Football News: Liverpool Icons – Number 1: Billy Liddell

Liverpool Icons – Number 1: Billy Liddell

It seems the most sensible place to start off a new series on the icons from Liverpool’s history with Billy Liddell, a player so iconic that the club was referred to as Liddellpool during his playing days.

When he runs down the wing,
You can hear the Kop sing,
Billy Liddell!
When he runs through to score,
You can hear the Kop roar,
Billy Liddell!
La la la la la la
La la la la la la
Bil-ly Lid-dell.” – Kop chant for Liddell.

On the 10th January 1922, in Townhill, Fife, Scotland, William Beveridge Liddell was born to coal miner father James and mother Montgomery, the first of 6 children. Like so many in those days, his family struggled with poverty and his diet mainly consisted of kail, bread and salt porridge. “I was the eldest of three boys, though afterwards the family increased by two more brothers and a sister. It was a struggle making ends meet, and many were the sacrifices my parents made for their children. In 1936 my father’s wage, as a mine worker, was £2 5s a week,” Billy wrote in his autobiography. “We lived in the mining village of Townhill near Dunfermline. Life was pretty tough, and the family’s main diet was porridge (with salt, of course), Scotch broth (kait we called it) and bread. Plenty of bread.” Like most children, he developed an early interest in football and his parents managed to scrape together the money to buy him football boots as a Christmas present when he was 7. At the age of 8 he became part of the school team, though the average age of the other children was 10.

“I used to run messages for my grandmother who lived in the village. I always had a ball with me, a tennis ball or a sponge ball,” reminisced Billy in his autobiography. “And when she asked me to go to the grocers I always ran there on the left hand side of the road, pushing the ball against the wall and stopping it before it went into the road. I did that all the way to the grocers which was a quarter or half a mile away from my grandmothers. Then on the way back I would run on the same pavement so that I had to use my other foot to stop the ball going into the road.”

When he moved up to Dumfermline High School, he was a reluctant rugby player under the guidance of retired Welsh international Richie Boon, but he continued to play football for local teams and Scotland Schoolboys. Between 1936 and 1937 he played for Kingseat Juveniles, who paid him half a crown a game. At the age of 16 in 1937, Liddell signed for Lochgelly…