Backtrack

"You should have said Millionaires' Row" says Colin Grainger. "That's what everyone calls it around here."

Like (say) Dickie Bird's charisma, it is a Yorkshire exaggeration. Elmfield Drive, Skelmerthorpe, is a road of spacious bungalows, nonetheless, comfortable like their owners and with much storage space amid the rafters.

From his sumptuous glory hole up aloft, Colin dusts down box upon box of head to toe souvenirs - caps, studs, cuttings, photographs, sheet music, even the shiny mohair suit in which he earned far more than ever he did in the lily white football shirt of England.

Among it all is the Wembley programme from England's match against Scotland in 1957, the left winger's seventh and last international. "Has great potentialities as a modern popular singer, and has made a record" noted his potted biography.

It was perfectly pitched. Colin Grainger, now 67 and still remarkably fit, is the Sunderland winger who (as recent columns have suggested) sang at the London Palladium, the man who not only became a hero at Roker Park but won over Wearside's workmen's clubs, a far more fearsome proposal.

He played football alongside Stanley Matthews, Billy Wright and Duncan Edwards, sang on the same bill as Bassey, Beatles and (for that matter) Old Mother Riley, has been blissfully married for 44 years.

"I've had a pretty good life" he concedes. "Put it this way, I don't think it owes me anything."

Who wants to be a millionaire, as one or two other crooners may have enquired.

He is exceptionally friendly, up and down the loft ladder not to be helpful, he insists, but to nourish his own nostalgia.

"Much more of this" he says, "and I'll be crying on your shoulder."

On one photograph he's with the Kaye Sisters, on another with the England team singing the national anthem - "just look how proud we were" - on a third with his friend Cecil Gee, the top people's tailor. Folk said he was the best dressed singer around, him and the youthful Max Bygraves.

Yet at 15 the former choirboy faced the limited options of most school leavers in the West Riding village of Havercroft - play football if you were any good, headlong down the pit if you weren't.

Colin joined the Wrexham ground staff for five guineas a week, £2 immediately deducted for board and lodging, most of the remainder deposited in the Post Office Savings Bank.

"My father always taught me to save a bit and spend a bit. It's been good advice" he says.

Sheffield United paid £3,000 for him while he was on national service in the RAF. "It were three buses and two hours each way from home to Bramall Lane but it never occurred to me that it were a trouble.

"I were doing something I loved and getting paid £12 a week for it, as well. Nowadays football's just cut throat, the money's crazy."

In 90 games the fair haired flier hit 30 goals from the left wing, scored two more on his England debut, half the village down on the train, against the ascendant Brazilians.

"One of the fastest men in football" the programme had noted. Though his popular song potentialities hadn't been discovered, fame of a different sort was soon to be calling the golden shot.

In the 17 days which followed he made further England appearances in Sweden, Finland and in a still remembered 3-1 win in the Olympic Stadium, Berlin.

It was at the post-match dinner in Helsinki that Nat Lofthouse propositioned the pianist and announced that they'd a singer in their midst. Thereafter young Grainger called the tune, an even keel ("I still liked doing Al Jolson") amid the turbulence of rock and roll.

Even as a 15-year-old he'd played the village club when the turn failed to appear - smuggled in the back door lest the doorman be in Cerberus mode.

Mainly it was Jolson and Mario Lanza, his heroes. If asked, he'll still do them - bit of Tom Jones, reprise of Elvis, one or two Engellbert Humperdinks.

"I've still the full vocal range, what you call a crooner" says Colin. "Better than ever" says Doreen, Mrs Grainger.

He moved to Wearside in February 1957 for £23,000, £2,000 short of Jack Sewell's British transfer record, Wolves eliminated from the bidding because they proposed to pay half then and half later.

Not for nothing were Sunderland known as the Bank of England club, not for nothing fretted over. That season they finished third bottom, the following year were relegated for the first time.

Billy Bingham was there, Ray Daniel, Charlie Fleming, Billy Elliott, little Ernie Taylor and future England manager Don Revie, his £20 maximum wage frequently supplemented in the Roker poker school.

Colin only played twice, forgot his old dad's advice, lost a week's wages each time. When he wrote to the dying Revie, the dictated reply noted that he'd been a far better football player than ever he was at poker.

"I came home the second time, looked at my wife and kiddie and said 'You stupid bloody so-and-so'. I never really gambled after that."

With what he saved he paid his first car, a Riley Pathfinder for £400, ideal for the singing engagements which had begun flooding in.

Though restricted to what might be termed a summer season, he could earn more than twice as much in a night as Sunderland were able to pay him in a week.

He'd joined the Beatles at the Southern Social Club in Manchester, Del Shannon in Wigan, Jimmy Tarbuck at Batley Variety Club - whatever happened to it? - Max Miller at the Metropolitan Hotel in London.

He appeared live on television with the Eric Robinson band, Jack Hylton, Hughie Green.

"I'd be far more nervous on stage. In football you were part of a team, as a singer one mistake and you'd had it."

The Palladium show was a charity event with Danny Kaye, Vera Lynn, John Hanson and Jerry Lewis.

"All those international stars" he says, "and Colin Grainger from Havercroft."

His most frequent co-star, however, was legendary North-East comic Bobby Thompson, principally at Empire theatres upon which (in those days) the sun hardly ever set.

They broke box office records at the Empire in Sunderland, even at the Empire in Middlesbrough, collided head on with a language barrier at the Empire in Glasgow.

"It was a well known graveyard but hell's fire, poor Bobby never raised a titter, paid up after one night. I don't suppose they understood a word he said, or probably vice-versa."

"The week before they'd had Burl Ives, who had so many coins thrown at him they had to pull the safety curtain down. They got a Scotsman instead, brought the house down."

Much the same thing happened at the Farringdon Club in Sunderland, though with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, then barely puppy walking. "I was fine, of course, what with being Sunderland's outside left, but they'd paid up the Dog-Doo Band after the first spot and gave me double to come on again.

"They always said if you could do well in Sunderland you could do well anywhere, but I suppose I had a flying start."

That his England wings had been clipped followed a broken ankle in the international against Wales in November 1956 - "chasing a through ball from Johnny Haynes when it just went over, I can still feel it" - standing on the train back from Kings Cross to Wakefield and coming back too soon.

"After that I always had to have it strapped up and somehow it never felt free. I really felt I'd been flying and no one could catch me, could have been another Cliff Bastin, but I had a poor game against Scotland and that was it."

He left Sunderland "on principle" - "Allan Brown was a funny man, you know" - after three and a half years, had a season at Leeds and spells with Port Vale and Doncaster Rovers before retiring at 33.

"Basically it was old age" he says, "and, of course, I still had the singing."

He played in the Yorkshire League until he was 47, tasted success with a wine company, now scouts for Sheffield United and hopes he might have seen something in his seven-year-old grandson.

His son, daughter and five grandchildren all live within five minutes walk in Skelmerthorpe, south of Huddersfield.

We sat chatting for three hours, up and down the loft ladder, several laps of memory lane. Next Sunday he expects to be singing again at a family christening. Yes, Sir That's My Baby?

"Dunno" says the singing winger, "but I just might give them My Way."

...the only Englishman apart from former Stanley United goalkeeper Allan Ball to have represented the Scottish League (Backtrack, August 8) was meant to have been Joe Baker.

But what about Jackie Hather, asks Hails of Hartlepool, and at once returns us to the extreme left.

Jack, known to Aberdonians as the Human Flying Machine and to his father-in-law as the Durham Heelander, was born in Annfield Plain, hewed coal at Horden and was rejected by Newcastle United.

Aberdeen signed him when he was 21, and still never been further than Blackpool.

He stayed for 12 left wing seasons from 1947 but did he, as Ron Hails supposes, play for the Scottish League? Back in Peterlee, we'd interviewed him in 1993 without mention of it. Jack, sadly, has since died.

Whilst we try to work it out, readers may care to identify the Sunderland outside left (and former Scottish League representative) who steered Halifax back to the Football League.

On the flanks again on Tuesday