You could take the man out of Motherwell but you couldn’t change him
Ripper victims’ families demand share of estate after claims he owned Scots land
IT’S 60 years since Ian St John moved to Liverpool but it’s hard to overstate how well remembered he remained in Motherwell.
He’s one of those characters who could genuinely claim to be a local legend in equal degree in two cities.
I was just a bit too young to have watched Ian banging in the goals for Motherwell but the legend of the man was something you quickly became aware of as a child, whether you were into football or not.
I went to the same school, Calder Primary, and everyone who went there knew all about Ian St John and the fact we were walking in his footsteps.
Everybody knew somebody who knew his family and, by the time I was at school, Liverpool had grown to become perhaps the biggest team in Europe and Ian had been credited by Bill Shankly as being perhaps the key player in starting the big climb at Liverpool to the world stage. I was essentially born a Motherwell fanatic and that meant any highlights in recent history were soon drilled into me even if I never lived through them.
By the time I was going to the Motherwell matches, I was aware that the main stand had been paid for by the transfer fee paid by Liverpool to sign Ian back in 1961.
They paid the princely sum of £37,500, which was a record fee at the time but about a million quid in today’s money, so that would have been one of the bargains of the century if you were judging it like that.
At Motherwell, he scored 80 goals in 113 games, so you could imagine what a local hero he would have been.
I was too young to experience Ian’s stint as manager in the 70s either but he gave a debut to a young Willie Pettigrew and that’s another part of the Motherwell history any young diehard would be expected to be able to recite if required.
My mate Jim Walker’s dad Forbes told a story of how he took a very young Ian St John from his home in Park Street to his first ever Motherwell match, a claim to greatness in these parts.
I didn’t really know Ian personally until I got him on to my BBC TV show Offside in 2003. That was a great opportunity to bring on folk I selfishly wanted to meet and Ian was maybe the best example of that. And he was great fun.
By this time, he was as familiar to football fans as Gary Lineker because Saint & Greavsie at Saturday lunchtime had been essential viewing for years.
It was unmissable to any selfrespecting football fan, so I’d be getting up to watch Tiswas or Saturday Swap Shop then Saint & Greavsie then heading to the match.
He was on with Owen Coyle and he got right into the spirit of the show, talking away about the great Liverpool managers Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley.
We did a quiz about other Scottish players who got more caps than he did, guys like Dave McPherson and Stewart McKimmie, and I still remember the way he got right into the spirit of it.
He went down a storm on the show and we then retired to the green room and he enjoyed a few glasses of red wine as we compared stories of Motherwell.
We bumped into each other a few times after that and he was always somebody who’d greet you warmly and it was good to catch up with him because he always liked to exchange a bit of patter and talk a bit about how the current Motherwell team was doing.
He remembered some of the families I mentioned and the old streets and he still sounded the same as the day he left, with his broad Lanarkshire accent that he never lost.
There’s a great clip I saw from the time Scotland played Uruguay in the 1986 World Cup and managed to only draw against 10 men after getting kicked off the park.
Ian was watching the match and the camera panned to his face just after Stevie Nicol missed a sitter and the clip was all effing and blinding and bleeping, the same way the rest of Scotland was.
That clip proved you could take the man out of Motherwell but you couldn’t change much about him.
LOCAL LEGEND
RETURN At Fir Park in the 70s, below
FAMILIES of victims murdered by the Yorkshire Ripper are demanding his estate be shared between them.
Mystery surrounds the contents of Peter Sutcliffe’s will, amid claims he owns two plots of land in Scotland.
The late serial killer boasted that one of the Kray twins offered to buy the land, gifted to him by a female admirer while he was in Broadmoor hospital.
But Neil Jackson, 62, whose mum Emily was Sutcliffe’s second victim, said: “Any money or property he had an interest in should be divided up and handed over as compensation to the families he destroyed.” Neil, who had to identify his mum’s body when he was just 17, added: “Sutcliffe didn’t just kill my mam, he killed my family. We got no compensation or support. I’ve never received a penny.
“The Government should really look into what funds and property he had.”
Survivor Tracey Brown, 59, who was 14 when Sutcliffe attacked her and left her for dead, agreed with Neil.
Tracey. from Bingley in Yorkshire, was not named in the charges against Sutcliffe when he was jailed in 1981 but he later confessed to attacking her.
She said of the Ripper: “Any money that horrible beast has collected should be split with the victims and survivors, it’s the least they could do for us.
“At least it would be a bit of solace and there are families who are vulnerable and struggling who could do with this money.”
Mo Lea, now 60, was an art student in Leeds in 1980.
She almost had her spine severed by Sutcliffe. She told our sister paper The Mirror: “This is a conversation which is not one for the victims
– as there are so few of us left – but for the professionals and West Yorkshire Police.”
Sutcliffe’s brother Mick has been pleading with his deceased brother’s ex-wife Sonia Woodward to tell them what’s in the will.
He said he had been contacted by a fellow inmate of the Ripper, who claims to have seen the title deeds to the Scottish land, allegedly gifted by a woman named Pauline.
Sutcliffe died in November, aged 74, after contracting Covid-19.
Sonia, 70, who is remarried, still owns the former marital home, a £279,000 detached house in Bradford.
Days ago, she was seen waiting at a bus stop wearing a mask and hat near the house – the first time she has been spotted in public since Sutcliffe’s death.
He didn’t just kill my mam, he killed my family NEIL JACKSON ON PAIN INFLICTED BY KILLER