A lost world

But the reality is that the observer looks at hills and fields and grass and more grass. Once there was a community here, but Glenbuck is now placed like Brigadoon in myth. Hollywood celebrated the latter in song and on celluloid, creating a soft-focus image of a mysterious village that appears for only one day every 100 years. But Glenbuck is gone. It exists only as a spot in the map or as a fragment of information lodged in the minds of every football fanatic.

The mining village has slipped into the abyss of time, an entire community with its goods and chattels made redundant by the imperatives of capitalism.

But something of substance remains. A cairn stands at the side of a road marking both a lost village and its most famous son. Bill Shankly was born here 100 years ago next month. The words chiselled into stone proclaim him "The Legend, The Genius, The Man".

Football embraces hyperbole and Shankly was almost wed to it. The Liverpool manager used exaggeration the way Jim Baxter once employed his left foot, with style and purpose. But there can be no dispute with the cairn's description of the boy who grew up as one of 10 children in a mining village and went on to become one of the greatest figures in world football.

The search for Shankly starts on that summer's morning in front of a cairn, but the manager slowly grows to assume his proper proportions as he is brought back into focus 32 years after his death with the publication of Red Or Dead by David Peace, the clamour over the centenary and conversations with those who knew him best.

The man who took Liverpool from the Second Division to the pinnacle of English football and laid the foundations for the club to become regular champions of Europe lies shrouded in stories. They whisper from beyond the grave, telling the life of an extraordinary figure in a heady mixture of laughter and awe.

The Man

"I would like to be remembered, first and foremost, as a man who looked after his family.''

The scene at the casualty department of Alder Hey Hospital, Liverpool, on a Saturday night in the early 1970s held a blood-spattered resemblance to the clearing stations of Flanders past. "There were groans and confusion, people milling about and a sense of chaos,'' says Karen Gill, the phone line crackling as she speaks from her home in Greece. ''I had cut my hand badly, putting it through a pane of glass. I was only eight, feeling a bit sorry for myself and awaiting treatment that seemed to be hours away. My grandy had been phoned to say I was in hospital and when he arrived the most amazing scenes occurred.

''He was surrounded by those who only moments before had been lying in pain or screeching for treatment. There was a young boy who had fallen on to a spike and he still had it in his side. He got off his bed and rushed to see my grandy." Bill Shankly was in casualty. It was time for the sick to take up their beds and walk.

The idea of Shankly as a secular saint has long been promoted in Liverpool and elsewhere. Peace, who identified the demons of Brian Clough in The Damned United, reveals Shankly as a victim of obsession, a martyr to the demands of work in his novel. Gloriously, though, Shankly emerges as a good man.

''He was gruff at times, particularly when you hurt yourself,'' says Gill, 48, one of Shankly's five grandchildren. "He hated to worry about us and I think it was the same with his players. If they were injured, he ignored them or got angry with them. It was the same way with us. If we were hurt, he worried and that came out as gruffness. On that night he marched into the hospital I was expecting a row but he was immediately surrounded by patients wanting to talk to him, demanding autographs. He was signing bits of paper while demanding attention for the boy who had been impaled on a spike. Extraordinary."

Bill and Nessie Shankly had two daughters. Barbara and Jeanette. Barbara had three daughters: Karen, Pauline and Emma. Jeanette was the mother to Jennifer, Claire and Christopher.

"My grandy was surrounded by women," says Emma Parry, his granddaughter. Both she and Karen remember their grandfather as a man besotted by football but as gently loving, too, with a rasping voice and a hand that always seemed to contain 50p pieces. "His idea of a day out was to take us to Anfield," remembers Emma, "but we could not tell Nannie Ness. We would sit in his office as he talked to his staff or the players walked by."

Nessie Shankly had one rule that was inviolable. Sunday lunch at the Shanklys' home in West Derby was attended by all the family. "It may seem strange but it was normal to us. Grandy would sit at the top of the table and move the condiments about, talking about tactical formations and how he would set his team up next week. We would just sit and stare at him. The door bell would be going constantly. Fans would just turn up at the doorstep and grandy would go out and talk to them. He lived in a 'Blue' area, that is, there were plenty of Everton supporters nearby. But he was loved by all the people. He still is. I am stopped in the street to be told of instances of kindnesses."

The girls knew their grandfather was a celebrity. He had to park streets away when he picked them up from school. They were feted on their arrival at Anfield.

He is still remembered. "I was heading home from a function at Anfield," says Karen, "and the taxi driver asked why I was there. I told him I was Bill Shankly's granddaughter. He said: 'Will you marry me?'"

The most enduring memories are the ones from the home in West Derby. "We would stay over on a Saturday night and grandy would come back from the football, have his tea and then come upstairs," says Karen. "He would then tell us stories of Glenbuck."

The Legend

"We could have beaten any five brothers in the world."

William Shankly was born in Glenbuck on September 2, 1913. He was one of 10 children, with five brothers, to a hard-working, loving mother and a stern but devoted father who earned his living as a tailor. Shankly briefly worked in the pit before pursuing, like all his brothers, a career in professional football. He was proud of his family's sporting prowess but deeply driven about his future.

He reminisced of Glenbuck in his autobiography: "The Ayrshire road was white and the Lanarkshire road was shingle." Shankly took a well-trodden path from a mining village to professional football. However, the impact he made resounds down the ages.

Shankly is one of the four great Scottish managers - the others are Sir Matt Busby, Jock Stein, and Sir Alex Ferguson - who took a working-class, socialist ethos and used it to develop teams and, ironically, create commercial behemoths. Busby took over Manchester United when it was basically a hole in the round created by a Luftwaffe bomb and made the club pre-eminent in England and Europe. Stein took Celtic from woeful underachievement to a European Cup. Ferguson made United so big, so successful after years of mediocrity that its market capitalisation is routinely pitched at $1bn. Shankly took Liverpool from the Second Division to champions of England. Incredibly, Liverpool had never won an FA Cup until Shankly arrived on the Mersey after spells as manager at clubs including Grimsby and Huddersfield.

The four Scots were masters of the alchemy of replacing dross with gold dust. They were also fanatical proponents of winning with a swagger. Shankly, a marvellous judge of talent, signed good players and then instructed them to play with a devastating simplicity. "Football is a simple game based on the giving and taking of passes, of controlling the ball and of making yourself available to receive a pass," he said when asked about his strategy. He believed he had bought the best players, he believed in making them the fittest in the country. He believed.

He won three championships and two FA Cups, the first in 1965, and the Uefa Cup - the club's first European trophy - before stepping down in 1974. Liverpool subsequently went on to win five European Cups, the first in 1977 under Bob Paisley, Shankly's successor.

The manner of Shankly's departure is shrouded in some mystery and no little controversy. The Scotsman felt under-appreciated and was exhausted. He believed he had neglected his beloved wife, felt she deserved more of his time. Yet his retirement was never unconditionally happy. He felt, sometimes justifiably, that he was not fully welcome at Anfield. He found it impossible to take a step back from the game. "It is difficult to describe how much the game and the club meant to him," says his granddaughter Emma. "He was obsessive about football.''

Shankly, the personality credited with giving so much joy to others, states bluntly in his autobiography: "Life's a struggle from the cradle to the grave." The manager who devoted his hours to making Liverpool great, died on September 29, 1981. He had not long celebrated his 68th birthday.

The Genius

"Just go out and drop a few hand-grenades all over the place, son."

THE words were spoken by Shankly to Kevin Keegan, signed from Scunthorpe for a modest fee who was to become the greatest Englishman to play for Liverpool. Shankly was prompting Keegan's instincts to cause mischief in the most well-organised of defences. But it is a sword not a hand grenade that testifies to the Shankly genius of not only discovering talent but making every one of those disparate personalities desperate to do their best for a manager they loved. "I will talk all day about him," says Keegan with a chuckle when I ask if he would discuss his relationship with Shankly.

First, there is the story of the sword. Emma Parry recalls: "It hung in Nannie Nessie's hallway and we were always told not to put our dirty fingers on it."

Keegan explains how it came to be a part of the Shankly household. The sword was presented by Shankly on behalf of a sponsor to Keegan in 1979 in recognition of his achievements as a player. "I immediately turned to Shanks and said: 'This is yours. I would have been nothing without you. You made me. You take it'. He did.

"Then just after he died the Shankly family said they were returning the sword to me. The boss had told Nessie that if anything happened to him it should be given back to me. I just want to do what the Shankly family wants and I believe it will now be put in a museum.''

Keegan is brilliant on both the genius and the madness of his mentor. "The first day I was at training he took me aside - and remember I was just a lad who had signed from Scunthorpe - and told me: 'You will play for England'. And you just believed it because it was Bill Shankly who was telling you it.

"But there were crazy, funny moments. I had a foot injury that would not go away. Shanks finally became convinced it was because I had bought a new car, a Ford Capri. He told Joe Fagan and Bob Paisley [his assistants] that it was the clutch that was the problem: it was so stiff it was affecting my foot. So three of the best football brains in English football history went out in to the car park and refitted my clutch. Basically, they tore my car apart. It was never the same again. Of course, the injury went away simply through time and rest, but Shanks put it all down to his work as a mechanic."

Keegan recalls: "I had a rapport with him. I was of Yorkshire mining stock and he and I were on the same wavelength. He was really humble in the proper sense. He knew what he was but that did not make him any bigger than anyone else. He would talk to the Prime Minister in the same way he would address a fan in his working clothes. He was always attentive and polite when fans approached him. When we were on the train coming back from matches in London, he would bring fans into our carriage and talk to them all the way home. When we kidded him on about the supporters disturbing our rest, he would roar: 'That is who you are playing for, boys. Those people are what this great game is all about."

Shankly always had a sense of his greatness. He was never false, particularly in his modesty. He once said: "Above all, I would like to be remembered as a man who was selfless, who strove and worried so that others could share the glory, and who built up a family of people who could hold their heads up high and say: 'We're Liverpool'.''

This was Bill Shankly.

Red Or Dead, David Peace, Faber, is out now

Tomorrow in the Sunday Herald: David Peace on Bill Shankly - a good man in football