“I was on holiday, not feeling myself, and reading in a newspaper about Bobby’s widow who was saying that if he’d gone to the doctor when he first thought something might be wrong he’d still be alive. That seemed like Bobby, bless him, giving me a warning and an Englishman doing a Scotsman a favour. I couldn’t believe it, I thought cancer was something that happened to other people. But I took the hint and ended up having 12 inches of my colon cut out.”
That was nine years ago then during a check-up in 2014 he was referred to another hospital. “I joked with the doctor: ‘So you don’t want me dying on your patch?’ He was concerned about my oesophagus.
"The top man in the field, Professor Mike Griffin, told me there was a big operation which would make the cancer in my colon seem like a little nick but hopefully I’d just need the small operation. I needed the big one: eight hours with Mike going in through my back, collapsing one lung and removing nine-tenths of my oesophagus.” He puts a hand level with his shoulder blades. “Now my stomach starts right up here.”
Hopefully, he says, that’s his lot. He swims and cycles and, as a sailing nut, hopes he’s got another round-Britain race in him – but then he thought he was fit before.
“I drank but wasn’t wild with it. Lots of footballers in my day smoked – the ones at Newcastle would have fags lit for them at half-time by [manager] Joe Harvey if they were playing well – but I never did. Maybe the grot in the air from all the mines round here didn’t help.”
But Moncur will never criticise the place he’s called home from the age of 15. He would cross the north-east divide to play for Sunderland with his son returning home from a challenging day at school to inquire: “Mum, what’s a traitor?” He would go back to Scotland to manage Hearts – a mistake because the club were in “a right mess”. But he will always be a Magpie, the Monk, who saved virtually all his goals – three of them – for the Inter- Cities Fairs Cup triumph of 1969.
Has cancer changed his outlook? “Oh yes. You sit up and think about your life, how you shouldn’t take anything for granted, how there’s no time for hanging around. After we’re done talking Camille and I are off on holiday to Lake Como.”
And the same sense of urgency was evident earlier in the day when Mr Newcastle had lunch with the new manager tasked with keeping the team in the Premier League, Rafa Benitez.
“I was trying to get him to commit to the club long-term. Everyone expects him to leave if we get relegated but I told him he was the future. He could re-build us and hopefully make us great again. I told him I was speaking on behalf of all the fans, those poor, long-suffering folk who sing Blaydon Races in all weathers. I got quite emotional as I was speaking to him and could feel myself welling up. That happens more since my cancer.”
Moncur fell in love with Newcastle, the city, at first sight. “It was the friendliness of the people which swung it for me.” United let him sign at 15 while staying in Scotland would have meant a wait for two years and there was no trace of homesickness in this determined fellow when he took up residence with his landlady at the notable address of 188 Two Ball Lonnen and was taxied to training by Ronnie Simpson.
There were plenty more Scots in the team by 1969: “Jim Scott who came from the Hibs was a proper old winger and grumpy with it. Jackie Sinclair on the other wing was quiet and quick and sadly he was the first of us to pass away. As for Tommy Gibb, he might not have been the best player in the world – we all got the cry ‘Heap o’ shit!’ and maybe him more than most – but he did the running and was an unsung hero.”
One of the biggest characters was another ex-Hibee, John McNamee: “We were together in the middle of the defence. He’d go and win the ball and I was supposed to do the clever stuff alongside him. But you had to watch out for his great, muckle, scything left boot. He caught me with it more times than I was kicked by any opposition centre-forward. Once, against Queen’s Park Rangers, he hit the ball so hard off my backside it cannoned into our net for an own goal.
“I can still see him swinging on the crossbar like a fish, roaring at the Sunderland fans after scoring against them. I remember him chasing [Leeds’ United’s] Gary Sprake who was running for his life. Big Mac was hard as nails but a gentle giant who lost his wife very early. He’s not been very well lately and in the bad weather was flooded out of his house in the Lake District three times. Our heroes’ association managed to send him a few quid.”
United made money from the Euro triumph. “Rather than pay the tax we went out and bought Jimmy Smith from Aberdeen.”
The record £100,000 signing, who’d made his Scotland debut on the same night as Moncur, came off the same production-line as all our other wayward wingmen.
“Jinky was brilliant but infuriating. The defence would win the ball and give it to him, then he’d wander back and try to nutmeg the opposition in our box.
“He liked a drink and a bet; I tried to tell him to leave that stuff until after he’d stopped playing but he wouldn’t listen. He had a girlfriend who was a banker’s daughter and going to pick her up, pissed, he drove right across the old man’s lawn.
“Later when I had a taxi business I gave him a job but he quit just before Christmas to flog turkeys. ‘I’m making more money doing this, Bob,’ he said. ‘Yeah, but what happens in January?’ That was Jinky.”
Moncur has lots of stories. Joe Harvey wasn’t the most scientific of managers, although before playing Sporting Lisbon in the Fairs Cup the players were surprised to not be handed specific instructions, given the manager had twice been to Portugal to spy on them.
“Didn’t you bother going to their games, Boss?” they asked. Harvey retorted: “Just bloody get into them. A taxi driver told me their centre- forward’s a bit quick and a waitress said there goalie’s dodgy on crosses.”
Then there was the semi-final, a tie which has gone down in infamy with the Rangers fans running riot on the St James pitch and in the city. “Something flew through the air near a corner flag. I thought: ‘Was that a bottle?’ It smashed into a fan’s face. Then our goalie Willie McFaul picked up his cap and sprinted straight past me. I turned round: there were thousands on the park. The game was stopped, Rangers conceded, but we had to go back out and finish it.
“Usually after European matches players exchanged gifts outside the dressing-rooms. I had to go to the boardroom – my first time up there – to collect ours from the Rangers chairman John Lawrence, who was so embarrassed about what had happened that I thought he was going to be sick.”
As he knows only too well, though, all his tales concern 1969. It’s high time there were some new ones about Magpies on the rise again. “Yes, and they’d better get a move on,” he says, waving me off. “I want to be around to see that.”