Interview: It's the toughest job in the world being a director of Leicester City
The 80-year-old former chairman of Leicester City Football Club struggles with a muscle-wasting condition today, a cruel condition exacerbated by the dodgiest of dodgy knees.
It is one of life's cruel ironies that this tall, still-imposing one-time Army PE instructor, a man who spent his life playing and being involved with sport, should spend the twilight of his years cut down by it.
But the mind, he winks, well, that is just fine.
"Ask me what you like," he says. "You might have to check some of the dates, but I remember most things pretty well."
He is a lovely old chap, Terry Shipman, and sitting here reminiscing about the good old days and the not-so-good old days during his time on the City board, it comes as a splendid surprise to find him in disarming, modest and chortling good form.
If all you know about him is the refrain "Shipman Out" – which, for a good portion of 1990/1991 season, was one of the most popular chants in Filbert Street, beaten only by the similar but more vociferous rumble of "Pleat Out" – then the truth, as it usually is in these situations, is a little more complex.
Shipman is a dyed-in-the-wool, blue-through-and-through, bona fide City fan; a man with an expansive knowledge of a game he fell in love with as an eight-year-old, on the packed terraces at Filbert Street, being passed down to the front to watch his boyhood heroes Sep Smith, Johnny Duncan and Walter Harrison.
After the war, he played semi-professionally for AC Hamburg in Germany ("Most of their players had been killed or captured," he explains), and could have made a career out of it – if his dad had not put his foot down.
"I had trials at Chester but my father wouldn't let me go. He said there was no money in football," says Shipman. "And he was right, too."
Instead, he returned to Leicester and built his own haulage business.
He bought an ailing transport company with eight drivers, eight lorries, one mechanic – and no customers.
"So I went round Leicester, met the managers of every factory in town and virtually begged for work," he says.
All the lorries were on HP and the bills, he says, were piling up. It was a massive risk.
But it worked. In 1966, Shipman – by now a successful haulage boss with a fleet of more than 100 lorries and full order books – was invited to become a Leicester City director.
He was 38, the youngest director the club had ever had. There still was not much money in football in those days, particularly at City, and Shipman spent far too much of his time trying to persuade local businessmen with a bit of spare cash to invest in the club. It was the most difficult thing in the world, he says.
Over the next 25 years, he learned the second hardest thing in the world was hiring the right manager.
"Not just finding the right man, but finding him at the right stage of his career," he says. "I'd say we did that – with one or two exceptions – pretty well during my time at Leicester."
He liked them all, he says. Every single one of them. There was Matt Gillies – an intelligent gentleman, whose impressive career at Leicester was blighted with illness.
Gillies – a heavy smoker – thought he had cancer, remembers Shipman. When he was finally diagnosed with a treatable form of TB, City were virtually relegated. Gillies resigned that year.
Then came Frank O'Farrell, the softly-spoken Irishman who got City promoted but left after two years to join Manchester United.
"I remember him telling the board he wasn't going to go to United but he wanted to speak to them," says Shipman.
O'Farrell spoke to them and the next week he had his bags packed for Old Trafford.
"I think we were a bit naive there," admits Shipman.
Then came Jimmy Bloomfield, a man recommended to Shipman by a couple of London-based newspaper reporters.
"We took a bit of a chance with Jimmy," he says, "but it paid off."
Then Frank McLintock – a great City player who returned to Filbert Street for one terrible season that ended in relegation.
"I always liked Frank, I do to this day," he says, "but it didn't work out. It was disastrous, wasn't it?"
Then it was gruff Scot Jock Wallace – "a big bear of a man," remembers Shipman, "I could barely tell a word he was saying. I sat next to him on a coach journey to Scotland once and I only understood about one word in 10. I stepped off that bus and just hoped I hadn't agreed to double his wages."
Next came Gordon Milne – a thoroughly decent man, says Shipman, who kept City in the top flight against the odds for nearly five years before handing the reins over to Brian Hamilton whose inexperience took City down to Division Two.
And then in stepped David Pleat, a man whose respect in the nationwide football community continues to have an exclusion zone around Leicestershire, thanks largely to his spell as City boss.
Shipman worked with eight managers before the arrival of Pleat, yet it is Pleat's name that will be forever associated with Shipman's in the history of Leicester City.
"I can tell you, hand on heart, David Pleat was the most knowledgeable football man I have ever met," says Shipman.
"He didn't just know every other team in the rest of the four divisions – he knew their reserve teams and some of their youth players as well. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the game and tactics when we got him – I don't mind admitting to you, I was chuffed to bits."
That first season, as Pleat took Hamilton's faltering side and added some shrewdly-acquired additions, his appointment seemed like a masterstroke. Pleat's City lost only four games from January until the end of the season.
Two years later, it was all going badly, embarrassingly and obviously, wrong. City hovered perilously close to the bottom three and the crowd turned, not only on the manager but the man who hired him in.
It is not nice, says Shipman, to sit in the stand and hear 5,000 or more voices demanding you quit the job you love.
"You'd have to be a funny sort of chap to sit through that and not feel anything," he says.
So where did it all go wrong?
Shipman hunches his huge shoulders and looks again for an answer that has eluded him for the best part of 20 years.
"If only I knew," he says. "I just don't know. That's the honest answer.
"With managers sometimes, I don't know, their talent, their gut instinct, whatever it is, it leaves them.
"It hadn't been the best season, the season before, but I'm an optimist. Come the start of the next season, I thought we'd do better.
"I stood by Pleat – I'll stand by anyone who I think is a good man, who is doing their best, I think they deserve that – but, well, he lost the plot.
"They do that, managers. That's the trickiest part of being a director – picking the right man, at the right time.
"I thought David was the right man, I really did. But, by that period, it clearly wasn't the right time."
By January 1991, with City on the cusp of the bottom three, it was Shipman who proposed to his fellow directors that Pleat should go. It was just after Christmas, he remembers, and "I had the rotten job of telling him."
The board, however, had another request. They suggested he should step down, too. He did not want to, but he did not argue.
"I wanted to stay on until the end of that season, but I saw no reason to stand in their way," he says.
Martin George became the new chairman, Brian Little took over the manager's job and City began a revival which lasted the decade.
"Martin was a younger man, he did well, the club did well," says Shipman. "I was pleased for them."
He has been out of the game for a while now, losing a small fortune when his shares were wiped out when the club went into administration in 2002. He lost a lot of money that day, he says ruefully.
"It's a different game now," he says. "I wouldn't like to be in it now. It's all about money."
It was all about money then, though, wasn't it?
"Well, it was important, yes. But not like it is today. The amounts of money today are ridiculous. The gap between the big six clubs and everyone else is getting bigger and bigger. It's not good."
Former City chairman Terry Shipman
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