They Also Had A Dream

Walking through the woodland at the old Sutton Manor Colliery site in St Helens you will come across a sculpture 20 metres high, made from brilliant white pre-cast concrete with Spanish dolomite, the whitest marble. It stands on a plinth in the shape of a miner’s tally which is 17 metres in diameter. At its peak in the 1960s, over 1,400 people were employed at the colliery and over 300,000 tons of coal were produced in a year. It closed in 1991 and in 2009 'Dream' was officially unveiled. It was created by Jaume Plensa and not only serves as a memorial to the colliery, but serves a symbol of hope for the future. 

"When we dream, anything is possible..." - Jaume Plensa

Nothing is more true than when you look at another mining community in Scotland. Glenbuck was a remarkable village in Ayrshire in the southern Uplands, so small, poor and remote that it had no electricity or indoor toilets. The nature of the work which sustained the village and shaped its footballers, meanwhile, was hard, precarious, back-breaking graft deep beneath the surface of the earth. At least 12 men died underground between 1884 and 1928, succumbing to collapsed roofs, runaway haulage cars, or lift cages which plummeted to the dark of the pit bottom. Most pupils in those days relied on the National Union of Scottish Mineworkers to provide a mid-day meal of a roll and jelly. Mining was the thing that made the football players in Glenbuck, as one old resident explained, "It was the pit. We were desperate to get out of it.You would do anything to get out of the pit."

The vast majority of men worked the mines, and in their youth played for the town's amateur team, Glenbuck Cherrypickers where generation after generation took to the humble pitch of Burnside Park. The team produced four English FA Cup winners, five full Scottish internationals and 53 professionals over the course of less than four decades. This from a coal mining village whose population never exceeded 1,700.  These included Bill Shankly and his four older brothers. Sir Alex Ferguson has never tired of invoking their memory.

Preston FA Cup winners 1938

Sandy Tait and Sandy Brown were part of the Spurs team that won the FA Cup in 1901 and another FA Cup triumph was recorded by Glenbuck-born George Halley with Burnley in 1914, while village alumnus Robert Blyth, Bill Shankly's uncle, played for Portsmouth before going on to become manager, chairman and director of the south-coast club. Tom Smith, originally brought up and educated in Cumnock, was another player who enjoyed fame and fortune as captain of the Preston North End side which won the FA Cup in 1938. Completing the Glenbuck connection was team-mate Bill Shankly, while two other Ayrshire men, Bobby Beattie and Bud Maxwell, played in the same winning side. Jock Stein, who coached Celtic to European Cup glory in 1967, worked the mines of Burnbank in the neighboring county of Lanarkshire. Matt Busby, who led Manchester United to continental glory a year later, spent his youth in the pits of nearby Bellshill. Further afield, Bill Shankly's successor at Liverpool, Bob Paisley, worked the coalfields of Durham in the northeast of England in the early part of his life.

 

 

 

 

In September 2019 the Glenbuck Heritage Village was opened with the memorial to Bill Shankly, initiated and funded by Liverpool supporters in 1997, relocated to the spot where the Shankly family home once stood. A number of further memorials have been moved from the nearby village of Muirkirk, along with a new memorial to the community's football team together with a number of information boards to give visitors an insight into the history and cultural significance of the place.