Phil Rostron - Big Fry - Barry Fry - The Autobiography

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

‘Practice son, practice’

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.