Last updated 10:57, Friday, 26 September 2008

The interview with Andrew Jenkins lasted two hours and 40 minutes. The transcript ran to 14 pages and 10,572 words. Extra space in the sports section has been negotiated and the painstaking business of compressing Jenkins’ 49 years as a Carlisle United director has begun.

Kevin Keegan

It’s not a tale you can craft lightly, since no director among the Football League’s 72 clubs has offered such a period of service. 1959! The year transistor radios went on sale. The year the first stretch of the M1 opened. The year velcro was invented. The year Robert Jenkins, a well-regarded local butcher, was invited to join the Carlisle board and said no thanks, but I’ve got a son who might be interested.

So you stack up the stories and press on. Jenkins’ stint has absorbed more than 2,000 matches, 29 managers, hundreds of players, United’s dance to the top-flight and then down to non-league; a little boom and plenty of bust. You’re wondering how the keyboard will cope with it all. Then the phone goes.

“Hello, it’s Andrew. I’m just checking whether you got the bit about Keegan”

Yes, I got the bit about Kee… the what?

A chuckle. “Did I not tell you about how we nearly signed Kevin Keegan? No? Well, in ’71 we offered money for him when he was at Scunthorpe, and we thought we had him. Our scout said he used to get barracked for jumping out of tackles, but he was still a decent player and worth going for.

“We offered £20,000, but Scunthorpe wanted £25,000. So we upped our bid to £25,000, which was as high as we could go, and we thought that would be that. There was some talking between the two clubs, then Scunthorpe eventually decided they wanted £30,000. Then Liverpool nipped in and got him for £35,000.

“Just imagine, Keegan in a Carlisle shirt. And it nearly happened. Anyway, if you haven’t started your piece I thought that might be worth a mention, that was all.”

You note this down, clear the screen, and begin again. But what other stories are hiding under rocks, waiting to be turned up by Carlisle’s 72-year-old chairman? How long will it take to find them all? How many more killer anecdotes has he simply forgotten to pass on? All you can do is let his story unravel, and hope for the best.

Tomorrow, Carlisle United play Walsall at the Banks’s Stadium, and Jenkins won’t be there. Nothing untoward, you realise, but for a man who has been velcroed to his football club for five decades, it’s a fact worth reporting.

“My wife Diane is 60 this year,” he explains. “I’ve promised to take her away for the weekend and it’s the least I can do. She is wonderful. If we are ever invited out, she’ll look at the fixture list first and say, ‘No, we can’t, Andrew will be away’. She’s never put me under any pressure at all. So I’ve got to look after her.

“At times, over the years, I’ve said to her, ‘I’m fed up, I’m thinking about packing it in.’ She’s always said, ‘You won’t.’ And she’s right. I would miss it terribly. I can’t imagine not being part of it.”

He struggles to see the end, but the beginning comes to mind in sharp detail. The first revelation, which arrives during our conversation in the boardroom he has occupied all these years, is that Jenkins owes his lasting links with Carlisle United to a chicken plucker.

“My father used to go round the farms to collect poultry, then take them to our depot in Burgh Road and pluck them for the shop,” he recalls. “Myself and a lad called Peter Myers were there one Saturday morning – we were eight years old – and there was this guy called Charlie Wright, who was an excellent plucker.

“He said, ‘Where are you lads going this afternoon?’ We weren’t going anywhere, so he suggested we go to the football. I hadn’t really heard of the team. He said, ‘Go to the top of Warwick Road, and follow the crowd’. Carlisle were playing Barrow, Ivor Broadis was playing, and they won 2-1.

“That was it. From then on I would walk down with a gang of lads to every match, kicking a tennis ball down the back lanes on the way to the ground. Later on I got caught biking up from boarding school in Wigton to watch a reserve game. I wasn’t allowed my bike back after that.”

After two years in the army’s catering corps, he rejoined his father’s business – Pioneer – in the catering section, which included the refreshment vans at Brunton Park. At 23, a director’s resignation created a vacancy on the board which was offered to his father, declined, but then claimed by an apprehensive Jenkins in November 1959 .

“For a young lad like me to come onto the board with people in their 50s, it was rather strange to say the least,” he says. “But George Sheffield, the chairman, I looked up to like nobody else.

“He was a bit abrupt, but I admired him. He would say to me, 'Always be fair, but be firm'. He never saw the glamour side of it. He always believed the game was about players, not directors or even managers. I still think it should be that way. Too many people today do it for an ego trip.

“When I speak about him now, I still refer to him as Mr Sheffield. ‘You’ve known me for 15 years, why don’t you call me George?,” he once said. “Righto, Mr Sheffield,” I said.

“The team wasn’t exceptional, to begin with. Every year you would have one lot of players out and another lot in, to see if they would do any better. The maximum wage at the time was 20 quid a week. We used to pay 14 during the season and 12 in the close-season. It was free transfers all the way, until we got the commercial side of things going and we could finally get players in for £1,000 or so.”

Managers? He dealt with them all, from Bob Stokoe, the giant of the north-east, to Alan Ashman, the striker-turned-poultry farmer who, in his second spell in charge, delivered Carlisle into the First Division in 1974. Players? Many shone, but none with the dazzle of the brilliant Scot, Hugh McIlmoyle. “He was my favourite,” says Jenkins. “I remember a cup tie at Gateshead when we were 2-0 down at half-time. Then McIlmoyle beat them on his own in the second half. That was typical Hughie.”

The golden memories: “In the early 1970s, when we brought Alan Ashman back from Olympiakos, it was the start of the really heady times.

“Alan was very good at blending the team, Dick Young was good at coaching them, it was old-fashioned push-and-run football, and the players had such a good spirit. Everyone was together, like they are now.

“Somehow, we got into Division One, which Bill Shankly said was a miracle and I suppose he was right. When he was manager here, incidentally, my dad used to help him out with meat for the players, when it was on the ration. I didn’t really know him myself, but I do remember a game at Tranmere one day when he was manager of Liverpool, and he turned around from the seat in front and said, ‘That Chris Balderstone could put the ball in yer pocket’. And he could.

“It was a daunting time going into the First Division. It was a fairer system then, because everyone got share-outs the same, and a lot of the big clubs were run by families.

“Football was run for the benefit of football. But there was no £50m to help you stay there. We had to do it on our own.

“Another five points that season and we’d have survived. There were so many games we could have drawn instead of losing, for example. But there were still plenty of memorable times.

Winning those first three games to go top of the league were unbelievable. Later on at Everton, we were losing 2-0 and our players were late coming out for the second half.

“This Liverpudlian wag said, ‘Looks like Carlisle have gone home’. Then we came out and beat them 3-2.”

Tales of the boardroom also flow liberally. “At Ipswich, myself and David Dent were invited for lunch with their directors, the Cobbolds.

“We had whisky before the meal and if I had one I had six.”

Then they brought us stuffed mushrooms and white wine. Then it was sausage and mash, with red wine.

“When the game started, we were 2-0 down quite quickly, and me and David were the only people from Carlisle who were still laughing.”

After the top-flight dream was popped, in the wake of an earlier foray in the Anglo-Italian cup which included a startling 3-2 victory at AS Roma, the club slipped into a slow decline. Jenkins took over as chairman in the early 1980s and grimaces at the memory of the hardest times.

“Football was on its knees,” he says. “There was no share of the gates all of a sudden, there were no grants to improve the ground. We used to do the concreting and maintenance work ourselves, most nights and weekends.

“We were budgeting on gates of 2,000. Paying the wages was more important than improving the team. There were a few occasions when I had to pay them myself.

“I used to wake up and think about the club all the time. But one thing I will say with pride is that we never went to the PFA for a penny. We never went cap in hand.

“Over the years I’ve probably painted every wall in this building.” A pause. “I painted the toilets as well.” A task, you ponder, that may or may not be assigned to football’s modern-day chiefs, like the Arab billionaires of Manchester City. “In those days, it saved money,” he replies, straight-faced. “We had to get on with it.”

During these unstable times, Jenkins represented United at Football League meetings where he would forge lasting contacts with the good men of the game, and witness some of the other breed at work. “Robert Maxwell would come to the meetings late, remove his jacket, spout off, get himself on a committee, and then go,” he recalls.

By the late ‘80s, the game was starting to creep from the doldrums. Carlisle weren’t. “When Clive Middlemass was manager, we started a youth system, which produced the likes of Matt Jansen and the others,” says Jenkins. “But that was always going to take time.

“We were struggling, just about surviving, but we weren’t putting anything on the pitch to get the crowds in, and the club was half a million quid under.

“We were short of cash. One or two directors said they would lend the club some money, but in the end we decided to let it be known we were interested in selling. And then Knighton came along.”

The ensuing soap opera, as told by Jenkins, demands space of its own.

Likewise United’s revival under John Courtenay and Fred Story, and the current regime which sees Jenkins, at 72, as one of the club’s four new owners. The questions keep coming, the tales keep tumbling.

After a discussion on the changing game (“it’s more skilful now, but the people were more down-to-earth in the old days”), the interview concludes with a conversation about his childhood.

“We had a great home life, me and my older sister,” he says.

“My mother was a really nice, homely lady, and my dad was more outgoing than me.

“He ended up Chief Constable for the specials and got the British Empire Medal. Of course I looked up to him.

“One time, not long before he died, he came down to the ground and they wouldn’t let him in, because he didn’t have a car park pass.

“They eventually let him in, and the first thing he said to me was, ‘Son, what on earth have I got you mixed up in here?’”