It’s not been a good time to say goodbye to fine people and Peter Corrigan, who had been ill for some little while with cancer, was among the finest you could ever wish to meet.
He was, as the BBC correctly observed on Friday, “a well-respected sports journalist”. But, as anyone on this newspaper who ever shared a pint, an anecdote or an argument with Peter will know, he was much more than that.
Hugh McIlvanney, who has recently retired, remarked once that it was easy to disagree with Peter, but impossible not to read what he had to say. He had that rare facility – identified by his brother Chris, who still works with us – of being funny in print. It was a priceless asset and much in evidence during his many happy years at the Observer, where he lit up all our Sundays with the most aptly named column in the business, Cyclops.
It wasn’t that Peter was one-eyed, it was more that the two eyes he brought to bear on any subject did not waver a split-inch from their target. He did not lack for conviction on just about any subject on which he was asked to pass judgment.
And that, of course, is what he was paid to do. He was a fine working journalist in the field, a great story-getting football writer and particularly fond of golf, but he was a born columnist who could shout above the storm with unmistakable clarity.
Peter was sports editor here for a while – in more relaxed times, it should be noted – and, once all the gubbins of the section had been ordered, put in place and prepared for consumption, he would rise towards the end of a Saturday afternoon shift and head for the door and back to Cardiff, stopping only to say to whoever was his deputy: “Take her into Heathrow, will you?”
It was away from work that he left an impression, also. When this newspaper was wandering around the capital like a lost lamb, we landed up for a while at Chelsea Bridge House and within a short evening stroll of a comfortable old pub whose ale went down all the better for the presence each Friday night of an old-fashioned rock’n’roll band.
It did come as a minor surprise one night, however, to see Peter jitter‑bugging his way around the bar with a pint in one hand and a younger female member of staff in the other, as if he were Elvis Presley brought to life.
That was his era, but Peter never seemed old and it is hard to believe he was 80 when he passed away. He was always up for a laugh, against himself or whoever deserved it more. I bumped into him at The Open at Sandwich a few years ago and noticed he was limping. He’d fallen in a ditch, he said. “Drink taken?” I asked. “Don’t be daft, man,” he said in that lovely Welsh lilt, “who falls in a ditch sober?”
As former colleagues reminisced about Peter on Friday, the memory that was most fixed was his boundless and indiscriminate decency. He treated everyone the same, with a smile that invited conversation, because that is what he loved as much as the job itself, a good old natter.
As his son, Jamie, the Telegraph’s golf correspondent, recalled, they were watching Wales play Slovakia in the European Championship last Saturday and, to the surprise of many, their team won 2-1. Peter, getting near the very end of his life, said: “Worth the wait,” and went back to sleep. It was, Jamie related, “a lovely, lovely moment”.
Those in the business who’d known him the longest echoed every kind sentiment that poured forth on social media. Norman Giller, a Fleet Street sage and author, called him “Peter The Great”.
Giller on his blog described him as, “a warm, witty and wonderful human being”, adding: “Peter will approve of the alliteration, because he was a master at plucking the golden phrases out of the air and ad-libbing them to the copytaker in the long-gone days of chasing hot‑metal deadlines and running reports.”
The deadlines will always be there; it is the methods of reaching them that have changed. But, for romance, getting on the old dog-and-bone was what Peter and others of that fading era lived for. It’s impossible to convey how much he will be missed by everyone lucky enough to have known him, from his days as a teenage messenger on the South Wales Echo, writing about football for the old Daily Herald, which morphed into the Sun, and through to the Independent on Sunday, after leaving the Observer in 1993.
All of the places he worked would no doubt imagine that theirs was his favourite. And he’d more than likely tell them all they were right.
From the archive, 29.05.77: Peter Corrigan on a Liverpool win that changed everything
“I am a big Liverpool fan so I particularly enjoyed reporting on their European Cup wins in the 1970s,” Peter Corrigan said in 2005. The first of those triumphs came in May 1977, a 3-1 win over Borussia Mönchengladbach in Rome. In his Observer report Corrigan described its significance for the English game
The sight of the European Cup bestowing its blessing from the top of one of Merseyside Transport’s more attractive omnibuses was doubtless good for the souls of us all but more particularly for those souls darkened by anguish about the state of English football.
Perhaps that was the most welcome essence of Liverpool’s triumph in Rome on Wednesday; the generous quality of their performance, the glowing red lava of the terraces, overflowing the rim of the Olympic Stadium and spreading its celebration to any who wished to share it. To remind us that the game belongs to the people and their dreams was the achievement, and communion with their joy was available whether you were offered a sip from the shining depths of the trophy itself or from someone’s coveted last can of Newcastle Brown.
There have been comparable moments, of course, England’s World Cup victory in 1966, Celtic becoming the first British side to win the European Cup exactly 10 years ago, Manchester United claiming the same prize a year later; each event worthy of the pride with which we remember it. But even though Liverpool did not finish with a treble, which in my view would have made theirs the most outstanding feat, their accomplishment on behalf of a country so demoralised by self-doubt about its game could not have been better timed and their example to others may be of the most lasting benefit.
When the players unbuckled the emotional armour they had carried through the most demanding nine months of their careers the result was boisterously captivating. There was a willingness to assist any Pressmen into the swimming pool without the bother of him undressing and a determination that whatever other embarrassing surplus the Common Market is going to suffer this year it won’t be champagne.
On the way home the players were still lively enough to give a concert on the aircraft microphone, a spot of crooning from Callaghan, a dirty ditty from Keegan, an excellent impersonation of Johan Cruyff by Toshack and a totally irreverent and hilarious take-off of manager Paisley’s Geordiness by McDermott.
As we approached Speke Airport, Bill Shankly, who relinquished his famous management of the club three years ago, let one of those familiar sighs travel the rapids at the back of his throat. “There were 26,000 Liverpool fans in that ground last night. When I joined Liverpool in 1959 we couldn’t get that many to come to Anfield.”
It was said reflectively, not as a boast. Without question Shankly laid the pattern for Liverpool’s growth as a club and a force over the past 17 years, and when Bob Paisley, who has been with the club 31 years on the playing and management staffs, took Shankly’s place in the limelight it was not at the risk many imagined.
That Borussia Mönchengladbach did not play as well as they were expected to had been used by some to lessen Liverpool’s achievement. But to play the way they did, to prove the British style can be adapted to the Continental manner, was to prove that so much of our supposed inferiority has been psychological.
As usual, it was a Liverpool supporter who found a way of summing it up. As dawn broke over the Colosseum a banner had been fixed to its walls declaring: “When in Rome do as the Scousers do.” That may well be good advice when in England, too.
■ This is an edited extract. Liverpool’s victory was the first of six consecutive European Cup wins by English clubs
