Ron Warrilow covered Wolves as a journalist for some 55 years.
The first manager he worked with was Stan Cullis, and the last, Kenny Jackett.
He also covered West Bromwich Albion for 50 years and, as a respected doyen of the Midlands media patch, worked on news, and in particular court cases, for almost 60. Now that’s longevity.
Warrilow covered hearings at Stafford Assizes when guilty defendants were sentenced to death. He grilled iconic film stars such as Charlton Heston. He once interviewed Prince William of Gloucester, then ninth in line to the throne, minutes before he took part in an airshow race at Halfpenny Green during which his plane crashed, and he died.
He also once got locked in Banks’ Brewery after a press trip and had to escape by building a wall of beer crates. At least, when he and his fellow beer connoisseurs finally decided it was time to leave. And his famed ‘Tarzan’ phone ringtone once went off when a Judge was delivering a verdict in Crown Court and, perhaps more dangerously, during a Mick McCarthy press conference.
For someone who had his words about football read by millions thanks to his freelance commitments with so many national dailies and Sunday newspapers, there has also always been a large extent to which home is where the heart is. He admits he has ‘gold and black coursing through my veins’, but also, unlike most of that persuasion, counts Albion as his ‘second team’. His was a career packed with hard work and determination, but also plenty of fun.
Warrilow, who lives in Sedgley, turns 80 today, a landmark celebration which will be marked by a family meal.
And one which provides an opportune moment to look back on his decades in the trade.
“I will always be thankful for having the most wonderful career for which I feel very blessed,” is the Warrilow summing-up. Concise and evocative. Ever the professional.
“I have covered so many brilliant football matches, and met so many great people not only in sport but across showbusiness with film stars and others from stage and screen,” he continues.
“There are so many highlights, too many to mention, and I have seen so many changes.
“And I made so many friends, both from the local area and nationally when people came to Molineux or The Hawthorns to cover games.
“I feel I have been very fortunate.”
What a career. What a story. ‘Crackerjack’, you might say. Which is the Warrilow catchline when it comes to showing his approval.
And so, to the age-old question, how did it all begin?
With a job advert in the Express & Star, no less!
‘Wanted: Young person to train as journalist’, read the notice from Bayliss’s News and Sport Agency.
That was music to the ears of the young Warrilow, who had completed his O levels at Dudley Grammar School, but wasn’t too enamoured with the prospect of following up with A levels.
Eight aspiring hopefuls were handed the assignment of heading to Molineux on the following Saturday afternoon to produce a 250-word report on the reserve game between, ironically, Wolves and Albion.
On the Sunday, Warrilow received a phone call to say the job was his. On the Monday, he went into school and, despite his headmaster’s protestations, which included having to pay ‘two pound seven and six’ as he had already been entered for the exams, he said he was leaving. On the Tuesday, he enjoyed a day off. And on the Wednesday, he started work. Craig David, eat your heart out.
“Journalism has traditionally been a very difficult profession to get into,” Warrilow admits.
“By sheer fluke or good fortune, that wasn’t how it proved for me!”
What’s that old proverb? A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. So, too, a career of six decades.
Whilst quickly learning ‘on the job’ from more experienced colleagues, Warrilow taught himself how to type – you could take a typewriter into the Wolves press box back in those days – and studied Pitman shorthand before eventually honing that system to suit his own style.
Thrown straight into the world of news and sport, one of his first assignments was to cover a tennis tournament in Malvern.
At 16, Warrilow didn’t drive, so that trip involved a bus from Wombourne into Wolverhampton, train to Birmingham, motorway express coach to Worcester, and bus to Malvern. Then the same on the return journey. Every day for a fortnight. The exuberance – and determination – of youth.
He was already covering football, initially Wolves, at the start of the 1960/61 season months after the team had won their most recent FA Cup and not long after their three league titles.
The powers of that incredible team were just starting to wane, and the Golden era had effectively come to an end.
Cullis, who would eventually leave the club in 1964, was known as the ‘Iron Manager’ for his sometimes uncompromising nature, part of the recipe behind his success.
But for Warrilow, the young journalist pup, he couldn’t have been kinder.
“Stan was as good as gold,” he says, pun perhaps intended.
“I think because I was so young he took me under his wing, I wouldn’t say we were ‘close, close’ but he was great to deal with and always answered my questions.
“I can remember sitting next to Stan a few times in the director’s box at Castlecroft watching the young players come through in the Midland Intermediate League and again he would always be happy to be sociable and have a chat.”
Delving into the Warrilow memory bank for his thoughts on managers, players and games is an extensive process. As we spend an hour in the café at the Beacon Centre in Sedgley he recalls those memories with metronomic accuracy. He has more than enough to fill a book.
Of the managers, he particularly recalls Ian Greaves as ‘one of the nicest managers and a hell of a man’, not to mention the home-made biscuits Mark McGhee would bring to press conferences at the Newbridge tennis club which had been baked by his wife.
Then there was McCarthy, whose press conferences were always lively, even more so when rudely interrupted by the Warrilow ringtone.
“Mick was there, chatting away as normal, and then, all of a sudden, Johnny Weissmuller chimed in with his jungle call,” he recalls.
“I quickly had to scuttle out with my tail between my legs.”
McCarthy collapsed in hysterics. As did the rest of the press corps. But Warrilow encountered a very different reaction when annoying Bobby Robson many years earlier in his career.
“I can’t recall upsetting too many managers, but Bobby was one of them,” he explains.
“Call it the naivety of youth, but Ipswich had just lost at Molineux and in the press conference afterwards he said his team had played all the football.
“’If that was the case’, I replied, ‘then how was it that Wolves won the game’?
“It was like a red rag to a bull, and led to a bit of a heated argument, but I saw Bobby again in the years that followed and all was fine!”
That’s a reminder that it wasn’t just Wolves managers who Warrilow questioned over that long and drama-filled career.
True greats such as Bill Shankly and Matt Busby were among them, and he feels privileged to have watched players such as the Manchester United trio of Best, Law and Charlton strutting their stuff at Molineux and The Hawthorns.
When it comes to Wolves, he was always a big fan of the skills of Peter Broadbent, and Peter Knowles, whom he still chats to regularly.
He loved Frank Munro, never saw Terry Wharton miss a penalty, and has fond memories of the latter and Alan Hinton bursting down opposite flanks before putting crosses in for Jimmy Murray to nod home.
More recently, he loved the partnerships of Dougan and Richards, and Bull and Mutch, and feels privileged to have seen Wolves win four big finals – the 1974 and 1980 League Cups and the 1988 Sherpa Van Trophy, all at Wembley, and the 2003 Championship play-off success at the Millennium.
But the best goal he has ever seen? That accolade belongs to Dave Wagstaffe.
“It was a goal Waggy scored against Arsenal, past Bob Wilson,” he explains.
“He went past a defender before smashing it into the net from distance, a goal which has always stayed in my mind.”
As for the game which has also stuck in his mind, that would be the epic Molineux clash with Leeds in 1972 when a 2-1 win denied the visitors a league and cup double, instead handing the title to Brian Clough and Derby County.
“The atmosphere in the ground was absolutely incredible that night,” Warrilow recalls.
Goals, games and highlights may not have changed too much down the years, but the way football is watched and covered by the media certainly has.
The arrival of the Premier League and monumental broadcasting deals, and then the internet and social media, has dramatically changed the footballing landscape, in many ways to the good, but whilst also making it seem less familiar.
For a vast swathe of Warrilow’s career, newspapers and radio – which he also worked on from time to time – were the only means of communication when it came to football news and results.
When he covered Central League reserve matches at Molineux on a Saturday afternoon whilst the first team were away, he would prove the most popular man in the stadium at full time.
Whilst phoning his report through to the Express & Star, he would enquire of the copytaker if legendary Wolves correspondent Phil Morgan had been on with the first team’s score, and then relay it to a group of spectators gathered in the Waterloo Road enclosure below.
Simpler and far less cluttered times!
“If I think back to the Sixties and Seventies, I think football clubs were a lot warmer, there was a lovely atmosphere and it was all very different,” Warrilow explains.
“We used to interview everyone in a little tea room just off the main corridor in the Waterloo Road Stand, although we ended up outside, often in the rain, when the ground was redeveloped.
“I’d be walking from the main stand into the corridor and could chat to any player that I saw, the likes of Billy Wright, Jimmy Mullen, Peter Broadbent and Bill Slater – they were always happy to have natter after a game.
“As football changed and clubs changed you had to ask permission to speak to people and it became far more difficult.
“Back in the day you didn’t need that, players would have a rattle to you and would completely trust you – they knew you weren’t going to turn them over in the press.”
Warrilow spent several years with his first employers Bayliss, before then branching out with a couple of colleagues before eventually running his own agency, covering Wolves and Albion for numerous local and national outlets on alternate weekends, along with many other sports. On one occasion, whilst covering an athletics meeting in the old wooden press box at Aldersley Stadium, he shared an afternoon with Olympic gold medallist Harold Abrahams, later immortalised in the Chariots of Fire film, who was working for a Sunday newspaper. Another endearing memory.
Covering news and courts during the week, in all of those roles Warrilow was someone who would have plenty of words of advice and wise counsel for other journalists coming through the ranks, who still now hold him in such high esteem for his encouragement and support. ‘He has done so much, but has never had an ego,’ was a recent comment on Facebook. So very true.
True also that he has made so many cherished friendships as a result of his career. He still remains in touch with many, including regular gatherings of the ‘Old Farts’ – their terminology not mine – at the Great Western pub.
It perhaps remains difficult to believe that, right at the very beginning, his formative years included seeing people being sentenced to death at Stafford Assizes.
“The judge would don the black cap, and tell the guilty defendant that they would be taken to a place of execution to be hung by the neck until they were dead, before adding, ‘may God have mercy on your soul’,” he recalls.
“It was something that was always very chilling to observe.”
As Wolves prepare to complete their home fixture schedule against Crystal Palace this weekend, it is now a decade since Warrilow attended his last game in an official capacity, the win over Carlisle and lifting of the League One title.
And while he later also stopped covering courts and officially hung up his pen and notebook – he never used any sort of recording device – he does still emerge out of storage to cover election counts.
He was there at Aldersley last weekend for the local election results, and plans to be involved again for whenever the General Election takes place over the coming months.
Family understandably takes precedence these days. He has been married to Hilary for 58 years, has a son Guy, daughter Leigh and granddaughters Natalie, Erin and Talia.
And when it comes to family, and his surname, therein lies another story!
For Ron Warrilow was actually born Ron Van Zuiden, as his mother met and married a Dutch soldier who had been part of an encampment at Wrottesley Park after leaving German-occupied Holland during the Second World War.
The young Van Zuiden then lived in Holland for three years of his early childhood before his parents split up and his mother married again, and he had his name changed by deed poll to his stepfather’s surname, Warrilow.
So, the man who has told so many stories over six decades have quite a good one to throw into the mix, about himself!
Which carries a certain amount of irony, as Warrilow has never been the loudest presence in a media room or the press gallery in court. Apart from the Tarzan ringtone.
Instead, for all those years, a calm and knowledgeable figure doing a professional and excellent job whilst always being such relaxed and encouraging company.
It was a career well worked, and one which still lingers on, even if the football side is now followed more as an observer from the fringes than inside the heat of battle!
As Warrilow turns 80 today, what a journey, and what a ride it has been.
Crackerjack.
- Ron has sat down with Tim Beech of Wolverhampton Community Radio to go through his ‘Inside Tracks’ and tell the story of his life. This will go out at 6pm on WCR on Tuesday, May 28th.
PICTURE COURTESY EXPRESS & STAR
