William "Bill" Shankly
The story of William "Bill" or "Wullie" Shankly, player and manager, has been covered by many others in detail. The bare bones of it are that he was born in 1913 in Glenbuck, an Ayrshire pit-village that no longer exists. He was the youngest of five footballing brothers, whose game-prowess came through their mother. Their father, born in a Douglas, local but just in Lanark-shire, was a tailor come postman to trade with no pedigree in the sport but their locally-born mother was the sister of Bob, and Bill, Blyth. Born in 1869 Bob was the first of two generations of fourteen men of Glenbuck, his brother included, who were to emerge to play football at a high level. In his case it was with Preston and then as player-manager, indeed a founder of Portsmouth on its formation in 1898.
But Bob Blyth, a half-back as his nephew would become, never won a Scottish cap. In fact none of the Blyths or the Shanklys did with the exception of Wullie. He would win five, the first at the age of twenty-five, whilst also by then at Preston. However, international honours all came in 1938 and 1939 with it highly likely that many more were a possibility but for the War that also robbed him of his best League years. He was at the end of the hostilities thirty-two and through pure force majeur an under-achiever, leaving the question of whether his drive as the manager he would become was in part a result of the frustration felt from a playing career essentially cut short?
However, the War years were to bring Shankly something more than drive. In 1944 in Glasgow he married Agnes Wren Fisher. Both were serving in their respective branches of the Air Force. They were to have two daughters, the elder born in Glasgow.
Bill and Nessie Shankly would be married for thirty-seven years. Once he had been appointed Liverpool manager in 1959 they would move into a house a just couple of miles from the Anfield ground and it was essentially from there that they would pass, although Bill in 1981 was to be in hospital following a heart-attack. He was four weeks past his sixty-eighth birthday. He would be cremated at Anfield Cemetery but with an memorial erected back in Ayrshire were his Glenbuck had once stood. And Nessie would survive him by fully twenty-two years, dying in 2002 at the age of eighty-two.
Birth Locator:
1913 - Manse Place, Glenbuck, Ayrshire
Residence Locations:
1921 - 3, Auchenstilloch Row, Glenbuck, Ayrshire
1938 - 12, Lowthorpe Road, Preston
1939 - 224, Skeffington Road, Preston
1944 - 6, New Houses, Glenbuck, Ayrshire (Bill)
1945 - 128, Dunchattan Rd., Glasgow (Nessie)
1965-81 - 30, Bellefield Ave, Liverpool
Death Locator:
1981 - Broadgreen Hospital, Liverpool
Grave Locator:
Cremated at Anfield Cemetery, Liverpool
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