An Irishman's Diary

I COULD blame end-of-season fatigue for my spectacular own goal – pointed out by Paul Delaney and other readers – yesterday, in suggesting that Liverpool’s most successful manager, Bob Paisley, was Scottish. Alternatively, I could try claiming that my reference was to the political boundaries of 1644, when the Scots briefly occupied Sunderland: near which the said Liverpool manager was born, albeit 275 years later.

But the sad truth is, I have laboured for decades under the misapprehension that Paisley was yet another Scotsman who had made it big in English football management. And being in no doubt about the matter, I never thought to check. Now at last I know that he was born in the interestingly-named town of Hetton-le-Hole: from where even the most southern extremity of Hadrian’s Wall – the loosest possible definition of where Scotland starts – is 30 miles away.

You learn something new every day. In fact, I have learned two new things since writing yesterday’s column. So perhaps readers will bear with me while, in an effort to distract from my embarrassment, I share details of the other revelation.

You may recall that the main point of the piece was to reclaim the memory of Liverpool’s very first manager and spiritual father, “Honest John McKenna”, who was from Co Monaghan. But no sooner had I read up on McKenna’s life story than my informant added that, by the way, the person responsible for setting up what is now Manchester City Football Club was “from Clones”.

Unless you’re from the Oriel County yourself, this is not perhaps the most remarkable thing about the story. Arguably more notable is that the person in question was a woman. But then again, she was the daughter of a rector. And it was in the course of doing what rectors’ daughters often do – charity work on behalf of the poor – that she sowed the seeds for what, 130-odd years later, became one of the world’s richest clubs.

Although she was born on Christmas Eve 1851, Anna Connell would in time prove less a gift to Clones, where her father Arthur was then based, that to the parish of West Gorton in Lancashire, where the family would end up.

In between, they had spells in Lurgan and in Tullylish, Co Down. Then Arthur received a better offer from a parish in Yorkshire. And although the people of Tullylish offered to match the improved salary if he would stay – which sounds like a faint premonition of the sport the Connells would become indirectly involved in – the lure of England proved too strong.

In 1866, Arthur Connell moved to St Mark’s Church in Gorton, a once-rural town then being swallowed up by the spread of industrial Manchester, with all its problems.

Poverty, alcoholism, and gang violence were rife there. A later visitor, Sylvia Pankhurst – daughter of the famous suffragette – was so depressed by conditions that she wrote of having an impulse “to dash my head against the dreary wall of those squalid streets”. But growing to adulthood in the town, Anna Connell decided to try and do something about.

Her sister had already set up a mothers’ club in the parish. Anna opted to do the same thing for the men. What she had in mind was to organise wholesome entertainment – musical evenings, drama, and so on – to lift their spirits. And such was her idea’s popular appeal that at the first meeting, which she had advertised by visiting all 1,000 houses in the area, only three men turned up.

She refused to be discouraged, however, and soon the crowds came. Eventually, membership grew to over 100. From this captive audience, the club expanded into sporting activities: first cricket, and then – to keep the cricketers interested in winter – football. It’s only fair to point that Connell herself was not directly involved in the sporting wing: that work devolved to one of her assistants, a church-warden named William Bearstow.

But St Mark’s football club, as it became, was a direct product of her initiative among the town’s male poor. And after a couple of name changes, it turned into Manchester City, as which it continues today. So it’s not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that the likes of Carlos Tevez and Mario Balotelli are carrying on the dramatic performances that Anna Connell first planned. Of course they play football too, sometimes.

Sad to say, the woman who was described as a “mother to the fathers” of West Gorton is in some ways even more forgotten than John McKenna. In his book on the church origins of many of the English clubs, Thank God for Football, Peter Lupson laments that there is no photograph of her anywhere. Nor is the location of her grave now known. But as he adds, “her lasting memorial . . . remains Manchester City Football Club.” I hope Anna Connell’s story, for which I again thank David Moen, will go some way to getting me out of the Hetton-le-Hole I fell into yesterday. In any case, I’ll stop digging now.