Fondest Of Farewells To Fred
It says much about Fred Kemp that one former Molineux team-mate travelled up from Cornwall for his funeral and another journeyed from Berkshire.
From much closer to home, Peter Knowles put in an appearance and the nicely filled St Andrew’s Church in Weston Park also contained John Cross, a tangerine-clad liaison man from the Blackpool Former Players Association.
Others got to know much more than we did about Fred the footballer – after all, he played more games against Wolves than he did for them along a career path that took him from Molineux to Southampton, Halifax, Hereford, Durban City and Geoff Hurst’s Telford, as well as the Fylde coast.
But, what he lacked in first-team opportunities at Wolves, he compensated for in his later long-term role helping to run their old boys team and through his businesses in the city over several decades.
People, lots of them, knew him – and liked him enormously. But what was not to like about this gentle, personable soul? A nicer man you couldn’t hope to meet.
“He knew how to enjoy life,” said his son-in-law, John Marshall, in the eulogy. “There was always laughter and fun – and a drink or two. He valued people.”
The back story is highly unusual. Kemp was born in Salerno to an Italian mother and British Army father, his dad, Devon-born Bill, having been stationed there in the war and served as a football referee.
The family settled in Exeter in good time for Fred to grow up and be schooled there. By another strange quirk, a Wolves scout spotted him in a junior game – we say odd because lads sent from the south-west to Molineux are a rare breed indeed. In fact, naming any big football names from Devon and Cornwall, other than Trevor Francis, Colin Lee, Ollie Watkins and Everton’s surprise 1966 FA Cup final hero, Mike Trebilcock, is no easy task.
Kemp, who signed under the eye of Stan Cullis on the same day as Peter Knowles, was part of the Wolves side who reached the final of the 1961-62 FA Youth Cup and was also part of the 50-year anniversary reunion of the squad in 2012.
As a teenager, he shared digs with the ‘daft-as-a-brush’ Knowles and flew back from a holiday in Majorca to meet up with he and his other old mates 14 years ago. Three of his youth group were present to pay their respects to him on Thursday.
Vic Povey, the Wolverhampton-born winger who had to move to Notts County to gain Football League experience, drove up from Truro and Jim Barron made the trip from the Home Counties. “I liked Fred and wanted to be here,” said the man who served Wolves as a goalkeeper and assistant manager.
A third member of that youth group in attendance in Weston Park was John Southall, a full-back who began the Youth Cup run in the side before losing his place well before the lost two-legged final defeat against Newcastle.
The season after Barron graduated to Wolves’ first team, Kemp did so, too. He made his debut in a home game against Leeds in the middle of 1964-65, kept his place for the Boxing Day visit of Villa and was then in the line-up at Arsenal at the start of the New Year.
This being a relegation campaign, Wolves lost all three matches, so thank goodness he also played in a 0-0 FA Cup third-round draw at Portsmouth before the curtain fell on his senior career at the club.
He wore the no 10 shirt on all four of those occasions, playing in an inside-forward role before coming to be seen more as a wing-half; the somewhat deeper-lying form of the midfielder breed.
At only 19, Kemp was sold to Southampton for £5,000 a few months before Wolves nightmarishly conceded nine there in September, 1965, but had to wait until mid-season for his Saints debut – a 5-2 home win over Preston in which he scored.
His career at The Dell was something of a slow burner and not until 1968-69 did he win a regular place, his 43-game contribution to the club’s successful season being launched by the opening goal in their late-August home win over Ronnie Allen’s Wolves.
He followed that up by also playing in the goalless return clash between the two clubs in the March and briefly represented the Saints in Europe, facing Rosenborg in a Fairs Cup run that took them through two rounds before elimination came in the unlikely surroundings of defending champions Newcastle.
Fred then played home and away for Blackpool against Wolves in 1970-71 after moving north for £35,000 following 61 senior Saints appearances, the coast-to-coast transfer to top-flight rivals proving momentous for he and his Wolverhampton sweetheart, Glennys. They bought a house in Lytham St Anne’s with the signing-on fee but their wedding in the seaside town was no drawn-out occasion. He was given permission to marry on a training day but only on condition that he didn’t miss that day’s work-out.
Proud home owners or not, the newly-weds were soon moving out. After less than a year as a team-mate of Jimmy Armfield, Tommy Hutchinson and Tony Green, he switched clubs again and this time there wasn’t a beach anywhere in sight.
Third Division Halifax were the club with whom he totted up by far the most appearances of his career and he accrued well over 100 of them as he achieved almost ever-present status.
As at Southampton, he also had an overall goal tally in double figures but missed the chance to add to it when failing from a penalty at The Shay in what was the opening assignment of Wolves’ glorious 1973-74 League Cup run.
A 1974 move to Hereford, where Kemp linked up again with Southampton legend Terry Paine, enabled him to take his overall total of League appearances past 200 and he wound down with stints at Colin Addison’s Durban City and at Telford, where he was captain of a side managed by Geoff Hurst.
It was no doubt the pull of the World Cup final hero that drew England’s 1966 World Cup winners to the Bucks Head for a charity game. “We lost five or six in front of a crowd of about 8,000 but what an experience it was,” Fred once told me.
He didn’t cling to football when his playing time was up. He set up an office supplies business in Wolverhampton and expanded it in later years to specialise in office furniture, with daughter Sam taking an increasing role.
For many years, he ran and played in the Wolves Old Boys team and raised vital funds through matches for Guide Dogs For The Blind. Steve Daley was often at his side and, like former Molineux and England full-back Bobby Thomson, was also on the company pay-roll for a while.
No wonder Fred hit it off with John Marshall after the latter’s first meeting with Sam in a Majorca nightclub led to them getting together.
Marshall, a Londoner, played well over 400 games for his local club, Fulham, and became a son-in-law, with the wedding taking place on the island. As we have reported in the past, John worked through three World Cups as a scout for England then served Wolves as head of recruitment, so the Kemps’ links to Molineux remained strong with regular match-day tickets.
John had joined the family business, too, before football consumed him for the second time and came to admire Fred’s determination in bearing various health issues after being diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2006.
“He never wanted sympathy or attention,” the 62-year-old told us. “He just got on with his life and organised various golf days for the prostate charity.”
Generous, kind, decent, loyal and humble were just some of the words used about him in the service. In his adopted West Midlands, he touched countless lives and improved them.
We last saw him at the funeral of his pal, Terry Wharton, in January, a few months after I visited him to get some photographs signed for Wolves Heroes contributor Chris Westcott.
Home had, by then, been in the sticks ìn ‘John McAlle country’ near RAF Cosford for several years after three generations of the family had uprooted from Finchfield.
Mel Eves had been a near neighbour of the Kemps in the Wolverhampton outskirts and he was there on Thursday to pay his respects, along with Daley, Gerry O’Hara, the Wolves FPA’s Richard Green and Barry Stobart’s widow, Maureen, a close and long-time friend of Glennys’s.
Fred loved Majorca and enjoyed substantial stays there up to the last year or two. I bumped into he and Glennys at Knutsford Services around two decades ago, when they were heading for Manchester Airport and I was off to cover a teatime game at Bolton or Wigan or Blackburn. I remember thinking who I considered to have the better of the deal.