Bang in the Middle. Robert Shore

Clough went south to Brighton there was a similar cultural misunderstanding. Only Midland clubs were equal to Ol’ Big ’Ead’s idiosyncratic and abrasive style of management.

      Forest were a terminally unglamorous outfit when Clough and Taylor took over in 1976. The duo gained the club promotion to the top table in 1977, then won the championship at the first attempt in 1978. The European Cup was secured for the Midlands the following year, and again in 1980. (Every year, when the last club from the metropolis was knocked out of the Champions League, Forest fans held a special ‘Nottingham 2 London 0 Day’ to mark the fact that Clough’s team secured the top European prize twice while no London outfit had ever won it. What a pity Chelsea triumphed in 2012 – although the score remains Nottingham 2 London 1. Actually, make that 9–1, since a homesick Nottingham lacemaker named Herbert Kilpin was responsible for creating Italian footballing giants AC Milan, who have won the biggest European prize seven times.) And then there was the little matter of the League Cup in 1978, 1979, 1989 and 1990 – an astonishing record when you consider that it was achieved without major financial backing. Clough wasn’t generally interested in making star signings (Trevor Francis being the exception that proves the rule): in fact, that’s probably why he was cold-shouldered by the North and South big-money boys. Only in the Midlands was success possible on Clough’s terms.

      It wasn’t only in his ability to pick up key players for peanuts that Clough’s managerial style was unique. There’s also the matter of his celebrated bons mots. ‘At last England have appointed a manager who speaks English better than the players,’ he noted sardonically on the appointment of Sven-Göran Eriksson as national manager. Which Liverpool or Manchester United manager has ever matched Clough for wit? And it wasn’t only Clough’s words that were memorable. After Forest supporters mounted a pitch invasion at the conclusion of a League Cup victory over Queen’s Park Rangers in 1989, an appalled Clough took to the field himself and punched a number of errant Forest fans; he was fined £5,000 for his trouble, and banned from the touchline for the rest of the season. The attacked supporters refused to press charges, however, and when they realised who their aggressor was begged his forgiveness. What a strange incident that was. But life under Clough was full of such curious, heart-gladdening spectacles. He was famous for reprimanding his players – telling star striker Trevor Francis to take his hands out of his pockets as he was presenting him with an award on one occasion – and he had a similar authority when it came to handling crowds. As a boy, I remember watching as a sign was hauled out and placed in front of the Trent End terrace. It read: ‘Gentlemen, No Swearing Please – Brian.’ The famously foul-mouthed Trent Enders got the point – and the joke. Afterwards away supporters were routinely greeted with chants of ‘You’re gonna get your flipping head kicked in’, while on-field officials who made decisions that disappointed the Forest faithful were treated to a chorus of ‘The referee’s a naughty’. Only in the Midlands.

      As Brian Glanville observed in an obituary of the Forest manager: ‘Clough’s methods were unique. He was essentially a dictator, and not always a benevolent one.’ Given his much-quoted pronouncements on his dealings with his players, Clough could hardly have disagreed with this assessment. ‘We talk about it for twenty minutes and then we decide I was right’ was how he once explained his manner of dealing with team members who questioned his tactics. He rarely indulged in self-doubt: ‘I wouldn’t say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one,’ he famously opined. Yet despite (or perhaps even because of) that, when the end came for him professionally – Forest relegated, Clough battling alcoholism – he cut a peculiarly pathetic figure. And, of course, he never made English football’s top job – manager of the national team – a failure he deeply regretted. ‘I’m sure the England selectors thought if they took me on and gave me the job, I’d want to run the show. They were shrewd, because that’s exactly what I would have done,’ he commented. For all his successes, Clough remains the archetypal Midland tragic hero.

      There’s also a more serious, socially engaged side to this eccentric, rebellious Nottingham spirit. It’s a tradition that begins with the Gest of Robin Hood, written in about 1500 – ‘For he was a good outlaw, / And did poor men much good’ – and finds particularly strong expression in the region’s line of Nonconformist (i.e. dissenting from the Church of England) religious radicals. It strikes me that there’s more than enough matter here for a Midland foundation myth or two.

      If you head south-east from Nottingham city centre, you find yourself climbing out of the Trent valley and up Sneinton Hill. Here, outside 12 Notintone Place, stands a weathered statue of a preacher with arm upraised in full oratorical flow. This is William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, and the building he guards is the William Booth Birthplace Museum.

      Like his fellow Midlander Margaret Thatcher, Booth (1829–1912) was a Methodist with an extraordinary zeal for his chosen line of work. ‘His spirit was like a white flame … There was nothing of the gentle saint about him,’ a journalist named Philip Gibbs reported in 1902.

      On the day I went to see him, on behalf of the Daily Mail, he started by being angry, and then softened. Presently he seized me by the wrist and dragged me down to my knees beside him. ‘Let us pray for Alfred Harmsworth [the great press baron and owner of the Mail],’ he said. He prayed long and earnestly for Harmsworth, and Fleet Street, and the newspaper Press that it might be inspired by the love of truth and charity and the Spirit of the Lord.

      Amen to that – but did Booth intend this little performance to be at least semi-humorous? Certainly Gibbs paints the scene comically, and there is evidence elsewhere that, for all his spiritual dedication and blood-and-thunder rhetoric, Booth had a splendid sense of the absurd. For instance, the early Salvation Army was a notable equal-opportunities employer, a progressive idea to which Booth gave memorable verbal form when he exclaimed: ‘My best men are women!’

      Indeed, Booth’s heady strain of Midland eccentricity was his greatest spiritual weapon, and it was only when he began to give full vent to it, in 1878, that he really found his feet as a preacher. It was at this time that Booth literalised the notion of Christian soldiers fighting sin by reorganising his Christian Mission along quasi-military lines and renaming it the Salvation Army. Booth himself took the title of ‘General’, with his ministers also being accorded military ranks, and all now began to ‘put on the armour’ (the Salvation Army’s own uniform) for their ministry work. It was a daring, potentially silly idea – but it captured the public imagination: within four years, one London survey estimated that on a particular weeknight the Salvation Army attracted 17,000 worshippers while the Church of England got only 11,000 through its doors.

      Booth’s influence as a reformer extended well beyond purely spiritual matters. His bestselling book In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) in many respects served as the blueprint for the British welfare state in 1948. Booth compared industrialised England with ‘Darkest Africa’ and found the former wanting. In ‘The Cab-Horse Charter’ he wrote: ‘when a horse is down he is helped up, and while he lives he has food, shelter and work’; the same basic level of social assistance, he suggested, should be extended to humans too. The rest of the book is concerned with various schemes to improve the living standards of millions of poor and homeless people in Britain.

      Booth was no Northern socialist, though. Rather, it’s the Midland spirit of self-sufficiency, or the yeoman ideal, as it’s sometimes called, that underpins his thinking. Where the state would not or could not act, the individual must step into the breach, Booth believed. Thus when the General and his wife, the redoubtable Catherine, discovered the national shame that was ‘Phossy Jaw’ (a condition caused by the toxic fumes given off by yellow phosphorus which caused the premature deaths of innumerable female match-factory workers by destroying their faces), the Booths’ response was simple: they opened their own factory, using only harmless red phosphorus in their manufacturing process and paying their workforce twice as much as traditional employers such as Bryant & May. Booth was justly proud of his achievement and organised tours of his ‘model’ factory for MPs and journalists.

      Despite his extraordinary influence, Booth struggled to find favour with the Establishment. Actually, that’s not quite true – like all true Midlanders, he never even tried to curry favour with