Which Detective Novelist Managed Hull City?

With City back in the Premiership today, our soccer scribes correspondent Phil Ascough looks at the moonlighting gig of a previous top flight manager.

Is the linesman far away or is that striker massive?

He led Hull City to two Premier League promotions, the FA Cup Final and a brief campaign in European competition. He also managed a dozen other clubs and his son recently took on his first manager role. As a player he made more than 700 appearances including more than 300 for Manchester United. But throughout a professional career which began in 1979 at Gillingham he never – as far as we know – had to deal with the murder of a colleague. Not even for missing a penalty or notching an own goal.

That’s what sets Steve Bruce apart from Steve Barnes, manager and coach of Leddersford Town.

Barnes was the character created by Bruce as the hero in all three of his detective novels. The titles – “Striker!”, “Sweeper!”, and “Defender!” – are, thankfully, not the full extent of the creator’s imagination. Typically self-deprecating, Bruce once told an interviewer from Eurosport that you could probably pick up a copy of any of the titles for 99p. In fact they’re pretty hard to come by. I think I paid about a tenner for my copy of Striker! and we read excerpts from it during a football literature event at the Humber Mouth Festival in 2013.

More recently I’ve seen it available online for more than £150 and, after recent events, the cover alone could make it worth a punt. The artwork shows a player, unluckily wearing the number 13, lying face down on a football pitch in a pool of blood, the smear on his blue and white striped shirt indicating he’s been stabbed in the back. A bloodstained knife, presumably the murder weapon, has been dropped inches from the victim’s body. Yet the fans in the stand are just sitting there, the stewards and ballboys are unmoved, and the assistant referee is waiting at the halfway line, flag just hanging down from his wrist, having not seen anything untoward. You could be forgiven for thinking someone finally snapped after watching the antics of Argentina’s World Cup bad boys, went too far, and everyone in the stadium turned a blind eye.

The original price of £5.50 now seems like an absolute bargain.

It’s an easy read in that you can get through it in maybe two hours, so about the same duration as watching a match with half time and a bit of added time. And maybe something a little stronger than water during the hydration breaks to get more in tune with Bruce’s flights of fantasy. But it’s also a challenge as the first three lines undermine the picture and confuse the reader about the crime scene:

“Bright red blood on the knife blade.”

“The knife is in my hand.”

“Duffy’s dead body stretched out on the locker room floor.”

Barnes is the manager, an undisguised Steve Bruce writing in the first person about the pressures of managing an unfashionable football club with a shot of getting into the Premier League. Duffy is the new signing and top striker. Barnes suspects his assistant of having committed the deadly deed and the flimsy scenario descends into a shambles of shoot-out, kidnapping, and Barnes swimming the length of a reservoir to escape gangsters – or possibly terrorists. References drawn from Bruce’s playing career – he only moved into management a year before Striker! was published – demonstrate his passion for fitness, a strong moral code, Jaguar cars and painful cliches.

You can’t judge the book by its cover but some of the reviews are worth a read. A one-star review of Sweeper! Makes the assumption that Bruce has attempted parody: “The cover, the title, everything about this sounds like a send up surely?” Tongue is no doubt firmly in cheek for this assessment of Defender!: “Absolutely genius. The plot twists are phenomenal and the imagery that Steve conjures up of Brazil and food is on a par with Shakespeare. A must read, 5 out of 5.” As for Striker!, the consensus seems to be “so bad it’s good”: “There is something about this book that makes it absolutely brilliant… even though it’s, err, awful! I read it in one sitting (it’s only 128 pages long) which took me a couple of hours. Hours that I will never have again, but I’m glad that I spent them reading this.”

And then there’s Bruce’s own honest opinion. He told the Eurosport interviewer: “It was a long time ago, and I’m not sure I want to be reminded of how bad they were. Just because I got a GCSE in English, I thought I was going to be the next Dick Francis. It didn’t make any contribution at all to anyone’s income. It became a laughing stock, to be honest. I think they’re probably still on the shelves somewhere.”

 And when a Sky Sports reporter asked Bruce if he would be “dusting off his typewriter” he replied: “No. Have you read them? Go and read them and you’ll understand why.”

Phil Ascough

Did William Wilberforce Own A Pet?

At Curiosity, we like to think we’re not afraid to handle the big questions. Here, our animal ownership correspondent Angus Young takes on a surprisingly important one.

Wilberforce’s statue at Wilberforce House, yesterday. He looks to us like a cat man.

In June 1826 a meeting of like-minded people was held at Old Slaughter’s Coffee House in St. Martin’s Lane in London. The gathering was taking place because of shared determination among those present to change animals’ lives and among their number was an MP.

By then, Hull-born William Wilberforce was best-known for heading an ultimately successful parliamentary  campaign to end the British slave trade. However, he also had a common cause with most of those present in the coffee house that day. Wilberforce was convinced of the importance of religion, education, morality and championed  numerous related causes and campaigns. Among them was a burgeoning movement to protect animals from human cruelty.

At the time, cruelty to animals was widely accepted by society. Few people kept pets and animals were used for working, food and entertainment while setting dogs on chained bulls or bears was considered a sport. Four years earlier the first-ever law protecting animals had been passed after a campaign by an Irish MP Richard Martin. The legislation applied to horses and cattle. Martin was also present in the coffee house along with Wilberforce and the Reverend Arthur Broome, a vocal animal welfare campaigner and vicar of St. Mary’s in the Bow.

Together, the meeting of 22 people agreed to form a new society dedicated to the prevention of cruelty of animals, later re-named as the RSPCA when  Queen Victoria gave her permission for the addition of the prefix  ‘Royal’. Wilberforce’s interest in the subject was a long-standing one, prompted by his own religious conviction. He wrote many essays on how to combat the mistreatment of animals, including a fierce condemnation of the practice of bull-fighting. His belief was that both man and animal were of the same origin and, as such, they were both meant to live in a harmonious relationship.

Early campaigns organised by the new society covered animal welfare on farms and animal fighting. Until then and like most large towns, Wilberforce’s birthplace was rife with animal cruelty. Bull-baiting continued to be a regular event at carnivals during Wilberforce’s lifetime while cock-fighting remained a popular pastime. A book printed in Hull in 1761 titled The Gentleman’s or Farmer’s Companion even provided extensive advice on how to buy and breed fighting cocks along with tips on their diet and how to house them in coops fragranced with burnt herbs to protect the birds from mites.

Today, the RSPA hosts an annual Wilberforce Lecture allowing leading figures to talk about the relationship between humans and animals and recently published the Wilberforce Report, mapping out a detailed look at the challenges and opportunities facing animal well-being over the next 25 years. As for pets, it’s known that when Wilberforce married his family home in London became a slightly eccentric place with numerous pets living inside the house, including a cherished rabbit.

Alas, we don’t know the rabbit’s name.

Angus Young

Which is the most colourful church in Hull?

Unless you’re Catholic, you may never have set foot in an undeniably beautiful building right in the city centre. Our tabernacle appreciation correspondent Angus Young had a shufty.

St Charles Borromeo church, Jarratt Street, yesterday.

I was prompted to pose this question after reading a new planning application submitted to Hull City Council. Part of it seeks listed building consent to demolish an internal wall between the front and rear reception rooms in the presbytery of St Charles Borromeo Church in Jarratt Street to create a new larger community space. The presbytery was created by modifying two early 19th century town houses to provide a home for several priests, a deacon and a housekeeper required for the new Roman Catholic church built next door in 1829.

Today it is occupied by just one priest Father Phil Cunnah who divides his time between St Charles Borromeo in Hull and two churches in Holderness – Saint Mary and Saint Joseph in Hedon and Saint Peter and Saint John Fisher in Withernsea. As for his official home, it’s now regarded as being too large for just a single priest serving several parishes hence the current conversion plans. The idea behind creating a new larger internal space is part of an initiative to host more public tours of the church highlighting its stunning art and architecture.

Many places in Hull lay claim to be the city’s best kept secret but, in my humble opinion, none come close to St Charles because unless you happen to be Catholic the magnificent interior remains largely unseen and unknown. Father Phil says he’s hoping to change that by making the church more accessible and by encouraging more visitors to enjoy it.

Originally, the church’s walls were largely bare but the whole interior was painted and decorated in 1841. Just over 45 years later a new senior priest William Sullivan was appointed with grand plans to upgrade the building which was now the focal point for a rapidly expanding Catholic community living in the city centre.

Previously an oblong hall with little decoration, it was transformed at a cost of £3,000 in the style of the Italian Renaissance with many new features being reproduced from the great churches of Rome. The architects responsible were a local firm, Smith Brodrick and Lowther, but the artist behind many of the paintings and decorative work still one show today hailed from Germany. Heinrich Immen-Kamp had moved to Hull and was living in nearby Wright Street at the time of the facelift in the early 1890s. A contemporary newspaper report describes him as a “decorator of much taste and capacity” who had turned the church into “one of the prettiest chapels in England”.

Immen-Kamp is now a largely forgotten figure in Hull but his work at St. Charles remains his lasting legacy. Virtually every wall carries some of his decorative flourishes. Father Cunnah’s predecessor, the Very Rev. Canon Michael Loughlin, said: “St. Charles’ is a magnificent  example of flamboyant Austrian rococo and Italian Baroque architecture, more reminiscent of the sunny climes of Italy or Spain than the north of England. “This beauty and splendour in the heart of Hull is one of the city’s best-kept secrets.”

As well as the visual overload, there is a huge chunk of religious history to digest if you happen to spend time in the church. My personal favourite story relates to a painting of the Nativity hung in the north aisle which was brought to Hull in 1798 by a French priest who smuggled it out of his home country to prevent it being destroyed by revolutionaries. The priest reputedly hid the painting in a cart full of hay but was stopped on his journey by soldiers who thrust bayonets into the hay looking for hidden goods. Somehow the painting wasn’t discovered but it was damaged and still features a tear in the fabric made by a bayonet blade.

St. Charles will be opening to the public for guided tours as part of this year’s Heritage Open Days weekend in September.

Angus Young