Philip Tallentire, sports editor of the Evening Gazette, has taken a great interest in the subject matter of the book and regularly provided me with much vital information on Middlesbrough FC during those years.

Crucial assistance came also from Garry Richardson, my old colleague on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme; his unrivalled contacts book opened many doors.

I must also thank John Helm, expert football commentator and analyst, for his recollections of Leeds United, Don Revie and Brian Clough in the early 1970s.

Alan Peacock, Clough’s striking partner at Boro in the 1950s (and later a Leeds and England centre-forward), is an absolute gentleman. He freely shared his experiences of that time and put me in touch with many of his playing colleagues.

Others I must also thank are Robert Nichols, devoted Middlesbrough supporter and editor of the splendid fanzine Fly Me to the Moon; Christine Talbot of the present Calendar team at Yorkshire TV, and all those members of the programme in 1974 who helped me recreate the events of 12 September that year; and Jonathan Harvey, another of my old Today colleagues, who delved into the BBC archives on my behalf.

I spent a good deal of time in the British Library at Colindale, and the staff there were extremely helpful; equally so were those at the Royal Society in London and Teesside Archives in Middlesbrough.

Andrew Gordon has been the ideal agent, always calm and thoughtful. He gave me the confidence to pursue the project and always had imaginative suggestions about how best to shape the book. Claire Rose has been a most assiduous and constructive editor.

Finally, I must thank my lovely Eileen for her unstinting encouragement and support along every step of the way.

I had about an hour to make some calls, piece together the salient facts of his life and then file my story, which was obviously destined for the following morning’s front page. Whatever the wider world may have thought about him by then, Revie remained a hero in the eyes of the city to which he had brought so much football fame and success.

It was obvious where to start. Billy Bremner – ‘ten stone of barbed wire’, as one writer once memorably described him – had made his debut for Leeds alongside him at the age of 17, and then, when Revie became manager, had made sure his writ ran large on the pitch as his inspirational captain.

Bremner spoke passionately to me that night about the man who became like a father to him. ‘The Guv’nor was a master tactician, a superb manager. But more important than that, he was a good guy. He was totally honest and fair, and never badmouthed anyone.’

Bobby Collins, Revie’s midfield enforcer in the 1960s, whom Bremner had succeeded as captain, alluded to his empathy with his players, telling me, ‘He got the very best out of them and what’s more he looked after them.’

Then there was Allan Clarke, his goalscorer supreme, a man who tended to let his boots do the talking. His tribute was characteristically concise: ‘Don made Leeds United. It’s as simple as that. I have played for quite a number of managers and he was the best.’

Armed with those quotes and having worked in the obvious biographical details of his career as player and manager, I sent the story off to the subeditors. It was a remarkable night on the sporting front: Arsenal were winning the Football League championship in sensational fashion on the last day of the season, defeating Liverpool at Anfield with a last-minute goal from Michael Thomas.

One line in my piece intrigued me: ‘Don Revie was brought up in Middlesbrough.’ At that time, I was unaware of his connection with the town. Such was the power of his association with Leeds that it seemed to put every other aspect of his life in the shade. As my father’s family came from Middlesbrough, it interested me even more.

Years later, when I turned away briefly from making news programmes for the BBC and delved into the world of football in the 1960s and 1970s, I discovered that another complex, controversial football character had been born only a few streets away from Revie. What’s more, it was none other than Revie’s managerial arch-rival and most outspoken critic – Brian Clough. A story of these two Middlesbrough boys seemed rich in potential.

In Tom Hooper’s compelling film The Damned United (from the book of the same name by David Peace, a fictional account of Brian Clough’s 44-day tenure at Leeds United), there’s a scene in which Clough – played by Michael Sheen – is looking forward to the FA Cup encounter between his own side, lower Second Division Derby County, and Leeds, managed by Don Revie and riding high at the top of the First Division.

Clough muses about the similarities between himself and the more experienced Revie, by way of both their personal lives and their footballing careers. He tells his faithful sidekick Peter Taylor:

One of Revie’s boyhood contemporaries, the journalist Peter Thomas, described his upbringing more evocatively than anyone: ‘His was the harsh background of a Middlesbrough still touched grey and dark by attitudes of Victorian Methodism, where every rich man had his castle and a poor man at his gate.’ Not to be the poor man at the rich man’s door was what drove Revie on throughout his life.

Through talent, desire and determination both of them went on to become highly successful – if not exceptional – professional footballers: Clough flourished as a free-scoring centre-forward for Middlesbrough and Sunderland, Revie usually in a more deep-lying version of the same position at Leicester, Hull, Manchester City, Sunderland and Leeds United.

Both, too, were capped by England – albeit on just a few occasions. Revie marked his debut in October 1954 with a goal against Northern Ireland; he went on to win six caps. Clough’s first game came five years later against Wales; he played only once more, and in neither game did he display anything like his true potential.

Then, as young managers in the early (Revie) and late (Clough) 1960s, they both took clubs languishing in the doldrums (Leeds United and Derby County) and moulded them into championship winners.

So much similarity, then, in background, career path and achieve-ment. But peas in a pod? Emphatically not. These two sons of the Tees had little else in common, and were as different in character as Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. A bitter rivalry developed between them, which in turn enlivened and then arguably blighted English football in the late 1960s and early 1970s as their sides fought it out for the major honours.

After Clough had made another of his barbed comments about Leeds when he was Derby manager, it prompted this unusual response from a normally reticent Revie: ‘Clough is the last man I would like to be stranded with on a desert island.’ The feeling was almost certainly mutual, and that personal animosity often appeared to spread throughout their respective clubs.

These parallels in their professional lives culminated in the remarkable events of the summer of 1974. Revie, who had just led Leeds to another First Division title, decided to leave the club he had nurtured like a family for 13 years to become England manager, after the dismissal of Sir Alf Ramsey. Clough – to the utter disbelief of the football world – succeeded him at Elland Road. Three years later, history repeated itself: when Revie resigned as England manager, one of the four main candidates to be interviewed for his job was one Brian Clough.

Clough, then, was forever following in the footsteps of the older man. To some extent, there was a natural envy on his part of Revie’s achievements and a consequent fierce desire to better him. The two men ran their clubs almost as their own personal fiefdoms, but they held very different views on how the game should be played and the role of football in society; those ideological differences also provide an explanation for the bitter clashes.

Temperamentally, too, they were oceans apart: Clough was an extrovert, a showman who was at home in the bright new world of television in the early 1970s, while Revie all too often – in public, at least – appeared to live up to the caricature of the dour Yorkshireman.

Theirs was a gripping enough story even without being fictionalised or put on the big screen, a tale about passionate, driven, extraordinary characters who stood above and beyond their contemporaries, a rivalry in the classical tradition, one that could have leapt from the pages of Homer or Shakespeare.

Then there was my other reason for wanting to write a book about Revie and Clough. I wanted to explore my background and heritage, because the Hermistons were in the first wave of migrants from other parts of the British Isles who came to help build this frontier town in the early nineteenth century. Some of my ancestors on my father’s side worked in the ironworks at Eston and helped forge Middlesbrough’s pre-eminent place in the Industrial Revolution.

Revie and Clough were outstanding footballers, but my paternal grandfather and father were outstanding local cricketers. My grandfather, Robert Nelson Hermiston, captained Normanby Hall in the 1930s and 1940s, scoring several centuries and thousands of other runs in an aggressive yet elegant style, so much so that he once moved a correspondent on the North-Eastern Gazette to write (in an account of a match against Darlington): ‘Hermiston has the stamp which puts a batsman into the aristocracy, and would score more runs than he does were it not for a certain casualness of stroke which is often suddenly and quite unexpectedly his undoing.’ He was also a choir conductor and a church worker and taught in Middlesbrough schools for 35 years.

My father, Stanley Thomas Hermiston, was born in 1927, the same year as Don Revie. He, too, was an excellent cricketer, and after he left the North-East in the 1950s to find employment in Cumberland he captained his local side, Egremont, to numerous successes, while he himself consistently topped the county batting averages.

My book, then, in its early chapters at least, will have a third character, the town of Middlesbrough itself, a town that invented itself almost out of nowhere and fashioned generations of resourceful individuals with a fierce desire to make something special of their lives, men like Don Revie and Brian Clough – and my grandfather and father.

The book will trace events from Sunday, 10 July 1927 in Bell Street, Middlesbrough, when Donald Revie was born on an exceptionally hot summer’s day, and it will finish half a century later in the chill of a December morning in 1977 with Brian Howard Clough coming down the steps of the Football Association’s headquarters in Lancaster Gate, west London, having completed the interview for his great rival’s job.

Fifty years, then, during which British society underwent profound change, through depression, growing material benefits and choice, war, austerity, increasing prosperity, sexual liberation and finally back to a grim economic climate and a more disturbed, apparently fractured society in the 1970s. Half a century of revolution in football, too, when the rewards for playing and managing at the top level became greater but the divide between the supporter – the working man – and his idols grew wider.

The lives of Don Revie and Brian Clough were, to a certain extent, shaped similarly by their experience of the harsher decades of the 1930s and 1940s. But, 30 years later, all that shared experience counted for nothing as the game of soccer was tugged and twisted in different directions while they fought for influence and achievement. At times, it seemed like an all-out battle for the soul of British football.

He’d just been set a deadline of 9 a.m. on Wednesday to decide whether to leave Sunderland and make the 25-mile journey south to join Middlesbrough, his home-town club, the side he had dreamed of playing for ever since, as a young boy, he’d first listened to the roars of acclaim for a George Camsell goal as he stood in the alleyway behind his home in Bell Street.

Revie disliked deadlines, the pressure to make instant decisions. He was by nature a cautious, meticulous man, who liked to consider, prepare and then make a judgement when everything was firmly settled in his mind.

But for Middlesbrough the courtship was over; they’d pursued their man over several weeks, and now they demanded an answer. In the hour-and-a-half meeting they’d had with him on Tuesday afternoon, they had once more spelled out their admiration for his footballing skills, their vision of how he could help transform the fortunes of their side and their assurances for his financial security.

The Middlesbrough manager, Bob Dennison, and secretary Eric Thomas had impressed him with their enthusiasm and their ambition. There was a clear suggestion, too, that a new house in the area would be part of the financial package. Sunderland had told him that they wouldn’t stand in his way, and a fee of around £12,000 had been agreed.

When he was growing up in Middlesbrough, playing his football first at Archibald School then later as a developing teenager for the Boro Swifts side, Revie had no desire to look beyond his native town for a professional career. He was desperate to follow in the footsteps of the forwards he’d idolised, pestered for autographs and watched in wonder on a Saturday afternoon: Camsell, Micky Fenton, Wilf Mannion, great players with flair, imagination and personality. But Leicester City had won the race for his signature, and his career had followed a far different path from that which he’d envisaged as a young, starry-eyed boy.

He was used to change; even before he’d joined Sunderland in November 1956, he’d called himself ‘Soccer’s Happy Wanderer’ (the title of his autobiography), as his search for the best place to display his talents had taken him from Leicester to Hull City and then on to Manchester City.

Now, he was starting to feel, it might be time to move once more. On a personal level, there wasn’t much that was wrong with his life. He lived conveniently in a house not far from Sunderland’s training ground at Cleadon; his wife, Elsie, had settled into a teaching job in a nearby village, while his young son Duncan was growing up happily.

But as far as the football was concerned, it was an entirely different matter. When he’d first arrived at Roker Park, the side had boasted players of the calibre of Len Shackleton, George Aitken, Billy Bingham and Ray Daniel. True, they were all in the latter stages of their careers, but there was enough quality there, apparently – and with fresh talent coming through from the youth section – to ensure that the club maintained its proud record of First Division status before moving on to bigger and better things.

It wasn’t to be. Relegation was narrowly avoided at the end of the 1956–57 season, while a greater calamity was taking place away from the pitch. A Football Association inquiry had found Sunderland – known as the ‘Bank of England’ club as a result of its spending in the transfer market – guilty of making illegal payments to players. Sunderland’s charismatic chairman, Bill Ditchburn, along with director Bill Martin, were permanently banned from the game; two other directors were suspended sine die. The club was fined a record £5,000, and manager Bill Murray £200; Murray, a broken man, left the club in June 1957.

For Revie, the problem wasn’t the scarring of the club’s reputation; it came in the form of Murray’s replacement, Alan Brown. Revie could appreciate that Brown had an inventive tactical mind, and there were aspects of his style of management – his closeness to the players, his continual chivvying and coaxing of them, his values of openness and honesty – that he would acknowledge as being of benefit to the side. Indeed, as he always did, he would watch, absorb and store away information that might be of use to him if he was to pursue a managerial career of his own.

No, the problem was that Brown had made it clear, fairly early on, that Revie wasn’t going to be part of his plans. And after relegation to Division Two followed in 1958, Brown opted for the energy of youth to restore Sunderland’s glory. He instituted a style of play that was complete anathema to Revie, placing the emphasis on hard running, chasing and harrying rather than letting the ball do the work.

For Revie, running twenty yards and then passing the ball five made absolutely no sense; for him, it was far more rewarding just to run five and then pass the ball effectively over twenty yards. Too often now, training was just a grind, a triumph of sweat over skill.

There was a personal antipathy that accompanied the differing footballing philosophies and went beyond the resentment Revie felt at being made surplus to requirements. Deep down, he just didn’t like the man.

So, shortly after the start of the 1958–59 season, Revie had asked to be placed on the transfer list. The team had made a dreadful start in the first month and soon found themselves languishing at the foot of the table. As he returned home that Tuesday evening to talk things over with Elsie, Revie was thinking, from a footballing point of view, wouldn’t Middlesbrough be a much better bet?

He ran through the pluses and minuses. Yes, Boro had a creaky defence, with a relatively untried goalkeeper in Peter Taylor and a group of defenders who may have had experience but lacked reliability. At least Sunderland had a gifted young centre-half in Charlie Hurley, who promised to be the bedrock of their defence for many years to come.

No, it was the prospect of linking up with Middlesbrough’s exciting young forward line that was making Revie think long and hard about a move. Bob Dennison – a decent man of equitable temperament, as far as he could make out, far removed from the forceful and volatile Alan Brown – had emphasised that he wanted Revie to be the old head that would guide his gifted young forwards towards maturity. Dennison had assured him that he would be accommodated in the deep-lying role in which he revelled and which best suited his playing style.

So who would be the recipient of his long, sweeping passes from the middle of the field? On the right wing, 21-year-old Billy Day had already shown he possessed a nerveless temperament, excellent close control, speed and accuracy with his crosses. On the left, Revie was aware of the precocious talent of Leeds-born Eddie Holliday, still only 19 but in many people’s eyes destined for international honours.

In the middle, Alan Peacock’s height, strength and bravery were making him an increasing handful for defenders. Not yet 21, what Revie liked about him – from the little he’d seen and from what others had told him – was Peacock’s unselfishness, his willingness to provide opportunities for better-placed colleagues, his vision in and around the 18-yard box.

Then there was Brian Clough. At the beginning of the season, the 23-year-old centre-forward had been made captain of Middlesbrough, an appointment that had raised many eyebrows, not just because of his relative youth but also because of his aggressive, self-confident – some said arrogant – character.

But in just seven games this season, Clough had scored twelve goals (five of them coming in the opening game against newly promoted Brighton) and led his side to four victories. In the previous two campaigns, he’d hit the back of the net a staggering eighty-two times.

If Revie was to believe that his time at Middlesbrough could be fruitful, he would have to be convinced that he could forge a good working relationship not only with Dennison but also with the young Boro captain. Loud, abrasive types – as he’d learned to his cost with Alan Brown – clashed with his more introverted, thoughtful personality, upsetting his equilibrium and his game.

Nonetheless, he found the prospect of playing with such a natural goalscorer quite enticing. He could help maintain, and hopefully improve, Clough’s ration of goals by setting wingers Day and Holliday free through his penetrating long balls out to the flanks; they in turn would provide the crosses for Clough and Peacock to convert in the penalty box. Equally, he could envisage himself supplying incisive through-balls for Clough to race onto and crash into the net with his characteristically fierce, low drives.

Although he’d never walked out at Ayresome Park in the red and white of Boro, he did have fond memories of his appearances at the ground for Manchester City six years previously. He’d scored one goal with a ‘grand shot’ – as one writer had quaintly put it – in the 2–2 draw in March 1952 and then, six months later, a couple of opportunist efforts in a pulsating 5–4 defeat before a crowd of more than thirty thousand. A hugely superstitious man, he deemed the Middlesbrough stadium to be one of his ‘lucky’ arenas.

Those were some of the thoughts that swirled around his head as he made his way home to Cleadon that evening. In 24 hours’ time, he would either be lining up with his new teammates at Ayresome Park to face Rotherham, playing on the ground just a few hundred yards from where he had been born and brought up, or he would be taking the field with his Sunderland teammates at Hillsborough for a difficult match against league leaders Sheffield Wednesday.

Revie was aware of one other club that might be interested in his services. Leeds United were not a household name in the game, but the presence in their side of the colossus John Charles had made them a force to be reckoned with in Division One. In the last season, however, Charles had departed to Juventus for £65,000, a record transfer fee for a British player, and the team had slumped from seventh to seventeenth in the table. Revie still felt his football warranted a place in the top league, so he wasn’t prepared to dismiss Leeds’ interest – at this stage, only tentative – out of hand.

The local press were intensely interested in his decision. Subeditors at the Northern Echo had already put their back page to bed; the headline in the morning would read ‘Revie’s 9am Call May Help Put Boro’ Back in Division 1’. ‘Mandale’, the pseudonymous writer of the piece, declared optimistically: ‘If Revie’s answer is “yes”, he will return to his native town riding on the wave of soccer enthusiasm which is likely to promote the sound of clicking turnstiles for tonight’s match with Rotherham.’

Fifteen hours, then, before Revie would pick up the phone to Bob Dennison. Could it possibly be a triumphant homecoming? Or was it a mistake to retrace your steps, in life and in football? His heart said the former, but his head remained to be convinced. He needed stability at this point in his career, and he pondered long and hard about whether that would be possible at Middlesbrough.

In particular, his thoughts turned back to Clough. Could the young captain’s ambition and drive provide the spark to reignite his own halting career? Or would Clough’s blunt, cocky nature disturb and disrupt his ordered playing style?

As he entered his front door, he was beginning to think he knew what his decision would be. But first he had to talk it over with Elsie.

Many outside observers peering in on the town in the 1930s – when Brian Clough was born and Don Revie was growing up – too often judged it on its aesthetic, rather than human, value. Writers of both fact and fiction invariably depicted Middlesbrough either as some kind of smoking, clanging urban hell or – if in slightly more understanding vein – as merely a desperate, somewhat coarse place overwhelmed by the misery of the Depression.

To catch the prevailing view, look no further than J.B. Priestley and George Orwell. Contrasting figures of the literary left, both were then carving out reputations as perceptive chroniclers of the country’s social condition.

Priestley passed through Middlesbrough in 1933 for English Journey, his state-of-the-nation book following a pilgrimage through town and countryside, and you might perhaps have expected a fellow Yorkshireman to offer the place some sympathy. Not a bit of it. Pronouncing it to be a ‘vast, dingy conjuring trick’, he went on to ram the verbal boot home:

To be fair to Orwell, Ravelston’s social conscience is clearly troubled by his vision. ‘What of the real poor?’ he asks. ‘What of the unemployed in Middlesbrough, seven in a room on twenty-five bob a week? When there are people living like that, how dare one walk the world with pound notes and cheque-books in one’s pocket?’

Orwell and Priestley no doubt embellished these views of the town, for their very different ends; to leave a lasting impact on the page, it is arguably far more profitable to caricature than to analyse soberly. The reality of living and growing up in Middlesbrough in the 1930s was somewhat different – and a little brighter – than their stark assessments. But what was undoubtedly true was that in those days the range of career options open to young working-class men like Revie and Clough were severely limited.

There used to be a saying in the North-East, almost certainly invented around then, that if you whistled down a pit, up would pop a fast bowler. In the footballing world, substitute bowler for centre-half or centre-forward and the same aphorism would apply. The area teemed with talented young boys, eager to embrace their sporting heritage and escape a life of manual labour that was the norm for many.

Nowhere was that more the case than Middlesbrough, where, after the First World War, a succession of gifted working-class footballers emerged to represent both club and country. George Camsell, a powerful and prolific centre-forward, was one, George Hardwick, ‘Gentleman George’, stylish left-back and captain of England, another, and the incomparable inside-forward Wilf Mannion, the ‘Golden Boy’ of Teesside, was the cream of the crop.

Mannion is the only Middlesbrough player to have been inducted into English football’s exclusive Hall of Fame. But there are two Middlesbrough men who have made it there as managers, and if you’d picked up a loudhailer around the area of the Ayresome Park stadium in the 1930s and 1940s and summoned them both, they might just have come running.

Later on in their careers, the gulf between Don Revie and Brian Clough would seem as wide as the River Tees. But when they were growing up in Middlesbrough, the geographical distance between them was small; indeed, they were just a brisk walk from each other’s front door. If you make the journey east to west across town from Clough’s birthplace at 11 Valley Road, in Grove Hill, to Revie’s home at 20 Bell Street, in the Ayresome area, it’ll take you about 15 minutes.

Of course, neither boy made that exact walk; now if they had done, that would be a story to beat all stories. They were of a different generation: Revie was born on 10 July 1927, and Clough followed just under eight years later on 21 March 1935. But to step out on that route is not just to sense the physical closeness of young Don and young Brian as they grew up in Middlesbrough but also to appreciate how their shared environment shaped them. It’s also as good a way as any to get a feel for the history of this remarkable town.

The Grove Hill estate, of which Valley Road was part, was built in an area that, a century earlier, would have been countryside. Most of the Victorian gentry who lived in or near Middlesbrough had their residences here. Valley Road is on the site of the original Marton Grove Farm, which comprised a large farmhouse and a clutch of other dwellings.

Rewind another hundred years or so to 1728, and two miles south of Clough’s home lies the birthplace of Captain Cook, explorer, navigator, cartographer. He was born in the village of Marton, well before Middlesbrough even existed – but it hasn’t stopped the locals claiming him as the town’s most famous son because of his geographic proximity.

But back to the 1930s, and those three-bedroomed council houses on tree-lined Valley Road would have had a fresh, optimistic feel for the Cloughs and other families, an escape from the privations of the back-to-back terraces that dominated vast swathes of Middlesbrough.

If you step out of the front gate of No. 11 and turn right down the street, you’re just 150 yards away from Clairville Common. Back in the 1940s, the Clough brothers would be out there playing football most nights of the week, providing the weather was fine. In those days, there were two cinder football pitches on which some of the leading local sides used to train. Amongst those teams were South Park Rovers, a nursery club for Doncaster Rovers, and Middlesbrough Swifts, who similarly supplied talent for Leicester City.

Young Brian Clough would practise balancing a ball on his feet in the front garden of 11 Valley Road. But when he stepped out to watch football on the common, he would have appreciated the skills of the teenage boys holding their own with the older players in the Rovers and Swifts sessions. Is it too much of a flight of fancy to imagine that, at the age of seven, he cast an admiring glance towards a lean fourteen-year-old playing on the wing for the Swifts, showing an early awareness of how to find space on a crowded pitch and exhibiting good passing skills?

It’s not an utterly improbable thought. Certainly Don Revie was playing quite often for the Swifts on Clairville Common in those wartime days, and the impressionable young Clough would have picked up some footballing ideas from the likes of him and a multitude of other talented young players.

But the journey has barely begun. Continue down Valley Road, and then, at the roundabout, turn left into Park Road South. You’ll quickly pass the fire station, formerly a site for houses back in the 1950s; Clough’s Middlesbrough and England teammate Eddie Holliday, the flying winger, used to live there, just round the corner from his colleague in the forward line.

The feeling of relative affluence on Park Road South, where the trim 1930s detached homes all have sizeable front gardens, derives from its position opposite one of the glories of Middlesbrough: Albert Park.

Strictly speaking, if you took the quickest route to Don Revie’s home, you would continue in a straight line down Park Road South. But it’s far more pleasurable to cross the road, step away from any traffic and breathe in the fresh air of 70 acres of open, green space.

The man who finished runner-up in a council poll of influential Middlesbrough figures (Captain Cook was first, Clough fourth and Revie nineteenth) was responsible for the creation of this Victorian splendour. Henry Bolckow, ironmaster, was one of the great figures of the Industrial Revolution, the town’s first mayor and also its first MP. He recognised that the area needed a ‘green lung’ to ease the plight of the burgeoning industrial population he had substantially helped to create with his discovery of iron ore in the nearby Cleveland Hills.

Bolckow was a man with a strong sense of civic duty. His ‘People’s Park’ was duly opened on 11 August 1868 by 19-year-old Prince Arthur, the third son and seventh of the nine children of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and it was named after his late father. In his speech on opening the park, the young prince said Bolckow had ‘stood by the side of the iron cradle in which Middlesbrough was rocked, and had watched over the child with care as it grew’.

Brian Clough would have entered Albert Park from Park Vale Road, running next to Clairville Common, over a little wooden bridge running over Marton West Beck, and then headed straight up the bank towards the bandstand, with a children’s play area and boathouse on his right. Another right turn and he would pass the roller-skating rink, which dates back to the 1940s, and from there, he’d reach the central tree-lined thoroughfare that traverses the middle of the park.

Soon you’ll observe a bust of Henry Bolckow himself, followed by a memorial to those who lost their lives in the Boer War, before you encounter a seven-foot bronze statue of a very familiar figure.

The sculpture of Clough, which cost £65,000 to make, was unveiled on 16 May 2007. It depicts the young footballer, in his mid-20s, on the way to training at Ayresome Park, boots slung over his left shoulder, face looking intently ahead with the hint of a smile, clearly a spring in his step, with right heel off the ground and left foot in the air.

Clough spent many hours in the park as a boy with his brothers and sisters, but tennis had to be his sport here, as kicking a football around with any serious intent was forbidden. Later, as a young professional footballer, it was the perfect early-morning walk to the stadium just a few minutes away.

You pass the Victorian clock and cannon, then the sundial (which, on a sunny day, tells the time in Middlesbrough, Melbourne and New York), and you eventually reach the front gates of the park. Pass the cenotaph and the Dorman Museum, cross Linthorpe Road, and you’re on Ayresome Street and heading for the stadium, just as Clough would have done in the 1950s.

But there’s one more significant landmark before you walk a few hundred yards down Ayresome Street, with its tightly packed terrace houses, to the football ground. Rea’s Café, on the corner – now the site of a pawnbroker and jeweller – was a vibrant social centre back in the 1950s, a popular meeting place for young men and women because of the quality of its coffee and ice cream. Especially popular, too, for courting couples, because of the seclusion afforded by the separate booths along the length and breadth of the establishment.

It was to here that Middlesbrough footballers naturally gravitated after training, and it was in this place that Brian Clough met his future wife, Barbara, the introduction having been made by Clough’s more gregarious colleague, Italian-born goalkeeper Rolando Ugolini.

Continue down Ayresome Street, turn left into Warwick Street, and you’ll reach the entrance to a relatively new 60-home Wimpey development – on the site of the famous old football stadium.

Ayresome Park, scene of a thousand great footballing memories from the aforementioned Camsell, Hardwick, Mannion, Clough and the more modern-day heroes such as Maddren and Juninho, was demolished in 1995 when Middlesbrough Football Club decided to move to the glamorous, new Riverside Stadium down by the docks. Fans bemoaned the passing of the great ground, but those inner-city stadiums, set amongst packed, narrow streets, had become an anachronism and allowed no room for expansion.

Nonetheless, as your journey takes you through the estate, along The Turnstile, into The Midfield and finally into The Holgate (named after Middlesbrough’s kop end), you wonder whether there’s nothing more to remember the old ground by than a clutch of street names. But if you advance slowly and keep a sharp eye about you, you’ll spy a number of references to Ayresome Park; it’s like an old-fashioned treasure hunt.

First, there’s a pair of cast-iron football boots situated at the exact place where the centre spot was marked out each Saturday. Further on, a bronze football marks the old penalty spot, while the nearby goalposts are commemorated by a sculpture of a child’s coat slung over a railing. There’s little by way of actual preservation, but the old back wall of the Holgate End – together with the section where the pie stall was located – has been kept for posterity.

But the jewel in the crown of this open-air ‘museum’ is to be found just outside the front door of one of the houses in The Holgate. There, embedded in the lawn, is a curious little sculpture fashioned by South African-born artist Neville Gabie. It’s a set of cast-iron stud marks in the shape of the boot of North Korean footballer Pak Doo Ik, and it marks the spot of one of Ayresome Park’s most romantic moments.

It happened at 8.10 p.m. on 19 July 1966, when Pak Doo Ik, for one fleeting moment, became the most famous footballer in the world when he drove the ball home from 15 yards, the only goal of the game, to knock haughty Italy out of the World Cup and send the North Koreans – amazingly – into the quarter-finals. Nineteen thousand were there on that remarkable night, but many thousands more have claimed to have been present as the years go by, and the legendary moment remains forever etched on the collective memory of the town. It’s also still lodged very firmly in the minds of the North Koreans, who have been back to visit and have made the spot one of their National Heritage sites.

Barely have you left Mr Wimpey than you get to meet Mr Barratt. The old Middlesbrough General Hospital, at the end of Ayresome Street with the main entrance on Ayresome Green Lane, was a massive building stretching over many acres and had a proud history of tending to the town’s sick. Seven years ago it was pulled down and a spanking new Barratt development put up in its place, catering for first-time buyers and young families.

It will perhaps, by now, come as no surprise to learn the names of the streets on this estate: Camsell Court, Maddren Way and Clough Close – three generations of Middlesbrough footballers. The town and the game seem inextricably linked.

You’re nearing the end of the journey, as the Barratt development is just a couple of minutes from the Revie home. At the end of Ayresome Street, you’ll quickly cross a pedestrian bridge over the busy Newport Street, a feeder road for the A66 Middlesbrough bypass, before rejoining Ayresome Green Lane. You’ll see Archibald Primary School on your left, where the young Revie was a pupil, and then it’s just a few yards before you turn right into Bell Street.

Although hemmed in by those two busy roads at the back and front, Bell Street these days has the appearance of being a tranquil little cul-de-sac. Unlike Clough’s house in Valley Road, there’s no plaque on the wall at No. 20; indeed, it’s the one house on the street that seems to have lost its number plate.

In Revie’s day, the little two-up, two-down council houses, built just before the First World War, would have had a uniform look; now, as private dwellings, they have different-coloured front doors, and the odd-numbered homes on the other side of the road have new porches and other embellishments at the front.

But it’s easy to imagine the scene in the 1930s, because the alleyway at the back of the houses remains pretty much the same as it was then, a perfect venue for a cricket wicket or a football pitch for the children in the street.

So, from Clough to Revie, from the bright new homes of the 1930s back to the cramped terraced houses of the 1920s – which is where our story really begins.

The new addition to the family entered the world on a turbulent day – at least in meteorological terms. Over in Europe, the Times’ special correspondent in Berggiesshubel, Germany, reported at least 110 deaths and many villages destroyed after severe storms and flooding on the border with Czechoslovakia. ‘The catastrophe is the worst of its kind that the country can remember,’ he wrote.

Back home, in Middlesbrough, the town had experienced a heatwave. A correspondent for the Evening Gazette painted a vivid picture of ‘Night Life in the Slums’ in the Marsh Road district, not far from the Revie home.

Nonetheless, their two-up, two-down terraced houses made for basic living – even more cramped if inhabited by a large family, like the Revies’ neighbours, the Rhucrofts, at No. 28, who packed seven children into the bedrooms upstairs. Many households, too, regarded the front room downstairs – or the ‘parlour’ – as fit to be used only for high days and holidays, thus squeezing most activity into the kitchen and two bedrooms upstairs.

Mavis Barwick – then Longstaff – lived along the street from the Revies at No. 40 during the 1930s. ‘We didn’t have a bathroom – we brought in the tin bath from the back shed into the kitchen once a week. We washed in the sink in the kitchen, and of course our meals were cooked there. We did everything in that room! We had a three-piece suite and a piano in the front room, which was quite chock-a-block. But to me our house seemed quite luxurious, far better than houses further down the town.’

Mavis’s father would become trading manager at the Middlesbrough Co-op and later on, in 1956, mayor of the town. The Revies struggled more than their near neighbours. Don’s father was in work in 1927 as a qualified and skilled joiner but often unemployed in the Depression years that followed. Revie himself painted a bleak, forbidding picture of his early years. In Soccer’s Happy Wanderer, he recalled: ‘Unemployment and its attendant miseries stalked through Teesside in those years. There was no money; precious few toys for the children. My father was among that vast army of unemployed.’ And in a television interview in 1974, he said: ‘We were a very poor family. My father was out of work for two years and had to go looking for odd jobs; my mother had to take the washing in to keep us.’

In a 1975 radio interview, he would reflect more deeply on how his life had been shaped by this tough upbringing: