Marvellous: Neil Baldwin - My Story. Neil Baldwin
text, and Toby Buchan and Graeme Andrew of John Blake Publishing for their help in bringing this edition to print, as well as Justin Lewis for his careful and assiduous copy-editing. Grateful thanks, too, to David Brownsword, Philip Kempson, Andrew Billington and Keith Clarke for the use of photographs, and Greg of Greg Harding Photography, Sale, for his help with reproducing some pictures, as well as to the RAF for use of an official photograph.
We hope you enjoy Neil’s story as much as we have enjoyed writing it.
MALCOLM CLARKE
To Dorothy ‘Mary’ Baldwin
1922–2003
A loving mother whose wisdom, courage and foresight were truly remarkable.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: NEIL’S FIRST CELEBRITY: THE ENGLAND FOOTBALLER WHO SIGNED HIS BIRTH CERTIFICATE
CHAPTER 2: NEIL IN THE SIXTIES: A TIME TO SOW
CHAPTER 3: NEIL IN THE SEVENTIES: POLITICS, FOOTBALL AND THE BOAT RACE
CHAPTER 4: NELLO THE CIRCUS CLOWN
CHAPTER 5: THE STOKE CITY KIT MAN
CHAPTER 6: MORE TIME TO SPEND AT KEELE AND LOOKING AFTER MUM
CHAPTER 7: NEIL LEARNS TO LIVE ON HIS OWN
CHAPTER 8: NEIL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: A TIME TO REAP
CHAPTER 9: NEIL: THE BIOPIC
CHAPTER 10: NEIL BALDWIN, SUDDENLY A CELEBRITY
CHAPTER 11: THE BAFTAS AND MORE
CHAPTER 12: KEELE UNIVERSITY – PILGRIMS, REFLECTIONS AND LOCKDOWN
APPENDIX: ADDRESS BY DR MALCOLM CLARKE
By Francis Beckett
It was one of those occasions the British film industry does well: a glittering preview at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank. Famous actors, footballers and politicians mingled with the crowds, and watched the new film for the very first time before applauding the stars as they walked on stage.
Television presenter Samira Ahmed, who has fronted PM, The World Tonight and Sunday Morning Live, led the way, followed by the stars themselves: Toby Jones, Gemma Jones, Tony Curran, Greg McHugh, with writer Peter Bowker and director Julian Farino. They started to talk, but there was still a sense of expectation. Something was missing.
Then a short, stout, late-middle-aged man walked on stage, using a walking stick because of a recent hip operation. His round face was covered by the widest and happiest smile we had seen for a while, and he spoke in a gravelly and curiously flat voice with a strong Potteries accent.
He was wearing a dinner jacket, in stark contrast to the elaborately casual clothes of the metropolitan elite around him, but clearly didn’t feel at all overdressed. In fact, everyone else suddenly felt a bit underdressed, and Samira Ahmed said, ‘You’re the only person here who’s dressed properly.’
His name was Neil Baldwin, and the film was a fictionalised version of his life.
It’s a name everyone now feels they know, but can’t quite pin down. Is he Neil Baldwin the cabinet minister, or Neil Baldwin the famous writer, or the actor or the talk-show host or the footballer, or the latest winner of Celebrity Big Brother?
It has been like that for more than half a century. When eighteen-year-old Malcolm Clarke arrived for his first day at Keele University in 1964, a short, stout young man wearing a clerical collar came up to him and said, ‘Welcome to Keele. I’m Neil Baldwin.’ Fifty years later, Malcolm wrote, ‘I appreciated his warm welcome, but just who was he? As always with Neil, his exact status seemed uncertain.’
It was still like that in 2010, when I profiled him for the Guardian. The profile inspired the film Marvellous, which was broadcast in 2014.
So who is Neil Baldwin, and why does he matter? To understand that, you have to understand his singular life, and in this book Neil and Malcolm, with a little help from me, guide you through it. Maybe, when you come to the end, you will feel you understand; and maybe not. But you will feel more optimistic, because that’s what exposure to Neil does.
NEIL’S FIRST CELEBRITY: THE ENGLAND FOOTBALLER WHO SIGNED HIS BIRTH CERTIFICATE
NEIL
There are two things I want to tell you at the start. First, I like to remember the happy things. I put nasty things behind me. And, second, you can get things by asking for them. I always do.
I was born on 15 March 1946. Mum and Dad were both big Stoke City – or Potters – supporters, so they named me after Neil Franklin, who was the Stoke City centre-half in 1946. He was quite a player, Neil Franklin. He played for England twenty-seven times in a row and, if he hadn’t been silly enough to go to Colombia, he would have been the first player to get a hundred England caps. The day after I was born, Franklin turned out for Stoke City in an away game at Grimsby Town, which we won 2–0. I’ve been a winner ever since.
My mum and dad even got him to write a message on the back of my birth certificate, too. It says, ‘With very best wishes from Neil Franklin, Stoke City FC and England.’ I’m very proud of that. Of course, I’ve got to know a lot more famous people since then.
MALCOLM
Neil was the only child of Mary and Harry Baldwin who were married in October 1944, when Harry, an engineering fitter, was thirty-one, and Mary was a few days short of her twenty-second birthday. They settled in a prefabricated bungalow in Chesterton, a working-class suburb of Newcastle-under-Lyme, the so-called ‘Loyal and Ancient Borough’ next to the city of Stoke-on-Trent.
Mary didn’t have an easy pregnancy. One family story has it that, because of a fear that she might miscarry, she was given an injection she shouldn’t have had, which caused the ‘learning difficulties’ or ‘special needs’ that Neil was once labelled as having.
We’ll never know for certain. But, if a clinical mistake was responsible for Neil’s total lack of the embarrassment, self-consciousness and fear of artificial social niceties that often hold most of us back from doing the things we want to do, then it’s not such a bad thing, is it?
NEIL
I don’t know anything about an injection, but I’m not worried about that. All I know is that I came out OK and I’ve had a great life and I’ve always been very happy. I’ve become a film star. Not many people have a film made about their life, do they? And I’ve got an honorary degree, which not many people have.
MALCOLM
Harry Baldwin, who was born in Wolstanton, Newcastle-under-Lyme, came from a North Staffordshire working-class family.