People sneered Bill Kenwright was a friend of my family like it was a dirty secret. It was an honour and in years to come he will be regarded as the father of the modern Everton

• Bill Kenwright was one of the last great club chairmen in English football
• But the Everton chairman was also a kind man, a good man and a friend
• He was one of the guardians of our game and always wanted the best for Everton
• Listen to the latest episode of Mail Sport’s football podcast ‘It’s All Kicking Off!’ 

Bill Kenwright was my mum’s friend long before he became mine. They worked together on Coronation Street in the late 1960s when my mum was already an old hand in the show and Bill was introduced as Betty Turpin’s son, Gordon Clegg. She was kind to him back then and he never forgot it.

In recent years, when she began to struggle with illness, Bill repaid that kindness many, many times over. He invited her to his stage productions and arranged a reunion with her and Sir Ian McKellen when he was playing Hamlet at the Theatre Royal, in Windsor, a couple of years ago. My mum wasn’t well enough to go but the invitation meant the world to her.

In the last year of his life, when a section of Everton fans attacked Bill and drove him out of the club he loved to the core of his being, those supporters would turn their venom on anyone who wrote or said anything positive about him as if they wanted an apology for loyalty and to cow his friends into silence.

There was never any chance of that happening. Those people sneered about me being ‘a friend of the family’ as if it were an insult or a dirty secret. I took it as a compliment. To be a friend of Bill’s was an honour.

He was a kind man, he was a good man and he was one of the last great chairmen in English football, a beautiful antidote to the self-interest of the Glazers, Todd Boehly and Mohammed bin Salman, the men who own English football now. You will never catch me apologising for saying that, either.

Bill Kenwright was a friend of my family and it was a pleasure to have known him

Kenwright (right) as a young star on Coronation Street worked with my mother (middle) on the show

Everton paid tribute to Kenwright with many gestures over the weekend after his passing

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Bill was one of the guardians of our game. As Everton chairman since 2004, he was one of those who helped to face down the European Super League. He hated that betrayal of English football by the owners of Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Tottenham and Chelsea.

He was not an asset-stripper. He did not want to be involved in the club so he could draw dividends from it. He did it for love. For 40 years, until he was told in January this year that it was no longer safe for him to attend home games, he got the 9.07am train up from Euston every other Saturday morning, to watch his team and live his dreams.

It was a great grief to him that he could not bring the kind of success to Everton he and the fans craved. No one gives him credit for it but it was his triumph that he kept the club in the Premier League when plenty of other big clubs fell by the wayside and down the divisions.

He preserved Everton’s soul, too. Maybe some supporters would rather the club had sold that soul, like Newcastle United, to a nation state. Everton have not done that and, for all their troubles, there is a worth to that which has untold value.

It is hard not to feel angry about the way he was treated by supporters but that is the way football is now. It is not about Everton supporters, either. They are hardly alone in meting out that kind of treatment. They have a right to protest, too. It is just that, with Bill, it was hard to escape the conclusion they were looking for a scapegoat and they picked the wrong man.

Bill understood the nature of expectation. He knew what it was like to be a fan. He was one. He never lost his affection for the supporters even when they turned against him.

He understood the passions football unleashed. He had to watch a banner being flown from a plane with ‘Kenwright Out’ emblazoned on it. ‘I’ve had them marching against me and it just kills you,’ he said once. He never exuded anger about that. Just sadness. He loved sports writers and their work. He often talked about Patrick Collins, Martin Samuel and Dominic King and their writing.

The last time I went to see him in his office on the top floor of his theatre company building in Maida Vale a couple of years ago, I finally got around to asking him to talk me through the collage of pictures and newspaper headlines about Everton that were plastered all over one of the walls.

Bill understood the nature of expectation at Everton and he knew what it was like to be a fan

He was the long-term chairman of Everton and for 40 years he attended games before his health deteriorated

And even though he was deep into his own battle with illness by then, he sprung up from the sofa and explained the stories behind the photos of the Everton team that came from 2-0 down to win the 1966 FA Cup final against Sheffield Wednesday.

He told me about his friend, Eddie Kavanagh, who was captured sprinting across the Wembley turf during the game, tie flapping in the wind, trousers held up by braces, pursued by the ‘London police’.

Next to that, there was a poster of James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.

When I asked about his hero, Dave Hickson, the Cannonball Kid, a striker who played for the club in two spells in the 1940s and 50s, Bill broke into song to the tune of Davy Crockett:

Born one morning in Ellesmere Port

Football was his favourite sport

Signed on for Everton for half a crown

Then he went to Villa and Huddersfield Town

Davie, Davie Hickson, coming back to Everton.

When Bill realised that he did not have the resources to fund Everton’s future he sold the club to the billionaire Farhad Moshiri (right)

Bill’s life was wrapped up in the theatre, of course, but it was also one long love letter to English football and to Everton. He gave everything to the club. He worked for it tirelessly. He craved success for it as keenly as its most devoted fan because, actually, he was its most devoted fan.

That that success never came was a great source of grief to him. When he realised he did not have the resources to fund Everton’s future in a league dominated by oligarchs, US venture capitalists and the sovereign wealth funds of energy-rich Middle Eastern autocracies, he sold the club to the billionaire Farhad Moshiri.

Bill was blamed for Moshiri’s failings, too, though the reality was that, without his steadying influence, the uncertainty that gripped the club would have been far worse. When the mob bayed for Kenwright’s fall, Moshiri was begging him to stay to help save it from relegation.

Without Moshiri, the club may not have survived the financial challenges set by the Covid pandemic. Without Bill’s guidance and drive, it may never have secured the finance for the magnificent new stadium, which is being built at Bramley-Moore Dock. It will probably be named after a sponsor, maybe a telecoms giant or an airline. How much more fitting if it were named The Bill Kenwright Stadium.

Bill was the chairman who wanted more than anything to restore his club to glory

Bill gave everything to the club and he worked tirelessly to make Everton a success

Bill told me once that The Independent had sent a psychotherapist to spend a day with him back in the 1990s to talk about his love affair with the classic western movie, Shane. The man had told him he wasn’t sure if Bill thought of himself as Shane, the rider who comes in to rid the homesteaders of the baddies, or little Joe, the kid who looked at Shane with loving eyes.

‘He got it spot on,’ Bill said. And he was right. Bill was the chairman who wanted more than anything to restore his club to glory. And he was the fan who never lost the wonder of going to the game and seeing his heroes in blue play.

‘You mention Dave Hickson and I fill up and I’m 75 years old,’ he said. ‘Graeme Sharp, Tim Cahill, Mikel Arteta. Steeped in Everton. Seamus Coleman. They’re the people that matter.’

Like Shane, Bill rode off into the sunset with a bullet in him but in years to come, when time has healed all wounds, he will be regarded as the father of the modern Everton, the club he nurtured and adored until the end.

IT’S ALL KICKING OFF! 

It’s All Kicking Off is an exciting new podcast from Mail Sport that promises a different take on Premier League football.

It is available on MailOnline, Mail+, YouTube, Apple Music and Spotify.

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