The story of Craig Bellamy and the teacher who taught him the value of a big heart

The future football star was an unruly kid and in the remedial class for most subjects but the late Eryl Walsh saw more in him, writes Oliver Holt

Local boy done good: Eryl Walsh watched Bellamy's rise to football fame with pride

This is the story of a teacher and the boy she never gave up on.

Not even when everyone else at their school had turned their backs on him.

Not even when the boy had long since moved on and she knew she was dying.

Eryl Walsh was a Welsh language teacher at Rumney High School on the outskirts of Cardiff when Craig Bellamy arrived there in 1990.

He was an unruly kid who ­sometimes played truant and was soon relegated to the remedial class in most subjects.

“Before every class,” Bellamy wrote in his autobiography, ­GoodFella, “the teacher would say, ‘If you don’t want to learn, go and sit at the back of the class’.”

So that’s what Bellamy did. He sat at the back, daydreaming or horsing around with his pals.

Except in one class. Mrs Walsh’s class.

In Mrs Walsh’s class, he sat front and centre.

There was a slight sadness about Mrs Walsh.

She and her husband, Paul, desperately wanted children but she was told she was unable to have kids.

Most of all, though, she was kind and patient and devoted to helping children learn.

Sometimes when she got back to her home in Roath after school, she would tell her mum, Rona, about the little boy in her class.

It saddened her that the other teachers seemed to have ­abandoned Craig, she told her mum. She could see something in him that they couldn’t.

They chatted sometimes in lessons and if any of the other kids grew raucous, the 13-year-old Bellamy would tell them to stop messing around.

As he got older, Bellamy missed more and more school as he veered towards delinquency.

But even though he moved to Norwich to join the club’s youth system when he was 15, Mrs Walsh never forgot him.

She followed his career with great pride and defended him even when he was being pilloried for one or another of his many misdemeanours.

She watched as he rose to play for Newcastle, Liverpool and Manchester City.

And she saw how his pride in Wales drove him to play more times for his country than anyone except Neville Southall, Gary Speed and Dean Saunders.

Her own life, though, took a tragic turn. Her husband died suddenly of a rare heart ­condition.

And in November 2010, when Mrs Walsh was just 56 years old, she was diagnosed with motor neurone disease.

At first, she anticipated living for 10 more years but by the middle of 2011, she had already become gravely ill.

So she began to think about what to do with her money. She decided she wanted to give most of it to charity.

With the help of her friend and financial planner, Craig Palfrey, she picked out organisations connected with her great passions, the Welsh language and the ­education and well-being of ­children.

She earmarked funds for Ty Hafan, which cares for life-limited kids. And for Tenovus, which helps cancer patients and their families.

And then, at the end of January 2012, when she only had a few months to live, she watched a documentary on ITV4.

She had seen the trailer for it the week before as she sat with Craig Palfrey. It was called Craig Bellamy’s African Dream.

She told him she used to teach Craig. She said she had adored him when he was a kid. She told him how proud she was of him.

She had not realised until then that Bellamy had started a ­foundation aimed at improving the lives of children in Sierra Leone.

But when she saw the ­documentary and heard how he had built a football academy to try to drag children out of poverty, she knew all her faith in him had been rewarded.

As soon as the documentary was over, she told Craig Palfrey and his company Penguin Wealth that she wanted a chunk of her savings to go to the Craig Bellamy Foundation.

A month later, Eryl was taken to the Cardiff City Stadium in her wheelchair as Bellamy’s special guest for the Gary Speed tribute match between Wales and Costa Rica.

Eryl was finding it difficult to speak by then, as the illness took hold, but when Bellamy bounded into his private box at the end of the game, her eyes lit up.

Craig Bellamy and Eryl Walsh
Reunited: Craig Bellamy and Eryl Walsh

They managed to have a chat about old times at Rumney High School and then Bellamy introduced her to his own children.

He told his three kids that Eryl was the reason he had been telling them they had to ignore his example and get everything they could out of their education.

Eryl died on June 27, 2012, but last week she made one final gesture to the kid she never gave up on.

As Bellamy sat on a stage at his book launch in Cardiff, Craig Palfrey came up to make a presentation - a cheque to Bellamy’s foundation from Eryl for £50,000.

“With all the other charities,” Palfrey said, “Eryl wanted all sorts of stipulations and safeguards put in. When it came to Craig’s ­foundation, she was happy to sign the money over straight away.”

Somehow, from the day she met him, Eryl knew the boy would end up doing the right thing.

And now Bellamy is helping to educate other kids that people gave up on.

Eryl started it, Bellamy is paying it forward.

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