Forty years ago today Bill Shankly and his wife Nessie were househunting in Formby. It was the start of something new and English club football was never to be the same.

The week before, on Tuesday December 1 1959, the local Echo had announced that Shankly was to be the manager of Liverpool FC, then in the Second Division, and that he would begin duty on new year's day, his present club Huddersfield Town having demanded he work out a month's notice.

The paper said the 46-year-old former Scottish international had beaten the other shortlisted candidates Harry Catterick, Jimmy Murphy, Peter Doherty and Jimmy Hagan for the job and that his annual salary of £2,500 was £500 more than he was getting at Huddersfield.

The sports editor, Leslie Edwards, wrote prophetically: "Liverpool are getting the man they want. He is a 100% club man, an expert and enthusiast rolled into one; in fact a one-man combination that will not rest till Liverpool are in the First Division."

In fact, within days of his resignation Huddersfield, desperately sorry to lose him, relented on the month's notice. Early on the morning of Monday December 14 Shankly parked his Austin A40 in the tiny car park behind Anfield's gabled main stand. He had bought a new suit. He announced himself at the front office - "I am your new manager, lassie" - and was told to go upstairs where the imposing chairman Tom Williams and club secretary Jimmy McInnes awaited him, as well as a photographer from the Echo who at once posed the trio shaking hands and "sharing a joke", although Shankly was not smiling.

"Now we'll show you around," said Williams. "No need," said Shankly, "I saw all I needed on Saturday after I watched the reserves play." The two Liverpool men were taken aback. On Saturday they had been with the first team at Bristol Rovers, and it was news to them when Shankly announced that the reserves had beaten Manchester City's "stiffs" by 5-0. "Did you know you've some useful players in the reserves?" he told them.They were already thinking they had made the right choice.

Anfield was as run down as the club, which had been consigned to the Second Division since 1954 and earlier in 1959 had been a national laughing stock when beaten in the third round of the FA Cup by non-League Worcester City. But Shankly's reasons for leaving Huddersfield - after a 10-year apprenticeship as manager at Carlisle, Workington and Grimsby - had been the obvious potential of a big city club.

He wanted to stir a giant, however slothful, and felt he was ready to do so. Mind you, in 1959 the city of Liverpool itself had yet to stir from the postwar industrial depression, even though Harold Macmillan had that year won a general election for the Tory party on the slogan "You've never had it so good".

Socialist Shankly knew better than that. The once great port of his new city was economically dispirited, and on that very day the Echo printed the photograph of his arrival at Anfield the paper led on the forecast that the city's 800 male juveniles on the dole would rise in number tenfold within three years.

Nor had Liverpool remotely realised its cultural potential for the new decade. That first week in December, Cliff Richard and the Shadows were playing at the local Empire and only their best friends knew that a group of lads had formed their first pop group, about to rename themselves the Silver Beetles.

Williams and McInnes took Shankly down to meet Anfield's small staff once they had all reported for work that morning. Although their new manager had not yet mentioned it, they presumed, as was the custom, that he would be bringing in his own lieutenants and that Liverpool's lot (recruited under the previous manager Phil Taylor, who had retired through ill-health) would be leaving.

Again, Williams and McInnes were mightily surprised that Shankly treated the group of men sweating on their jobs almost as blood brothers. He had played with and against trainer Bob Paisley, a fellow devotee of American boxing, and he embraced him. He knew Reuben Bennett through his own brother Bob when they played together at Dundee. He had tried to sign Joe Fagan years ago for Grimsby when Fagan was playing for Manchester City, and he warmly told old Albert Shelley, who had cleaned the dressing rooms for years, that he was a legend in the game.

In Stephen F Kelly's biography Bill Shankly (Virgin, 1996, £14.99) the author writes: "On that first morning Shankly was to make the wisest decision he was ever to make in his entire Anfield career. He guaranteed every man their jobs... at a stroke he had Paisley's supporting role and tactical knowledge, Fagan's psychology, Bennett's Scottishness, Shelley's loyalty; all of them, including Shankly, had been forged in the same hard-knocks-school of life... and had all learned the lessons of common decency, honesty and pride."

Shankly sat them down that morning. "Fellows, your jobs are safe. Some managers bring their own people with them. Not me. I have my own system and it will work in co-operation with you. I will lay down the plans and gradually we will all be on the same wavelength. I demand only one thing: loyalty. Nobody must carry stories about anybody else. If anyone tells me a story about anybody else, that man with the story will get the sack, and I don't care if he has been here 50 years. Every one of us must be loyal to each other - and every single thing we do must be for Liverpool football club."

The legendary ethos of Anfield's bootroom was born. And so was the most successful football club England has ever had.