough.
‘You want some money, don’t you?’ he asked, rather needlessly.
I told him that we were desperate for cash.
‘We’ll hire out the ground. I’ll bring some top people over,’ he said.
‘Keith, I’m not being funny but it might be a flop.’
He assured me that everything would be all right because he would pay the money up front and he proceeded to stay in Peterborough for two months. He made it clear that he wanted to buy the club and I arranged meetings with all the directors. He came to league games and youth games and talked to this person and that within the club. He liked the fact that we owned the freehold on the ground and that we had several promising young players who would ensure progression on the playing side.
He got really into it, bringing his accountant into things and acting as though it was a foregone conclusion that he would own the place. One or two people were getting a bit hot under the collar and then one night he invited us all out for a meal. He talked freely and openly about the City of London heist, asserting that he got on with all the coppers because he knew them so well, claiming kinship with the mafia bosses and asking if we had seen the television documentary about him.
Nobody had seen it, but I later viewed a video copy that he had given to me. I, in turn, showed it to all the directors of the club and to anybody who is squeamish or a bit nervous it is very frightening. It centres on the world’s biggest robbery and, after they had seen it, there was no way the board wanted him in their club.
The round-up to the piece is an interview with him in which he is asked: ‘Well, that’s the world’s biggest robbery. Is that you finished with crime now?’ He smirks and says: ‘No. I want to top that.’
Well how do you top it?
The atmosphere in the boardroom when they came to discuss the proposal was icy. It was dead in the water and Keith knew that. He had had his card marked and when he called me to ask what had happened I told him.
‘Keith, you frightened them to death.’
He said that he had to go to Luton and would pay a social visit to me at home on the way back to his hotel before I set off for my day’s work at the club.
As he was nearing my place he called on his mobile phone to check my exact location and I asked my great pal Gordon Ogbourne, who has been with me for 20 years as kit manager at various clubs and whom I trust implicitly, to go to the end of the drive and just wave him in.
We had tea and sandwiches and he said that he was not prepared just to accept what had happened. He was not giving it up that easily. He wanted the club and was going to get it.
After half an hour of reinforcing his ambition we both decided that it was time to go our separate ways for the day ahead and I said that I would follow him out. We reach the main road from my drive and he turns left, I turn left. We get to the lights and he goes straight on, I go straight on. At the next lights he turns left, I turn left. Then as he goes straight on to pick up the A6 to Luton, I turn left to get on the A421 to Northampton. I had no sooner reached this main highway through a little village than my mobile phone rang. It was my wife, Kirstine.
‘Stop at the nearest phone box and ring me back at the neighbour’s house over the road,’ she said with some urgency.
I protested and said that whatever she had to say she should just say it.
But she insisted. ‘Barry, I ain’t being funny. Stop at the nearest phone box and ring me back. Immediately.’
Realising that something strange was happening, I did as she said.
What’s going on?’ I asked from the phone booth.
‘You ain’t going to believe this, Barry. I’ve got our neighbour over here. I think you’d better come home. She has had people with guns with telescopic sights in her garden. They are following you.’
‘Following me? I’m in a phone box. There’s nobody here.’
‘I don’t mean you,’ she said. ‘I mean Keith.’
So I put the phone down on Kirstine and called Keith on his mobile. I relayed the message that when he pulled into my driveway a white van turned up in the drive of the house opposite and that there were men with guns.
Understandably, the neighbour was petrified because she could see what they were tackled up with. They even knocked on the door and she didn’t know whether to answer it or not. She decided not to, but they said they were police and that she should ring the station to verify their presence.
She did this and the officer who answered the phone said that he knew nothing about it. Well, she was in a panic now and didn’t know what to do. Thankfully, with two men with rifles on the other side of the door and her quivering, her phone rang and it was a return call from the police to say that, contrary to the information previously given to her, they did know about the situation. It was nothing to do with them, said the caller, it was Interpol.
Armed with this information, she opened the door to them and they presented their badges with the reassurance that they were just observing somebody.
In my conversation with Cheeseman I continued.
‘They’re following you.’
‘Not me, mate,’ he replied with typical bravado. ‘You must have been up to no good Barry.’
That’s the way he plays it. So bloody cool.
I met him the next night at the home of Rinaldo, an Italian gentleman who lived in Peterborough and owned a night club of the same name. Cheeseman wanted to buy his property which was on the market for £750,000. That was the last I saw of him for some time.
A couple of months after that I had a phone call, again from the police in London, to ask if I had a phone number at which they could get hold of him, but I could not help them. The officer said there had been a few complaints about Keith and they were searching for his whereabouts. Did I have a previous address for him? All I could tell them was that he had stayed at The Butterfly Hotel, and that I had a mobile phone number for him which was no longer applicable.
Then I had the manager of The Butterfly phone up.
‘You know Keith Cheeseman, don’t you?’
I said I did (only too well, by now).
‘He’s left an unpaid bill of £3,500 here.’
I could not help but laugh. Uncontrollably. Then a finance company (ho-ho) called with an all-too-familiar opening line. ‘Do you know Keith Cheeseman?’ Apparently he hadn’t paid the last five instalments on a car loan.
Keith Cheeseman is the greatest conman I have ever known; possibly the world has ever known. When you were out with him he always had loads of readies and he was the most generous man with tips you could wish to meet. One day at The Dorchester Hotel in London he gave the porter £20 just for taking the bags to his room. A waiter brought an ice bucket and he gave him £20. Then he gave a taxi driver a £20 tip when he took us less than a mile round the corner.
He was such good company that you would have thought butter would not melt in his mouth. Yet in a roll-call of 20th Century villains he would have to be near the top of the league.
If my first job in management was a roller-coaster ride, it could hardly have prepared me better for the long and winding road ahead.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_656b421e-96c0-51ef-8009-d1956390374b)
‘Practice son, practice’ (#ulink_656b421e-96c0-51ef-8009-d1956390374b)
Pilgrims Way, Bedford, was part of a council estate of prefab housing originally designed to last for 10 years, though they must have been made of strong stuff because my father actually lived there for 49 years and 11 months before they finally brought in the bulldozers. For me, it was wonderful to be resident there as the most popular kid in the block, entirely due to our being the only household to possess a proper football. My dad worked as a Post Office engineer for 40 years while mum was employed at a television rental company called Robinsons and also for, as I called it, the ‘knicker’ factory. This was, in fact, a lingerie outlet called Hallwins.
I went to Pearcey Road School from the age of five and it was here that my lifelong obsession with the wonderful game of football began. I got into the school team when I was eight and in those days I used to wait for dad after coming home from school, looking anxiously over our little fence in readiness for him to appear on his way home from work. Football quickly consumed my entire young life. I would say to dad, ‘Will you play football with me?’ almost before he could get to the front door.
There were plenty of fields down at the bottom of the street and it was greatly pleasing that dad encouraged me and all the kids round our estate to kick around with a football. We were the first to have a posh ball with laces and it was amusing at Christmas time and when the kids had birthdays. They would all come round to our house and ask, ‘Can Mr Fry pump our ball up?’ They didn’t know how to lace it up, either, and dad was an expert on that.
I was an only child and it must have been comical for the neighbours to see dad and I emerge from our front door. He was like the Pied Piper. As we walked down the street, bouncing the ball, the other kids would emerge, one by one, and by the time we had reached the fields there were enough bodies for a 12-a-side game. We would use milk bottles or jackets for goalposts and the games were never-ending. Dennis Brisley, who was a bit older, was one of the boys I was friendly with. He just used to love football and played until he was 45. He was a super-fit man. Ken Stocker, another one of the knockabout boys, was in my school team and it’s a coincidence that two of my best pals, he and Dennis, were right wingers. Tommy McGaul was another one of the crowd. He had two brothers and they all used to come down to the green to play.
Dad was trainer for the Post Office side as well as playing for them and whenever the GPO had a game I would take the day off school and go and support him. He was obliged to wear glasses because a bomb in the war had sent him flying, but it was frightening and almost farcical to see him playing in those spectacles. Born in Dover, he had been a navy man. Mum was from Jarrow and there was as much a contrast in their personalities as there was in their geographical roots. Dad was always the serious one, a stalwart of the school of rigorous discipline, whereas mum liked a joke a minute. Both had big families.
There had been no football on television in the days of my early youth and, anyway, we did not possess a television set. But in 1954 Wolves were to be shown on television playing Spartak Moscow in a friendly and I went to the house of a neighbour, Terry Mayhew, whose mother was Irish, to watch it. I was spellbound, mesmerised. Tilly Mayhew later told my mother: ‘I asked Barry if he wanted a drink and he was just oblivious to the question. He just kept staring at the screen.’ I became a mad Wolves fan, so much so that mum knitted me a scarf with all the players’ names on. I’ve still got it all these years later! I was besotted just through watching them on television. Billy Wright was my idol. Not only was he captain, but he was a gentleman and conducted himself correctly. Everything about him was pure magic. I kept a scrapbook on Wolves and a separate one dedicated entirely to Billy Wright. Among the team there was Swinbourne, Clamp, Deeley, Flowers, Delaney, Hancocks, Mullen, Murray and Broadbent. Peter Broadbent was another one of my favourite players. He had such grace about him. Their names were all on my scarf, but when it came to the captain he was given his full name. The stitching says ‘Billy Wright’. I don’t know why I loved him so much because he played in that unexciting position of centre-half. He was, however, the England captain and that may have had something to do with my boyhood admiration. I was also incredulous at how high he could jump for a little man. Dad was later to take me to London to see Wolves play whenever they came south.
You can imagine the scene then, years later, when I’m in a garage at Barnet, filling up my car. Another man pulls in, jumps out and he comes over to me and I instantly recognise him.
‘Hello Barry,’ he says. ‘You’re doing a wonderful job down at Barnet.’
It was none other than Billy Wright. Imagine, my hero says that to me! I was so awestruck that I nearly squirted him with all this petrol.
‘You wouldn’t believe this mate, but you’re my idol.’
He smiled. ‘I’ve been watching your progress down at Barnet at close quarters and you have done fantastic.’
I asked how he knew about what, to him, must have been such a rudimentary matter.
‘I only live down the road,’ he said.
So Billy and his wife Joy were living so close without my ever knowing, even though at the time I knew he was working for Central Television. I was further able to indulge my hero worship because, on occasions, I used to get to sit in the Royal Box at Wembley alongside Billy, who was a director at Wolves. He always looked after me in those circumstances.
My favourite carpet game as a kid was tiddlywinks, though I played it in a manner which can hardly be said to have been traditional. I turned the tiddlywinks into massive football matches – red tiddlywinks versus blue tiddlywinks; black tiddlywinks versus yellow tiddlywinks. I would put two Subbuteo goals at either end and this massive tournament would start and go on all day.
One of my earliest memories of football is of the so-called ‘Matthews Final’ in 1953, the FA Cup Final at Wembley between Blackpool and Bolton Wanderers. Dad’s football connections with Elstow Abbey and the GPO allowed him access to one ticket to stand behind the goal and he gave me a tremendous thrill when he announced that he was taking me. After our journey by train and tube he put me on his shoulders as we mixed with the thronging crowd and walked down Wembley Way. I was to remain in this elevated position – even though I must have felt like a sack of potatoes by half-time – right through the match. Dad wanted Blackpool to win it; everybody wanted Blackpool to win it because of Stanley Matthews. They may have called it the Matthews Final but I have never understood why because Stan Mortensen scored three goals.
I was the envy of all my schoolmates and, indeed, I have been at every Cup Final since. I was always very keen to collect autographs and after the matches I used to stand outside Wembley and try to figure out a way to get to the team coaches. I couldn’t get in because of those big doors. Then I discovered that if you went down one of the long tunnels from inside the stadium and avoided being stopped you would eventually get to the buses. So it became my practice to do this. Dad would be looking everywhere for me and it would not be until both buses pulled out, and I had got all the autographs, that we were reunited.
Another of my indulgences was to jump the perimeter fence and get a bit of turf which would then be in a bowl in the garden for ages.
Throughout my school years I was never interested in any of the lessons, only in sport. I used to get the slipper a lot. When I was aged 11, and in my first year at Silver Jubilee, one particular teacher who hated my disregard for education would say, ‘Come out here Fry!’ and I would say, ‘No.’ In those days the desks had ink wells in them and in one of this gentleman’s lessons I threw one at him. But this prank rebounded horribly when he sent me to see the headmaster.
‘Right Fry,’ he said. ‘You’re not playing for the school team on Friday.’
He could not have taken a worse course of action. Six of the best with the slipper would have been preferable. I begged him and cried my eyes out, but all to no avail.
That slaughtered me. I was captain of the school team and became a prefect, to be identified by the red and white braid on the black jacket of the uniform, later on in life. I was urged by the headmaster, Jack Voice, to put as much effort into education as I did into football and I determined to at least try during lessons. I began to get a prize a year for English, not because I was ever going to raise a challenge to William Shakespeare, but because I tried. It was made clear to me that if I didn’t concentrate and I became a pain in the arse I wouldn’t be allowed to play football. There could have been no greater incentive. Really, I had no interest in school whatsoever but if they had told me to jump over the moon in order for me to play football I would have jumped over the moon.
I missed the one solitary game and that was it. It taught me a lesson. It was ‘three bags full, sir’ after that.
Jack Voice was the one who put me on the straight and narrow. He certainly knew my Achilles heel and he had no trouble with me after that. He said he was aware that I didn’t like school but emphasised that while there were lads who succeeded at football there were a lot more who did not and therefore I should try because you would never know when you needed to fall back on education. As I am only too well aware now, for all the stars such as the Beckhams and Owens of today, there are a million who get released and hit the scrapheap.
All the teachers encouraged me in the sporting arena because, after all, it was good for the school to have one of their pupils representing them outside. Whether it was cricket or football, whoever was in charge just gave me my head.
As a boy I once had a conversation with Stan Matthews. I managed to get onto his team bus and asked him to sign his autograph.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.
‘I’m watching you. It’s fantastic.’
He asked how old I was and I told him I was 10.
‘You shouldn’t be here, you should be playing. Practice son, practice.’ Stan has since passed away and I joined the rest of the football world in mourning over his death.
It soon became apparent to me that you can’t be a softie and be a good footballer but I remember being frightened to death at Pearcey Road one day. I was going home for dinner and suddenly became aware that a bloke was following me. I was convinced he was chasing me and wanted to murder me so I ran into the house of a couple who fortunately were in at the time. I didn’t want to go back to school. They had to get a kid called Brian ‘Trotter’ Foulkes to look after me, get me across the road and make sure I was all right. I must have been the youngest kid in the country with a minder. But eventually you had to look after yourself. As I got older and a bit more successful football wise, people who were not so interested in football thought I was cocky and big headed and all that. You always get bullies trying to pick a fight or sort you out and I fought like everybody else though with me it was an instinct, a reaction. I was always a scrapper, really, because you had to be to survive. The alternative was that people would walk all over you. I was as placid a kid as I am a man but when too much gets too much you hit out at people. I never went looking for a fight but I certainly wouldn’t run away from one.
Football being my only interest in life, I always got hot-off-the-press copies of Roy of the Rovers and Charlie Buchan’s Football Monthly. I would get up in the morning and hope that I was early enough to play Wolves v Manchester United at tiddlywinks and when I got home I couldn’t wait for dad to come round the corner. Now my kids do the same to me but I say, ‘No, I can’t. I’m mentally and physically drained.’ Dad must have had such patience. There are days for most people when you have been to work and you simply can’t be bothered playing head tennis. My little 10-year-old, Frank, will say, ‘Well just give me a few headers, dad.’ I tell him to kick it against a wall instead.
I used to say to my dad that I wanted a wall to kick a ball against and we didn’t have one. He got me this magic thing with a ball on the end of some elastic and you’d kick it this way and that and it would always come back to you. Mind you I broke a lot of things in the house. Mum went mad and dad would tell her to leave me alone. They had World War III and I would sneak off.
I never knew the meaning of being bored. I either played football and when I came back it was time for bed, or I played a full league table of tiddlywinks. There would be a goal scored and me making an almighty racket, while mum and dad sat there listening to the radio in the other room. The decoration in our front room was rosettes and other football memorabilia. Normally parents wouldn’t allow those things in the room where guests were entertained, but my mum and dad were very understanding. The front-room carpet would be covered with all my ‘players’ and my parents were so considerate that if they wanted to go to the toilet they would walk all the way round the house to avoid the living room so that they would not disturb my game. The sacrifices they made – you don’t appreciate it at the time. My bedroom was also full of Wolves momentos.
When I was 12 there was a brilliant article in the local paper. Because I’d been to Wembley so many times since turning eight, the only thing I ever dreamed about was actually playing there. In this feature my dad was quoted as saying, ‘It’s Wembley or bust, isn’t it son?’ Dad had taken me to internationals, FA Cup Finals and amateur cup finals between the likes of Crook Town and Bishop Auckland, so by that time I had gained a real feel for the place. There were the old songsheets and such like and I just loved going to that magical place.
Mum and dad were bringing up their only child in a sublime area for sporting activity. The local hamlet of Elstow was proud of its pristine village green and I would play cricket as well as football there. Dad was also trainer of Elstow Abbey, a men’s team in the Bedfordshire and District League. I played for them at the age of 14 against all the village sides and I would have to look after myself although some of the lads, particularly our centre-half Maurice Lane, and Charlie Bailey, would not allow the opposition to take liberties with me. They didn’t mind me being kicked, because that was all part of the game, but if there was any sign of a rough house they would look after me. If you were in the trenches you certainly wanted Maurice with you. I appeared for them in a cup final at Bedford Town’s ground. At school at Pearcey Road I had played in a cup and league-winning team, scoring 60 goals in one season, and was in the Bedford and District team when I was eight. When I moved up to Silver Jubilee School I was soon into the Beds and District Under-13 and then Under-15 teams. It was a period in my life when I walked to school and ran home!
Dad, as always, encouraged me in my football passion. He would come and park outside school in his lorry and watch me play and he was even known to have climbed up a GPO pole to get a good vantage point. These were Friday afternoon matches, after the last lesson in school, and in my playing days in the Bedford and District side we played on Saturdays and went all over the country together.
At 14 I was picked for London Schoolboys. I know the saying that Big Brother is watching, but how the hell a boy 56 miles away in Bedford is selected to play for London is beyond me. Then, in what was a wonderful year for me, I had trials for England Schoolboys. They were organised as Southern Possibles v Probables and Northern Possibles v Probables and then South v North and for the first of these I was down as a reserve. As luck would have it, somebody didn’t turn up and I got a game. I must have impressed the right people because I was called up for the next trial and then the other. As a kid you never know how these things come about, but it was announced in school assembly one day that I had been picked to trial for England. I went on to play for England schoolboys six times and the most memorable of these was in front of a 93,000 crowd at Wembley against Scotland on Saturday 30 April 1960. Among my England team-mates were Len Badger, the Sheffield United full back, Ron Harris and David Pleat, while George Graham played for the opposition. My international selection was terrific for Silver Jubilee school because I was the only Bedford boy ever to have been picked for England. A convoy of buses left the school for Wembley and later the headmaster insisted on a photograph being taken of the entire school with me wearing my England cap.
I used to wonder what it was all about when the other kids would say they were going to Blackpool for the week or Great Yarmouth for a fortnight, for we never had a holiday. Never once. Aunts, uncles and mates all had cars and forever seemed to be darting here, there and everywhere, but for me it appeared that the Bedfordshire boundary lines indicated some kind of electrified fencing to keep us in there, with the rest of the world a no-go zone. I never knew why this was the case but it has since become clear. After all the years dad worked he was allowed four weeks’ holiday, then five, then six but never used to take them. What he did instead was to build them up, because he felt that at one time he might have to pack up work, or take a long period of time off, to look after mum. He had to look after his family and do the best he could for them. When retirement came upon him it became apparent that he could have finished a year earlier because of all the time due to him that he had in the bank.
Mum, Dora, died a month after my son Mark was born and it was very sudden. It was as though she had been clinging on to life just so that she might see him. I was at Bedford Town as a player and I worked for the chairman, George Senior, in the mornings. He had a cafe down the London Road and had all these breakfast rolls to get out for a lot of local companies. I couldn’t cook, so I was just serving or cutting rolls and putting cheese and ham in them. About 7.30am dad came in with Maurice Lane. He and Maurice often popped in but this day he came in the back way. He never did that. He said he’d been up all night with mum and she was in pain and at the hospital in Kempston, where I lived at the time. Dad said mum had said that I was to get on with work, but I wanted to go to the hospital to see her. He said there was nothing to worry about, but it did concern me. After half an hour I said I wanted to go. At Bedford I used to go round in a van collecting from the sale of lottery tickets. This night I went to hospital with dad, a week before Christmas on a Friday, and mum was obviously in a lot of pain. She had her face screwed up and complained of feeling cold.
I was in the room alone with her for a while and she kept saying that I had to go to work. I felt very uncomfortable. When dad came back I asked if he’d seen the nurse to sort out her coldness and he just said: ‘No’. The bell ending visiting hour was going in no time, so I kissed her and she said: ‘Go to work.’ Dad had to pick up her mate from Hallwins. She was a Scottish lady called Jenny Denton who was getting the bus to Biggleswade from where she would catch the train to Scotland for New Year, so mum was on about dad not forgetting the passenger and me not forgetting to go to work. I went first. Dad had a car then, which I bought for him. I just wanted to go home and not go to people’s houses. My house was only five minutes away. I walked in the front door and Anne, my first wife, said the hospital had just rung to say my mum had died. My reaction was to turn round and put my fist through a pain of glass in the window.
‘You’ve got it wrong,’ I said.
My dad wasn’t on the phone. He worked for the company for 40 years and never had a phone. Can you believe that?
I was 26. I didn’t even know mum was ill. My first thought was about dad taking this lady to Biggleswade, so I jumped in the car, got there taking one route to find the bus for Scotland had gone and coming back another route without seeing my dad. I stopped at a club, run by my mum’s sister, Alice, which my dad sometimes popped into for a drink. I saw Auntie Alice and asked if she had seen my dad and she said: ‘No, why?’ I said: ‘My mum’s dead.’ She screamed. I was in a daze. ‘Our Dora’ was all she could say. I was trying to find my dad and couldn’t. I called at a couple of pubs in which he would usually be having a drink with his mates but nobody had seen him. They all knew he was going to take this woman to Biggleswade. I just went home. I was telling Anne the story when there was a knock on the door and it was my dad.
‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Mum’s dead.’
‘Yeah, I’ve been expecting that,’ he said.
Just like that.
We went back to the hospital. Upstairs the curtains were drawn and by this time it was 10 o’clock at night. I could hear people near mum breathing and you didn’t know she was dead. I went a bit crazy. Dad calmed me down and took me to the pub opposite the hospital. He said there was nothing I could have done. That was the way she wanted it. She knew she was bad but just tried to forget about it. She had being going to London for years for chemotherapy treatment and there was no way you could have known this unless you had been told. She was always as white as a freshly-starched tablecloth so there was no reason to suspect that anything was wrong.
