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ОглавлениеNEIL IN THE SIXTIES: A TIME TO SOW
NEIL
When I was fourteen, a student teacher called Dave Cox turned up at my school for a few weeks’ teaching practice. He was training to be a teacher at the local university, Keele. He and I got on pretty well, and he said, ‘Come along and visit me at Keele.’ So I did.
I came on the bus after school. It was March 1960, just after my fourteenth birthday. The campus was all covered in snow – the lawns, the lakes, the woods, everything. It looked marvellous.
I met Dave Cox in the Students’ Union. In those days the union was just a Nissen hut. They didn’t build the present union building until 1963. I sat down with Dave, we had coffee, then he showed me round, showed me the library and the big old building, Keele Hall, and I thought, I like this, I’ll come again. So I arranged with Dave Cox that I would see him next time, and he introduced me to some other students.
That first time I couldn’t get home because of the snow, so Dave Cox invited me to stay. He lived in one of the Nissen huts – lots of the students did in those days; they were left over from the war, with about six students in each one – and they had a spare bed in the hut. I rang my mum and told her where I was. My mum wasn’t worried – she always wanted me to be happy.
After that I came to Keele most evenings. By the time Dave Cox left I knew a lot of other people.
It never seemed odd to me. I know that none of my friends from school did anything like going up to Keele and getting to know everyone. But I did. I met the students and the Vice-Chancellor, too. You can get things by asking for them. I always do. I got the confidence from my mum, and from the church too.
My mum wasn’t worried about me coming to Keele. She wanted me to have a good life. And that’s what I’ve had. She did a good job.
I left school that year. I didn’t bother with any exams or anything, and the school didn’t put me in for any, so I went to work at Swinnertons. It was a big pottery, and I took the plates to the dip. I did that for about four years. I worked from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon, and then I’d get the bus home and my mum would give me some tea. And then I’d get the bus to Keele and meet my friends there. Saturdays I’d go to the Stoke City match, and Sundays I’d be back at Keele.
MALCOLM
One of the students Neil met in 1961 was Glyn Cherry, a Christadelphian. They are still friends today. Glyn recalls:
I think Neil and I may have first met at a Bible exhibition we held in the Municipal Hall, Newcastle. As a result, Neil came to see me at Keele and came to some of our meetings. One day Neil said, ‘My mother wants to meet you.’ Two of our Christadelphian members went to see her. It was quite difficult at first because it turned out that Mary was very suspicious and worried about who we were. She was a very devout lady and insisted on saying a prayer at the end of that meeting. But a couple of years later she had a conversion to us and had her Christadelphian baptism. But Neil didn’t join us because he doesn’t think in terms of religious doctrine at all and likes all the ceremony of the Church of England, which we don’t have. Mary was very proud of Neil and always backed him.
The story is typical of Mary. She had a fierce independence of mind, and she also wanted to support Neil’s independence, while always keeping an eye on him.
NEIL
We were Church of England but in 1961 I went to a Christadelphian Bible meeting with Glyn Cherry. I told Mum about it and she came with me to a meeting. She liked it so much that she became a Christadelphian but I liked the church and remained C of E. Mum was quite happy about that. She always let me do what I wanted. So long as people believe in God and live a good life it doesn’t matter which church they belong to.
One day at the beginning of 1964, I saw Pete Dunkerley in the Students’ Union, and I knew he was the new Rag Week Chairman. So I went up to him and I said, ‘I want to do the Rag.’ And he got me collecting money and made me a marshal, and then he made me Rag Safety Officer. I like Pete Dunkerley. He’s a very nice man. And it’s a very important job, Rag Safety Officer.
I’ve been the Rag Safety Officer ever since, and I still am, and Pete and I have been friends ever since. I had to deal with the Rag Committee and the police. I used to go and talk to Sergeant Dave Nixon, and he turned out to be the manager of a police football team, so, when I started the Neil Baldwin Football Club a few years later, we played them.
MALCOLM
Peter Dunkerley (only Neil is allowed to call him Pete these days) is a key figure in Neil’s story, because Peter made him a central figure in the annual student Rag, which he’s been ever since. In 1964 Peter was an eighteen-year-old under-graduate, the product of a North Manchester grammar school. Peter says:
The student Rag was a big deal. We had a procession half a mile long and we raised a lot of money for local charities, so it was also a way of putting ‘town and gown’ together. We needed a lot of willing volunteers, so, when Neil came up to me, the first thing I did was to put a collecting tin in his hand, and he went round with the others to working men’s clubs, and came back with a full tin, and he was really pleased at how well he’d done.
For the procession we had to have six marshals – they wore an armband with a big M on them – and I made Neil a marshal and he went and checked on parts of the procession for me, and he really liked doing that. Then one of us – I’m not sure if it was me or Neil – invented the post of Rag Safety Officer for him. He took the job really seriously. He must have done something right: no one was hurt on the procession, then or afterwards.
For the rest of Peter’s time at Keele – he left in 1966 – Neil visited his room in one of the student halls of residence about once a week:
I’d make coffee, he’d talk about what he was doing, about his mother, Stoke City. He was always chatty. Quite often he’d be carrying a Bible but he was never Bible-thumping, he didn’t discuss that. He was part of my experience of Keele.
Like many of Neil’s oldest friends, Peter has found Neil good at keeping in touch, and gets the occasional visit at his Hampshire home.
It was through the Rag that Neil got to know some of the campus children. Keele at that time (and even today to a lesser extent) was unusual because almost all the students and the majority of the lecturers lived on the campus, with lecturers and support staff bringing up their children there. There was a whole community of families, and of course all the campus children loved going to the Rag procession. David Nussbaum’s father was a classics lecturer, and David told me:
One Keele Rag Week in the 1960s, various floats on lorries were parading around, and Neil, of course, was there in the midst of the spectacle. He mentioned that he was ‘the safety officer’ – which seemed to entail him being able to get on and off any of the floats he wanted to at will, and being given due respect by the students, and of course by us children, as that meant it would be him who decided whether we could get on some of the floats as well.
We campus children of course took Neil as we found him, and rather took to him. He was usually with students, but we sensed he wasn’t quite one of them. Indeed, he seemed somehow in charge at times. Neil was also known to me from chapel (where we went on Sunday mornings), so he felt a familiar member of the Keele community. From our perspective as children, students came and went, but Neil seemed always there, from year to year – with the students, but not quite one of them.
He started playing football with the campus children. Some of them called him Stan, a reference to the great Stoke City player Stanley Matthews – an ironic reference, as Neil always played football with more enthusiasm than skill.
Those were innocent days. Today, I suppose, the parents would wonder who this strange man was who seemed to enjoy playing with their children, and what his agenda was, and someone would call the police. But I’m glad to say the campus parents in the sixties seemed to take Neil at face value. David’s mother, Enid Nussbaum, got to know Neil pretty well. She says:
After the Keele chapel service one Sunday we invited Neil to lunch. Over lunch, Neil suddenly asked me if we had a telephone. We had. ‘Oh,’ said Neil, ‘I think I’ll just phone the Bishop and ask him if I can be ordained.’ He was around seventeen, I suppose. I suggested that, as it was Sunday, the Bishop would be very busy – in fact it was highly likely that he wouldn’t be at home at all, better to put it off for a day or two, to which suggestion Neil concurred.
In September, 1964, I turned up at Keele, and Neil Baldwin was one of the first people I met.
NEIL
I have been greeting the new students at Keele since I first got to know the campus. I stood just outside the Students’ Union – they had the new building by the time Malcolm arrived in 1964. I just came up to the students and said, ‘Welcome to Keele. I’m Neil Baldwin.’ I did that because I thought it would be nice to meet students and meet people, because in my life I always wanted to meet people. They were OK about it; they liked it, too. Lots of them stopped and had a chat with me.
That’s how I met Malcolm. He came along and I said, ‘Welcome to Keele. I’m Neil Baldwin.’ And he looked quite pleased and he said, ‘Thanks. I’m Malcolm Clarke.’ And that’s how that all started. We’ve been friends ever since.
Now, I know Malcolm says I was wearing a dog collar, and all I can say to that is, maybe I was. I put it on because I thought it would be nice.
MALCOLM
I was a fresh-faced student of just eighteen. My family had lived at Yarnfield, near Stone, and not far from Stoke, until I was ten, when we moved to York. When I returned to North Staffordshire to come to Keele I was away from home for the first time. I approached the Students’ Union nervously. A rotund, jovial figure offered a confident handshake and said, ‘Welcome to Keele. I’m Neil Baldwin.’ I’m pretty sure he had a dog collar on. I thought he was a few years older than I was – it was some time before I realised we were born in the same year.
I appreciated his warm welcome, but who exactly was he? The university chaplain? I wasn’t quite sure. And so it has always been with Neil, who lives by many roles. It is not that he doesn’t know the difference between fantasy and reality, but rather that he renders the distinction irrelevant and continually turns one into the other across the loves of his life: Keele University, Stoke City, the Church, circuses, the Boat Race and famous people.
We chatted, and he reminded me that Stoke City were at home a couple of days later. That was how our lifelong friendship started.
NEIL
The job at Swinnertons was all right, but I knew things weren’t right and I left in 1964 after four years and went to work at Dewar’s butchers in Newcastle-under-Lyme, cutting up meat and serving customers. That was good because it was easier to get to Keele in the evenings, because Newcastle is just down the road from Keele. It’s a very short bus ride.
I did it for a year-and-a-half, but it meant I couldn’t go to watch Stoke City on Saturdays and I didn’t really like the blood, so I went to work at the pottery Woods and Sons. I worked there for fifteen years, right up to 1980. I was a dipper’s assistant, and what I did was, I helped the dipper. I helped the dipper check the plates and put them in glaze. It was all right, but towards the end I thought the pottery business was going down.
I’d finish work, go home, have some tea, get the bus up to Keele. On Saturdays I’d go to watch Stoke City, then to Keele, where I’d go to the union bar and the snack bar. On Sundays I’d go to the chapel at Keele. That’s where I met the vice-chancellor, Harold Taylor. He always went to chapel, and Sunday morning I would always meet him. He was an excellent vice-chancellor. He was a nice person, he was nice to me. He was a lovely chap. I’ve known all the vice-chancellors since then.
MALCOLM
Harold Taylor was Vice-Chancellor from 1960 to 1967, and, long before he left, his old-fashioned and straitlaced ideas were coming into conflict with the sixties generation of students who were coming to Keele.
One Sunday morning, early in 1965, the BBC came to Keele for the morning service on the radio. It was a big event for Harold Taylor. He was delighted that his university had been chosen, small and new though it was. He was sitting in his place, and, a couple of rows away, there was Neil.
And what neither of them knew was that a student had fixed the wiring, so that, just as some devotional song was beginning, what those in the service and those listening on the radio actually heard was a very loud, raucous pop song, featuring revving motorbike engines, by the Shangri-Las, which the BBC had unaccountably banned – the lyric sounds pretty tame now. It was called ‘Leader of the Pack’.
NEIL
When ‘Leader of the Pack’ came on, I was really upset for Harold Taylor. It was the first time he’d appeared in public after his wife died, and it was only two days after Winston Churchill’s death. I think it was shocking.
Anyway, he retired two years after that, in 1967, and went to live in Cambridge. I went to see him there, in his retirement. I rang him up and said I was coming. I hitchhiked down there and I went to his house. He remembered me from Keele. That’s where I met Mary Glover, who married him after his wife died; she’d been his secretary.
We talked about Keele. He said what a lovely place Keele is, and I said it is. We talked about my work at Keele. And we talked about Princess Margaret, who was the chancellor. I met her at the Students’ Union before the Royal Ball one year, and she talked to me again after it. She was the guest of honour. Many years later I performed in front of her as Nello the Clown at a special royal performance of the circus in London.
And another thing happened in 1967, which was marvellous. My friend Malcolm Clarke was elected Students’ Union President. That meant he had to dance with Princess Margaret, the university chancellor, at the royal ball – it was one of the things the union president was supposed to do. That was very funny because he can’t dance. He’s too big and gangly. Our friend Francis Beckett who was also a student calls him ‘a man of many parts, clumsily assembled’. Mrs Boote, the Students’ Union receptionist, tried to teach him, but she couldn’t. I felt sorry for Princess Margaret. I think she got kicked a lot. That’s no way to treat the university chancellor.
MALCOLM
It’s true. I was advised to keep her in the bar until the formal dance band had gone, so that I didn’t have to attempt a waltz. When I finally took her into the ballroom, a jazz band was playing. She said, ‘I only do the bunny hop,’ and draped her arms round my neck. The problem was that I’m six foot four and she was small, so she was staring at my navel. I had no idea what a bunny hop was, so I ended up kicking her shins all through that dance. It was the only dance we had all night. Neil wasn’t impressed when I told him. In 2019, the BBC talked me into re-enacting this infamous dance in a documentary shown on BBC 2 called Princess Margaret: The Rebel Royal, which is available on iPlayer, DVD or YouTube.
The late 1960s was a very lively time at Keele, as it was at universities throughout the country – indeed, the world. We thought we could change the world by starting with changing the university. The only question was how long it would take us.
Students wanted a much greater involvement in the running of the university and less control by the university over our private lives. Tensions built up throughout my year as president, and, towards the end of my term of office in 1968, I went to the senate to present the students’ case. I knew that, if significant concessions were not made, it was likely that the union would decide to take direct action, but the senate gave me very little to take back to the members. A large union meeting was held shortly before the end of term to consider what to do.
I didn’t support taking direct action, even though I didn’t have any principled objections to it. I just thought it unwise to play our strongest card only a few days before the end of the academic year because the university would just ride out the storm and the threat of direct action would lose much of its potency in the future. I spoke against the motion but it was carried, and the students occupied the registry. I resigned as president because, having opposed the action, I was not the right person to lead the negotiations with the university on the terms on which it would finish. In the end the occupation ended after a couple of days without the university having made any further concessions.
Throughout all this turmoil, Neil simply remained as a constant, dispensing his usual good humour, and continuing to live his life as normal in the Students’ Union, and taking an active role in the student Christian community.
They didn’t support me over the occupation, but the union general meeting did agree, without any opposition, with my proposal to make Neil Baldwin an honorary life member of the union. And, looking back, I think that was more important than the occupation.
NEIL
They were funny times. I didn’t really like the students marching into the registry, and sitting in the registrar’s office, but they meant well. I told them that they were being a bit silly but they didn’t listen to me – but that’s sometimes the trouble with young people: they have to learn.
A few years later things turned more nasty and there was a firebomb thrown at the registrar’s house, which was shocking. Once, a few of them took all their clothes off on the roundabout and walked naked into the shop, and it got all over the papers. I didn’t like that because it harmed Keele’s reputation, and Keele is the best university in the world. Another time they all marched up to the Clock House, where the vice-chancellor lives, and made a humming noise to try to make it go up in the air. How silly was that!
I’m very pleased that Malcolm made me an honorary life member of the Students’ Union and I’m very proud of that. Over the years I’ve known all the presidents and officers of the union, and some of them have gone on to do wonderful things after leaving Keele. I’m pleased that I helped to set them on their way.
In 1967 I decided to start the Neil Baldwin Football Club, which is still running to this day. I said to some students, ‘Would you like to be in my football team?’ and everybody thought it was a great idea. The first fixture we had was against a local cement firm. I knew someone who worked there. Then I just started ringing round for fixtures. I just rang up and said, ‘This is the Neil Baldwin Football Club. I’ve got a football team. I’m keen to play you.’ That’s how it’s done. Some of our other early games were against Lincoln Theological College and St John’s College, Nottingham. We just turned up to play on the Keele pitches. No one ever said we couldn’t.
I have kept a record of every game we have ever played. We have played 314 games, won 240, drawn 26 and lost 48.
I have a lot of connections with Cambridge University. I take the team down to Cambridge quite often to play fixtures against various colleges. We are always given a warm welcome.
MALCOLM
Neil Baldwin Football Club (or NBFC) comprises students of varying levels of footballing ability and is a completely separate team from the university football club. Neil appointed himself as manager, player-manager, coach, kit man and general organiser. I’m not sure that an audit of the playing record would match Neil’s official statistics, but nobody is worried about that.
He has appointed a board of directors. I am still on the board, although in over forty years we are still to hold our first meeting.
NEIL
Gary Lineker is the president at the time of writing this. It used to be Kevin Keegan. Gary thinks it is a great honour. We have forty patrons, including former Stoke City manager Lou Macari, Asa Hartford, Joe Corrigan, Gordon Banks, Robbie Fowler, Chic Bates and Peter Shilton. Now it also includes the actor Toby Jones and the rest of the cast of Marvellous; Peter, the writer; Julian, the director; Katie, the producer; and Patrick, from the production company Tiger Aspect. Until I gave up playing, I had won Player of the Season over forty times.
MALCOLM
During the 1960s Neil was also a regular outside the Victoria Ground, then Stoke City’s ground, and its adjacent training ground, near the middle of Stoke, sometimes teaching his young second cousin, Dan Johnson, the ropes.
In 1967, a young red-haired Irish winger called Terry Conroy came over the water to play for Stoke City. Terry was destined to become an iconic player in Stoke City’s history, scoring the first goal at Wembley in 1972 to help secure the League Cup, the only major trophy that Stoke City have ever won. He was a one-club player who has retained his association with the club to this day, being a club ambassador. He has been friends with Neil since his earliest days at Stoke.
Terry went into digs in a terraced house adjacent to the Stoke City ground with another young player called Micky Bloor, just two doors away from George Jackson, another young player. Neil was soon part of their social scene.
George remembers:
Neil would knock on the door and say, ‘Can we have a kick-around?’ I would sometimes reply, ‘I’m having my tea.’ But Neil would say, ‘Go on’ and often as not persuaded me to go out and have a kick-around outside. I’ve known him ever since then as a friend.
Terry recalls:
I met Neil during my first week outside the Victoria Ground. He was a big supporter. Fans can become a nuisance but Neil was different. He was funny, but needed looking after. It made me considerate towards him. He was often at the ground. He came into our lodgings and Kate Cope, our landlady, used to feed him.
The football social club across the road had a TV, so we would go in there most evenings. Alf and Ivy Coxon, the landlords, looked after everybody. They put on sandwiches and were very friendly. Some of the other players such as John Mahoney would be there. Everyone knew Neil as ‘one of the family’. The people in there took to him and were very protective of him.
We had games of cards and darts but when Neil played darts he would hit everything but the dartboard. There was another lad called Ken Green who used to go in there. He was of limited intelligence, but nobody ever mocked him. We set up darts competitions between Neil and Ken and everybody joined a fan club for one or the other of them. We had to change the rules by abolishing the doubles and make it up to a hundred and not five hundred, otherwise the game would never have finished. We even had rosettes with the slogan ‘Baldwin for Ever’. Neil would check on everybody’s rosette and try and get them to support him, but Ken also had his own supporters’ club. There was a big build-up to the darts matches.
George Jackson recalls:
Ken Green worked in the railways. Neil and Ken always had a rivalry, so we organised a darts competition and on one occasion they both dressed up as professional boxers with boxing shorts and gloves. Throwing the darts wearing boxing gloves was hilarious, with people shouting for one or the other, but we turned it into an occasion to raise money for charity. Neil has always been willing to do anything to raise money for good causes.
Terry says:
We would also create little scenarios to keep us entertained. At that time there was a lot of trouble at football matches and we would re-enact little scenes where Neil would be the Stoke supporter, George Jackson and Terry Lees would pretend to be opposition supporters and bump into him and soon Neil would be on the floor. Neil would then say, ‘Let’s do it the other way round.’ But, whichever way round it was done, Neil never won. Of course, it was all in good spirits.
George:
Sometimes we would go round to Terry’s at number 4 and say, ‘What should we do?’ We’d agree to re-enact something. Me and Neil would be the Stoke players. For example, we’d pretend that Stoke had won five–nil, that Neil had scored a hat-trick and that hooligans were causing trouble. Terry and Micky would pretend to be one of the hooligans. Terry would say, ‘You two play for Stoke, we’ll get you.’ The plan was that we get duffed up. Sometimes we would swap round so that Neil was the hooligan, but he always still ended up on the bottom.
On one occasion the entertainment was more formal. Here’s Terry again:
For Christmas 1970 we decided to do a pantomime. On Sundays the club closed at 2 p.m. and we would rehearse after that. We decided to do Cinderella about six weeks before Christmas. We would be constantly rewriting the script.
We realised that we had to find parts for Neil and Ken Green. We decided that Neil would be Prince Barmcake. I was an Ugly Sister. John Mahoney was Buttons. I’ve still got the script at home.
NEIL
I was Prince Charming. Terry was the Barmcake.
MALCOLM
Terry continues:
Neil came out from backstage with only one line to say. He always wagged his finger in the air which itself reduced the audience to hysterics. His line was, ‘I suppose you know why I am here.’ But Neil always said ‘suspose’ instead of ‘suppose’. We tried to teach him to say ‘suppose’ instead of ‘suspose’ but without success. He would come to the rehearsal, put his finger up again and say, ‘I suspose you know why I am here.’ We tried for three weeks to get it right, but on the final Sunday we decided that it was funnier to leave it in. The club was packed. It was a success beyond our wildest dreams and hilariously funny. Everybody agreed that Neil was the star of the show.
George also recalls the pantomime: ‘Neil was in it as Prince Charming. It filled the club, his line was, “I suppose you know why I am here.” But he couldn’t say “suppose”. It brought the house down.’
George also recalls how Neil harboured his own hopes of becoming a footballer:
One time Neil said he wanted a trial, so we decided to organise a trial. We took him on the far side of the training ground to have a warm-up. Neil was shattered even after the warm-up, so we never got as far as the trial.
On one occasion Neil announced to our astonishment that he had got a trial at Exeter City. When he came back we said, ‘How have you got on?’ All we could get out of him was a complaint that Exeter City wouldn’t pay his expenses and he had to thumb it back.
NEIL
George has got that wrong. It wasn’t Exeter. It was Blackpool. I got locked in the dressing room. They forgot I was there. I also had a trial at Crewe Alexander when Alan A’Court was in charge there.
MALCOLM
George continues:
Neil used to clean cars for the players to raise a bit of money. One time Terry Lees decided to pull Neil’s leg by pretending he wasn’t satisfied and saying, ‘I’m not paying you, you haven’t done it right.’ Neil was horrified and challenged him to a fight. Terry said, ‘Take your jumper off’ and pretended to accept the challenge, but of course he wasn’t serious. All the lads loved Neil. He was part of the scenery.
We never let anybody take things too far, but Neil had a lot of spirit and always gave something back. He made quite an impression on my life.
We were once driving past Keele in Dave Hughes’s car. It was pouring down at half past midnight and we spotted someone walking down Keele Bank to Newcastle town centre. It was Neil. We asked him where he was going and Neil just replied, ‘You’re taking me where I’m going!’ Dave had a mannequin from the Just Jane dress shop in the back, so he sat Neil in the back with a naked woman. They were an interesting pair of passengers.
The former Stoke player John Ruggiero recounts the time when the famous England international George Eastham signed for Stoke. George had been in England’s 1966 winning World Cup squad and some years later was to score the winning goal for Stoke in the 1972 League Cup final at Wembley. He now lives in South Africa. John recounts the tale as told to him by George:
When George signed for Stoke City, the club put him in a house in Sneyd Green. He’d been there a few days when there was a knock on the door and he opened it to see a vicar standing on the doorstep. George thought, I’ve only been here a week and they’ve sent the local vicar round to make sure I’m all right and settling into the local community.
He really appreciated this gesture and invited the vicar in for tea. George produced some tea and biscuits and then noticed that the vicar had taken out large number of books and magazines and asked George to start signing them. George thought this was very odd. Eventually, he discovered that it was Neil, not a real vicar. He took a great deal of ribbing from the other players about that, but George has a great deal of time for Neil and, whenever he rings up from South Africa, always asks, ‘How’s Nello?’
George was neither the first nor the last to be taken in by Neil’s occasional dog collar. I had done the same on my first meeting with Neil a couple of years earlier at Keele University. In those days Neil also occasionally used to wear it while hitchhiking.
NEIL
I used to hitchhike to visit old Keele friends, circuses, church services and football matches. I found that wearing a dog collar was a very good way of getting a quick lift, because drivers liked to pick up someone in the church. My ministry’s very important to me. In those days, all the students used to hitchhike, but nobody does any more. I haven’t been hitch-hiking for a long time. I find it’s better to just to ask friends for a lift.
MALCOLM
Betty Cartwright, a longstanding member of St Mark’s church in Birkenhead, which Mary and Neil used to attend when visiting her family, recalls an incident in the late sixties or early seventies:
Neil wore a dog collar, which led our minister, Canon Maurice Marshall, to believe he was a vicar and he invited him back to the church to preach at a later date. The family had to go round to tell Maurice the truth.
Denise recalls her mother Iris saying, ‘I just can’t believe our Neil has fooled Maurice.’
Cousin Brenda confirmed that Maurice was a ‘rather stiff ’ person who wasn’t too pleased that he had been misled in this way.
It was during the sixties that Neil started to turn his childhood interest in circuses into an adult reality. Norman Barrett MBE is one of the circus community’s most famous members, a ringmaster and former bareback rider who is also famous for his act with trained budgies. Norman recalls:
I first got to know Neil in the 1960s. He came to visit my mother, who invited him for a cup of tea and gave him some circus programmes. And he became a regular visitor after that. On one occasion he came with a dog collar and a Bible. He came to see us at the Tower Circus in Blackpool, and also to Zippos in Stoke and down to shows in London.
He took my retired budgies and I still give him budgies because he takes great care of them.
He’s a circus lover; he visits circuses all over the country, and indeed the world. He goes to the annual get-together of the circus community and the circus fans’ association. He still phones me regularly.
Phillip Gandey of Gandeys Circus says, ‘Neil used to visit my father’s circus as a young man and always visited my mum and dad. We see him at family funerals and know him as a friend. He is part of the wider circus family.’
Andrew Edwards is a local funeral director with strong connections to Stoke City. He recalls:
A few years ago, we did the funeral of Mary Gandey, who was prominent in the circus community. Mourners came from all over the country. I was very surprised to see Nello there, but I shouldn’t have been, because it was obvious he’s a friend of the family and knew loads of people from the circus families very well.
NEIL
Norman and Phillip are very good friends of mine. Norman is one of the most famous circus people and has one of the best acts in the country. I have been pleased to look after his retired budgies. I have known Phillip’s family ever since I was young, and in 1974 I performed in a show of theirs at Stoke Polytechnic as a clown. All the Gandey family are good friends of mine. I went to Mary’s funeral at Brereton. That was sad. It was organised by Andrew Edwards, who is a big Stoke City fan. He is a nice man who is very good at running funerals.
I see a lot of my old circus friends at the annual national circus reunion. A circus is the most exciting form of entertainment you can have. I love making people laugh.
