The remarkable life story of a Ferryhill miner’s son who became a top footballer, a sports shop entrepreneur and a multi-millionaire tax exile is told in a book out this month.
Bill Gates died in October last year, aged 79, his later years clouded with dementia believed to be the result of many years repetitively heading a football on the field and in training during a 14-year career with Middlesbrough FC.
His illness prompted his wife, fellow former Spennymoor Grammar School pupil Dr Judith Gates (nee Curry) to found Head Safe Football, a charity which seeks to raise awareness of the game’s inherent dangers and greatly to restrict heading.
No Brainer
Called No-brainer, the book has been written by Shildon born Mike Amos MBE, seven times the North-East Journalist of the Year.
Daily Telegraph chief sports writer Jeremy Wilson has called it “a heart breaking but still inspiring insight into the real-life impact of the biggest issue facing the world’s biggest sport.”
Bill Gates was one of five sons of Jimmy Gates – all with the middle name Lazenby – brought up in Neale Street, Dean Bank. His brother Eric was twice capped by England and played for Sunderland and Ipswich Town.
Posh
Judith Curry lived with her parents in a terraced house in Whitworth Terrace, Spennymoor. “We had a little balcony outside the bedroom window. People thought we were posh,” she recalls.
Bill captained the English schools team, travelled Europe and was in Spennymoor United’s Northern League side before he was 16. Judith was a more studious type, reckoned her best game was Scrabble.
They got to know one another better on a school trip to the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome – he’d originally had an eye on a blonde lass from Shildon – threw their three coins in the Trevi fountain and wished. Bill even bought the young Judith a single rose.
“It was quite romantic for a Ferryhill lad,” she says.
Within a year she was pregnant, effectively required to leave school in disgrace. “There was no option. It was as if being pregnant was infectious, like Covid,” says Judith.
At 17, Bill had signed for the Boro, said to be Britain’s first £50-a-week footballer, put up with his new wife and baby son in a club house. “It didn’t even have a telephone,” says Judith. “I had to go to the call box at the end of the road to ask my mother how to make mince.”
Sports shop
An accomplished but no-nonsense defender, Bill studied accountancy after training and in 1974 opened his first sports shop in the Dundas Arcade in Middlesbrough – a time when trainers ceased just to be men in frayed tracksuits and a mucky towel around their neck and were becoming the leisurewear of choice.
By 1987 Monument Sports had ten shops, sold for £4.4m. Thanks to support from both sets of parents, Judith had attended teacher training college in Durham, given birth to a second son, became a head teacher at 29, a school inspector at 36 and later a world-travelled visiting professor. The business sold, they moved to a beachside villa in the Cayman Islands, their boat – named after her father – moored outside.
Head Safe
Though the couple continued to have adventures around the world, the crippling headaches which Bill first experienced as a player were worsening. By 2014 concerns were growing about his memory. Doctors feared chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurological condition caused by repeated head impacts. It was confirmed at post mortem.
Dr Gates, 78, campaigns ceaselessly and globally. “I want to shout out a warning to the young players of today. I want to tell them that they are not indestructible, that there’s a ticking time bomb,” she says. “As you are, so once was Bill.”
The Head Safe Football charity was launched last year back in Neale Street, a life-size inflatable elephant reinforcing the theme that the life-changing dangers of repeated heading are the elephant in the room.
School mates
Mike Amos has travelled Britain talking to medical experts and to the families of former players but also, much closer to home, tracked down some of Bill’s old friends and former school mates like Keith Telford and Les Walker from a time when coalface camaraderie surfaced seamlessly to the long terraces above.
Some remember grammar school headmaster Billy Sumner, who’d patrol the corridors on his push bike, wearing an academic gown and wielding a cane. Others remember pig muck derbies around the streets of Dean Bank, or how Jimmy Gates would always keep a pane of glass handy for the regular occasions when his kids or their mates put a neighbour’s window out.
They also talked of the occasion when Jimmy travelled to Scotland to watch young Bill – Billy, they called him in Dean Bank – in a schools international. “All the lads round the doors wanted to talk about the match and all Jimmy wanted to do was talk about the electric blanket at the hotel. He’d never had one of those before. Probably no one had in Dean Bank.”
Pauline
The book also talks to Pauline Blanch, the blonde from Shildon upon whom young Bill’s eye had first lit. She recalls a formally “mixed” school in which the deputy head still kept a list by the chemistry lab blackboard of all the young ladies seen fraternising with the opposite sex.
Yet more extraordinarily, Pauline recalls that the senior mistress would lift girls’ skirts as they left assembly, ostensibly to check if the regulation blue knickers were in place.
So did the young Gates ever get into scrapes? “Oh come on,” says Keith Telford. “Billy was the biggest catch at Spennymoor Grammar School. Don’t you think that getting Judith pregnant was a big enough scrape on its own?”
*No-brainer by Mike Amos is published by Haythorp Books (£14.95) with every penny in profits going to Head Safe Football. It’s also available through Amazon or other bookselling websites or from the author at mikeamos81@aol.com
A formal launch takes places in the Legends Lounge at Middlesbrough FC’s Riverside Stadium at 10.30am on Tuesday May 7, when Paul Frost’s film about the Bill and Judith Gates story, The Billion Pound Game, will also be shown. All are welcome.
South West Durham News covering news across County Durham.
