On a sunny day in Lancashire, living football history is waiting for us in a quiet corner of a Preston care home. James Ernest ‘Ernie’ Bond is sitting on a sofa near the fish tank. Carlisle United’s oldest living player, who turned 96 in May, greets us with a warm smile.
He offers me a handshake, and does the same for David Steele, the historian who is part of the Carlisle United Heritage Group. When he sees Barbara Abbott, our photographer, he pauses and smiles. “I want a kiss,” he declares. Barbara politely obliges.
“I’m a silly old bugger at the best of times,” Bond chuckles as we all sit down. “Wouldn’t be any other way. Now, I’m very pleased to see the three of you here. Tell me where you’ve come from and things like that.”
We explain that this is a special visit – and even that description is an understatement. For a number of years, members of the volunteer Heritage Group, notably Ron Maddison, have been researching Bond’s life and career and attempting to track him down. When his whereabouts were finally discovered, enquiries were discreetly made about the possibility of an interview.
Through the kind help of his care home, here we are. Bond today is small in stature, but then always was: a rapid, dynamic, diminutive outside left whose career, with Manchester United and Carlisle United, was significant, and who connects eras of the Blues’ history on an extraordinary level.
Bond was a Busby Babe at Old Trafford and a league championship winner with the Red Devils. He then transferred to Carlisle and spent seven years in the blue shirt, playing in some evocative teams and in some considerable games. This star of the 1950s is still with us, a living link to football times so long ago that this afternoon in his company feels like time travel.
At 96, many of Bond’s memories have faded, some gone completely, yet we were told in advance of our visit that he remains enthusiastic to talk about his footballing life – and this is clear. When we show him a series of photos, collated by the Heritage Group, he vanishes for a few moments down the decades.
“Who’s that?” he says, immediately locating himself on a black and white team photo and smiling. “I’ll tell you what, he looks a lot younger than me. Not a bad-looking bloke, eh? I always took a good photograph…”
We mention Carlisle further. “Well, I was only a youngster when I was at Carlisle,” he says. “But if things had been different, I might have finished up living there.”
He liked it, then? “No, I didn’t like it at Carlisle. I loved it.”
Bond’s story with Carlisle began fully in September 1952, when he was transferred to Brunton Park from Manchester United. Yet links were there even before that, since he did his National Service at Hadrian’s Camp, as a physical training instructor. This was shortly before the aspiring young footballer received a different kind of summons in 1950.
He had played at Frenchwood in Preston, and for North End’s juniors and reserves, but it was later for the works team at Leyland Motors when his career ignited. Through the haze of time, a memory glimmers.
“I was playing for them [Leyland Motors] at Waverley Park, and this particular person came to me and said, ‘Hey, can I have a word with you, son?’ I thought, ‘Have I done something wrong?’ He said, ‘Would you like a trial?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know who you are’.
“I didn’t know it was Matt Busby. When he said that, I got the shock of my life. I nearly fainted. Anyway, that’s how I started at Manchester United.”
Bond went into Manchester United’s reserve team who won the ‘A’ League in 1950/51. The following season, with the number 11 on his back, he made his first-team debut in a 3-3 draw with West Bromwich Albion. While Bond became a team-mate of a burgeoning generation of Old Trafford players, there was also an immediate Carlisle link: trainer Tom Curry had held a similar role at Brunton Park in the 1930s, and coached some of the players who had been part of the Blues’ very first Football League side in 1928.
For Manchester United in 1951/52, he played 19 league games and one in the FA Cup. His first goal came in a 5-2 win against Aston Villa, and a side propelled by stars such as Roger Byrne, Reg Allen, Stan Pearson and Jack Rowley won the Division One championship for only the third time, and delivered the great Busby’s first title.
“I played outside left, and I used to make a lot of the goals,” Bond says. “I was small, but fast. I was very quick. And all of a sudden, the goal situation started to climb, even though I wasn’t particularly scoring myself. And we won the league.
“Matt Busby called me into his office. I thought, ‘Oh, God, what have I done now?’ He said, ‘Bondy…well done, lad. Without you we wouldn’t have got so far up the goal charts’. He was a brilliant, brilliant person, the best manager in the football system. I’m not saying there weren’t other good ones. But he was the one.”
It is poignant to think that Bond played alongside and worked under certain lads and men who would perish in the Munich air disaster six years later, like Byrne, Curry, Bert Whalley, Ray Wood and Mark Jones, and others who would survive it, such as Busby, Johnny Berry and Jackie Blanchflower. The latter months of his time at Old Trafford also briefly overlapped with the club’s signing of a brilliant schoolboy named Duncan Edwards. “Just a young lad, then...” Bond says.
Bond also has a distant memory of a member of the Royal Family congratulating him after a particular game. “They said I was the one making the goals,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it.”
“I wouldn’t say I was the best player,” he adds. “No, I was a good player, like the rest of them. We worked well together.”
Bond had suffered an injury in his second Manchester United season, and had not played as frequently in 1951/52’s closing months or at the start of the following season. And so, in what must seem an unlikely sequence of events today, a Manchester United top-flight title winner moved to Carlisle just a few months after receiving his medal.
Carlisle was not alien to Bond because of his National Service experience. “Well, you had to do it,” he recalls of his Army time in Cumbria. “I wouldn’t say it was all nice. I’m not going to start swearing, but some of it was bloody rubbish. So, if you come through that, you can hold your own, shall we say.”
During that time he had also, in 1948, played at Brunton Park, for an Army Western Command XI against the Blues, lining up alongside the great Welsh inside forward Ivor Allchurch against a home XI starring the likes of Ivor Broadis and Geoff Twentyman; future team-mates.
The Carlisle manager, Fred Emery, had coveted Bond earlier in 1952, and Busby honoured an agreement to give the Blues first refusal should the outside left ever become available. A fee of £5,000 was exchanged, and in September Bond became the first player to transfer from the one United to the other.
He quickly became fundamental to a team making its way in Division Three North, lifted by talents such as Twentyman, Broadis, Jimmy Whitehouse, Jim MacLaren, Billy Hogan, Alan Ashman and Paddy Waters. We pore over a series of team photos, and Bond struggles to pinpoint the names. “It’s that long ago,” he says. But when David Steele mentions Paddy Waters, something flickers.
“Oh, I remember Paddy Waters,” Bond says. “He was a big lad. Big defender.
“We didn’t win any leagues or anything like that, but we had quite a good side. I scored my share, and I was making the goals for the team.”
Bond made his debut in a 3-0 victory against Grimsby Town on September 25, 1952. ‘The Rover’, writing for The Cumberland News, noted some “classy touches” from the new signing. In the 22nd minute, he beat an opponent and crossed for Archibald Smith to score. Two months later, he claimed his first goal in a 2-2 draw with Bradford Park Avenue. His Carlisle era was up and running.
It was a period where Bond’s personal and professional lives intertwined, sometimes in unlikely ways. He lived close to the ground in a house on Warwick Road, with wife Patricia and where children Antony and Sharon would soon come along. When, in 1953, Brunton Park’s main stand burnt down, the club used the Bonds’ front room as a temporary office.
Carlisle picked their way through the ashes of that incident, borrowing kit from Workington Reds and Newcastle United as they resumed Division Three action, and Bond remained a mainstay, capable of some inspirational performances. One showing, in a 5-1 win over Scunthorpe United at Brunton Park in December 1953, earned him glowing press reviews.
“Although he did not score himself, Bond was responsible for most of the goals,” our correspondent wrote. “The little winger had a brilliant game.”
The biggest game of his Cumbrian era came in January 1957, when United took on Birmingham City in a pulsating FA Cup third round tie at Brunton Park. Carlisle’s comeback to draw 3-3 in a rammed ground – 27,164 were officially inside the ground – was inspired by a hat-trick from the South African, Alf Ackerman. Bond, to the left of Ackerman, gave England full-back Jeff Hall the runaround.
We talk some more about Carlisle, where his team-mates also included an old Manchester United pal, Frank Mooney, and we study further photos, including an image of 1950s Brunton Park. It taps gently at another memory. “I just lived round the corner, you know,” Bond says. He left United in 1959, after 191 appearances and 24 goals, and crossed the border to play for Queen of the South.
“I enjoyed it up there too,” he says, then pauses. “Hey, I’m going to start singing.” In a clear baritone, Bond warbles, ‘Happy days are here again…’ then laughs. “I’m a daft owd bugger…”
Bond, in a programme interview with David Steele back in 1996, had said that if work had been available at the time, he would have stayed in Carlisle. In the event he and Pat – the sweetheart he had met when working as a teenager in a shoe factory – returned to their native Preston, Bond working in insurance, for Ribble Paper Mill and then Baxi Heating before retiring in 1990. A football legend moved into his dotage.
As we regard more photos it returns to mind once more just how deep his connections run. He is pictured with Ashman, the prolific striker who became Carlisle’s greatest manager, and Dick Young, the Blues’ iconic trainer. His links to Manchester United players who were at Munich tie him to heroes such as Harry Gregg, who later became Carlisle’s manager and went on to recommend the club to a would-be owner in the early 1990s: Michael Knighton.
When Knighton was an Old Trafford director, the team included a potent Welsh striker by the name of Mark Hughes. Today, Hughes is Carlisle’s head coach. He has signed a photo which we present to Bond (who is also Man Utd’s second oldest living player behind 99-year-old Joe Lancaster). It will go up in his room in the care home, along with other framed images of Bond which the Heritage Group have prepared.
He has lived in the care home since January and by all accounts likes nothing more than talking about his vast footballing past. “He likes to brag about football,” smiles Dawn Ward, the home’s wellbeing coordinator. “I’m never gonna give that up,” Bond says.
He still watches football on television, and says he’d love to be a player today. “Well, that stands to sense, doesn’t it? Even though things now are a lot different. I’m not saying it’s better, but it’s very, very good.”
What would he tell a youngster aspiring to a career now? “Well, whatever the situation, you’ve got to keep yourself in line with how far you’re going to go in the game,” he says. “Some of them in my time used to play up. I’d sooner keep things on a level.”
“Anyway,” Bond adds, looking one last time at the array of photos and binders on the table in front of us, “thank you for bringing all this out to me. I’m so pleased. I’m never going to sleep after this!”
At the end of our precious and privileged afternoon with Carlisle’s oldest survivor, we all take turns to shake hands with James ‘Ernie’ Bond. “And I’ll see you after,” he flirts with Barbara again.
“I hope I’ll be able to see you all again soon,” this great old player adds, as we say our goodbyes. “And I’ll come to you next time. I don’t like it all to be one way. I hope you have a nice trip home. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.”
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