Episode 3 : The Man Who Changed Everything - Resurrection (1959–1966)

In December 1959, Liverpool FC were tenth in the Second Division. The directors, having finally accepted that something fundamental needed to change, advertised the manager's job. A Scotsman named Bill Shankly heard about it and took the train south from Huddersfield, where he had been quietly reinventing a struggling club. He would never quite leave Liverpool again.

Episode Three covers Shankly's first great era — the rebuilding from the Second Division, the signing of Ian St. John and Ron Yeats, the invention of the Boot Room, the all-red strip, and back-to-back titles in 1964 and 1966, with the first FA Cup in between. This is the story of what one man's absolute certainty can do to an institution that has forgotten how to believe in itself.

Player of the Era: Ian St. John — the Motherwell striker signed for £37,500 in 1961, who became the soul of Shankly's first great team and proved that resurrection was possible.

Research Sources

Dave Bowler, Shanks: The Authorised Biography of Bill Shankly (Orion, 1996) — the definitive account of Shankly's life and management; essential for the arrival at Liverpool, the early signings, and the character of the man

Ian St. John, The Saint: My Autobiography (Hodder & Stoughton, 2005) — St. John's own account of his time at Liverpool; vivid, funny, and specific about the culture Shankly created

John Williams, Red Men: Liverpool Football Club — The Biography — for the social and cultural context of the 1960s Anfield and the Kop's developing identity

Brian Pead, Liverpool: A Complete Record — season results, scorelines, and statistics throughout this period

Phil Thompson and others, various interviews and memoirs — for the atmosphere inside Anfield during the Shankly years; the Boot Room culture; the effect of Shankly on individual players

Transcript

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December 1959, Anfield Road, Liverpool. A man gets out of a car and stands for a moment in front of the ground. He has driven up from Huddersfield, where he has spent the last three years rebuilding a club that was heading nowhere, because that is what he does. He takes clubs that are heading nowhere and turns them around through a combination of absolute certainty, ferocious hard work, and a quality that is almost impossible to name, but that everyone who encountered him seemed to register within minutes. The sense that this man simply did not entertain the possibility of failure. His name was William Shankly, he was 46 years old, and Liverpool Football Club, 10th in the 2nd Division, without a 1st division title in 12 years, with a dressing room that needed clearing out, and a ground that needed modernizing, and a fan base that had been patient long past the point where patience was reasonable, were about to become something they had not been since the 1920S. Genuinely great. Welcome back to Reds Through the Ages. This is episode 3, The Man Who Changed Everything. Today we cover the seven years from Shankly's arrival in December 1959 to the end of the 1965-66 season, the years that brought Liverpool back from the second division to back-to-back first division titles, their first FA Cup, and the Threshold of Europe. This is the story of one man's belief colliding with an institution that has spent 30 years forgetting how to believe in itself. It is one of English football's great stories of resurrection. This is episode 3, The Man Who Changed Everything. The Britain that Bill Shanckley arrived in at the end of 1959 was a Britain in the early stages of transformation. The austerity of the post-war decade was lifting. Full employment, the National Health Service, the expansion of working class leisure. The 1950s had, despite everything, been good for ordinary people in ways that the 1930s had not been. By 1959, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had already told the country they had never had it so good. And while that claim had its complications, it contained a measurable truth. People had more money, they had more time, and they were spending both of them at football grounds across the country, where attendances remained enormous and the game's place at the centre of working-class culture was unchallenged. English football in 1959 was also at a crossroads. The shock of the 1953 Wembley defeat to Hungary, the first time England had lost at home to a continental side, a 6-3 humiliation that exposed the tactical complacency at the heart of the English game, had not yet fully worked itself through the Football League's thinking. The game was changing. More tactical sophistication, more attention to fitness and preparation, a growing awareness that the continental approach to football was producing players and teams that England would need to take seriously. The managers who would define the 196-0S, Shanckley at Liverpool, Don Revey at Leeds, Matt Busby at Manchester United, Harry Catterick at Everton, were all men who understood this. They were builders of systems, not just selectors of talent. Liverpool themselves, as Shankly walked through the door in December 1959, were a club that had been left behind by all of this. They were in the second division. Their training methods were outdated. Their scouting was haphazard. Their ground was functional but loveless. The one asset they had, beyond the support of a fiercely loyal fan base, was a group of coaches already in place: Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan, Reuben Bennett, who were quietly competent, and who Shankly, with characteristic shrewdness, immediately recognized as the foundation on which everything else could be built. The boot room was not Shankly's invention, but it was Shankly who understood what it could become. Shankly's first act at Liverpool was to look at what he had and decide, with characteristic bluntness, that most of it was not good enough. He told the board he needed to clear out 24 of the existing playing staff. He was not unkind about it. He was notably compassionate in the way he handled individual players, but he was absolutely clear. The club needed to be rebuilt, and rebuilding meant starting with the right people. What he did keep was the coaching staff. Bob Paisley had been at Anfield since 1939, initially as a player and then as a trainer. Joe Fagan was a quiet, steady presence who knew the game deeply and communicated it without fuss. Reuben Bennett, a Scotsman like Shankly, provided the physical conditioning work. These three men, working with Shankly in a small room off the main corridor at Anfield, a room that contained their kit, their boots, their training plans, and eventually an extraordinary accumulated wisdom about how to run a football club, became the nucleus of what would be known and celebrated as the boot room. It was a culture, not a place. The culture of collaborative expertise, of shared knowledge, of the belief that football was a collective endeavor at every level of the organization. That culture would outlast Shankly by 30 years. But in December 1959, it was just four men in a small room trying to work out how to get a second division club promoted. The first season under Shankly, 1959-60, was a consolidation. Liverpool finished third in the second division, good enough to see that the tools were in place, but not yet enough to go up. Shankly used the time to identify what he needed. He needed pace in attack and authority at the back. He needed players who believed what he believed, that Liverpool Football Club were not a second division club, had never been a second division club, and were going to prove it. In the summer of 1961, Shanckley made the two signings that would define his first great team. They cost a combined pound 74,500. They were worth to Liverpool Football Club everything. Ian St. John arrived first from Motherwell for pound 37,500, a significant fee for the time and one that required some persuasion of the Liverpool board. The story of how Shanckley secured the money is instructive. He told Eric Sawyer, the Littlewoods Pools representative on the board who controlled the purse strings that St. John was not just a good centre-forward, but the only centre-forward in the game. It was not entirely true, but it was the kind of absolute statement that Shankly made naturally, and it had the effect that such statements had when he made them. It made the argument feel unanswerable. St. John was signed. Ron Yates arrived from Dundee United a few weeks later. Also for £37,500. Yates was a centre-half of enormous physical presence, six feet two inches, broadly built, commanding in the air and imposing on the ground. Shankly, when he introduced Yates to the press, did something that became one of the defining images of his management style. He invited the assembled journalist to walk around his new signing. Take a walk around him, gentlemen, he said. He's a colossus. And they did. And Yates stood there, slightly bemused, but beginning to understand what his new manager was doing. He was not just introducing a player, he was beginning a myth. St. John and Yates gave Liverpool a spine. The attack had a focal point. A short, powerful, technically precise striker who could hold the ball, bring others into play, and score goals of breathtaking quality. The defense had an organizer, an immovable, dominating presence around whom everyone else could arrange themselves with confidence. The two signings transformed the mood at Anfield immediately. Shankly's certainty, which had previously been his alone, now had physical embodiment. The supporters could see what he was building. The 1961-62 season was Liverpool's last in the second division. They won it. Shankly's side finished eight points clear, playing football that was direct, organized, and relentless. A pressing physical game that exhausted opponents and made Anfield, for the first time in decades, an uncomfortable place to visit. Roger Hunt was the leading scorer with 41 league goals across the season. A remarkable return, and one that announced Hunt as one of the most lethal finishers in English football. Back in the first division, Liverpool did not take time to settle. They finished 8th in their first season back, which was creditable. And then, in 1963-64, they were champions, first division champions. For the first time since 1947, 17 years, the title was won with 26 victories from 42 matches, with Hunt scoring 31 league goals and St. John contributing goals and assists, and the kind of tireless, intelligent work that statistics do not fully capture. Liverpool finished four points ahead of Manchester United. Anfield was loud in a way it had not been in living memory. Shankly stood on the pitch at the end of the final home game, looked at the cop, packed, roaring, full of people who had waited through the drift and the relegation and the five years in the second division, and said something that captured, with his characteristic mixture of sincerity and theatre, exactly what the moment meant. He told them that he had been made in football by the people who watched it. He meant it. The relationship between Shankly and the cop was not manager and supporters, it was something closer to a mutual dependency, each feeding the other's belief, each requiring the other's presence to be fully itself. In 1964, Shanckley made a decision that seems, in retrospect, almost too good to be true. Liverpool had historically played in red shirts and white shorts. Shankly had a theory, not entirely scientific, but completely characteristic, that an all-red strip would make his players look bigger, more imposing, more intimidating. He brought out the all-red kit before a home game against Anderlecht in November 1964. He asked Ian St. John and Ron Yates to put it on and walk out under the floodlights to have a look. Christ shanks, said Yates looking down at himself. We look like giants. Liverpool have played in all-red ever since. The 1964-65 season brought something Liverpool had never had: the FA Cup. After 73 years of trying, after the 1914 final loss to Burnley, after near misses across the decades, Liverpool beat Leeds United 2-1 at Wembley an extra time. Roger Hunt scored. Ian St. John scored the winner, diving to head home across with the kind of commitment that the player's entire career embodied. Shankly, in the aftermath, called it the greatest day of his life. Given everything that followed, it is a striking claim. But for a man who had been building towards something for five years, watching his team lift English football's oldest trophy for the first time in the club's history was a completion, a proof of the belief he had carried from that car journey to Anfield in December 1959. The 1965-66 season brought the title again. Back-to-back champions, the first time Liverpool had done it since 1922 and 1923. This was Shankly's first great side at its peak. Organised, experienced, confident in its own identity. They also reached the final of the European Cup Winners' Cup, losing 2-1 to Borussia Dortmund in Glasgow, a defeat that pointed toward the European ambition that would define the club in the decade to come. By the summer of 1966, Liverpool Football Club were one of the great clubs of English football. Back-to-back champions, FA Cup holders, European finalists. Seven years earlier, they had been 10th in the second division. It remains one of the most complete rebuilds in the history of the sport, and it was done by one man who carried the belief for all of them until they were ready to carry it themselves. What came next? The aging of the first great side, the rebuilding of the second, and finally the question that would define Shankly's entire story is episode four. The player of the era for episode three could have been Roger Hunt, the most prolific scorer of the Shankly era. A future World Cup winner whose 41 goals in the promotion season remain one of the great individual contributions to Liverpool's history. It could have been Ron Yates, the captain, the Colossus, the man around whom the first great team was literally constructed. Both men gave Liverpool something essential. But the player whose story most completely captures what this era was, what it felt like, what it meant, and what it embodied, is Ian St. John. Because St. John was not simply a player Shankly signed, he was the first expression, in footballing terms, of what Shankly believed Liverpool could be. He was born in Motherwell in June 1938, the son of a steelworker, raised in the tight Scottish industrial culture that produced so many of the players who came south to English clubs in this period. He had an exceptional career at Motherwell, dangerous, direct, technically gifted, with a kind of low centre of gravity and explosive first step that made him nearly impossible to handle in a confined space. When Shankly paid £37,500 for him in 1961, several people in football thought he had overpaid. They were wrong in the way that people who underestimate what a player can become under the right manager are always wrong. At Liverpool, St. John was the player who made the system work. He was not the most spectacular member of the team. Hunt scored more goals. Yates commanded more physical attention, but he was the one who connected everything. He dropped deep to receive the ball and turned. He held it up when the team needed a rest. He pressed when the team needed to press. And he scored goals, 118 of them across nine seasons. That included some of the most important in the club's history. The 1965 FA Cup final winner, diving at the far post. The goals against European opposition that suggested Liverpool could compete at the highest level. He left Liverpool in 1971, returning to Scotland to play for Coventry and then Tranmere, and later became a celebrated football broadcaster. His television career, particularly the programme he co-hosted with Jimmy Greaves, reaching audiences that dwarfed any that had watched him play. He died in 2021 at the age of 82, and the tributes from Liverpool supporters were those of people mourning someone who had given them something they had not known they were missing. The experience of watching their club become, for the first time in a generation, genuinely worth watching. Ian St. John arrived at a club that had forgotten what excellence felt like. He was part of the reason it remembered. For a player, that is not a small thing. That is everything. Shankly once described his relationship with the Liverpool supporters in a way that has been quoted many times and never quite loses its force. He said that the Liverpool supporters were the best in the world and that he loved them. Not as a manager loves his crowd, but as one working man loves another. That the people on the cop were his people, from the same background, with the same values, with the same understanding that football was not a game you watched from a distance, but something you gave yourself to completely. There is a photograph taken at Anfield in 1964, after the title was won, of the cop. It is a sea of people, tens of thousands of them, packed together, scarves raised, faces lifted. And what strikes you, looking at it now, is not the size of the crowd or the intensity of the celebration, but the expression on the faces closest to the camera. It is not quite joy, it is something more complicated, something that looks like relief and recognition, and the particular emotion of watching a promise you had almost stopped believing in finally being kept. These were not people who had waited one or two years. Some of them had waited since 1947, some since 1923, they had kept coming back, and now, finally, here it was. What Shankley gave Liverpool was not just football. It was the right to believe again, and the people in that photograph knew exactly what that was worth. So, Liverpool Football Club, December 1959 to the summer of 1966, from 10th in the 2nd Division to back-to-back 1st division champions, from a ground that had forgotten its own greatness to one of the loudest, most atmospheric stadiums in England, from a club that advertised for a manager in the newspaper to one that was the envy of the Football League. Shankly did that. With Paisley and Fagin and Bennett, with Yates and St. John and Hunt, and a dozen others who became more than the sum of their parts because of what their manager made them believe about themselves. The house that had been standing empty since the 1920s was full again, properly full, noisily, magnificently, unmistakably full. Next time, on episode 4 of Reds Through the Ages, the sign that went up above the tunnel, the second great team Shankly built, older, wiser, European. And then, on a July afternoon in 1974, a press conference that nobody in the room believed was real. Because Bill Shankly was going to do something that none of them could understand. He was going to walk away. Episode 4 is called This Is Anfield, and it ends with the most painful sentence in Liverpool's history. Until then, thank you for listening. You'll never walk alone.