By: Paul MILLAR

REST in peace Bill Muir the man who could spin more yarns than a cotton mill. You are truly a legend, a term that is used too loosely these days, you are a legend, not only of Geelong soccer, but a legend in all forms of the word...

PHOTO: The late, great Bill Muir pictured with his wife Flora (photo provided by Paul Millar)

A veteran of the Malayan campaign, a concreter with a song in his heart and a poem in his pen, a truly great man with a memory that never faded with time.

The times you recounted teams of the past before most of us were born and made us laugh with tales of your misspent youth.

The gambling, the card tricks, always spiced with humour and warmth, and your affection for your homeland.

Your stories about serving with the Ghurkas and how you loved their tea, but could not stomach their curry, only you could tell it like it was.

Born to a trucking contractor in 1931, you saw the hard times and lived through them with a smile on your face. Billy remembered the year that war was declared and typically linked it as another memorable day.

“Of course I remember it, it was the same year that Blue Peter won the Epsom Derby,” he said recently.

School classes were frequently interrupted during air raids and the older boys were given lessons in fire-fighting. As in London, the Clydebank Blitz had not broken the people’s spirit. Billy remembers that the bombers hit the local school by mistake, their target was presumably the nearby Parkhead Forge.

The picture in the history books is of grim times, but Billy recalled happy days in a city that, at the time built a fifth of the world’s shipping. It was also a place of adventure for the young.

Billy was the fifth child of Wilmena and followed John, Bobby, Tommy and Geordie, his elder brother, and Ina his younger sister.

Billy and his mates were always up to mischief and in those times the term political correctness had yet been coined, if it had been they would have been challenging it every day.

They became experts with slingshots and were frequently involved in stone throwing exchanges with rivals in the neighbourhood. The stone fights were not limited to the boys as Billy remembered one of the mothers Annie Lowry could “throw a brick that would almost knock your head off, all the boys feared her”.

Then there was the timeless ploy of tying neighbours’ doors together and chapping on them, watching in delight as the home-owners pulled against each other until they realised what had happened.

The Muirs moved to Chapelhall about 15 kilometres east of Glasgow’s city centre for a better life in 1941. Billy believed they were better off than many as his dad, a dealer - who had steady work – was buying and selling cars, which gave young Billy an intimate knowledge of the country, as he travelled to auctions with his dad.

At the height of the war, Billy, then aged ten or eleven was evacuated to Kinross with his sister Ina and brother Bobby. It was a world away from the heavy bombing that the port city was enduring.
Now in the Burgh of Perth, but then in Kinross-shire the burgh is now a well attended tourist attraction, located on the shores of Loch Leven and a boat journey away from Loch Leven Castle, where Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned on the island in 1567.

He lived with the local banker in a plush house, where there was a maid, but he soon found out there were expectations.

“They made me go to church every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, that’s why I still know all the books of the bible,’’ Billy said recently.

After the war Billy was introduced to black marketeer Joe McCudden. It was a time of rationing, when you could not get the ingredients for ice-cream, but Joe somehow managed to find a regular supply, which was secreted away in storage plots.

Billy ended up selling ice cream cones for Joe, earning him 20 pounds a week, when the average for a worker was about six pound ten shillings.

He also took up gambling, or more correctly took the money off punters, who bet on sprints, of which Billy had inside knowledge.

His dodgy dealings came to an abrupt end when he was conscripted and trained with the Royal Gloucesters as a radio operator. He counted himself lucky as he could have been sent to Korea.

In 1955 he moved to Australia to start a new life, but always remembered his roots, quoting Scottish history and songs at every opportunity. Who ever heard of a concreter, who wrote poetry? Billy Muir was the man. It was unusual in the macho world of concreters for a man to spend his spare time creating words about beauty and passion, but then again he was his own man.

At times he would draw his inspiration from the world famous Scottish bard Rabbie Burns.
Billy was, like Burns, an advocate for social justice, believing that honesty, dignity and justice is a right for all class of man.

They are not linked to the privilege of rank or birth and underneath it all men are all equal.
Like Burns he believed the man who toiled at his labour is as worthy as any man of wealth and he lived his life with that philosophy. Poetry laced with gambling and concreting, however, is a different mix

One of his gambles backfired literally when his concrete gang was working at the International Harvester during the holidays and had to knock a brick wall down.

Billy told the engineer they would have to blow it and he had the man in his mate the late Bill Dair, who had trained in explosives in the war. The engineer reluctantly agreed and they blew it at lunch time, sending huge lumps of concrete across the factory floor.

The police arrived and could not understand the broad Scots accents and thought they were IRA terrorists. They had some explaining to do before being released.

But the enduring memory of Bill Muir is the half time chats over a beer when Hamlyn and then Geelong Rangers were playing and sometimes losing.

“Ach it’s in the bag,” he would say and he was often right as the players knew if they lost they were letting down men like him, who were the heart and soul of the club.

The final whistle has sounded, but we will catch up in extra time. Thanks for the memories...