Mike Amos: Remembering Paul Tully and Bob Cass

NOT to Blaydon Races, nor even to Local Hero – though goodness knows Mark Knopfler’s masterwork would greatly have been appropriate – Paul Tully’s funeral at Newcastle crematorium began and ended with songs by Katherine Jenkins.

The reception was at St James’ Park, where for 13 years Paul had been an inspired, enthusiastic and damn-near omniscient publications editor. “A walking encyclopaedia,” said former United chief executive Russell Cushing.

They fed us pies, probably Greggs, thus disproving the belief that Paul had eaten all of them. He’d seen off a canny few, mind.

A lifelong Mag, he’d started in newspapers on the Blaydon Courier, remembered by former colleague Yvonne Ridley as a mean three-card brag man – “our pharisaic old boss didn’t approve, we suspected he was a Mackem” – and for the wintry night in 1978 when together they tried to blag a way into St James’s for the epic FA Cup tie between Blyth Spartans and Wrexham.

Paul made it over the top of the turnstile, Yvonne, high heeled, fell at the first hurdle. He never lost his soft spot for Spartans.

All three of us were Northern Echo colleagues in the 1980s before the man some called Jethro – O-level history students may recall Jethro Tull – landed a job at Newcastle United, a round peg in a made-to-measure hole.

He’d grown up in Denton Burn with Paul Joannou, now the club’s historian and prolific chronicler, who’d masterminded for the funeral a magnificent “Official souvenir programme” in tribute to his friend.

In it Kevin Keegan talked of one of the really great guys, Alan Shearer of a gentle giant with incredible knowledge and passion, Peter Beardsley of one of the best. “If ever someone could be described as a football man, it was Paul,” Beardsley added.

Another page listed some of Paul’s favourite things, from Ken Dodd to Katherine Jenkins, from Wild West to Wilds of Wannee – the moors of mid-Northumberland – and from the Pink, of course, to the pies.

He was 61, had spent many years watching Newcastle with his mum, took her to Wimbledon – another of Paul’s passions – and was a conscientiously topped-up member of football’s 92 Club.

Made redundant at Newcastle in 2009, he became ever more familiar around the Northern League and at Blyth Spartans. Better class of tea hut.

Peter Beardsley and Bobby Moncur were among the mourners; so was Rob Mason, for many years Paul’s opposite number at Sunderland. “You’d have been surprised by how many Sunderland fans knew him and every one of them loved him to bits,” said Rob.

“He was one of those blokes who, while black and white to the core, totally transcended rivalries. Proper supporters know a proper supporter when they see one.”

CANON Frank Dexter, who led the funeral service, repeatedly emphasised Paul’s “professional integrity” and commitment to accuracy – particularly, said Canon Dexter, at a time of fake news and half-truths.

The example may not totally have been followed by the less experienced writers on Darlington Drinker, the Campaign for Real Ale magazine, who in the issue before this one reported that, somewhere in Europe, they were brewing beer from urine collected at a pop concert – “the idea being to remove impurities by reverse osmosis.”

Apologetically, the new issue admits it wasn’t even half true. “Total pish,” it concedes.

NEW BOOK: Bob Cass' book, called By The Way, is a compelling account of how football journalism has changed

BOB Cass was every bit as familiar at St James’ Park – and at many other football grounds – as a sports writer for The Sun and, after the Super Soaraway demanded he dig more dirt on players’ lives, for the Mail on Sunday.

Delivered by Granny Harburn in the front room of the family home on Albert Hill, Darlington – “this was Barton Street, not Great Ormond Street,” he said – he died a year ago, aged 78.

He’d almost finished an account of his life in football – Cass and tell, it could be said – now completed by his son Simon and available from Waterstone’s and as an e-book.

It’s called By the Way. “Bob would always say ‘By the way I’m going to do so-and-so by the way,” explains his brother Billy, still in Darlington.

Chiefly it’s a compelling account – though perhaps not news to those still in the inky trade – of how wholly football journalism has changed.

Bob wasn’t just a journalist he was a middle man, a fixer, an ambassador and a trusted confidant of many of the game’s top men in an age when no expenses were spared.

Those were the days when reporters might still travel on the team bus, be welcomed in the dressing room – Bob ended, fully clothed, in the bath after Sunderland’s FA Cup win in 1973 – or have lunch with the rival managers the day before a big game.

The pack also hadn’t social media mouths to feed. Arnold Howe, the Daily Express’s man in the North-East in the 1960s, still found time to run The Grange pub at Belmont, Durham – close to where Bob had long lived.

These days the media are marshalled, corralled, players and managers kept at a distance from reality by a protective posse of public relations people a-feared of cross-contamination.

Sunderland legend Niall Quinn wrote of those former times in his newspaper column after Bob died. “It was a very long time ago,” he said, “a time before evolution had allowed footballers to grow big earphones out of the sides of their heads and completely to ignore the world around them.”

Such the respect in which Bob was held that Sir Alex Ferguson, no great media man, happily wrote the book’s forward. – talk of the “old bugger” wholly affectionate.

“Maybe it’s a generation thing, or maybe journalism has just deteriorated, but I find it difficult to trust sports journalists these days,” writes Fergie.

Sir John Hall similarly described Bob. “It’s that bugger Cass who got me started at St James’ Park in the first place,” he once observed. The respect was mutual, but may not have extended to the black and white knight’s successors.

“The impression is inescapable that Mike Ashley goes walkies with a bunch of nodding dogs fit only for the back of a car,” Bob writes.

His days in the Sun long gone, he maintained a reputation as one of journalism’s gentlemen. The chapter headed Big Boobs is (of course) about some of his mistakes.

Lovely guy, brilliant raconteur, former chairman of the Football Writers’ Association, he’d undergone a quadruple heart bypass, survived botched stomach surgery and may have been the only man in history to break an ankle while playing dominoes, the chair collapsing beneath him.

He lived to tell many a tale, and to make many friends. The book’s a real eye-opener, by the way.

BOB Cass was a gauche 16-year-old with three O-levels when first he tried to join the press gang, the Northern Echo and Northern Despatch in Darlington. They told him to return to St Mary’s RC Grammar School and to come back when he had O-level maths. A decade or so later, an 18-year-old from Shildon, eternally unable to understand algebra, knocked no less timorously on the Despatch’s door. Had journalism still demanded O-level maths in 1965, how different the past 50-odd years might have been.