A stalwart for Leeds United and Manchester United in the 1970s and 1980s he began his career with Junior side Largs Thistle and signed for St Mirren before going down south. He is most remembered by Scottish football fans for his goal at Wembley against England in 1977.
In later life he suffered from throat cancer but, most poignantly, from dementia as a consequence of heading a ball so often.
Life – and death – can be so unfair.
Gordon McQueen: 26/6/1952 – 15/6/2023. So it goes.
On Monday myself and the good lady had an emotional day when we said our final goodbye to Eric Brown, Science Fiction writer, crime novelist, devoted husband and father, a dear friend, a gentle man and gentleman.
He had an interesting life which took in his origins in Haworth, Yorkshire, and a sojourn in Australia before returning to his Yorkshire roots then visiting India without first ever having tasted a curry. He soon learned to cook curries from scratch and was a devotee of that food from then on. He also spent some time in Greece. All of these influences fed into his fiction.
After his marriage to Finn they moved to Cambridgeshire before, with their beloved daughter Freya, coming up to Scotland to live in Berwickshire.
I first met Eric at a Science Fiction convention and immediately recognised him as one of nature’s good guys. It wasn’t until the move to Scotland that we were able to have extended conversations with him, though he and I had been emailing each other for a long time. In his emails he frequently would note a particularly good performance by Sons while usually bemoaning how Leeds United had fared. Football, SF and literature (probably in that order) were our perennial talking points, though the conversation would roam far and wide.
He always sought out a good curry house and would be disappointed when the fare wasn’t to his liking. I remember he told us a story about a meal in a curry restaurant in Dunbar where he said to the owner afterwards that it had not been formulated properly – only to receive the reply that that was how their patrons liked it. A year or so later he went to the same establishment to try to obtain for one of his own curries an ingredient which he had run out of. The owner was surprised Eric cooked his own curries and, being short of a chef, immediately offered him a job! Eric refused, no doubt courteously.
Eric sometimes solicited from me my comments on a story or novel he had not yet submitted to a publisher and never moaned at my nit-picking. He also took with very good grace my irritation at the use of the ‘time interval later’ turn of phrase.
(Edited to add: this was such a difficult post to write I knew I would miss out something. I had intended to say that the good lady and myself felt incredibly honoured when Eric dedicated one of his books to us.)
Eric, it was an absolute privilege to know you and call you friend. I still cannot bring myself to believe you have gone and that those emails will no longer drop into my in-box.
He had not been well for some time and had borne it with fortitude and good grace (and not a little optimism, or so it seemed when we visited him) but though this outcome was always likely the news nevertheless came as a shock.
A proud Yorkshireman – born and brought up in Haworth – and not shy of living up to the stereotype, Eric was neverthless one of the kindest, friendliest people I have ever met. His writing embodied those attributes and always had a warm, human heart to it but was not appreciated as widely as it ought to have been and never achieved as much success as it deserved.
Among many other things I’ll miss our mutual commiserations about the fortunes of our respective beloved football teams (in his case Leeds United.)
He is a great loss not only to the field of Science Fiction (and with his Langham and Dupré stories to the ‘cosy crime’ genre) and as a friend to the good lady and myself but most of all to his wife Finn and daughter Freya, taken from them far too soon.
Another football name from my youth has gone. The death of Peter Lorimer has been announced.
He came to prominence playing in that great Leeds United side of the late 60s and early 70s, managed by Don Revie.
I actually saw him play once. He even scored. It was in a World Cup qualification game against Denmark at Hampden in 1972. Denmark outplayed Scotland all over the park except in our penalty box. Everything kind of petered out just before they reached there. Scotland won two-nil.
In the finals Lorimer was involved in the most bizarre free-kick incident ever to have happened during a World Cup. It was Scotland’s first game, against Zaire. Lorimer was lined up to take it when the ref blew his whistle and a Zaire player rushed out of the wall. Lorimer hesitated, waiting for the ref to blow for the ten yard distance to be re-established. He didn’t, and the Zaire player kicked the ball upfield. Lorimer scored the first in a 2-0 win.
Peter Patrick Lorimer: 14/12/1946 – 20/3/2021. So it goes.
So, with the passing of Jack Charlton, another of that select group, English footballers to have won a World Cup, has gone.
Not the most cultured of players, unlike his brother Bobby, Jack was said to have thought when he learned of his England call-up that they’d picked the wrong Charlton. His position at centre-half though, has not historically been the preserve of the cultured. In his club career at Leeds United he had big shoes to fill, taking over from the Gentle Giant, John Charles, after his transfer to Juventus. In all he appeared for Leeds 629 times – a club record unlikely to be surpassed.
As a manager I remember him leading Middlesbrough to promotion to the top flight before spells at Sheffield Wednesday and Newcastle United but it was as manager of the Republic of Ireland international team that he made his greatest mark, taking them to a World Cup quarter-final in 1990. Four years later they had a famous 1-0 win over Italy (who went on to reach the final) in New York.
John (Jack) Charlton: 8/5/1935 – 10/7/2020. So it goes.
Jimmy Armfield was an almost forgotten member of a certain England football World Cup squad but had a follow-up career as a manager in which he took Leeds United to the European Cup final where they were diddled out of a win by some dodgy refereeing but crowd trouble took some shine off the team’s efforts and later as a commenter on BBC radio’s football coverage.
I’m not much into jazz but was aware Hugh Masekela was an impressive musician, and equally important for his standing in the anti-apartheid movement.
I posted about Ursula Le Guin on Wednesday 24/1/2018. There were two articles about her in yesterday’s Guardian. This one by Alison Flood and Benjamin Lee plus David Mitchell’s appreciation.
The Fall is a band I didn’t follow (they were a bit after my time) but some folks swear by them. By all accounts Mark E Smith was a particularly exacting taskmaster.
Argent’s biggest hit was Hold Your Head Up from 1972. This is a TV performance from 1973.
Argent: Hold Your Head Up
Below are two samples of Masekela in performance.
Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela: Soweto Blues
Hugh Masekela: Bring Him Back Home (Nelson Mandela.)
And here’s The Fall’s cover of the Holland-Dozier-Holland song There’s a Ghost in My House, which gave them their highest UK chart placing.
The Fall: There’s a Ghost in My House
James Walter Rodford: 7/7/1941 – 20/1/2018. So it goes.
James Christopher Armfield: 21/9/1935 – 22/1/2018. So it goes.
Hugh Ramapolo Masekela: 4/4/1939 – 23/1/2018. So it goes.
Mark Edward Smith: 5/3/1957 – 24/1/2018. So it goes.
I was sad to hear of the death of Cyrille Regis, a stalwart of a West Bromwich Albion side which finished third in the English top division in the late 1970s and fourth a couple of years later. Imagine that happening now!
Prior to his career along with Laurie Cunningham and Brendan Batson (nicknamed the Three Degrees though that seems excessively patronising now) there had been few black players in the British game since its very early days.
Albert Johanesson of Leeds United and West Ham United’s Clyde Best were trail-blazers and the amount of racist abuse all these had to suffer doesn’t bear thinking about.
Regis and the other two degrees helped to show that players like them could, “do it on a wet Wednesday afternoon in Stoke.” Not that that should ever have been doubted.
Regis’s five caps for England is not a true reflection of his abilities and stands as an indicator of the difficulties he faced in forging a career in football.
