PETER JACKSON
THE MAN TRULY IN THE KNOW

AT HOME in Angelina Street one Friday evening during the early spring of 1953, Billy Boston thought about what he had just done and burst into tears.
As the Wigan delegation headed off on the long journey north armed with his contractual signature, it would not have occurred to them that behind the front door in the Boston family’s crowded patch of Tiger Bay they left a teenager in some distress.
“When the Wigan people left the house late that Friday, I cried,’’ he told me long ago. “I thought: ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’
“I never saw any of the...