Imagine living inside a football stadium. Every corridor is yours to stroll down day or night. The dressing rooms outside of match-day are at your disposal for a shower or a bath. The secrets of every nook and cranny of each stand are guarded by you. The keys to one of the most grandiose entrances in the history of football stadia are in your possession. It is your job to open the door first thing in the morning and lock up when everyone else has left.
Paddy Galligan lived at Highbury. He started off as a member of the ground staff in the 1978-79 season and never looked back. Finding an actual job description is not the most straightforward task but he became essentially the one-man welcoming committee, keeping an eye out for whoever appeared at the stairs outside the Marble Halls, while also looking after the dressing rooms and performing an assortment of old jobs, from resetting every turnstile with a long wooden stick to clambering on to the roof to put up 16 flags for every match-day. At night, he would walk around the pitch to his flat above the entrance to the West Stand. He had a great view of the Clock End terrace from his kitchen window. Thierry Henry described Paddy as being “like part of the stadium”. The players loved him.
Everybody knew Paddy and Paddy knew everybody. People like him used to be the lifeblood of a football club. There are fewer of them about the bigger and richer Premier League clubs get. More’s the pity. With hundreds of staff across dozens of departments, a club can feel more like a sprawling conglomerate nowadays. But in Paddy’s day it was, as his friend Pat Rice puts it, like a family. “We looked after each other,” Rice says. “If someone was in trouble, you would help them if you possibly could and you knew they would do the same for you. We all had each other’s backs. Paddy was unbelievable. If you wanted anything, if he could do anything for you, he was the man.”
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George Graham recalls how Paddy’s face lit up when the manager was in late. “Paddy was always the last one to lock up. I’d take him up to my office upstairs and crack open the whiskey and we would just chat. Such a nice man. Eventually I’d think: ‘Best go home’.” Paddy was home already.
There wasn’t an inch of Highbury he didn’t know like the back of his hand. One of his favourite spots was up on the roof. There wasn’t much of a barrier in terms of health and safety, so the view across London felt open and vast. On a sunny day, any excuse to nip up, take off his top and lie down on his own for a quiet sunbathe was seized.
Those roofs were hazardous. Stuart Macfarlane, the club photographer, sometimes climbed up to set up some high cameras. While he watched his step, Paddy would bounce around seemingly without a care in the world.
“The East and the West Stands were death traps,” Macfarlane recalls. “You used to go to the top tier of the West, climb on to a seat and on to a ladder that would take you through a hatch to then go up another ladder on the other side. You would walk along and look through the grates all the way down. On the front of the roof were wooden planks; really slippy. Paddy had two sets of flags that used to fly from the roof of the East Stand. He would go up, take one down to wash and put the fresh ones up. Once, the wind took him and threw him up. He was basically hanging off the side of the stadium over Avenell Road.” Paddy dragged himself back up, dusted himself down, and cracked on with his day. That was one to tell down the Bank of Friendship pub over a pint later on.
I first met Paddy accidentally. It was December 1991 and some very lucky programme-collectors have a rare copy of the edition published for the match that day. Arsenal v Norwich was one of 16 matches that never happened. A thick fog took hold and the decision was taken at 1.30pm, just 90 minutes before kick-off, to postpone. Yours truly was oblivious to this news during a two-hour drive to Highbury, singing along to carefully-collated mixtapes in the VW Polo — and, of course, there was no such thing as a mobile phone alert.
Once in the vicinity, everything was discombobulating. Where was everyone? Nobody in the pubs, nobody in the streets, no programme sellers or hamburger vans. I walked towards the main entrance in a state of confusion to find Paddy in his usual spot perched on the steps outside.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
He was amused that some idiot turned up not knowing the game was off but when I forlornly explained I’d travelled for the match, he responded in classic Paddy style.
“Have you ever seen inside the Marble Halls?”
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I hadn’t.
“Well, you’d better come in then”.
So at 3pm, when the game should have been kicking off, I found myself on a private tour of the dressing rooms, past Herbert Chapman’s bust, down the tunnel to pitch side to see the dugouts. We stopped off at the Halfway House, a little room midway down the tunnel and Paddy made tea and biscuits while we watched the half-time scores coming in from those games that survived the fog on a little portable telly.
So, a far from wasted journey after all.
In later years, Macfarlane took over Paddy’s flat. “It was in the old art deco building above the entrance to the West Stand on Highbury Hill. A one-bedroom flat with a big living room, kitchen, but back then it was in need of repair. I remember going to have a shower and when I turned the water on, there was no cold water. It was just boiling hot. That’s why Paddy used to go to the stadium in the morning and have a bath or a shower in the dressing room. He never used any facilities at his flat except to sleep.”
That’s why the sound of Paddy warbling in the showers of the first-team dressing room was often heard floating up by other staff working late at Highbury. He was known for plunging into one of the old tin freestanding baths, run to the rim with bubbles pouring over the side. “It must be a unique existence for a member of staff to live on-site and the changing rooms were his manor,” adds Macfarlane.
“On a match-day, he would clean the dressing room, make sure everything was ready, help a bit with the kit and he would be in there when the team arrived. He was probably the only non-coaching staff who would be in the dressing room the whole time. Then, he would sweep up around them after the players when they came back in at full-time. He was close to George Graham. Arsene wouldn’t bat an eyelid around him as he was part of the fabric of Arsenal.”
Paddy had his own favourites. Writing in the programme about his life at Arsenal, he once explained: “My hero on and off the pitch is Tony. You will never get another Tony Adams. I have known him so long that now when I talk to him it is like talking to a son”.
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Paddy joined as a member of the ground staff in the 70s and he picked up responsibilities and jobs along the way. Rice recalls how he inadvertently took over looking after the pitch for a while when the previous groundsman left suddenly. “Paddy will do it, no problem! We used to tell Paddy that the pitch was uneven and needed topsoil. The next thing you know, we were sitting in the dugout and you couldn’t see the line on the opposite side because there was a mound of topsoil in the middle of the football pitch. It was like a hill!”
Once, he was out with the lawnmower and lost control and when hurtling into the North Bank. Another time, he was sent to take the entire takings of a match-day in a cardboard box to the Barclays at Finsbury Park where Arsenal had an account. Anything went.
Although he could be gruff and a straight talker — no bad thing for the man who spent so much time on the steps by Highbury’s main entrance — the twinkle in his eye and kindness meant so much laughter when he was around.
“Paddy, to me, was great fun,” Rice says. “We used to play staff matches in the indoor gymnasium above the Clock End and the best way I could put it was he was a trier. Nine times out of 10, he would come to close you down or tackle you and the next thing you know he had belted you against the wall! He’d do that to anybody — even George Graham.
“If it snowed and there was ice everywhere, I would get all the apprentices shovelling the snow from the terraces and Paddy would be there with his wagon as well, like a dumper truck, helping out and taking the mickey. The young players loved him.”
Andy Exley is the club’s de facto in-house historian and edits the match-day programme, amongst other things. His first memory of Paddy was this little bloke turning up with a plate of toast and jam for one of the girls in the office. “She was hungover and Paddy recognised that, so tried to ease her into her working day. I just thought, ‘Who is this man?’.
“At the end of the season, if he liked you, there would be a nod from Paddy to get something from the training kit the team had been wearing all year. It would be in bin bags in the room next to Pat Rice’s office. I’ve still got Tony Adams’ 2002 top. I gave my dad Thierry Henry’s training top. I’ve got Igors Stepanovs’ red training t-shirt.”
Like most people, Exley soon grew fond of Paddy’s eccentric charm. “He was like a mascot to the team. If he wasn’t there on match-day, all the players would ask after him.
“He was a sort of representative of the club. If you came along, he was there on the steps and people would talk to him constantly. People would come up to the stadium to see it, especially from abroad. Paddy would start talking to them and if he took to them he would invite them in and walk them down the tunnel to show them the pitch. You could see his face. As the person was wide-eyed looking at this incredible spectacle around, he would be so proud.”
Paddy died with Highbury. In the summer after the final match in 2006, as Arsenal moved from the ancestral home to the Emirates, he was on holiday in Greece and had a heart attack. He had been worried about what he would come back to, as no role at the Emirates could replace the one left behind at Highbury.
Macfarlane was with the squad on pre-season training when the news came through. “We were in pre-season in Austria and Arsene got the players together and made an announcement. It was a tough time,” he recalls. “We held a minute’s silence.” Wenger’s affection for Paddy was genuine. “For me, Paddy injected life and happiness around him,” he said. “He spread happiness around the stadium.”
At the Emirates, there is a staff kitchen behind the first-team dressing room for people to pop in and make a cup of tea or a plate of toast and jam. It’s called Paddy’s Kitchen. “He is still in the stadium,” says Macfarlane. “It was the least we could do, really.”
(Photos: Stuart Macfarlane/Arsenal Football Club)
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