The Don’s last home - remembering Don Revie’s Scottish links

Thirty years ago, Don Revie died in an Edinburgh hospital. Right until the end, Scotland played a big part in the life of the former Leeds and England manager. Daniel Gray’s article first appeared in Issue 12 of Nutmeg, a Scottish football quarterly publication available by subscription at: www.nutmegmagazine.co.uk
Don Revie raises the FA Cup after Leeds Uniteds victory over Arsenal in 1972. Picture: Getty.Don Revie raises the FA Cup after Leeds Uniteds victory over Arsenal in 1972. Picture: Getty.
Don Revie raises the FA Cup after Leeds Uniteds victory over Arsenal in 1972. Picture: Getty.

Edinburgh, late May 1989, the One o’Clock Gun soon to fire. Outside Warriston Crematorium, the princes of Elland Road queue. There is Bremner and there is Giles, there is Charlton and there is Gray. Throw a ball on to the well-groomed lawn and who knows what might happen. Also present are Allan Clarke and Mick Jones, Joe Jordan and Gordon McQueen. In the line too is a Liverpool interloper, Kevin Keegan, and the commentator Brian Moore. He whispers now, where four days ago he was bellowing at Anfield as Arsenal went through on goal… It’s up for grabs now.

These nobles of English football are in Scotland to say goodbye. Goodbye to the boss, goodbye to The Don, goodbye to another age. Today Don Revie, latterly of Kinross, will be cremated. There is a bottle of cognac on top of his coffin. “Have a few drinks on me and there must be no sad faces,” Revie had said towards the end.

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After the funeral, Bremner, Keegan and all shuffle down the steps and on to the crackly gravel outside. There they loiter and mourn a man taken too soon. Perhaps they grin and remember, swap yarns weaved many hundreds of times before. The good old days. Perhaps they reflect upon a tumultuous recent few weeks – Hillsborough horror, Arsenal’s melodramatic championship heist, England winning at Hampden and blood on the streets afterwards. Football in 1989 has started to feel like one long thunderstorm.

In Warriston’s overflow room, a few Leeds United fans gather. They have eavesdropped the funeral reverently, heads sunk and hands cupped behind backs. “He made us feel part of the family,” one says of Revie.

Bell Street in Middlesbrough is a stubby road of tight terraced houses. It is curtailed at one end by a fence obscuring the A66 motorway, and at the other by a main thoroughfare. Don Revie was born and raised at number 20, now pebble-dashed in the colour of a well-worn Leeds United shirt.

It takes about 25 minutes to walk from Revie’s childhood home to Brian Clough’s. The route skirts the housing development built upon what was once Ayresome Park. Ayresome was Middlesbrough Football Club’s characterful abode, a place I think about far too much. When you grow up a Teessider, you know that Clough was one of your own, but few people mention The Don. He is your other uncle, the outcast one who fled years ago. Clough has a statue in Albert Park and a plaque on that family home, at 11 Valley Road. Revie has nothing.

One explanation is that Revie, unlike Clough, never played for his hometown club. Another is the scandal and stereotype that mauled the former’s reputation in the last decade or so of his life. In death, Clough has been lionised and his fellow Teessider lampooned. Novel and film The Damned United bottled and pickled that very mood. Whatever the truth, to partially dim the lights when two of world football’s greatest managers grew from working-class estates a mile and a half apart is remarkable and depressing.

Born in July 1927, Revie was eight years Clough’s senior. The Middlesbrough young Don knew was filthy poor. It had once hissed, clanked and belched all the grimy tunes of the industrial revolution. Times of making things, times of smoking chimneys meaning work for all. Now, the Depression poured through every stopped factory and down alleyways like some unseen and toxic lava. His father, also Don, was an unemployed joiner. His mother, Margaret, worked as a washerwoman, taking in bundles of cloth from the slightly less poor. A workhouse that backed on to the Holgate End of Ayresome Park had only closed in the 1920s and hung around as an empty threat. Its backwall is still there today. The spectre of poverty burrowed its way into young Don and never left him. Neither, though, did his release: football.

“The roar of the crowd at Ayresome Park can be heard quite plainly in Bell Steet,” Revie wrote in the first line of his 1955 autobiography, Soccer’s Happy Wanderer. “I grew up with that roar.” Revie recalled steelworkers plodding past the front door of number 20 on their way to see George Camsell, Wilf Mannion, George Hardwick and all the other names that are scratched into our Teesside bones.

For much of his boyhood, young Don would stand and wait for the men attached to those names as they crossed Bell Street en route to training, gathering head pats and autographs.

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Then at last, enough pennies were found to send him inside Ayresome for a match. “I would watch the game with glistening eyes, then come home and play the match all over by myself in the back street,” he continued in the book. That back street now is locked shut and strewn with black bin bags and faulty fridges. Stare enough at its cobbles, though, and you can just about see young Don Revie, kicking rags shaped into a ball.

In 1939, Margaret Revie died of cancer. “Only a boy who has lost his mother knows what heartache it means,” wrote her son in Soccer’s Happy Wanderer. Don began to arrive early for school, kicking away his pain: “In the dull grey mornings of winter, flicking that ball against the wall helped to pass the time. I didn’t feel so lonely… I didn’t miss my mother so much.”

No wonder he retreated into football. A year after Margaret’s death, Middlesbrough became the first town in England to be bombed by the Luftwaffe. Everything must have seemed relentless and uncontrollable, everything except football. Revie left school at 14 to become an apprentice bricklayer. But the yards and commons knew of his talent; grass blades whispered in the wind that the boy Revie could play. He signed for Middlesbrough Swifts. Their manager, a train driver named Bill Sanderson, beguiled footballers with his tactical debriefings and set-piece plans, all mapped out on a model pitch with brightly-coloured corks representing players. Everything Revie became was smelted in Middlesbrough.

Swifts had a scouting link not with Boro but with Leicester City, 150 miles south. The Foxes called for Revie. The 17-year-old signed to Filbert Street in 1944. From 1946, his manager was to be Johnny Duncan, a Fifer. Revie became his deep-lying centre-forward, a modern No 10 scheming in Brylcreem days. As a player, Duncan had signed for Leicester from Raith Rovers alongside his brother, Tommy. Both had been cogs in a Stark’s Park forward line boasting the mercurial Alex James. Tommy had passed away young, in 1939. It was left to Johnny to watch over his five children. Enter Elsie Duncan.

Uncle Jock, the pleasant, experienced fellow who guided Don over the early years, the man whose niece became Mrs Revie.” Thus wrote Eric Thornton in his 1970 book, Leeds United and Don Revie. When Tommy Duncan died, Uncle Jock had taken in his two sons, David and John. It wasn’t long before Revie, so far from 20 Bell Street, became something of a third. Tommy Duncan’s daughters, Jenny, Agnes and Elsie, had returned north to live in Lochgelly with their mother. Then one summer, wartime lately over, Don joined the Duncan boys for a holiday in Fife. Having finished his bricklaying apprenticeship, he was able to help build the Lochgelly general store that would be run by the Duncan family. The star of Leicester City with his mason line and mortar. Elsie must have been impressed. In October 1949, they were married.

Elsie was born in Lochgelly, and attended school in Cowdenbeath. By the time Don fell for her, she was studying at teacher training college in Edinburgh. He would travel to Scotland by coach, and in pre-season kept up his fitness by training with Raith Rovers. “They used to call him Mister Handsome in the dressing-rooms of the Fifties,” wrote Thornton, “and he was always very happy about it… Yet it never affected his sang froid, because he was always so concerned about just one particular person – Elsie.”

Football transfers to Hull City, Manchester City, Sunderland and finally Leeds meant classroom transfers for Elsie. She was no supine, clichéd footballer’s wife. No move would be completed until Don had talked it over with her. It must have helped that both were golf devotees. That love of fairways was one reason they ended up in Scotland; another was that husband had long promised wife a return home. Interviewed by Yorkshire Television in 1974, Revie said: “I owe her an awful lot, because she had a fantastic education, which I didn’t have, and she could tell me an awful lot I didn’t know… she feels what I’m going through very much, and sometimes I think that on a Saturday she goes through it more than I do.”

Revie the footballer hit his peak in the mid-1950s. In 1954, he was the English game’s Player of the Year and a phrase had been coined for his Manchester City side’s tactically innovative 4-2-4 formation: The Revie Plan. He scored in England’s 1955 7-2 lashing of Scotland. In 1958 he moved to Leeds United. In 1961 he was appointed manager.

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The rest is history and conjecture, the record books versus The Damned United, and Elsie was there for it all. She had to live with the glory and the dismay. She must have read and heard the judgements and the tittle-tattle. First it was Dirty Leeds and Bite Yer Legs Hunter, then later tabloid allegations that Revie had for years sought to fix the outcome of matches. She had to live with the most thorough man in football, an obsessive compiler of opponent dossiers, the man who moulded his Leeds squad into an extension of the Revie family, which by now included son Duncan and daughter Kim.

Elsie also had to live with Revie’s epic superstitions – his lucky blue suits with charms in the pockets, his fear of ornamental elephants and birds, his habit of walking to the nearest traffic lights and back when Leeds arrived at a new hotel, his hiring of a gypsy to rid Elland Road of its curse. A ritual attached itself to Elsie herself. For five seasons, she was compelled to wear the same suede coat to matches. “This came from my mother… to this day I’m probably the most superstitious man in the world,” Revie said later.

In 1974 Don Revie was the national saviour. By 1977 he was a treacherous mercenary. That was the media line and football stuck to it. Appointed England manager to rekindle the glories of 1966, Revie failed to reach the European Championship of 1976. By the summer of ’77 he had resigned through the front page of the Daily Mail. His last England match was the 2-1 Wembley defeat by Scotland; turf, crossbar and all that. He took a job as manager of the United Arab Emirates. He would be paid £340,000 per year, tax-free. Money mattered to Revie as it did to Brian Clough. Handsome bank balances never quelled insecurity. Every day they lived as if a return to impoverished mid-century Middlesbrough was only one false move away.

For resigning, the FA hit Revie with a decade’s ban from the domestic game. Even when he overturned that ruling in the High Court, Mr Justice Cantley denounced him as “greedy” and branded his England departure an “outrageous example of disloyalty, breach of trust, discourtesy and selfishness”. The denunciations of Don had begun and would be reinforced from tabloid to cinema through subsequent decades.

The Revies returned to the United Kingdom in 1984. They lived at first in Surrey until finally, in July 1986, Don’s promise to Elsie was fulfilled. It was time for a retirement of golf and serenity in Scotland. Among bowling news from Bridge of Earn and tidings of a sponsored church walk in Blair Atholl, a short article on page 15 of the Perthshire Advertiser announced their arrival:

Don Revie, the internationally known football personality, has decided to settle in Kinross. Mr Revie, whose wife is a Fife lass, has opted for Kinross because of the relaxed atmosphere in the town, its proximity to many famous golf courses, and the closeness to his wife’s roots. Mr Revie has been staying at a Kinross hotel while finalising details of his new home.

Don and Elsie moved to a neat bungalow on Broom Road. It was, and is, a comatose street of cherished rose bushes and Granny Smith-green lawns. The quiet thickens halfway along when on one side houses give way to a cemetery. It is possible to imagine retired Revie at the garden gate, hearing beyond the silence, hearing the cataclysmic din of an Elland Road night game. The sounds and memories never stop.

In Kinross, Revie was known as a genial man. He and Elsie slotted into community life. On 17 April 1987, another short piece in the Perthshire Advertiser told of Kinross RFC’s “traditional dinner on 24 April in the Green Hotel, where the guest speakers will be David Leslie, ex-Scotland, Don Revie, ex-England football manager, and Sandy Sutherland, sports writer”. Yet by then, the disease that would kill him was already trickling through his nervous system.

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Revie began to feel pain whilst golfing. Not yet 60, he attributed the aches scything down the backs of his legs to an old football injury. As they played together, Elsie had observed the strange way he was moving. He had mentioned a puzzling sensation that made him feel as if he were floating. Tests followed, and then a call from a specialist in London. Don was to attend an appointment. Duncan and Kim went with him. “I think it’s motor neurone disease, Don,” were the words that preceded their tears.

“It was a shattering moment when I discovered I had the disease,” Revie told a TV reporter in August 1987, “but you have to fight it. It is incurable anywhere in the world... I’m living as normally as possible and will not give up – that is something I have never done. I will fight, fight and fight.”

That fight for him involved fundraising for an MND charity. At one point a newspaper appeal advert carrying a picture of Revie ran with the headline: Compared to fighting Motor Neurone Disease, winning the FA Cup was no problem.

The family researched treatments, transporting their beloved husband and father to clinics in America and the Soviet Union. The fruitlessness of these trips did not stop the News of the World printing a cruel article claiming that Revie had been miraculously cured in Moscow. The MND Association issued a response to the story: “It not only wounds Don and his family, it raises false hopes in the hearts of every one of the 5,000 people who suffer from MND in this country.”

Don and Elsie made the best of what was supposed to be their Kinross idyll. He watched her playing golf and attended daily treatment sessions at the Bridge of Earn Hospital. Their home was adapted to accommodate his wheelchair and an electric frame that helped him stand up. Shaving took an hour and after his hands began to curl inwards, he used large lightweight cutlery. He prayed every night, telling the Times newspaper: “I started that when I lost my mother, when I was 11. I used to say them on my knees, but I can’t now.” In the same interview, he revealed that he had booked three clubhouse suites for the 1990 British Open at St Andrews.

MND works through people like a vicious termite, gradually killing off the body, muscle by muscle. It can leave the brain largely intact, meaning a sufferer knows exactly what is happening. Revie had been a hulking man of 17 stone, the kind of Teessider whose pint you never spill. By 1989 he weighed under nine. The end was nigh. In his last days, he was moved to the BUPA hospital in Murrayfield. From its perch beside Corstorphine Hill you can see Hearts’ Tynecastle home. The hospital is not far from a viewpoint called Rest and Be Thankful, which overlooks a golf course.

Don Revie slipped away on 26 May 1989, a few hours before that decisive and dramatic Liverpool versus Arsenal game. Duncan and Kim were there when he died as, of course, was Elsie. Always Elsie.

After the Warriston funeral, Johnny Giles saluted “a great man”. Kevin Keegan said that Revie was “like a father to me”. Everyone who loved him was loyal to the very last. The Times recorded that Revie “was yesterday laid to rest without pomp and ceremony”, while the Irish Independent commented that he had gone “to his grave this week a discredited and pitifully lonely man… it emphasises the manner in which English football has shed its sense of reason”.

“Thankfully he will be remembered with a great deal more fondness in his adopted town of Kinross, in his adopted country of Scotland,” reflected the Perthshire Advertiser.