Anthony John Parry, born 8 September 1945, Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, England.
PART ONE
Tony Parry’s earliest footballing education came at Burton Albion, where during the early 1960s he learned his trade as a central defender in the non-league game, and it was there, playing week in and week out for a well-run but modest club, that he first caught the eye of scouts who recognised a player with the physique and the temperament to go further. He was broad-shouldered, difficult to knock off the ball, and blessed with the sort of unfussy defending that never draws headlines but always draws admiration from managers who understand its worth, and it was precisely those qualities that would, in October 1965, carry him out of the non-league game and into the Football League proper.
That move came about because of a young, largely unproven manager named Brian Clough. The former Middlesbrough and Sunderland forward had just taken charge of Hartlepool United and needed players he could trust, and so it was that Parry, signed from Burton Albion, became Clough’s very first signing as a head coach. Parry made his debut for Hartlepool on 18 December 1965 in a 1–0 defeat against Colchester United at Victoria Park, watched by a crowd of a little over four thousand, and although the result offered no hint of what was to come, the club’s supporters would not have to wait long before they warmed to him.
His following appearance, a 1–1 draw to local rivals Darlington at Victoria Park on 27 December, drew more than nine thousand through the turnstiles, and the very next day, in the customary Boxing Day return fixture of that era, the same two sides drew 1–1 again. Parry kept his place into the New Year, but a heavy 6–1 defeat against Tranmere Rovers at Prenton Park on New Year’s Day 1966 saw Clough drop him, and it would be March before the young manager, not yet renowned for patience, trusted him with a recall.
Parry continued to serve Hartlepool faithfully across the years that followed, and although the club could never again scale the heights of that 1967–68 promotion, he remained a fixture of the side through seasons in which Hartlepool, chronically short of money, relied on precisely the kind of unglamorous consistency that he offered. By the time his spell at the club drew to a close in January 1972, he had made close to two hundred appearances and scored five goals, a modest return in front of goal but an entirely unsurprising one for a player whose job was to stop opponents scoring rather than to add to the tally himself. What finally brought his time at Hartlepool to an end, however, was not a falling-out or a loss of form, but rather the same man who had started it all.
By 1972, Hartlepool were staring at the very real prospect of going out of business altogether, and the club needed to sell a player simply to survive; Clough, who by then had left the North East behind and was managing Derby County, stepped in with a bid of £2,500 for his old signing. It is generally understood, even now, as an act of goodwill on Clough’s part towards a club he had once served, albeit one funded with Derby’s money rather than his own, and Parry duly made the move south to the Midlands in January 1972.
PART TWO
The timing could hardly have been more awkward for someone hoping to establish himself. Derby County, under the one and only Brian Clough, were in the process of winning the First Division title for the first time in the long history of the Baseball Ground club during that very 1971–72 campaign, and a squad built around the imperious Roy McFarland at centre-back, flanked by the dependable Ron Webster and the elegant David Nish, offered precious little room for a defender arriving from League Division Four to force his way in. Training at Derby, too, bore scant resemblance to what Tony Parry had known further north, for Clough and his assistant Peter Taylor had, by this stage, built a slick, tactically disciplined operation geared entirely towards sustaining a title challenge, complete with rigorous fitness regimes and a squad of internationals who required no lessons in professionalism, and however diligently the ex-Hartlepool United stopper applied himself in that environment, there was simply no obvious route past the players already occupying his positions.
Parry didn´t make a single league appearance during that title-winning campaign, watching from the fringes as Clough’s side secured the championship, and although he remained on the books into the following 1972–73 season, opportunities stayed scarce; he was afforded only six appearances across that season, a mixture of starts and substitute outings, without troubling the scorers. It was a difficult period of adjustment for a player who had spent his whole career, until that point, in the comparatively rudimentary surroundings of Fourth Division football, and the step up to a Derby dressing room stacked with internationals and title-winners proved, in the end, too great a distance to bridge.
Seeking the regular football that had eluded him at the Baseball Ground, Tony Parry moved on loan to Mansfield Town in September 1973, joining a Fourth Division side managed by Tommy Cummings who were aiming for nothing more ambitious than a comfortable mid-table finish that season. Yet even there, first-team opportunities did not materialise as Parry might have hoped, and his loan spell yielded just a single appearance from the substitutes’ bench, without a goal to show for it. He returned to Derby at the end of that 1973–74 season, but with his path back into Clough’s first team effectively closed off, he was released by the club that summer.
What followed was a gap of a couple of years before Parry resurfaced in senior football, and when he did, it was in the non-league game that had first given him his chance. By the middle of the 1970s he was ready to commit himself once again to a club on a regular basis. In June 1976 he joined Gresley Rovers, the Derbyshire club based only a short distance from his native Burton upon Trent, and it was there, rather than at either of the professional clubs he had represented, that he would go on to enjoy the longest and most settled spell of his footballing life.
Gresley offered Parry something those bigger clubs never quite had, namely a settled dressing room close to home in which a player entering his thirties could still feel valued. Parry made his debut for Gresley on 21 August 1976 in a fixture against Hednesford Town, and across two separate spells with the club he went on to make 176 appearances, scoring six goals, while anchoring the Gresley defence in the competitive surroundings of the West Midlands League. Gresley’s supporters came to regard him as very much one of their own, a senior professional in all but name who brought a level of positional awareness and calm under pressure that the club’s part-time footballers found reassuring to have alongside them. His final outing in a Gresley shirt came on 8 April 1985, away at Atherstone United, closing out nine years of service during which he became one of the most respected figures in the Gresley dressing room.
Along the way, in the 1982–83 season, the supporters recognised his contribution by naming him Player of the Year, an honour that mirrored the one he had received at Hartlepool some fifteen years earlier and that spoke to a rare consistency across two very different eras of his life in the game, one spent chasing promotion in the Football League, the other marshalling a defence in the altogether more parochial, though no less passionately followed, world of Midlands non-league football.
Long after he had hung up his boots for good, Parry’s connection to football, and to the communities who had followed him, refused to fade, and in February 2009 he was welcomed back to the North East as guest of honour at Hartlepool United’s Centenary Legends Dinner, held at the Borough Hall, some thirty-five years after he had last pulled on the club’s shirt. Barry Butlin, who had served as Hartlepool’s secretary, later reflected that the depth of feeling shown to Parry that night by the North East public helped him appreciate, perhaps for the first time, just how much his contribution had meant to the club and its people.
Alongside these personal reflections, Parry’s story also came to be understood in a wider historical context, particularly in relation to the pioneering role he played as one of the earliest black footballers in the English league during an era when racism, however uncomfortable it is to acknowledge now, was tolerated in ways that would be unthinkable today. He is often remembered, in this respect, as Derby County’s first black player, and while the full picture is a touch more complicated at Hartlepool United, where an earlier player named Tewfik Abdallah had represented the club as far back as 1924, Parry’s status as a trailblazer of his own generation, arriving in the professional game in the mid-1960s and pushing through barriers that many of his contemporaries never had to face, remains a significant part of how he is remembered.