Bill Shankly: the man the gates commemorate
William Shankly was born on 2 September 1913 in Glenbuck, a small Ayrshire mining village that produced an extraordinary concentration of professional footballers — more than fifty in total — in the early 20th century. The village no longer exists. Football was its gift to the world.
Shankly played as a wing-half for Preston North End and won seven caps for Scotland before the Second World War interrupted his career. He turned to management in 1949, taking charge of Carlisle United, Grimsby Town, Workington, and Huddersfield Town before accepting the Liverpool job in December 1959. What he found at Anfield was a club in a state of serious decline — languishing in the Second Division, with a crumbling stadium, a training ground he described as "a shambles," and a squad he rapidly concluded needed wholesale replacement. Within weeks, he had released twenty-four players.
What followed is the founding story of modern Liverpool. Shankly rebuilt the club from the ground up — not just the playing staff but the training methods, the facilities, the culture, and the relationship between the club and its supporters. He brought in Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan, and Reuben Bennett as his backroom staff, and together they created the legendary Boot Room — a converted storeroom at Anfield that became the intellectual centre of Liverpool's footballing philosophy, a place where tactics were argued, boots were cleaned, and the principles of a dynasty were quietly established.
The results: Second Division Championship and promotion in 1962; First Division Championships in 1964, 1966, and 1973; FA Cups in 1965 and 1974; the UEFA Cup in 1973 — the first time an English club had won both the league title and a European trophy in the same season. He introduced the all-red home strip in 1964. He made "You'll Never Walk Alone" — originally a Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune, recorded by Gerry and the Pacemakers in 1963 — the club's anthem and a way of life.
Shankly retired in July 1974, at the age of 60, having just won the FA Cup, citing his wish to spend more time with Nessie. It was a shock to everyone, including the club. He struggled with retirement — still turning up at Melwood, still being called "boss" by players who belonged to a team he no longer ran. He died on 29 September 1981 following a heart attack, aged 68. His ashes were scattered on the Anfield pitch.
Bob Paisley, who succeeded him, went on to win three European Cups and six league titles. Every piece of that success was built on the foundations Shankly had laid. "He made the people happy," reads the inscription on the statue unveiled outside the Kop in 1997. It is the most accurate short biography ever written.
The making of the gates: Somerset iron
The story of how the Shankly Gates came to be made is one of the more extraordinary details in the history of football memorial. When Liverpool advertised for designs, the contract went to County Forge — a small blacksmith's workshop in Frome, Somerset, run by Ken Hall, who was twenty-five years old at the time and had been a Liverpool fan since the Keegan and Toshack era of the early 1970s.
Hall saw the advertisement in the paper. His father pointed it out. They rang up Liverpool Football Club and were eventually put through to club secretary Peter Robinson, who gave them the number of the architects handling the commission (Mather & Nutter, later Atherden Fuller). Hall submitted a design. Designs came in from across the country. They were laid out on a table in front of a selection committee that included Nessie Shankly. She chose County Forge's design. "There was nothing to touch it," she said.
Hall then had ten summer weeks — between the end of one season and the start of the next — to build the entire structure. For the most technically demanding elements, particularly the ornate leaf-work on the overthrow (the decorative arch that sits above the gates themselves), he brought in Chris Brooks, a master blacksmith from Melksham, Wiltshire. Hall forged the gates; Brooks did the leafwork. Each gate had to be made one at a time, laid flat because Hall's workshop was too small to stand them upright. When the whole three-and-a-half-ton structure was complete, it was loaded by crane onto a lorry and driven two hundred miles north to Anfield.
Somewhere on the gates, at waist height next to the central deadlock, is a small brass panel engraved: SHANKLY GATES DESIGNED & MANUFACTURED BY COUNTY FORGE 1982 — a quiet, proud note to posterity from a young Somerset blacksmith who built one of football's most famous structures in ten weeks in his small workshop.
