50 years ago today: When Bill Shankly shocked the football world

July can feel like a long month in the life of a football fan, the previous season a distant memory and the new one yet to kick in. So when a press conference was called at Anfield 50 years ago to this day, it may have seemed unusual but no-one was expecting one of the most earth-shattering announcements in Liverpool FC history: the retirement of manager Bill Shankly.

It’s no exaggeration to say that it stunned not only Reds supporters but the players, the sport, the city and the country at large.

Throughout the first half of 1974 change had been in the air. In February there’d been a general election and Harold Wilson, Labour MP for Huyton, had become Prime Minister for a second time. In April the city of Liverpool ‘left’ its traditional county of Lancashire to form part of a new metropolitan county called Merseyside.

In football, World Cup winner Alf Ramsey was succeeded as England manager by Don Revie, who as Leeds United boss had been Shankly’s great rival. By then, Leeds had clinched the top-flight title while runners-up Liverpool had lifted the FA Cup in style, beating Newcastle United 3-0 in the final.

As such, the two teams were scheduled to meet in the new season’s curtain-raiser, the Charity Shield. But Leeds were still without a new manager (Brian Clough would be appointed with calamitous consequences) while the Reds, acclaimed as Shankly’s second great side, saw only an exciting future ahead.

Friday July 12, 1974 began as a typically ‘slow news’ summer’s day. The headlines on the front page of Liverpool’s morning newspaper, the Daily Post, gave no hint as to what was to come: reaction from a couple of local by-elections; plans for a new polytechnic to be built on the derelict Albert Road; lightning strikes disrupting the BBC’s coverage of the Open Golf Championship up the road at Royal Lytham St Annes.

Golf dominated the back pages, too; the only football-related item was a photo of Reds defender Phil Thompson presenting schoolchildren with football medals in his hometown of Kirkby.

So when LFC summoned the press to Anfield, most people presumed a new signing was imminent. There would indeed be a new arrival – a significant one – but it would be shoved to the sidelines.

Later that day the Liverpool Echo would reveal that Bill Shankly strode into the stadium’s trophy room “looking relaxed, tanned and fighting-fit, wearing a neatly cut herringbone suit, tangerine shirt and one of his famous collection of ties”. As he talked with the assembled journalists about the recent World Cup finals in West Germany he was “in sparkling form”.

The report went on: “The stage was now set. The TV cameras were in position, pencils were poised and the fingers of the clock pointed to 14 minutes past noon. Mr Shankly disengaged himself [from the 30-strong press pack] and joined the directors, taking his place in a seat alongside Mr Smith, his chairman. One of the TV crews switched on his portable sunlight, bringing Mr Shankly to his feet with the comment: ‘Hold it a minute – John Wayne hasn’t arrived yet!’ The laughter was stilled by Mr Smith as he made the formal announcement that the King of Anfield had decided to abdicate.”

John Smith’s exact words were: “It is with great regret that I as chairman of Liverpool Football Club have to inform you that Mr Shankly has intimated that he wishes to retire from active participation in league football, and the board has with extreme reluctance accepted his decision.”

It’s not often that football correspondents are lost for words. Among them was John Keith, now a hugely respected writer and broadcaster, then a young reporter for the Daily Express. “Journalists are quite hard-bitten but I’ve never seen people as shocked as they were that day – you could hear gasps,” he recalls. “We had no idea, not a sniff about what was going to happen. Even now when I think about it, it’s hard to take in.

“Of course, Jürgen [Klopp] made his own [departure] announcement on a Friday too, but these were the days before mobile phones, laptops, social media, so the ability for word to spread was more restricted. But this wasn’t just a sports story – this was a news story. Harold Wilson [later the first guest on Shankly’s local radio show in 1975] was moved to comment on it.

“I was sitting there with Colin Wood of the Daily Mail and we were trying to digest it when suddenly Shanks says, ‘Boys, they’re signing somebody today, aren’t they?’ I said, ‘Yes, Ray Kennedy’. He was then Liverpool’s record signing [£200,000] but the next day it got a couple of paragraphs in the papers.”

While Shankly headed to Melwood to pose for photos with Kennedy, news of his high-noon announcement filtered out and fans jammed the club’s switchboard hoping it was a hoax. Famously, Granada TV dispatched reporter Tony Wilson to the streets of Liverpool to measure the shockwave.

“You’re having me on,” said one dumbstruck youngster. Wilson replied: “I swear it’s the truth – honestly, I’m not joking. I’ve just been to Anfield.” An elderly lady could barely utter the words, “Oh you’ll have me crying, that’s terrible.” The banner headline on the front of that evening’s Echo proclaimed: ‘SOCCER BOMBSHELL – SHANKLY RETIRES’.

Among the disbelieving young supporters was Joe McGann, eldest of four brothers, all of whom went on to become actors. He believes the shock was so great for so many because it felt so personal. “As a kid you don’t completely understand but I was aware amongst all the adults of how sad people were. I remember Evertonians were stunned too.

“The 12th of July is my brother Mark’s birthday, so we would have been celebrating at home at the end of the school day, towards the end of the summer term. My other brother Paul went to Cardinal Allen Grammar School [now Cardinal Heenan in Dovecot] so they used to see Shanks around because some of the kids used to go and play football with him as he lived down that way. I saw him too but never had the courage to approach him because I put him on such a pedestal. It wouldn’t be putting too fine a point on it to say he was like a father figure to us.

“Yes, he was partisan about Liverpool Football Club but he spoke about the game in a way that brought people together. You know, ‘It’s the way I see football, the way I see life’, that famous quote. He understood how much it meant.

“Jürgen Klopp called this a special club and it was Shankly who first made the club aware of that and said how much Liverpool people loved the game, how knowledgeable the crowd was. He was making observations that we felt to be true. It wasn’t a question put to him by the newspapers – this was stuff from his own head that he saw and felt.”

Long-time season ticket holder and LFC memorabilia collector Ray Hughes tells a similar tale. “In the summer of 1974 I was working at the Ford car plant in Halewood, I must have been about 22, and a newsflash came through on the radio. I thought I’d misheard it, like everyone else I couldn’t believe it.

“I’d started following Liverpool in the 1964-65 season, home and away with the supporters club on Lower Breck Road, and if you got there early enough to an away game and waited for the team, Bill would always come over to chat to the fans. But I was shy so I never spoke directly to him until a book signing years later when I also shook his hand.

“Today Bill is rightly hailed as a Liverpool FC legend, a messiah. Back then he was ‘just’ our manager but he had a special rapport with the fans – he’d say what we wanted to hear.”

That signed copy of Shankly’s autobiography takes pride of place among Ray’s possessions; he queued to get it signed by the great man upon its release in 1976. Later, Ray became an Anfield tour guide and for a while worked in an LFC-themed gallery at the Bluecoat Arts Centre in the city “when a fella came in and we got chatting and he said, ‘You know who I am? The lad with the long hair on that newsreel about Shankly resigning’.”

When the story broke, George Sephton had been Anfield’s PA announcer for three years and had also started a new job at pharmaceutical firm Richardson & Merrell (commonly known as Vicks) in Skelmersdale. “Somebody rang me at lunchtime in the office and said, ‘Have you heard all this?’ I’d not been there five minutes so I wasn’t going to spend all day on the phone – I had to wait until I got home to watch the news on TV. At the time we all thought it was the end of the world.

“My age group, we’d only ever known Bill Shankly as manager. I’d started going to Anfield as a fan about a month after he took over, in January 1960, when I was 13.

“I did meet Bill but not as often as people might think. When you saw him coming, you’d be inclined to bow. If you didn’t know who he was, if you weren’t a football fan, you’d know he was somebody special because he had an aura about him.”

Plaudits filled the pages of the Daily Post on Saturday July 13 along with reaction from Shankly’s players. Thompson, then aged 20, said: “He’s been everything to me – they’ll never be able to replace him.” Fellow defender Tommy Smith thought Shanks would “return to the game soon – how can he live without football?” Midfielder Ian Callaghan, recently voted the Football Writers’ Association Footballer of the Year, agreed: “I can’t see him retiring permanently – it’s his life, it’s all he knows.”

In that summer of 1974 two young local lads, flying winger David Fairclough and midfield dynamo Jimmy Case, were hoping to cement their places in the Reds reserves team. “It would have been the last few days before we came back for pre-season,” recalls Fairclough. “Like everybody, my only thought was: Liverpool without Shankly – what’s going to happen?

“The last time I spoke to him as manager was at the end of the previous season, in the corridor at Anfield near the Boot Room when we were going in to collect our boots. He told me, ‘Next season, son, [Hughie] McAuley’s moving on so you’re going to be outside-left for the reserves’. And you think: wow. You’re a young lad listening to Ronnie Moran and Tom Saunders, the ones you need to impress. You don’t think you’re in the manager’s thoughts, then he gives you that little boost.

“I’d only signed as a professional in January of that year and I have a picture of me with Shanks on the day. I’d never have thought that six months later he wouldn’t be there. He never looked like he was in that stage of his life. He was only 60 – I’m older now than he was then, it’s mad.”

Case, too, had just signed pro having served an apprenticeship as an electrician. He and the rest of the reserves had been invited to the FA Cup final and he remembers the party at London’s Waldorf Hotel afterwards. “The senior players were at the top table with the trophy and I said to myself: that’s what it’s all about – I’m going to have some of that.

“When you’re playing in the reserves you’re thinking: I might have a chance of making my debut soon. So when Shanks announced his retirement I was like Davey, wondering what would happen next.

“With Shanks it was his mere presence and if he said something to you, you felt 10 feet tall. But the main thing I remember was the five-a-sides after training. It was the staff, with one or two players, versus the youngsters. It was Bob Paisley in goal with the gloves on, Joe Fagan, Tom Saunders, Ronnie Moran, Johnny Bennison, Shanks, and they always had me in their side because I could run around and tackle and win the ball. You had to finish before midday to get back on the team bus back to Anfield for lunch. But if we were 1-0 down, Shanks wouldn’t stop the game until we’d equalised. Other players would look over and say, ‘Oh, they must be losing over there – we haven’t heard the whistle yet’.”

Eventually Case and Fairclough would break into the senior side under Shankly’s successor, Bob Paisley. For local radio listeners one of the voices of that new silver-laden era was Clive Tyldesley, now among football’s most respected commentators.

“I arrived on Merseyside in April 1977 and I came to know Bill through his Sunday morning show on Radio City,” says Clive. “I totally fell under his spell, I could not get enough of him. I used to volunteer to drive him to all sorts of events just so I could be with him, and I can honestly say that of all the people in football that I’ve been privileged to meet down the years, if I could go back and spend more time with just one of them, it would be Bill. Every second in his company was special to me.

“I’ve never got to the bottom about why he retired. I never saw Bill as a manager, only as a radio broadcaster and an interviewee. I was lucky to become a close friend of Ian St John, the man who did the best Shankly impression I’ve ever heard and told the best Shankly stories. He always gave me the impression that Bill often talked about retiring and this time [club secretary] Peter Robinson took him at his word, and I wouldn’t be surprised if both parties regretted it afterwards.

“But Bill was famously a bad loser, which most Liverpool greats have been. He couldn’t see any good reason why Liverpool had lost a football match – somebody or something else was to blame! That kind of intensity is sustainable only for so long.”

A fortnight after the announcement, Keith got a call from the Guild of Students at Liverpool University, which had invited Shankly to speak to them. “They told me that he’d stood up and said, ‘I know I made the wrong decision – I made it with my head but my heart couldn’t accept it’.

“I don’t think he was calling anyone’s bluff but I think he felt tired. At the close of every season Shankly went to Peter Robinson and told him he was quitting. Peter called it ‘Bill’s summer madness’. But as soon as there was a sniff of the new season he was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and couldn’t wait for it.”

Sephton thinks Shankly “had just run out of steam. He was a strong individual but he’d been here since 1959, so 15 years. In today’s terms that’s a lifetime with one club in management. Ditto, Kenny Dalglish, who’d been here for 13 years as player and manager when he resigned in 1990. I suspect Bill just needed a bit of peace and quiet.”

In that same edition of the Daily Post from Saturday July 13, former Everton manager Harry Catterick, who’d stood down the previous year due to poor health, insisted: “Bill’s taken the right decision… The modern manager at the top needs a very strong personality if he is to survive. It’s very easy to find your physical strength running down.”

The newspaper also sent a reporter to a West Derby hair salon to interview Bill’s wife Nessie while she was having her ‘regular shampoo-and-set’. She admitted she was “glad that the news is out. Since the decision was made five weeks ago it’s been like sitting on a time-bomb…

“What I want – and why Bill is retiring – is for this family to get a chance to see more of him. Of course he’ll still be interested and involved with football, it wouldn’t be him if he wasn’t. I don’t mind that. I want him to be happy, and he can’t be happy without football.”

Karen Gill, one of Bill’s six grandchildren, remembers getting to spend more time with her grandad even though “he was still very busy with football, going to matches. We loved being there because he’d tell us stories and take us out to an ice-cream parlour or a café or whenever he went to the barbers.

“Sixty is nothing these days, but he’d been a player for half his life and he’d managed quite a few teams, and growing up in Glenbuck he did go down the mines as well. So possibly that all took its toll.

“I’ve got loads of photos but my favourite is where he’s in front of his house leaning over the gate and talking to some kids [taken just over a month after Shankly’s resignation]. It shows the kind of man he was. As long as it was football, it didn’t matter – he’d always make time to talk.

“It’s lovely to hear so many tributes, to feel so much love for my grandad in the city and beyond. It makes me so proud, especially since I’ve moved back to Liverpool. I live right next to the ground and now there’s a new Jürgen Klopp mural at the top of my road. So it’s really nice every day on my way to work to see Jürgen and then my grandad’s statue too.”

In his autobiography Shankly would describe the decision to retire as a “terrible wrench” but explained: “I had been around a long time and I thought I would like to have a rest, spend more time with my family and maybe get a bit more fun out of life. Whilst you love football, it is a hard, relentless task which goes on and on like a river.”

For Liverpool’s opening fixture of the next season, 1974-75, at home to Leicester City, the matchday programme opened with a message not from new boss Paisley but chairman Smith. He wrote: “It was of course a matter of great regret to us all when Bill decided the time had come for him to retire, but at least we have been able to preserve the continuity of things with the appointment of Bob.

“Continuity and stability – that, we felt, must be the theme. Why change something that has been tried and proved over the years? We see no reason why Liverpool should not go from strength to strength.”

The Reds most certainly did, and Bill Shankly remains the man who made it all possible for LFC.