London - A few years ago, Lady Ferguson, sick of looking at her husband’s trophies and medals on display all over the walls of their house, ordered him to take them down. You might think Sir Alex, who defines himself by his triumphs and is, to say the least, a rather robust character, would have refused, or at least protested.
Instead, he obediently removed them, tucking them away out of his wife’s sight.
He is also banned from talking “shop” when he comes home from work to their £2 million (R28m) mock Tudor mansion in Wilmslow, Cheshire.
For Cathy is the one person in the world to whom Sir Alex – the famously bullying, rude, intimidating manager of Manchester United, who announced this week that he was retiring after 26 years at the club – does not answer back.
“You’ll not find a thing about my career in the house,” Sir Alex, 71, said recently. “Cathy is fed up with the whole thing. She’s unbelievable. I can’t even take a football book home.”
At home, Cathy, 74, runs the show, with the couple’s friends describing her as a woman of formidable presence. Despite that, she is also very private and has been photographed with Sir Alex just a handful of times during the 47 years they have been married – most recently last November, when she unveiled a 2.7m-tall bronze statue of her husband at Old Trafford.
Her elusiveness makes her an intriguing character. Elegantly clad, she wore black tailored trousers and a expensive-looking camel coat, accessorised with a smart handbag and silk scarf.
But Lady Ferguson, despite her chic appearance, is undoubtedly down to earth and remains firmly in touch with her working-class Glaswegian roots. She apparently squirms with embarrassment when people address her by her title. As Sir Alex says: “My wife cringes every time someone calls me Sir Alex or her Lady Cathy. She says: ‘I don’t know why you accepted it in the first place’.”
In recent years, though, she has certainly come to appreciate the finer things in life. The mansion in Wilmslow, holidays each year on the Cote d’Azur in France, a luxurious timeshare apartment within the grounds of a five-star hotel at Loch Lomond: Sir Alex’s millions have afforded her a very comfortable lifestyle.
They’ve come a long way from their first encounter, at a strike meeting at the Remington typewriter and shaver factory in Glasgow, where they both worked in the mid-1960s.
They soon met again at the local Locarno dance hall but initially Cathy was unimpressed and told her friends as he passed: “Look at him… he looks a right bad yin.”
But Ferguson, who was also playing football for Dunfermline at the time, pursued her with characteristic single-mindedness.
“She was pretty, had a lovely walk and a nice bum, and I made it my business to find out that she was Cathy Holding from Toryglen, near Hampden,” Sir Alex later recalled. They were married in Glasgow in March 1966.
It was a controversial match for a city divided by sectarianism: Cathy was a Catholic, while Ferguson was Protestant. But he was following the example of his father, who himself had “broken a taboo” by marrying a Catholic woman.
In 1967, Ferguson moved to Rangers, which was to prove problematic. Rangers and Celtic, the two big football teams in Glasgow, are representative of the city’s religious divide. Most Protestants support Rangers; most Catholics back Celtic.
On the day he signed for the club at Ibrox, one of the directors asked him about his wife’s religion and Ferguson confirmed she was a Catholic. When he said they had married in a register office, the director replied: “Well that’s all right then.”
In his autobiography, Ferguson recalled feeling a sense of “poisonous hostility” towards him from Willie Allison, Rangers’ PR manager, and also calls him a “bigot” for his dislike of Catholics.
When a story appeared in a Scottish newspaper headlined: “Ferguson finished at Ibrox”, he suspected Allison was behind it. He quit Rangers after just two years.
But Ferguson’s star was to rise and rise. And, as it did, he became more obsessive about football, working long, gruelling hours.
In the early 1980s, by now manager of Aberdeen, he was so preoccupied, he absent-mindedly left his wife locked inside the ground. Indeed, Cathy has admitted he was “really hard” to live with at this time.
Harder times were to come. When he was appointed manager of Manchester United in 1986, Cathy saw even less of him. His workload became so intense that everything seemed to come second.
Ferguson regularly forgot birthdays and Christmases. Cathy responded with cool disdain, tearing up a cheque, for example, that Ferguson once hastily inserted into her Christmas card.
But the difficulties have been worth it: Cathy has watched her husband become one of the most successful managers in modern times – winning 13 Premier League titles and 38 cups, including two Champions League trophies.
He is an idol to millions, although feared in the dressing room for giving under-performing players the “hairdryer” treatment – high-volume tongue-lashings delivered from close quarters.
But when Ferguson is at home, he’s expected to play the dutiful role of husband and father and to toe the line. Nevertheless, visitors have observed elements of the game still creeping into family life.
For example, when Cathy sets her husband a time limit of, say, an hour before they must go out somewhere, it is Ferguson’s habit to request an extra five minutes added on, in the way of injury time, if Cathy has distracted him at all during that period. It’s a comically uncanny echo of Sir Alex’s legendary ability to persuade referees to add “Fergie time” to the end of matches when his team are losing.
Perhaps Cathy made her husband take down all his trophies because of a belief that a man can be reminded of his “greatness” too much for his own good. She is, frankly, rather mystified by her husband’s lifelong obsession: she had no interest in football when she met him and that is the way it has stayed.
Sir Alex once explained a typical exchange after returning home from a day at the training ground. “I go home and say something about the game and all I get is: ‘Ma washing machine is no’ working, Alex.’
“I’m always easily outdone. Cathy just says: ‘Never mind the football. What a day I’ve had. Jason’s done this, Darren’s done that and Mark’s done this’. And me, my head’s bursting and I can hardly talk after shouting at the players all day.”
This anecdote, perhaps, explains why their relationship works so well. Where Ferguson is dominated by football, at the centre of Cathy’s world are her three sons, Mark, 44, and twins Darren and Jason, 40. She is a devoted mother – and some have wondered, indeed, whether she hasn’t mollycoddled the three boys a little too much, whether they haven’t been handed the sort of lucky breaks that others work years for.
Jason, in particular, has fallen foul of this criticism. In 2004 he was the subject of a Panorama investigation. The programme portrayed Jason, then working as a football agent, as somebody who exploited his father’s influence and position to his own ends in the market.
It must be said that Jason was never found guilty of any wrongdoing. His father was incandescent with the BBC and accused the broadcaster of being “arrogant beyond belief”. He boycotted the BBC until 2011, when the then director-general, Mark Thompson, brokered a peace deal.
Four years later, in January 2008, it was the turn of Darren to find himself in the news. Darren, then 35, was accused of kicking his estranged wife, Nadine, the mother of his two children, in the stomach on the front drive of his father’s house.
Nadine, from whom he had split in 2006, fell to the ground during the attack. Initially, Darren, now manager of Peterborough United, denied a charge of common assault and was due to face trial. His mother, it was reported at the time, would have had to give evidence – surely not a happy prospect. But Cathy was spared this ordeal when, shortly before the trial was due to begin, Darren entered a guilty plea before Macclesfield magistrates.
His lawyers contended that his plea was on a “limited basis”, asserting he had not kicked his wife, but that she had run into his raised leg, fallen to the ground and suffered pain in the abdominal area. If convicted, Darren could have been jailed but after he pleaded guilty, he was fined £1 500.
Mark, meanwhile, has avoided controversy. He used to work in the City and is now believed to help manage his father’s finances.
When Sir Alex announced for the first time in 2001 that he was to retire as Manchester United manager, it was Cathy who persuaded him to carry on, because she knew he felt his work with the club was not yet complete. With her approval, Sir Alex signed a three-season contract, worth £12 million.
Life was good, marvellous in fact, but then in 2002 the couple had to deal with allegations which, though unproven, were deeply hurtful.
While Sir Alex was in South Africa for a four-day tour of soccer academies, a 21-year-old woman, Nadia Abrahams, accused him of touching her leg when he took a lift back to his hotel after meeting her at a jazz restaurant in Cape Town.
When they arrived at Ferguson’s hotel, she claimed, he propositioned her. Sir Alex robustly denied the woman’s claims.
“I would like to make it clear that any allegations of improper conduct, let alone sexual assault, on my part are untrue and entirely without foundation,” he said.
An investigation launched by police was later dropped. It was upsetting for Sir Alex and his wife, though whatever Lady Ferguson had to say about it is not on record.
Nowadays, Sir Alex and his wife live fairly quietly. They like to spend their evenings at home rather than going out. But they do like going “to the pictures” – the early show, at 5pm. Cathy tolerates her husband’s passion for John Wayne movies.
She is fully supportive of her husband’s decision to retire. It was, apparently, a joint decision, taken after careful discussion. This time round, Cathy is said to have told friends: “The time is right”.
When he announced his intentions on Wednesday, Sir Alex paid a loving tribute to his wife. “My wife Cathy has been the key figure throughout my career, providing a bedrock of both stability and encouragement. Words are not enough to express what this has meant to me.”
After he retires on May 19, Sir Alex will become a director and ambassador for Manchester United. Still, he will have a lot more time on his hands than he has done for the past 26 years. It’s likely he will spend more of it with his 11 grandchildren.
He once said that his wife runs a “military operation” when she babysits the grandkids, adding: “Cathy is fantastic with the kids. If any of them misbehave, they’re in the doghouse. She is hard on them. But she loves them coming here. We maybe have two or three over every weekend.”
How will Cathy find it with her husband rattling around the house during the day? After all, she once said: “When he’s under your feet, it’s a nuisance. If he’s here too long, he gets in my road. I know a lot of people in Aberdeen with their men working on rigs. During the two weeks they’re back, the women are screaming after four or five days.”
It will be a big period of adjustment for both. What will they do with any days of leisure? That will almost certainly depend on what Cathy has in mind. – Daily Mail