Bill Nicholson. Brian Scovell
next door and Joe worked for a hansom cab company. Bill shared his father’s love of horses and enjoyed mucking out the stables, often accompanying his father as he drove the carriage along the Scarborough’s promenade in the summer months. He polished the brass harness, cleaned the carriages and rubbed oil on the horses’ hooves.
Bill must have been kept busy because in those days, as today, the town was always under aerial attack from indiscriminate seagulls. In the winter, however, there wasn’t quite so much work and it was hard to pay the bills. In the early thirties, when the horse and carriage became obsolete, the stables were turned into a garage, where charabancs (the posh word for coaches) were parked and it became a motorcar business.
Joe senior instilled his own willingness to work hard into his children and never once complained about the problems with his leg. ‘No one ever talked about it,’ said Bill. ‘Yorkshire people in those days were private folk and it was looked on as bad manners to discuss other people’s ages or their disabilities. I used to go out with him on the horse and carriage from a very early age. Every Sunday the cab would be used to take people to church in their best clothes and during the summer it would parade up and down the promenade and take customers to and from the station. It was hard work for a young boy, but I enjoyed it. Though I liked the horse, I was frightened of falling off when I was put into the saddle and never managed to ride it.’
Years later, Linda spoke of his love of big horses: ‘He really loved them. When he and Darkie came over on a vacation to New Hampshire we went to see the Budweiser Clydesdale horses not far from where I live and the lady grooming them said she could tell he had worked with horses by the way he stroked one particular horse named Willie. He had a certain rapport with the horse and his eyes were smiling. I am sure it had nothing to do with the fact that Mum called him “Willie!”’
Scarborough, a hilly borough with a population of around 100,000, is thought to have been founded in 966 AD when a Viking raider named Thorgils Skarthi arrived in that part of north-east Yorkshire, although there is evidence that the Romans were there first. Famous inhabitants include Sir Alan Ayckbourn, Hollywood actor and film director Charles Laughton, Sir Jimmy Savile, the Sitwell family, actors Ian Carmichael and Sir Ben Kingsley, TV journalists and presenters Selina Scott and Jon Snow. World War I poet Wilfred Owen convalesced there and Yorkshire fast bowler Freddie Trueman lived there for 17 years.
But the town has had few famous sportsmen and hardly any footballers of any class. Bill was probably the best. Next in line was Colin Appleton, the former wing-half who captained Leicester City in the 1961 FA Cup Final, which Bill Nicholson described as ‘One of the worst Cup Finals ever played.’ The other is Jonathan Greening, the West Bromwich Albion forward and captain. For someone like Nicholson, brought up in a far-off seaside town and sheltered from the stresses and strains of the big cities, to be plucked from that environment and sent to London on his own for a trial at Tottenham six weeks after his seventeenth birthday was an extraordinary and courageous story.
He loved Scarborough and leaving the town must have been a wrench for him. Besides his work alongside with his father, Bill did a newspaper round before going to school each day. He had to get up at 5am and earned 30p a week. ‘It was a straightforward upbringing with the emphasis on hard work and reliance,’ he recalled. ‘We made toys and games for ourselves and simple things brought the greatest pleasure, like playing marbles or riding scooters. Scarborough was a good place to live.’
The town was built around two wide, sweeping bays and the castle, constructed in the 12th century on a headland, was constantly fought over and changed hands seven times during the Civil War. On 12 December 1916, two German warships, SMS Derffliknger and SMS Von der Tann, landed 500 shells on it and the surrounding area suffered widespread damage. After Elizabeth I died, Scarborough’s fortunes changed and it became a fishing village. In 1627, local gentlewoman Mrs Farrow noticed that spring water was seeping through the side of the cliffs and showed signs of magnesium sulphur. An expert in the field informed her that the water was a cure for constipation, an ailment suffered by most people of the time. Suddenly Scarborough became a fashionable spa, attracting wealthy folk from all over the country. Unlike Bath, Tunbridge Wells or Buxton, it had the advantage of being on the coast and taking the waters had been introduced.
When Bill was growing up, food was relatively cheap. He recalled: ‘There was little money to spare but we ate vast quantities of food, particularly on Sundays. The day started with a large traditional English breakfast, followed by a roast beef and Yorkshire pudding lunch, with tea later in the afternoon and then supper, the remainders from lunch served cold in the evening.’ His parents were too busy to attend church themselves, but the children went to the Salvation Army Sunday School and later, an Anglican church. Jean Bell, Bill’s younger daughter, born in 1948, said: ‘My dad wasn’t really religious, but he led a very moral life.’
Despite living next to the sea, Bill never tried swimming. ‘My parents couldn’t afford bathing trunks for us,’ he said. ‘So none of us were swimmers.’ But he told his daughters that his grandchildren should be encouraged to swim and so Richard, Colin and Shaun started swimming after a year.
‘Scarborough was a pleasant place to grow up in and we took advantage of living near one of the best beaches on that part of the country,’ said Bill. ‘I spent many happy hours on the beach and when the sun was out, it was very crowded. The ladies were dressed in long, black dresses and hats and carried parasols. The men wore suits and bowlers, or cloth caps. No one sunbathed and you never saw a naked torso. And there weren’t many deckchairs either.
‘The ugly-looking mobile huts on wheels were still there and were used to take people out to the boats or to swim, but not many people swam. The children would burrow away with their buckets and spades and we were encouraged to enter sand-building competitions. Sand artists used to build elaborate castles and replicas of all kinds of things. Horses were a speciality and people threw coins as a token of their appreciation.’
The huge Grand Hotel dominated the beach. In Bill’s younger days, boys with a poor background might gaze wistfully up at the building, but they would never go inside. Jean said: ‘I am pretty certain my father never went there. Most of his holidays were at Scarborough and when his mother was alive, we stayed with her. Later we stayed at one of the sisters, or sometimes at a small hotel.’
Bill once went on holiday to Israel, a rarity from the normal pattern of going back to his birthplace but in later life, he visited Spain, Portugal and Greece. He liked staying in good hotels – the kind denied him in his youth. The once grandiose Grand Hotel, which later became a Butlins, was completed in 1867 and the owner wanted it to represent a calendar so the property had four towers to show the seasons, twelve floors for the months and 365 rooms for each day of the year.
‘I remember how cold it was when we went to Scarborough for our two-week holiday,’ said Jean. ‘It was always two weeks – my dad never took any more. When the tide went out, the sand was firm and he organised running games to keep us warm. We played all kinds of sport, including cricket. Dad played a few charity cricket matches, but he wasn’t a club player.’ Her sister Linda remembered: ‘He always got us involved in as many sports as possible, even bowls. He thought it made you fitter and that’s right, because my parents both lived into their eighties. He did find some time to relax in a deckchair, but the weather wasn’t always kind in Scarborough but even then we’d play badminton or kick a ball about to keep warm.’
Her husband Steve, paying tribute at Bill’s funeral in 2004, said: ‘Bill was raised in a happy, close and loving working-class family, all in a small, terraced house, where his beloved mother ruled the roost. Bill spent any free time with his mates, kicking about a tin can or anything else that they could afford, usually in the alley behind the backyard. The neighbours must have been irritated, but the skills he learned obviously bore rich harvest. These same back alleys are now clogged with cars.
‘Bill always enjoyed returning to his roots to see the Nicholson family and re-acquaint himself with Yorkshire. He knew the local streets like the back of his hand. The whole family knew the best fish and chip shops, greeted Auntie Mary’s donkeys by name – just like old friends – and either got stuck into cricket on the beach, built sandcastles against