Bill Kenwright was my mother’s boyfriend long before he became mine. They worked together in Coronation Street in the late 1960s, when my mother was already an old hand on the show and Bill was introduced as Betty Turpin’s son, Gordon Clegg. She was kind to him then and he never forgot it.
When she began to struggle with illness in recent years, Bill repaid that kindness many times over. He invited her to his stage productions and arranged a reunion with her and Sir Ian McKellen when he played Hamlet at the Theater Royal in Windsor a few years ago. My mother wasn’t well enough to go, but the invitation meant the world to her.
In the last year of his life, when a section of Everton fans attacked Bill and drove him from the club he loved to the core of his being, those supporters turned their venom on anyone who wrote or wrote anything positive about him said, as if wanting an apology for loyalty and silencing his friends.
There was never any chance of this happening. These people snapped about me being “a friend of the family” as if it were an insult or a dirty secret. I took it as a compliment. It was an honor to be a friend of Bill.
He was a kind man, he was a good man and he was one of the last great chairmen in English football, a wonderful antidote to the self-interest of the Glazers, Todd Boehly and Mohammed bin Salman, the men who now own English football . You’ll never catch me apologizing when I say that.
Bill Kenwright was a friend of my family and it was a pleasure to have known him
As a young star in Coronation Street, Kenwright (right) worked on the show with my mother (centre).
Everton paid tribute to Kenwright with many gestures last weekend after his death
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Bill was one of the guardians of our game. As Everton chairman since 2004, he was among those who helped tackle the European Super League. He hated the betrayal of English football by the owners of Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Tottenham and Chelsea.
He wasn’t a wealth stripper. He didn’t want to be involved with the club so he could get dividends from it. He did it out of love. For forty years, until he was told in January this year that it was no longer safe for him to attend home games, he got the 9.07am train from Euston every Saturday morning to watch his team and realize his dreams .
It was a great sadness for him that he could not bring Everton the kind of success he and the fans wanted. No one gives him credit for that, but it was his triumph that he kept the club in the Premier League when many other big clubs fell by the wayside and fell down the divisions.
He also kept the soul of Everton. Perhaps some supporters would have preferred if the club had sold that soul, like Newcastle United, to a nation state. Everton haven’t done that and despite all their problems, there is value in what is of untold value.
It’s hard not to be angry about the way he was treated by the supporters, but that’s how football is now. It’s not about Everton supporters either. They are certainly not the only ones offering this type of treatment. They also have the right to protest. It’s just that with Bill it was hard to escape the conclusion that they were looking for a scapegoat and that they had picked the wrong man.
Bill understood the nature of expectation. He knew what it was like to be a fan. He was one. He never lost his affection for the supporters, even when they turned against him.
He understood the passions that football stirred. He had to watch a banner being flown from a plane with the text ‘Kenwright Out’ on it. “I’ve seen them march on me and it just kills you,” he said once. He never expressed anger about that. Just sadness. He loved sportswriters and their work. He often spoke about Patrick Collins, Martin Samuel and Dominic King and their writing.
The last time I visited him a few years ago in his office on the top floor of his theater company’s building in Maida Vale, I finally got around to asking him to walk me through the collage of photos and headlines about Everton those were plastered over one of the walls.
Bill understood the nature of expectations at Everton and he knew what it was like to be a fan
He was a long-term chairman of Everton and attended matches for 40 years before his health deteriorated
And although by then he was deep in his own battle with illness, he jumped up from the bench and explained the stories behind the photos of the Everton team coming from 2-0 down and the 1966 FA Cup final won against Sheffield Wednesday.
He told me about his friend, Eddie Kavanagh, who was caught sprinting across the Wembley grass during the match, tie flying in the wind, trousers held up by suspenders, chased by the ‘London police’.
In addition, there was a poster of James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.
When I asked about his hero, Dave Hickson, the Cannonball Kid, a striker who played for the club twice in the 1940s and 1950s, Bill began a song to the tune of Davy Crockett:
Born one morning in Ellesmere Port
Football was his favorite sport
Signed for half a crown at Everton
He then went to Villa and Huddersfield Town
Davie, Davie Hickson, coming back to Everton.
When Bill realized he did not have the resources to finance Everton’s future, he sold the club to billionaire Farhad Moshiri (right)
Bill’s life took place in the theater of course, but it was also one long love letter to English football and to Everton. He gave everything to the club. He worked tirelessly for it. He craved success as much as his most devoted fan, because in reality he was the most devoted fan.
That that success never came was a great source of sadness for him. When he realized he did not have the resources to finance Everton’s future in a league dominated by oligarchs, American venture capitalists and the sovereign wealth funds of energy-rich autocracies in the Middle East, he sold the club to billionaire Farhad Moshiri.
Bill was also blamed for Moshiri’s shortcomings, although the reality was that without his stabilizing influence the uncertainty gripping the club would have been much worse. When the crowd called for Kenwright’s fall, Moshiri begged him to stay to help save the club from relegation.
Without Moshiri, the club might not have survived the financial challenges of the Covid pandemic. Without Bill’s guidance and drive, we may never have been able to secure the funding for the beautiful new stadium being built at Bramley-Moore Dock. It will likely be named after a sponsor, perhaps a telecom giant or an airline. How much more appropriate it would be if it were called Bill Kenwright Stadium.
Bill was the chairman who wanted nothing more than to restore his club to glory
Bill gave everything to the club and worked tirelessly to make Everton a success
Bill once told me that The Independent sent a psychotherapist to spend a day with him in the 1990s to talk about his love affair with the classic Western film Shane. The man had told him that he wasn’t sure if Bill thought of himself as Shane, the horseman who comes in to save the homesteaders from the bad guys, or as little Joe, the little boy who looked at Shane with loving eyes.
“He understood it perfectly,” Bill said. And he was right. Bill was the chairman who wanted nothing more than to restore his club to glory. And he was the fan who never lost the wonder of going to the match and seeing his heroes playing in blue.
“You mention Dave Hickson and I’m full and I’m 75 years old,” he said. ‘Graeme Sharp, Tim Cahill, Mikel Arteta. Steeped in Everton. Seamus Coleman. They are the people who matter.’
Like Shane, Bill rode off into the sunset with a bullet in him, but in years to come, when time has healed all wounds, he will be regarded as the father of modern Everton, the club he nurtured to the end and adored.