The Herald - The Herald Magazine
When it’s all about doubt and belief
LAST weekend was a big one for Scottish octogenarians on radio. On Saturday, it was Alex Ferguson talking about dancing and socialism on Radio 4, while on Sunday the former Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, discussed dogma and why he didn’t care for sermons on Private Passions on Radio 3.
Sir Alex was speaking to BBC Radio Manchester’s Mike Sweeney on Archive on 4 in a programme that concentrated on the great man’s early days.
Sweeney was not interested in the current travails of Manchester United, or Ferguson’s history as a manager at the club. Rather, he wanted to uncover the building blocks of Ferguson’s character, which turned out to be his parents, his days as a shop steward and buying hooky gear while running a pub.
In his time managing Manchester United, Ferguson had the legend “I come fae Govan” on the wall of his office. He grew up poor. “I always remember finding a wage packet of my dad’s – I was about 15 at the time – and it was £7.50, and he’d worked 70-odd hours,” he recalled.
Growing up, Ferguson learned to scrap and stand up for himself. Lessons handed down by his parents. His mum even tried to teach him to dance so he could impress the girls when he went to the Locarno or the Barrowland in Glasgow on a Saturday night. The lessons didn’t really take.
“I don’t think I was a good dancer, no. I relied on my patter.”
The thrill of the programme was hearing Ferguson sounding so engaged and eloquent, given everything he’s gone through in the last few years.
Three years on from his brain haemorrhage his speech is back to normal. And he’s clearly not lost his drive and self-belief.
“When you get an opportunity,” he advised , “don’t be afraid of it. Jump at it.”
Although he grew up in Alexandria rather than Govan, there were many similarities between the backgrounds of Ferguson and Richard Holloway. “When you’re a poor kid you’re not aware you’re poor if you’ve got loving parents,” Holloway told Michael Berkeley on Private Passions. But while Ferguson joined a youth team, Holloway left home at 14 to train for the priesthood in England.
Private Passions is your upmarket Desert Island Discs, with Holloway choosing classical music and plainsong rather than Elton John. “I don’t do jaunty music,” he admitted.
In between tracks, Berkeley probed Holloway on his work with Aids patients in Edinburgh in the 1980s and his advocacy for women and the LGBTQ+ community within the church.
“I think that a lot of Christians
just got stuck on a patriarchal ethic about sexuality,” Holloway suggested. “It wasn’t great for women until fairly recently in religious institutions. We only started ordaining them in the Anglican church five minutes ago ... The gay struggle is won in Scotland, won in the United States. It will happen in England, but England always seems to take longer partly because it’s stuck in an establishment kind of straitjacket.”
The difference between Ferguson and Holloway could pivot on the word belief.
Ferguson was always confident in his own belief system. Although keen to say he wasn’t an atheist, Holloway’s take was rather more nuanced. “I’ve become more comfortable with uncertainty,” he told Berkeley.
And how does he spend his Sundays? “I prefer when I go to church now to go to choral evensong where I won’t be got at by a sermon.”