Lady Cathy Ferguson, the wife of the former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson and the woman he called his “bedrock”, has died at the age of 84.
The Ferguson family confirmed the news in a statement released on Friday afternoon. “We are deeply saddened to confirm the passing yesterday of Lady Cathy Ferguson, survived by her husband, three sons, two sisters, 12 grandchildren and one great-grandchild,” the statement read. “The family asks for privacy at this time.”
Ferguson, 81, has not been present at the last of United’s home matches.
He revealed previously that he would have continued in the United hot-seat beyond his retirement at the end of the 2012/13 season were it not for the death of Cathy’s twin sister and best friend Bridget.
“I definitely would have carried on,’ Ferguson told the Daily Telegraph . “I saw she [Cathy] was watching television one night, and she looked up at the ceiling. I knew she was isolated. Her and Bridget were twins, you know?”
Ferguson explained how Cathy had persuaded him not to call time on his career when he announced his retirement many years earlier in 2002, reasoning: “One, your health is good. Two, I’m not having you in the house. And three, you’re too young anyway.”
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A Glasgow native, Cathy Holding met the former coach while they were working together in a typewriter factory in 1964.
They were married two years later and went on to raise three children and 12 grandchildren over the course of a relationship that endured for more than half a century.
Lady Ferguson once said she had feared that the man who went on to become the most successful manager in the history of British football was a “thug” when she first met him, as he was sporting a plaster on his face due to a football injury.
She also recalled their first date, a trip to the cinema and a gift of a box of liquorice allsorts “of which he ate all of them”.
“That was my romantic day,” she told the 2021 documentary Sir Alex Ferguson: Never Give In, directed by their son Jason.
“We got married in the Glasgow registry office in 1966, and that was the start. I went to my work, and he went to his football.”
Alex himself spoke about their relationship and of his debt to Cathy upon his retirement as manager of Manchester United in 2013, after 27 years in the job.
“My wife Cathy has been the key figure throughout my career, providing a bedrock of both stability and encouragement,” he said. “Words are not enough to express what this has meant to me.”