Alex Ferguson - manager and striker

Stephen Kelly wrote in the New Statesmen that Ferguson was born in Govan two years into the second world war.

His father worked in the local shipyard, his mother looked after the family. For Alex football was a sideline: at 16 he began an apprenticeship as a toolmaker at the Remington Rand typewriter factory in Hillington. It wasn't until three years later that the game offered him a full-time career.

Working in Glasgow inevitably meant a schooling in trade unionism. "Trade unionism was an integral part of the community," his old pal Jimmy Reid explains. Ferguson became a shop steward, attended branch and district meetings, and in the early sixties took part in the notorious engineering apprentices' strike that swept Glasgow's shipyards in the 1960s.

Gus Macdonald, now chairman of Scottish Television but then a young shipyard apprentice, was one of the ringleaders. He and another apprentice, one Billy Connolly, "marched up to Remington," he recalls, "met with Ferguson and the other apprentices and soon had them out on strike."

Ferguson has applied the lessons of his trade unionism to some effect in the dressing room. Over many years he was an activist in the Scottish Professional Footballers Association and at Falkirk, as player-coach, he even led the players out on strike when the manager docked their expenses after a 6-1 defeat.

The club bowed to player pressure and the manager was reprimanded.

Source: Profile: Alex Ferguson - manager of Manchester United Football Club PLC New Statesman, Oct 10, 1997