Jerry Kerr

Arabs of all ages were saddened at the recent news that Jerry Kerr had passed away. For Arabs over a certain age, however, he will forever be remembered as the man who started the transformation of Dundee United from the backwaters of Scottish football into a force to be reckoned with in Europe. He laid the playing and financial foundations that were to be later built upon by Jim McLean, and without him Dundee United would still be languishing in the backwaters of Scottish football, never mind being the underdogs in the city. My own personal memory is as an 9 year old boy, watching in awe as United trained at Caird Park under the watchful eye of Jerry Kerr, the famous pipe in his hand. He was one of the true unsung heroes of Scottish football, and will always be remembered as a true United man.

Jerry Kerr, who died yesterday aged 87, made an enormous contribution to Scottish football in the years after the Second World War as the manager of Dundee United. He was a robust, no-nonsense defender who was well known around the Second Division circuit with brief spells at Armadale and Alloa and even a short career as a Rangers player. He came to prominence as a St Bernard’s player in the famous Scottish Cup semi-final of 1938, when it required three meetings to separate them from East Fife, the eventual winners. Although both were Second Division clubs, the aggregate attendance for the three matches was just below 90,000.

It was, however, as a manager that Kerr was to make his considerable mark. Starting with Berwick Rangers, he had shown a considerable flair for the job when moving on to manage Alloa. He had an eye for a player and I well remember his telling me of his theory that the bigger the club, the worse the talent-spotting. When he was in charge at Recreation Park his inside-forwards were John White and Dennis Gillespie. There is, of course, no such thing as an Alloa player unavailable for transfer and £5,000 would have secured the services of both. Rangers watched White about a dozen times before coming down against the signing. Kerr got £3,000 from Falkirk for him and within two years he had moved on to Spurs for about £20,000.

No-one came in for Gillespie and he moved with his manager to Tannadice, where he adorned the old-style First Division for the better part of ten years. Kerr took over at Tannadice in April 1959 after United had finished third from bottom in the Second Division and he immediately began to transform the ground from a backwater to one of the most modern stadiums in Scotland. United were then the second ranking side in Dundee and, indeed, the rival club across the road at Dens were only three years away from the League Championship.

Kerr was methodical in all that he did and insisted that there had to be a properly constituted reserve side and an end to the previous policy of buying in over-the-hill First Division players. Promotion came in his first season, but that was the easy bit. The problem was how to keep them there. He emerged triumphant. Not only did United finish a highly creditable ninth, but they topped their city rivals by a point. Gillespie and Ron Yeats had much to do with this and Jim Irvine, with 23 goals, had perhaps even more.

Off the field, Kerr was just as remarkable. He had been greatly taken by the success of Warwickshire County Cricket Club in raising money for the rebuilding of Edgbaston through the medium of a football pool. The English county made hundreds of thousands of pounds from this idea and a conversation with their secretary, Les Deakin led Kerr to set up Taypools, which, for about a decade, brought money cascading into the club until the flow slackened greatly when the Old Firm set up Rangers and Celtic Pools respectively. He had a great capacity for lateral thinking and an ability to adapt and even improve the ideas of others. With Hal Stewart of Morton, he was the first to see the possibility of tapping Scandinavia for cultured players at an affordable price. And by 1964, Lennart Wing, Finn Dossing, Mogens Berg and Orjan Persson were Tannadice stalwarts.

They played on a ground that was changing. The first of the modern stands replaced the original small, low-slung grandstand, which had almost as many pillars as seats. Gradually, a park where the facilities were so bad that Celtic once refused to change there, was transformed in the slow and painful process of becoming one of the showpieces of Scottish football. First Division status was secured, League Cup and Scottish Cup semi-finals were reached and in Kerr’s 12-year span as manager, United moved into most certainly the top ten of Scottish clubs, perhaps even the top eight. He led United into their first ever European tie in 1966,an astonishing 4-1 aggregate victory over Barcelona in the Fairs Cup, which included a 2-1 win at the Nou Camp.

The Dundee United board had, sensibly, learned the virtues of continuity. When in 1971 Kerr moved up to become general manager, Jim McLean took over and, on a well-established base, went on to out-top the performance of his predecessor. Nothing about Dundee United is more striking than something to which I can testify. I have been covering sports broadcasting for 43 years and for the first 35 of those, the manager’s chair at Tannadice was occupied by either Kerr or McLean.

Latterly, Kerr moved up the road to Dens, but one always thought of him as a United man. His pipe was never far away on match days and, in the stand at least, he was imperturbable. A last-minute equaliser against Queen’s Park in a Scottish Cup tie at Hampden - he was already on his feet to shake the hand of the Queen’s Park president - was greeted with a wry smile, nothing more. His passing severs one of the few remaining links with pre-war football and deprives us of someone with whom it was a particular pleasure to talk to about football, then and now.