Simon McDermott - The Songaminute Man - How music brought my father home again

None of that history mattered to Ted as soon as he saw Lorraine bolt through the front door in tears – he was in the front room and shouted out: ‘What the bloody hell’s happened?’ Lorraine didn’t want to say anything at first but eventually they persuaded her to tell them – it turned out that one of the Spooners had said it would bring bad luck on the house if Lorraine looked directly at her with her bad eye. Ted didn’t wait around to hear the rest of the conversation – he marched to their house, banged on the door with the force of a hurricane and, as Spooner opened the door to see what all the racket was about, he knocked him out with one clean punch. As he left Spooner out cold in the hallway, he shouted over his shoulder: ‘Dow you talk about our kid like that again.’

A few weeks later, Ted and Spooner were down at The Cora again having a beer and listening to music, no grudges held but a point made and a warning thrown out to anyone else who tried to disrespect his family.

Ted wasn’t scared of authority either, and if the people in charge were the ones upsetting anyone in the family, they got the same treatment. One day, when his little brother, Malcolm was only about 12 or 13 years old, he came home from school sobbing and with food around his face, saying that the teacher had shoved his head into his dinner because he’d refused to finish his vegetables. Well, Ted saw red immediately and went striding down the road to the school, to find this so-called teacher and see what he had to say for himself. As he turned the corner, he saw two policemen waiting and as he approached, they put out their hands to slow him down: ‘Steady on, mate, where you going? We know why you’re here but you need to calm down, OK?’ It turned out that as soon as the teacher realized the boy he’d attacked was a member of the McDermott family, he told the headmaster and decided to call the police in anticipation of trouble. It seemed that Ted’s reputation for protecting his own went before him.

It wasn’t often that the kids went home and confessed to being in trouble and receiving the cane, as they knew they would get an extra clip round the ear for being a pain at school. But something like this was different, especially with a family that didn’t take too kindly to any sort of disrespect. The teacher couldn’t apologize quickly enough to Ted, who simply replied: ‘It’s not me yam gotta apologize to, it’s my brother you need to say sorry to.’ Once the matter was resolved, the second policeman, a friend of Ted’s, took him aside and said: ‘If I were you, mate, I’d wait for him and I’d give it him. If that was my brother or child, I’d wait for him and I’d make sure he wouldn’t do it again.’ But Ted felt he had dealt with the situation – his sister Chris avows: ‘Our Ted wasn’t violent, he wasn’t like that at all, but he would always stick up for what was right. If anybody said anything, well, that was it. He wouldn’t let anyone put on we.’

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In his early twenties, Ted was well known around the pubs in Friar Park for getting up and singing whenever he could. But despite working in the forge during the day, it was a chance meeting with an old Army mate, Tommy, that took his life in a different direction.

They were catching up over a drink one night, putting the world to rights, when Ted was offered an opportunity he couldn’t turn down. Tommy’s father worked at Walsall Football Club and had told him about the need for an announcer at the matches. Ted grabbed the opportunity with both hands – not only would it give him the extra pounds for his pocket, but it would also allow him free entry to the match as well as being able to put his vocal talents to good use.

After a quick training on how to use the Tannoy system, he soon had a regular gig every match day down at the club. As well as the standard announcements, he would entertain the crowd by playing records and reading out the raffle results. He was in his element. He slowly made a name for himself with the managers at the club, mainly as he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind, sharing ideas about what he thought would help contribute to the club’s success.

‘You gotta bring the women in more,’ he told one of the directors. ‘Get them in and the blokes will follow.’

It was a good idea. Soon the club was putting on a ‘posh’ buffet with drinks after the match. Music was the perfect accompaniment – which gave Ted the opportunity to perform alongside some big and brilliant acts. The platform was way more substantial than at the local clubs, the crowds were bigger and the nerves more palpable, but the adrenalin rush was just the same. The success of the events meant that Ted was given a full-time job at the club and put in charge of promotions, enabling him to leave the forge.

It was also a dream come true for Ted’s brother John. He was football-obsessed and took Ted’s job as an opportunity to be down at the club whenever he could. Ted had been there a few months when he came home one night shouting for John to ‘Get yer boots on! We’m a player short at Walsall and we need you to come down and play for a second team.’ John couldn’t get down there quick enough and played a blinding match – he wowed them all so much that they wanted to sign him up there and then. But doing so would have meant walking away from a steady job just when he was about to get married, and he had to pay the bills, not ‘run around a pitch for a living and hope it would fill the electricity meter’. These were obviously the days before players could earn a fortune and John became one of a long line of McDermott men who had to push aside their dreams for the sake of providing a roof over the heads of their loved ones.

Because the McDermott boys did pull their weight, they were never out of work despite the turbulent times, and Hilda felt proud to have raised them. As they got older, the priority was no longer pulling them out of bed for school, it was setting them all up with a good breakfast and clean clothes for a heavy day at work. One by one that responsibility became another woman’s, as each of the sons married and moved out.

Ernie, Maurice and Fred tried to make their money away from the factory; the three of them worked at a huge slaughterhouse, killing over 1,000 pigs a week. Ernie inherited Ted’s knack for spotting a way to bring home extras and always managed to snag a few slices of meat, making sure that his mum and the rest of the family had food. Like all families at the time trying to make ends meet, the McDermott boys loved to see how cheeky they could be when it came to sneaking extras. Each was full of charm and worked so hard that no one minded if they took a little on the side. It was the same story in every household, and if the boys put in the hours, bosses were happy to turn a blind eye. There are many stories about how Ernie once came home after work with a row of sausages wrapped around his waist, tucked under his shirt away from sight. Eventually, his brother Maurice became one of the deliverymen – which meant even more meat for Kent Road. ‘No one starved in our house,’ he used to say.

The gaffer of the slaughterhouse, Mr Hollinsworth, was a fan of the McDermotts, often saying to Fred as he left on a Friday: ‘Tek that for your dad’s tea’, and handing him a few slices of something for the weekend. Ernie and Maurice had other odd jobs, too – it was very much a family affair and they all did their bit to try and take some of the pressure off Maurice and Hilda whenever they could.

Although having a job for life would have provided some security, it just wasn’t like that in Ted’s part of the world in the late 1960s. You had to be nimble and willing to turn your hand to almost anything because things were changing all the time. So when work at the football club dried up, Ted had to weigh up the reality of working somewhere in town with fewer paying shifts just so that he could sing against moving on and taking more regular work with better pay. The need for a regular wage won the day and Ted, Fred, Morris and Ernie all ended up getting jobs with Wimpey, a company who were building new homes around the Midlands in places such as The Woods Estate, Bulls Hill and Hollyhead Road.