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Bankfield House was a community centre in Garston, Merseyside. A job advert placed in the Guardian in 1974 defines their activities pretty well: “The centre serves the dockside community of Garston, a neighbourhood with the characteristic problems of an area of social deprivation,” it read. “Programmes are provided for teenagers, senior citizens, mentally handicapped, a preschool play group, and there is extensive involvement in local community development.”
Garston still has not shrugged off that social deprivation. Linked for statistical purposes with neighbouring Speke, it remains one of the most downtrodden areas of Liverpool. Though there has been significant investment in recent years, latest figures show that 30% of Speke Garston residents of working age are unemployed, compared with a national average of 12.4%. Male life expectancy is 71.5, more than six years below the national average. Just 30.7% of students get between A* and C in five or more GCSEs, including maths and English, compared with the national average of 53.4%. Speke Garston comes in worse than the Liverpool average in every deprivation indicator concerning health, education and unemployment. It is, in short, the kind of place that could do with a decent community centre, and in Bankfield House it had one (until its landlords, the Church of England, closed it down in 2007).
“Pioneering probably sums up the whole history of it,” says Brian Taylor, who was its director until its closure. “We made every effort to make things different. In 1961 – and this doesn’t sound all that unique, but in those days there was nothing for children to do during the long summer holidays – we launched the first programmes in Liverpool for children during the school holidays. There’s so many now, but that was the very first one.”
As a charity, Bankfield House had to hold occasional fundraising events to pay for its activities and in 1967 Taylor organised a celebrity football match, to be held at Holly Park – then the ground of South Liverpool FC and now the site of South Parkway railway station. He quickly secured the services of several recently retired players who lived in, or had at least once played in, the city. Dave Hickson and Billy Bingham were among those who signed up; the Manchester City assistant manager, Malcolm Allison, agreed to play; and the former Liverpool captain Billy Liddell undertook to lead one of the teams. But Taylor felt that if the match was to draw a really big crowd, he needed a really big name. So he asked Pelé.
“Pelé was, of course, one of the greatest players in the world and it was a bit of a cheek to even think about it,” says Taylor. “But I wrote to the president of his club and a week or so later I received a reply. It said, ‘Dear Mr Taylor, thank you for the high honour of inviting our Edson Arantes do Nascimento for your charity match. Unfortunately, we need him for our league programme.’”
At 26 Pelé was very much in his prime, and playing for a club – Santos, of São Paulo, a state with plenty of its own social deprivation issues to worry about – that was several days’ journey time from Liverpool. It was a big ask. Taylor also telegrammed Real Madrid, to ask if Ferenc Puskas might be available. The Hungarian was still playing with some success at 40, having been among the competition’s top scorers as Madrid won the 1966 European Cup, and had no conceivable reason to put himself out to help a community centre in Garston. A few days later Taylor received his response, in the shape of a telegram which read: “All I wait is you send me plane ticket.” Ferenc Puskas, one of the greatest footballers in the history of the game, star and captain of perhaps the finest ever international side, three-times European Cup winner and five times a finalist, was coming to South Liverpool FC.
Taylor was at Heathrow to meet him off his flight, and the pair had a slightly awkward lunch while an Iberian Airways stewardess translated. Then they boarded a flight to Liverpool, where Puskas was greeted by Liddell, the deputy lord mayor and the chairman of Liverpool’s airport committee, who festooned him with ribbons, plied him with champagne and proclaimed him the airport’s 500,000th customer. “The man who used to be known as the Galloping Major looked a little greyer than in the days when he was winning 84 international caps and helping Real Madrid monopolise the club championship of Europe,” reported the Liverpool Echo, “but he also looked remarkably fit. ‘I have no special plans for training,’ he said. ‘I seem to keep fit quite easily. I have no intention of retiring yet.’”
During the couple of days he was in town Puskas made a handful of public appearances. Dunlop provided him with a chauffeur-driven car, in return for him visiting their factory in Speke (which closed down in 1979). “He was very obliging,” recalls Taylor. “The night before the game we entertained him for dinner at the Adelphi Hotel. We had a young person from the university join us to act as an interpreter. Puskas said he wished he’d brought some souvenirs from Real Madrid, for the community centre. The following day, when he got out of his car outside the ground, he handed me a parcel, and this parcel was full of badges and other souvenirs of the club. I couldn’t believe that it had been possible. But after we’d left him, which must have been nearly midnight, he’d phoned the club. Somebody had made this parcel up, put it on a plane to London, and there they transferred it to a plane to Liverpool, and a car was summoned to take it as fast as possible to the Adelphi. So he arrived with it in his hands and handed it over.”
The interest generated by Puskas’s presence resulted in a bumper crowd – 10,000 people were inside the ground, with as many again said to have been locked outside. The Echo reported that Puskas was forced to take “evasive action” to dodge the hordes of autograph-hunters following him around. Tickets cost 3/6 – taking inflation into account, the equivalent of about £2.40 in today’s money – and in the end the match raised £1,100 (about £15,000).
The names of Puskas and Liddell were the only ones to feature in the pre-match adverts, and when the story is retold these days – there was an exhibition about it in Garston five years ago – the Hungarian is the one who dominates. So it has been all but forgotten that one of Britain’s finest ever footballers also played that day – Puskas was marked for most of the game by the brilliant Welshman John Charles, who had retired the previous year. “When Puskas walked in they recognised each other immediately and embraced affectionately,” Taylor tells me. “It was nice to see these reunions. These were two of the all-time greats.”
On 8 May 1967, an otherwise miserable day for Merseyside (Gerry and the Pacemakers split up), the Liddell XI beat the Puskas XI 5-3, the guest of honour scoring all of his side’s goals including one, reported the Echo, “from his famous banana shot”. “The Galloping Major, now reduced to a trotting pace, was the target for autograph hunters before and after the match, until he took evasive action,” they wrote, “but on the field his duel with Charles was a feature until Big John decided to move upfield in order to have his own name on the score sheet. Bingham entertained the capacity crowd to some artistic football as well as putting on a subtle comedy act with Allison.”
Puskas’s appearance, apart from being a simple act of great kindness towards an organisation about which he could have known absolutely nothing before he accepted his invitation, was a fillip for Bankfield House. But it left Taylor with a difficult job in attempting to better it when a second match was arranged the following year. This time, he invited Alfredo Di Stéfano.
“He agreed to come, but then there was a second telegram near the match day in which he said he couldn’t,” says Taylor. “I was a bit disturbed about this because I’d advertised the match all over Liverpool and although we had two teams of stars, none of them matched Di Stefano’s reputation. So as soon as I got the message – I think I only had 48 hours left before the game – I got on a plane to London, took a second plane to Madrid and got a taxi out to his house. The trouble was, I hadn’t gambled on me not being able to speak Spanish and him not being able to speak English. He tried to explain to me, but to be honest I’ve no idea why to this day. He then took me by car to the Real Madrid stadium and asked the staff there to find out if one of the players could replace him. The only thing they came up with was a reserve-team player, and it was a lot of money to lay out, so I politely declined the offer and made my way back to the airport alone.” Suffice to say that 10,000 people weren’t locked out the ground for that one.
Taylor met Puskas one more time, when he was invited to the launch of the excellent but sadly now out of print book Puskas on Puskas in 1998. He left clutching three copies of the book, and one short, grammatically suspect but very fondly remembered telegram, now signed.
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