How letters from Bill Shankly inspired new book about Liverpool FC

A bag of letters from Bill Shankly helped Alan McDougall’s dream of writing a book about Liverpool FC become a reality

Alan said:

“The key turning point came when I went to Liverpool and met Bill Shankly’s grandson, Chris, who gave me these bags of letters from when Shanks retired in 1974,”

The personal messages sent to one of its greatest managers brought home the unbreakable and emotional bond between the club and its community during a time of monumental change. 

He added:

 “That was the trigger for a book telling the story of the club through the fans’ voices,”

“A book written by a fan – me – about the fans, and of course, it was for the fans.”

Dreams and Songs to Sing: A People’s History of Liverpool FC from Shankly to Klopp, offers a new filled-with-emotion take on the club’s history, bringing together years of research and interviews with fans from all around the world with Alan’s own lifelong passion for the Reds.

It tracks LFC from the construction of Anfield in 1892 to the return of the glory days with Jurgen Klopp, and along with lighter moments – like a 12-year-old Alan’s letter to Ian Rush asking how he was getting on in Italy when he was playing for Juventus –  there are letters from grieving Italians after Heysel, and eyewitness accounts of Hillsborough to tell the inseparable story of the club and the city.

It’s a change in tone for 49-year-old Alan who, as a history professor at the University of Guelph near Toronto, Canada, is more used to writing academic tomes for his students, and more serious books about the influence of the game on society.

But he said:

“I wanted to write something that would have a wider appeal and I’d always wanted to write about the club I support,” he says. “There’s lots of literature about Liverpool Football Club and I had to think about how to make the book a bit different.

“I was lucky to get letters through the club and from Shankly’s family, and I did a lot of interviews with about 50 fans, not just Liverpool but Everton fans too.

“And as an ex-pat living abroad I tried to bring in international voices. Liverpool has fans everywhere, not just in the obvious places, but in Rwanda, and Morocco and New Zealand.”

For Alan, football was there long before he was an academic:

“My family is very sporty.  Dad who’s from Liverpool played football as a kid and became a marathon runner; mum – who became a Liverpool fan when she met dad – her career was a PE teacher. My sister is an ultra-runner and my brother and I both grew up playing football and doing athletics.

“I was quite a good football player as a kid, I played with junior schoolboys at Spurs before I decided to focus on A levels and studying, but football and a love for Liverpool was there long before I became a history professor.

“My dad is from Walton, and he and his brother grew up in the 40s and 50s in Liverpool 4 and, as you did in those days, they both went to games at Anfield and Goodison depending on who was playing at home.

“My uncle became an Everton fan and my dad chose Liverpool – I think because his brother supported Everton! Dad left Liverpool to go to university and stayed in the south, so I grew up in Kent but had this family link to the city that never leaves you.

“I’ve written a lot about football but never been able to do a passion project and write about the team I love and write about it as a fan and not just a historian, objectively, but from the heart as well.”

Alan continued:

“The hardest chapter to write about was the one on the Heysel disaster, I think because, as a Liverpool fan, that’s always felt like this dark shadow on the club, and I had never wanted to engage as much with Heysel as I had to do and ask some hard questions.

“That was difficult.

“What surprised me is that you know that Liverpool are big internationally, but it’s the scale of it. The money and effort fans make to come from, say, New Zealand to watch a game at Anfield for the first time, and just how strange and wonderful it is that this relatively small city of Liverpool, that’s faced a lot of decline and challenges across the 20^th Century, becomes this almost mythical source of joy and passion for these people from places so far away.

“I mean I knew that but when you talk to fans about it and realise the extent of the passion, I wanted to get that across.  I wanted to celebrate that.

“A lot of them are as passionate as people who live around the corner from the ground.

“There was one fan who sadly passed away last year, Chris Wood, who really built his life around the club to the extent that he got a job working for British Rail so he could get free travel to go and watch Liverpool play.

“Tom Heath from New Zealand, whose dad was an itinerant preacher, knocked on the door of some stranger’s house to ask if he could watch the 1981 European Cup Final where Liverpool beat Real Madrid.

“We think of Liverpool now having an international fan base, but it started to happen under Shankly and then Paisley.”

Alan said:

“Every fan thinks their club is unique, but there are elements that make supporting Liverpool Football Club, good and bad, quite distinctive; from the club and its games, to helping to invent modern terrace culture in the 60s with its songs and its colour and the wit, and to the struggle for justice after Hillsborough which became central to its identity.”

Alan charts how, in the 60s, Liverpool became as big for the club as it did the Beatles and, as well as looking at its milestones and owners, goes on to look at a new chapter in its history with the women’s team.

Did he ever get a reply from Rushie: “No I didn’t.  But who knows, maybe I will now?!”

Dreams and Songs to Sing: A People’s History of Liverpool FC from Shankly to Klopp is published by Cambridge University Press and can be purchased here.

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