George Reynolds

‘Chinese takeaways and rum and coke ... prison was marvellous’
As Darlington prepare to move back to the town whose name they carry, George Reynolds, the former chairman, talks about cracking safes, life behind bars and how his reign went sour
George Caulkin, Northern Sports Correspondent
September 12 2016, 12:01am,  The Times

“I am not a religious man,” George Reynolds said, “but God gives every one of us a gift. Would you like to know what mine is? I couldn’t give a f***. That’s my gift.” And with that, he was off and running, riffing on safe-cracking, slavery, Donald Trump, bare-knuckle scrapping, prison, distributing Christmas hampers of nicked food, yachts, mansions, buying Nazi armbands on the internet and Darlington Football Club.

Reynolds has blagged and bulldozed his way through a lifetime of many lives. Born into crushing poverty in Sunderland, he was branded “mentally deficient” by the local education authority, he traversed the world with the merchant navy, ferried gelignite in an ice-cream van, was 112th on the Sunday Times Rich List, bought a club, built a stadium and was later stopped by police with £500,000 in the boot of his car.

Traffic wardens walk around in their black suits dressed up like the f***ing Gestapo. I’ve got 75 parking tickets and never paid one
Earlier this year, he turned 80. Later this year, after nearly half a decade of exile and a clamber through non-League, Darlington will return to the town whose name they carry, a club that ceased to exist, reformed and regrouped. Both, somehow, are still fighting. “People ask me why I work at my age,” Reynolds says. “I say, ‘Because I’m not f***ing bone idle like you.’ I like the aggravation.”

At 10am last Wednesday, Reynolds was sitting inside his E-nigma e-cigarette business in Chester-le-Street, Co Durham, engulfed in a fug of vapour (not his), munching a crab sandwich. He supplies 200 shops, he said, although the helicopter, the houses in Spain, London and the Lake District, are gone. Is he happy? “Happy? I’m f***ing delighted,” he says. “I’m over the f***ing moon. I’m 80 and I’m still breathing. I’m doing f***ing cartwheels.”

For vivid, personal reasons, Reynolds has always distrusted authority; he is engaged in guerrilla warfare against the local council. He has printed a pamphlet — 80,000 copies, he said — spending £15,000 on that and LED signs outside his shop, railing against parking charges. The telephone numbers of councillors are plastered on the window. “I’ve got 75 parking tickets and never paid one,” he says.

He calls himself, “the real Robin Hood. It only takes one man to stand up and be counted, to have a go. In this country — Oliver Cromwell. Spain? Franco.” He is not particularly keen on traffic wardens. “They walk around in their black suits dressed up like the f***ing Gestapo,” he says. “I bought some armbands on eBay with a f***ing swastika on. I had two of them out here and I said, ‘Would you mind putting these on?’ ”

That evening, Darlington beat Stockport County at home, although home is a relative concept. Since 2012, when they folded and were reborn four divisions down in the Northern League, they have shared Bishop Auckland’s Heritage Park. Under fan ownership, free of debt, they have been promoted three times and now play in the National League North, two rungs below Sky Bet League Two. Their manager is Martin Gray, who joined the (original) club as a midfielder in 1999, the same year Reynolds took over. As Reynolds wrote in his autobiography, Cracked It!, “I had been an impulsive buyer in the past; once going out for a sandwich and ending up buying a forklift truck” and he had “always been interested in football”.

He disputes that now. “I can’t stand it,” he says. “I never could. I f***ing hate it. I only got involved to help them out and I got a load of s*** for it. They’d sing, ‘There’s only one Georgie Reynolds’ and then the other side would score and it’s ‘You fat bastard, you ate all the pies’. Then we score — ‘There’s only one Georgie Reynolds’. It’s a f***ing mental institution, the northeast. Am I right or wrong?”

It is a question worth pondering, but then Reynolds is a man whom Michael Walker describes as “the surreal chairman’s surreal chairman” in Up There, his seminal book on the region’s football. Reynolds had sold his kitchen worktop business for £41 million — he estimated his own worth at £240 million — when he bought Darlington, paying off their £5.2 million debt. He had two targets; a new stadium and the Premier League.

He attempted to sign Faustino Asprilla, published his squad’s wages in The Northern Echo, and there was more uproar when his wife addressed a fans’ forum with the words, “It is not unknown for games to be thrown”; players and staff walked out. There was a blaze of publicity, a compendium of controversy and barneys with journalists; he would turn up on doorsteps in the middle of the night.

“One told me the pen is mightier than the sword,” Reynolds said. “Well you bring your pen and I’ll bring my f***ing sword and we’ll see.” He does not care for this profession, either. “I’ve achieved so much, which is more than I can say for some of you f***ing reporters,” he says. “Twisting words, putting out s***. You can chuck s*** from the high heavens. I’ll paddle through it like a dirty duck.”

In his first season at Feethams, where they had played since 1883, Darlington reached the League Two play-off final. Three years later, Reynolds delivered the 25,000-capacity Reynolds Arena. Their first game there, against Kidderminster Harriers, drew 11,600 people. The second, against Leyton Orient, attracted 4,660. Within a few months, the club were in administration and Reynolds had resigned as chairman. By then, Gray was a coach. “Given the opportunity to build a new stadium, what George Reynolds did was right for the club, but the capacity was wrong,” he says. “There’s where the cracks started to appear because we had a white elephant we could never fill. If the new stadium had reflected our size, I think we’d still be there now.”

As far as Reynolds is concerned, it was a case of “victimisation”. “I invested all my money and never took one penny out,” he says. “And the council said, ‘You’re a saint, Mr Reynolds.’ And then as soon as I got it built — state of the art — could I put concerts on? No. Blocked. Car boot sales? No. Nothing. Common sense tells you that you can’t run a business on a few hours a month.

I took a £100 bet to walk on the pitch after being told the fans would stone me. I put the mascot’s costume on and did it. I won
“People never blame the f***ing players, they blame the chairman. But I don’t play football. I got them to Wembley, I spent £37 million, built a new stadium, and all I got was a f***ing slagging. They wanted me out, I got out and they went down the f****ing plughole. People say I should have bought players, that I didn’t spend money. These fans are good at telling you to spend money, but you’ll never get them to spend it them-f***ing-selves.”

Another administration followed in 2009. “It was hard,” Gray says. “The administrators come in and they’ve got a job to do, but it’s cutthroat. I had ten years’ service and left with nothing. It’s history now, something you’ve experienced, a scar. And it’s something you don’t want to experience again.”

After a third administration, Darlington 1883 were formed and Gray returned, this time to the dugout. “It was a blank piece of paper,” he says. “We didn’t have a player, didn’t have a ground.” They went up that season, breaking records. Getting back to the town, pencilled in for before Christmas, is pivotal. “We’ve risen from the ashes,” Gray says.

Throughout an extraordinary existence, Reynolds has done the same. When things soured at Darlington, he took a £100 bet to walk on the pitch. “I was told the fans would f***ing stone me,” he said. “I said, ‘No, they’ll shake my hand.’ Just before kick-off, I put the mascot’s costume on and walked out. Nobody knew who I was, but I won. That’s fact.” He has been jailed several times, most recently for tax evasion. “I had the time of my life,” he says. “If you’ve got money you can get anything. Indian takeaways, Chinese, rum and cokes. I had a big television. F***ing marvellous.”

It was “luxury” compared to when he was dispatched to approved schools in Worcestershire. He was eight. “I was sold as a slave for £100 [a picture of the contract is printed in his book]. They worked us from 8am until 5pm, picking fruit, picking up s*** on the farm. When you got to 12, it was 12 hours a day. We slept in open dormitories, no walls, no running water, no toilet, no electricity, no heating.

“We woke up one morning and there was 18 inches of snow on every bed. A seven-year-old was stone dead, frozen. There were others, buried in a field.” Reynolds began to weep. “I got eight years for playing truant twice. Another kid got nine years for pinching a cricket bat. What’s been done about that? Nothing. Society is s***. You get to the top and they f***ing hate you for it.”

He learnt about explosives while working with a shotfirer in a colliery. “I thought, ‘There has to be a better use for this than blowing f***ing rocks up,’ ” he says. “So I decided to blow vaults open — more profitable. But I’ve never robbed a working man. I always robbed the PLCs, because they’re the real crooks. I went through the backdoor with a crowbar, they come through the letterbox in an envelope.”

Is he bad, good, a rogue? “I’m a good man,” he said and told a story, well-rehearsed. A key to the church safe in Shildon had been lost; Reynolds, his reputation preceding him, was asked to open it. “The safe purred like a kitten. I didn’t even have to try the door — I heard the tumblers trickle,” he says.

That Sunday morning, “the daft vicar gets in the pulpit and says, ‘Brethren, in this world, sometimes the bad guys are the good guys.’ ” The police found out. “‘F***ing hell, be reasonable. I was doing a good turn!’ I said. ‘George, we’re not doing you for the safe. We’re doing you for being in possession of explosives.” Bad can be good and good can bring trouble. That memory made him laugh.

Reynolds (previous business venture Georgie Porgie’s Puddings and Pies) is “still in touch with the top”, he said, and he pulled out his mobile phone, which listed numbers for Trump (“I knew him very well; nice fella,”), Uri Geller, Paul Weller.

Darlington, too, are within sight of the Football League, although there will come a time when they must ask themselves if they can thrive without a benefactor. Meanwhile, the stadium formerly known as the Reynolds Arena is owned by Darlington Mowden Park rugby club. “I feel disgusted when I see it,” Reynolds said. “It wants f***ing painting.”

He posed for photographs beneath his LED screens. In a quieter moment, he explained that his local councillors, “are nice really. It’s the officials who work for them who are drunk with power.” There are offers to make a film of his life, he said, which may be true, and he’s “thinking about becoming a gigolo in Spain,” which is probably not. A wooden spoon hangs behind the counter of his shop with the inscription “world’s biggest stirrer”.

He has trenchant opinions — “What this country could do with is another war; straighten the f***ing lot out. Everybody makes for Britain because we cater for the bums and stiffs who don’t work,” he said — but he has also weathered and endured. “I’ve never had a regret in my life,” he said. “It’s not regrets, really, it’s stupidity. I’ve been stupid, but I’ve never regretted it.”

He does not care how this interview reads, he said. “It doesn’t f***ing bother me,” but he pointed to his shop front again. “I can make anybody famous up there,” he says. “Your name could be in colour, in flashing lights. I can have a hit back.” George Reynolds might have winked. He reached across the counter to sign his autobiography. “Be lucky,” the inscription read.