He remains busy and often goes to Spain with his longstanding friend John Cook. He is in constant demand to attend local functions, dinners, presentations, charity events, and he rarely refuses. Just prior to our first meeting to talk about this book he had been to Belfast as a guest of the Sportswriters’ Association who were honouring the remaining members of the team of ’58, the one that did so marvellously well in the World Cup in Sweden, bringing honour and glory to Northern Ireland. Shortly before that he had been honoured at the Burnley Football Supporters’ Clubs awards evening. He was about to embark for Northern Ireland again for another football function. He plays golf regularly. But it’s hard on some days now to do something like work on a book.

     I tell him he can do as much or as little as he wants. The last thing I want is that he feels pressured, stressed, ‘bothered’. That was a word my grandmother used a lot. “Stop being a bother,” she’d say when I was being troublesome on Friday nights when I was a nipper and stayed with her.

     “If ever I am a bother, Jimmy, you must tell me,” I said to him one day. He laughed. The trouble is; he’s just too nice a person to say so. And always his worry is, “Will what you write sound like me?”

     He has the most quiet, gentle, lilting, almost quizzical, Irish voice. He pauses every now and then, while he thinks carefully of the next words. He still can’t imagine why anyone would want to read about him. He thinks there are far too many football biographies.

     The paradox is that when we sit down, or when I telephone, some of the memories do come back, some of the stories and tales are still there, and there is much he has to say.

     But age can be cruel and confusing. Some of the distant past can still be sharp and clear. But, the yesterday and the ‘now’, make us panic when we can’t remember something that happened just a day ago or week ago, or an arrangement that we have made. We struggle to make quick decisions and tire easily, “Sometimes Dave I just want to sleep. I haven’t picked up a paintbrush now for eighteen months. I come back from a holiday more tired than when I went.”

     When I telephoned to check it was OK to come over for the second visit, it had slipped his mind. We talked on the ‘phone instead; the call lasted an hour as I knew it would, and I scribbled rough notes furiously. The 2008 European Championships were taking place at the time. Much of it left him totally disinterested and bored. He watched very little of it although occasionally, Spain, Portugal and Holland lit up the gloom. As for the rest, it was all about not losing (I can hear his voice again saying “in my day we went out to win”), the Greeks just appalling, the score 0 – 0 as they pass the ball over and over again across the back four, deep in their own half, for fear of making a creative pass which may go wrong, and fear of losing. Even their own fans boo them. It didn’t work anyway. They lost 0 – 2; poetic justice, there is a football god.

   The modern game: hold the ball, pass it around in your own half, sideways, backwards, players bunching, bore spectators to death, hope for a set piece goal and then hang on. It won Greece the tournament four years ago. Danny Blanchflower would turn in his grave. And in Danny and Jimmy’s day they wouldn’t have called it a set piece, they’d have said free kick or corner. Today they call the wings, ‘channels’. What on earth for? Who thinks up these things? Jimmy Greaves once listened to a manager giving a team talk sprinkled with jargon. There was a blackboard and it was covered in arrows. “Which of us are the bloody Indians?” Jimmy quipped.

     And what did Danny Blanchflower once say? “The game’s about glory. It’s about doing things in style, with a flourish. It’s about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom.”

     In 1950 when Jimmy Mac arrived, Burnley was a grey, smoke-filled industrial place; and Britain, in general, a drab and gloomy place wherever you went: a nation still suffering from the lingering, debilitating effects of World War Two. National Service in the army was compulsory. Petrol rationing had only just ended. The country was still a place of austerity and hardship. Central heating, washing machines, fridges, telephones, televisions, what were they? Half of all homes had no indoor bathroom; one in five had no electricity and made do with glimmering gaslight. In winter you awoke unable to see out of the window because of the ice on the inside. Colour was in short supply although the Eagle comic and Dan Dare made their first appearance. The Festival of Britain that year was dreamed up to bring light and cheer into this pervading gloom, to remind people of what they were good at, to restore optimism. The joke was, however, that the slender symbolic Skylon tower had no visible means of support – like the still near-bankrupt Britain, people commented. Winston Churchill was re-elected Prime Minister. In sport Randolph Turpin beat Sugar Ray Robinson in the world middleweight championship. In the greatest football upset of all time the USA beat the mighty England 1 – 0 in the World Cup. England were shocked and humiliated and it was seen as a national disgrace. The West Indies beat England at cricket for the first time in England. And far away from these shores, the Korean War began.

     The official 1950 Burnley Corporation handbook, however, made fine reading, making little mention of the conditions of poverty and deprivation that existed in many Burnley areas. It began by suggesting that if coal had not been discovered in the region, then Burnley might well have become a fashionable spa town instead of one of Lancashire’s cotton towns. Before the mills and line upon line of terraced rows filled the vale, springs with excellent medicinal qualities had been found in the town. Had these been developed, as opposed to industry, there was the potential to develop a most beneficial inland watering place, not unlike Harrogate on the other side of the Pennines. In the places surrounding the town the area had, and still has, some of the most beautiful countryside imaginable, miles of wonderful stretches of scenery, and picturesque villages and hamlets.

     But, had that happened, then there would certainly have been no football club. Burnley Football Club grew from working men, not the affluent gentry dipping their toes into healing waters. The football teams born in the 1880’s grew from industry and the prosperity it brought, and from working men who needed leisure activities. As industry then thrived in the early 1900’s, so the football club in Burnley grew and developed, albeit with mixed fortunes along the way. Harrogate never became a strong base for football. Neither would Burnley have done so without coal, canals and cotton.

     Burnley in 1950, industrially, was still a thriving place with an official population of 84,590. ‘John Grey Limited’, for example, employed 500 people. In addition to the cotton weaving mills, there were attendant engineering firms and loom makers, bleachers, dyers and sizers. An aerial photograph of the town shows acres and acres of factories, mills, chimneys and workers housing. But, it was not all cotton. There were numerous coal pits. There were leather tanners, rope manufacturers, hosiery and underclothing firms, glass bottle makers, paperworks, sheet metal works, tin and copper works. There were manufacturers of shuttles, steel springs, washing machines, scales and weighing machines, raincoats, ‘Prestige’ kettles and kitchen tools, uniforms, metal toys, surgical appliances and furniture. There was electrical engineering, a brewery and brickworks.

     Entertainment was provided by two theatres, the Palace and the Victoria. There were cinemas in most parts of the town, The Savoy, Grand, Odeon. Roxy, Empire, Pentridge, Alhambra, Tivoli and the Imperial. The Empress Hall catered for roller skating and dancing. Thompson Park and boating lake covered 480 acres.

     What the handbook does not mention is that the Burnley in which Jimmy McIlroy arrived from the green hills and spaces of rural Ireland was more often than not clouded in a thick pall of smoke and soot belching out of the tall mill chimneys and the coal fires of hundreds of back to back houses. Nor does it mention that wages were low for those in work and for those who were unemployed there was a hopeless despair.

       Once a year the whole town seemed to decamp and vanish. It was ‘Wakes Week,’ and they went to Blackpool for a brief respite from factory drudgery. On a Saturday they wanted their football team to do well and to entertain them. They streamed in from the town and the surrounding areas, clambering aboard the ‘football special’ buses, then to alight and surge like a human tide underneath the canal bridge and up Yorkshire Street to Turf Moor. No man could have had a bigger culture shock to his system. The first time Jimmy McIlroy saw the town his eyes were wide with disbelief, his comprehension system struggling to cope. But he came to love the place and is still here today. Jimmy Greaves couldn’t shame him into moving, Danny Blanchflower could not persuade him, and nor could Sampdoria, who tried to tempt him away to the glamour and money of Italy.

     “First impressions are very important, and to be perfectly honest, I must say that my first impressions of Burnley were distinctly unfavourable. Frank Hill drove me from the ferry terminal at Heysham near Morecambe. The miles we drove through the countryside were pleasant enough, but then we approached Burnley. When I saw what I was coming to all I wanted was to get the next boat back. I thought it was like nothing I had ever seen before. For the first time in my life I was surrounded by grey, stone buildings, cobbled streets and the shawls and clogs of Lancashire. It looked awful. From open green field and the hills of the Lagan Valley to a place where there seemed nothing but rows and rows of featureless houses, factories and huge chimneys. In my innocence I had always imagined that such places only existed in the writings of Priestly or Cronin. At the old Empress Hotel in the market place, I stood and looked at the street carpeted by filth, waste, rubbish, rotten fruit and the general garbage left by stallholders. It was depressing and for this I had left the beauty of Antrim. It was paradise lost with a vengeance.

   With the clogs and shawls went the accent. It took me months to get used to it and translate the things that people said. But, in fairness, my own Irish brogue was no more understandable to the locals. In an early game Reg Atwell and I wondered if we really did speak a common language. I asked him if I should take a throw-in. He said he didn’t understand a word I’d said. Again I asked him. Again he didn’t understand. In exasperation he shouted: “I can’t tell a word you’re saying, just take the throw.”

   But since those early days and the awful first impressions I have become truly attached to Burnley. My worries were unnecessary because, in truth, beneath the grey, drab, exterior of this colourless, industrial town, there is a heart of gold.

     As early as October, in my first full season, I would wear the claret colours in the first team. In football, every player needs luck and the breaks going his way. Such an early promotion to the team was my biggest stroke of luck perhaps. Harry Potts was transferred to Everton for a fee of £20,000. There was no obvious replacement and the manager threw me in at the deep end. Perhaps Frank Hill felt that I just had to be good enough having paid that fee. I was only 18 and unknown. It was gamble on his part.

     As so often in their history, Burnley were then a mediocre, middle-of-the-table team. Mediocre results, plus mediocre gates added up to a mediocre club. Of course I had not known that when I signed but it would probably have made no difference. I was 18 and had burning ambition. The mediocre state of the club was of no consequence to me. I was in the first team.

(Adapted from Chapter One Right Inside Soccer, Jimmy McIlroy 1960)

       He was in the first team and ‘on his way’. But there were ambivalent attitudes to football in 1950. It was the game of the masses and the crowds attending football were still benefiting from the slow release from austerity that the war had imposed. But, as Maurice Edelston so eloquently wrote it was not everyone’s cup of tea. Snobbery and the class system, although eroded by the war years, were still rampant and football heroes were not everyone’s favourite.

       “What might be called the Henley-blazer, or bound-copies-of-Punch attitude to football, still lingers in the English air like the faint expensive flavour of an old pair of riding-boots in a box-room. Cricket is a sacred institution. Rugger is a man’s game. Golf is full of legend and pawky wisdom. Eton Fives and Real Tennis are solemn mysteries. The techniques of all of them can be discussed, gravely or wittily, in the most proper company. But football is low. Professional football is lower than amateur football. Professional players shake hands after goals. They have even been known to embrace and leap about ecstatically, instead of trotting back to their own half without looking at each other. Their shorts have no side pockets. Their supporters wear, not scarves but mufflers. They come from the North to gape at London, ‘Oop for t’Coop’. Sometimes instead of cloth caps, they wear painted toppers bearing such mottoes as ‘Up the Trotters’ and ‘Wor Jackie’. It is all rather undesirable.”

       As Jimmy himself would later write, there was more kudos in being a member of the golf or the tennis club in Burnley, than being a footballer. Nobody then from the middle classes or above wanted their daughter to marry one. Today, with the money in the game and the astronomical wages it is almost the opposite and quite de rigueur to bag a wealthy footballer for a husband, the ultimate accolade being ten pages in Hello magazine and more money for the bank account.

 A ROOKIE AT TURF MOOR, MY FIRST BURNLEY SEASON

     Burnley had the reputation, despite efforts to shed it, of being an ‘ordinary’ football club. Seldom collecting any of the game’s honours, and rarely in relegation trouble, we were often what was commonly called a ‘middle of the table’ outfit. This was quickly brought home to me when I was transferred from Glentoran in the spring of 1950. Burnley ended that season with the figures of an average team; played 42, won 14, drawn 14, lost 14. I played no part in first team games, concerned only with adjusting to a completely new way of life and at the same time finding my feet in the Central League team.

   The first team forwards were Jackie Chew, Billy Morris, Bill Holden, Harry Potts and Jackie Hayes. There seemed little likelihood of me challenging them for their positions. In the reserves I found the pace of the football quicker than it had been in the Irish league. But roughly the same as far as skill went.

   At the start of the 1950/51 season I was considerably alarmed when the club decided to convert me from an inside-forward to a wing-half. Manager Frank Hill thought I could be successful in this position but it had always been my impression that moving from a forward role to a half-back role or from half-back to full-back, needed less skill and was a backward step. I treated these experiments as personal relegation. Fortunately, another inside-forward, Jimmy Adamson, was undergoing similar switches as this time, to such good effect that, as we know, he developed into one of the finest wing-halves in the Football league. He became captain of the club and I remained a forward.

     When I ask the question ‘why me’ I know that luck is so important. I was lucky when Burnley felt they could not refuse an offer of £20,000 for Harry Potts from Everton. Harry signed for the Goodison Park team leaving a gap at Turf Moor that could be filled in one of two ways. They could either buy a replacement, or they could promote me – at least as a stop-gap. I was promoted and from then on until I was transferred to Stoke City, was never really pushed to retain my first-team place. Luck is the most valuable thing in football. I was so lucky to make the move from the obscurity of an Irish League team and so quickly win a place in the First Division in England. I had the good fortune to be given a few months in the Central League, an ideal training ground to raise the tempo of my game, at the same time as allowing me to develop skills at a level I was used to. I was lucky again when the conversion of Jimmy Adamson to wing-half ended any thoughts at the club of making a wing-half out of me. I was lucky when the transfer of Harry Potts gave me my place in the first-team. And on top of all this I had the breathing space to consolidate my place because there was no-one better there to displace me.

     The first twelve months in the first team is of tremendous importance to every footballer. These are the impressionable, learning months. A good game can loft a youngster to the heavens and a poor one can make him despair. Supporters seldom take into account the feelings of a young, raw, inexperienced player, trying to establish himself in the game.

     An Irish friend and I decided to try our skill at a game of bowls soon after I made my first team debut at Turf Moor. I have, by the way, tried every ball game possible, but still can’t play any of them to my satisfaction. This was my first game of bowls. On the bowling green I recognised a neighbour of mine, but he obviously didn’t realise who we were. He heard our accents, developed many miles from East Lancashire, and the following conversation took place.

     “You youngsters are Irish aren’t you?”

     “We are.”

     “Perhaps you’re footballers on trial at Turf Moor?”

     “That’s right.”

     “I’ve got an Irish footballer in lodgings near me. Fellow called McIlroy.”

     “What sort of player is he?”

     “Well when he first arrived he looked pretty useful. But I’m afraid he’ll never make the grade. He’s just not good enough.”

       After all these years, I suppose I should apologise to the chap for keeping up the deception during the conversation. But his summing up of my ability, which seemed to me to be complete condemnation, didn’t really bother me. A footballer usually knows himself whether he has what it takes to reach the top of his profession. Without being conceited, I felt I was gradually conquering the problems of English football. I had confidence in my own ability and that confidence meant more to me than the opinions of someone in Burnley. I was convinced of my ability to make good. At the same time I knew that much hard work lay ahead before I could impress people like my neighbour. No doubt there were others who thought ‘McIlroy will not make the grade’.

     Maybe I was thick-skinned. Maybe I possessed the sort of confidence that provided insulation and protection against critics. But If I’d been more sensitive when I had that chat on the bowing green, its effect on my subsequent career might have been disastrous. Youngsters are impressionable and very easily distressed. They need encouragement not criticism and should be given every chance to settle down before the critics jump on them.

   My immediate reaction was to prove, in the only possible way, that I was right and my critics wrong. Another youngster might have taken it differently; even to the extent of packing his bag and taking the next boat home. This is something that has happened many times to first-season professionals. Supporters would do well to remember this.

(Adapted from Chapter 5 Right Inside Soccer)

     Mrs Hesketh was his first landlady at 6 Stoney Street, up Todmorden Road. There was the traditional outside loo in those days, a perilous place on a freezing cold winter’s day, or a night when the rain was lashing down. But he enjoyed his time at Stoney Street; Mrs Hesketh being a homely woman in her fifties who had lost her husband just a couple of years before Jimmy arrived. “She was a lovely lady and her daughter worked at the Town Hall. Paddy Corr came afterwards and we shared a room. He was from Ballymena but only played in the reserves. I was well looked after there and it was just right for me. At Mrs Hesketh’s it was the first time I had eaten rabbit. There were still food shortages and rationing but we had a lot of rabbit which tasted like chicken.”

     Very occasionally his mother and father came over and on their visits stayed there too. When uncles and cousins came they came on the morning boat to Heysham and went back on the evening boat – no simple journey. Mrs Hesketh and he often played cards and on the morning of his home debut game against Aston Villa, Jimmy says he simply lost track of time and realised he was late for the bus he needed. All the buses that came by were filled of supporters so that there was no room for him. Panicking slightly, he set off to half walk, half jog to the ground and arrived in the dressing room, late, sweating, after the 2.15 deadline that players were expected to be there. The players were half stripped and into their playing kit. Nothing was said until the Tuesday after when Billy Dougal called him in for a chat.

     “I remember he called me Muckilroy. Why were you late on Saturday, did you want everyone to see you come in?” he asked. Jimmy explained that he had missed the bus. “He thought I was being big-headed but didn’t make a song and dance,” said Jimmy, “he just knew that a quiet word was enough, but he didn’t know how I had rushed to get down to the ground.”

     “I can’t praise Billy Dougal enough,” he continued. “He was the shrewdest man I ever knew and never got the recognition he deserved for what he did for this club.”

     Jimmy talks fondly of his father and the support he gave him during this early period. “A story my father, who stayed quite trim and youthful looking, never tired of telling was how he was mistaken for me at Everton when he had gone there with friends. Someone passing by heard his name mentioned, “McIlroy,” and asked him wasn’t it time he was getting changed. On the first occasion I came over he and an uncle came across with me and we were met at Heysham by Frank Hill. My father and uncle were quite concerned at how I would cope with the rough stuff in English football. Frank who had played for Arsenal and for some years after that just rolled up his trouser legs and showed them his legs. ‘Look at these,’ he said ‘not a mark on them after all these years’. I told Billy Dougal this story in later years. ‘That’s because he never made a tackle in his life,’ said Billy.

     “One of my best pals back in the early days was a lad called Joe McNulty. He was another Irish lad and was reserve keeper for a while. He was a year older than me and had been here that bit longer so he took me under his wing; he’d been around a little bit. We filled our time either at the cinema, the dancehalls or the coffee bar in the centre of town called the Lubeck. It was a regular meeting place for young or unattached players. Let’s just say the girls descended on us. There were never any problems finding girls. But then, no girl ever wanted to get pregnant, it was a stigma then to be an unmarried mother. On a Saturday after a home game we’d get back to our lodgings, have a meal, change; meet at the Lubeck and then go on to a dancehall, maybe the Imperial at Nelson. That place was always packed and you danced to top bands like Joe Loss.    

     Eventually Mrs Hesketh decided it was time for me to settle and meet a nice girl. She was concerned I was meeting the wrong ones. ‘There’s a nice girl in the choir at the Methodist Chapel at the top of our road’, she told me one day. So, I went to up there one Sunday, spoke to Barbara, arranged to meet – and that was it. She became my wife. She died just a few years ago and I still feel lost without her.

     “I didn’t visit home very often in those days, maybe once or twice a season. But then you went home for the summer break which could be as long as eight to ten weeks. We caught the ferry from Heysham and this was over the Irish Sea and this is a sea that can be very, very rough. There was one trip I did with Billy Bingham and I was in the top bunk and Binghy was in the bottom. This was a journey in a rough, rough sea. “Oh please God let this ship go down,” Binghy moaned over and again. Billy still remembers the occasion. “We were playing in Scotland and the journey was from Larne to Ardrossan. I actually had a blinder of a game.

     “My first pay packet was £10 in the reserves and £12 in the first team and it was less in the summer. I sent my mother £1 a week. Whenever I went back home I felt like a millionaire. I had to ask Mrs Hesketh how much rent I had to pay. She told me the last player had given her £2 a week. So I told her I’d pay her £2 and ten shillings. When I went back home to Ireland my mother wanted to know what I was paying for rent. When I told he it was £2 and ten shillings she replied, “And you’re only giving me £1.” I knew what she was hinting at and from then on I gave her £2 and ten shillings.”

     Legend tells that Jimmy helped build Gawthorpe but he actually escaped the rigours of digging ditches, laying drains, building brick walls, and levelling the grounds at Gawthorpe when Alan Brown oversaw, as foreman, the conversion of the green fields to a much envied training centre. “By then I was in the first team and we escaped those jobs. The younger players did all that.

   “Training was far more enlightened in the fifties at Burnley than at other clubs where running and endless lapping of the football pitch without a ball at your feet was the usual training routine,” said Jimmy. “We always had a ball at our feet.”

   “I was quite happy with my two first games, away to Sunderland and then home to Aston Villa. In both I was up against international players, Willie Watson at Sunderland who also played cricket for England, and against Aston Villa against a Welsh international. In the home game I laid on one of the goals, it was Atwell or Holden who scored. I felt comfortable; I had no nerves, and held my own.”

     From that point on Jimmy Mac developed and shone until the cataclysmic events of 1963 ended his time at Burnley. When Frank Hill brought him from Ireland he knew he had brought a rare talent to the club. He could never have imagined just how much that talent would grow.