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Harry Hibbs followed in their stead, unflappably pursuing a one-club league and Cup career of over 400 games. His first international came in 1930, the year after some shocks to the system. As if the Wall Street Crash was not enough, England’s first defeat abroad deepened the depression. It was one thing to be beaten by the Scots – twenty-four times between 1872 (when the first match between the two countries was staged) and 1929 made this reasonably common; it was quite novel to be humbled by the ‘continentals’. In the game we had invented, Spain did the dirty, 4–3 in Madrid. This was equivalent to bullfighting’s finest rolling up at Wembley from the estancias of Castille, to be humiliated by a squad of upstart toreros from the backstreets of Huddersfield. Previous English excursions abroad had been mainly confined to taking the steamer across the Channel to France or Belgium. We took our own matchballs to counter the likelihood of foreign jiggery-pokery. How the Spaniards had won the match was a source of national perplexity.
Hibbs was cannily suited to handle the uncertainties of the epoch, a man to lift the spirit by steadying the nerves. My encyclopaedia approved his style as a subtle variation from that commended by my father. Harry was ‘safe rather than spectacular’. At 5 feet 9 inches, ‘on the short side for a goalkeeper’, he compensated by refining the brilliance of Sam Hardy to still higher levels. Hibbs was not just in position for assaults on his goal, but in the only possible position: ‘He gave the impression that forwards were shooting straight at him.’
There was something very British about this knack. It was a natural detachment from the turmoil that enabled ultimate control of it. Britain in the 1930s had withdrawn into itself, in an understated, poor man’s version of the old and sensible glories of ‘Splendid Isolation’. As Harry Hibbs surveyed the scene from his goalmouth, the nation observed gathering continental chaos. Hitler and Mussolini strutted and pranced around. Britain did not have the faintest idea what to do. This could not be easily admitted, least of all to ourselves, so it was important to conjure up the sense of a nation being quietly ‘there’, in the right place should the need arise. Hibbs personified the being there. Like Britain, he was also particularly good whenever required to face the strutters and prancers. Harry’s skills were most marked, said my encyclopaedia, ‘against a continental side which included a showy keeper’.
This was possibly a reference to the Spanish goalkeeper, Ricardo Zamora, whom Hibbs and England came up against at Highbury in 1931. Revenge for the defeat two years earlier was duly extracted to the tune of a resounding 7–1. Zamora, who came with the reputation of being world-class, had a miserable game. What prompted more ridicule was the news that he earned £50 a week, compared with Hibbs’s wage of £ 8 during the season and £6 in the summer break. But the implication that the England keeper was always at his best against a showy continental was stretching the point. His better games were not abroad. He was more comfortable at home, closer to base, something which was reflected in his style of play. In keeping with the times, Harry was not one to advance happily beyond his goalkeeper’s area and into the broader reaches of the penalty box. By and large, he stuck firmly to his line.
In Hibbs’s protective shadow, a new breed was emerging. Its members were obliged to display the classical certainties of the tradition, yet felt able to add a touch of goalkeeping rococo. In Glasgow, Jack Thomson of Celtic made his reputation when Scottish keepers were expected to be no less soberly dignified than those south of the border. ‘There was little time for drama and histrionics,’ said local writer Hugh Taylor. The keeper who tried to invest his game with colour was regarded with deep-rooted suspicion, he added, and had as much chance of a successful career ‘as a bank clerk who went to work in sports jacket and flannels’.
Thomson could twist and change direction in midair. He also applied an extra thrust to his dives, to reach shots which would have been beyond others. This gift was compared to the hitch-kick later used by Jesse Owens, which won him the long-jump gold medal and world record in Berlin. All this, of course, could only be employed when the need for something spectacular arose. Thomson’s talent was not confined to his agility. As Taylor noted, he held rather than punched or parried the hardest of shots and there was no keeper more reliable. He ‘inspired tremendous confidence in the men in front of him, always watching play, combining rare, natural talent with a mathematical precision that took so many risks out of his often hazardous art’. Tragically, not all of them. He was a regular Scottish international by the age of twenty-two, but was killed in 1931 after diving and fracturing his skull at the feet of a Rangers forward at Ibrox Park.
Other young keepers who struck a popular chord followed. In 1932, Manchester City signed Frank Swift, aged seventeen. Goalkeeper for the third team, he was on ten shillings a week, so thought it financially wise to retain his job as coke-keeper at Blackpool gasworks. When City reached the 1933 Cup Final, he and a mate with a motor-cycle drove down to watch. Big for the time at 6 feet 2 inches and 13 stone 7 pounds, Swift squeezed into the sidecar. They left in the middle of the night in order to make the trip and, in the rain, managed to go off the road only once. Manchester City were more easily brushed aside, 3–0 by Everton. Swift soon found himself promoted in City’s pecking order of keepers and, on £1 a week, able to give up the gasworks. He made his debut for the first team on Christmas Day. When he was knocked out early on by the opposition centre-forward, his trainer brought him round by mistakingly spilling half a bottle of smelling salts down his throat. But in the months after, it was injury to the regular first-team keeper that left Swift in line for selection, as City won their way through to the Cup Final again in 1934. As the time approached to face this year’s opponents, Portsmouth, the prospect left him on top of the world one moment, he said, the next in fits of despondency. He told himself he was far too young to be playing at Wembley. With a ‘terrible, sinking feeling’, he saw the team sheet go up, with his name at the top of it.
He aimed to go to bed early the night before the game but shared a room with his team captain, Sam Cowan, who sat bathing a poisoned big toe in a bowl of hot water. Cowan kept him talking till 3 a.m. Swift reckoned later this was to make him sleep late and have less time for pre-match nerves. They got the better of him in the Wembley dressing room. The sight of a jittery senior player having to have his laces tied, he said, turned him green. The trainer hauled Swift off to the washroom, gave him a slap round the face and a tot of whisky. He made it through the parade on to the pitch and presentation to George V. Just after the game started, Matt Busby, Manchester City’s right-half, turned, shouted and passed back to him, to give him an early feel of the ball and calm him down.
Portsmouth scored after half an hour, for which Swift blamed himself. There’d been a brief shower of rain, which normally would have prompted him to put his gloves on. But he’d peered up the other end to see Portsmouth’s keeper had left his in the back of the net. Not trusting his own judgement, Swift did, too, and paid for it when a shot across him from the right slithered through his fingers as he dived. In the dressing room at half-time, the Manchester City centre-forward, Fred Tilson, told Swift to stop looking so miserable about it. Tilson added he’d score twice in the second half, which he did. The second came with only four minutes to go. Suddenly Swift, aged nineteen, realised he might be on the point of winning a Cup Final.
The photographers sitting at the side of his goal began to count down the minutes and seconds for him. Seeing how tense he was, they may have been trying to be helpful. Equally, men of Fleet Street, they might have had their minds on the story. Swift started to lose control of his with about one minute remaining. With fifty seconds left he was thinking of his mother and if the Cup would take much cleaning. At forty seconds he worried whether the king would talk to him. At thirty seconds, Matt Busby smashed the ball into the crowd to waste time and a photographer shouted, ‘It’s your Cup, son’. As the whistle went he stooped to get his cap and gloves from the net, took a couple of steps out of it and ‘everything went black’.
Swift was the favourite of millions of young fans thereafter. Among them was my dad, listening to the game on the wireless. He was to leave school at the end of that term, a month before his fourteenth birthday. For Swift at nineteen to be in a cup-winning team was enough in itself to make him a Kids’ Own hero. His faint in the Wembley goalmouth only heightened this. Though he was a virtual Superboy of the day, he showed himself vulnerable to pressure like anyone else, a big kid after all. Laid out on the turf, he was brought round by cold water poured on his face and dabbed by the trainer’s sponge. He was helped to his feet and limped across the pitch and up the steps to the Royal Box to get his medal from George V. The king spoke to him through what Swift described as a ‘dizzy mist’ and, at greater length than was customary, asked how he was, told him he played well and wished him good luck. The king sent a message the following week, via the Lord Lieutenant of the County of Lancashire, inquiring after Swift’s health.
Throughout his career, Swift showed himself to be not only a large person, but also a large personality. He’d turn and wave to the crowd, acknowledge their shouts, even chat if the ball was at the other end. He applied an occasional flourish to his leaps or dives for the crowd’s benefit. These were ‘flash’, though within limits. A dive when you could keep your feet, or a punch when a catch was feasible, was not the thing. Swift’s principle, however, was that as long as it was safe, where was the harm in the bit of extra for effect?
Among British keepers, Swift pioneered the skills of throwing the ball, something he’d picked up from watching water polo. Crowds tended to feel short-changed by a keeper doing anything but clearing the ball out of his penalty area with a hefty boot. But Swift had enormous strength and huge hands – the length of the average person’s foot – with which he could pick up or catch a ball single-handed. He’d hurl it over half the length of the pitch, and guide it far more accurately than could be accomplished with a hopeful punt. An extrovert character, it was one of the ways he imposed himself on the game. Swift was generally good at making himself known, not least to referees whose decisions he felt unable to go along with. Against the football hierarchy, he also became a vociferous campaigner for players’ wages and conditions.
After his Cup medal, Swift’s club career reached another peak when Manchester City won the league in 1937. Runners-up were Charlton Athletic, whose goalkeeper, Sam Bartram, had a similar personality and style. Not quite of Swift’s physical dimensions, he was a tall and broad, red-haired character, who indulged in the flamboyant when opportunity arose. Much thanks to him, Charlton had climbed in successive seasons from the Third Division South, through the Second, to challenge for the First Division title itself. Swift and Bartram were identified as future rivals for a place in the England team and at one stage Bartram appeared the most likely contender. The season after Charlton ran Manchester City closely for the championship, he played for the Possibles against the Probables in an England trial.
Swift and Bartram had been born within weeks of each other a little before the start of the First World War. From, respectively, the industrial north-west and north-east, they grew up in regions feeling the worst of the post-war recession. The country’s mood was also steeped in memories of one awful conflict and the strengthening conviction that a worse one was on the way. The Great War had had the wonders of the trenches and ‘going over the top’; everyone knew the next war would bid goodbye to all that with mass aerial bombardment of the cities. Swift and Bartram were products of the widely-held view among ordinary people that there was little sane reaction but to laugh, make the best of it and pretend the worst was not going to happen. If ever the laughter had to be prompted a little, there were always characters around like Swift and Bartram to help its orchestration. Vaudeville keepers in their way, they played in response to popular demand.
In any of their off-duty pictures I later saw – team photos, head-and-shoulders portraits, or shots of them being introduced to one dignitary or another before a big game – they were always at least smiling. In accounts of their matches that I read or was told about, their presence dominated. Each was likely to rush from the keeper’s 6-yard box, to the edge or beyond the penalty area to clear the ball, forsaking their hands and heading it if necessary. This was a way of doing things much more familiar to keepers on the continent. It brought the keeper out of his remote condition and into closer touch with his team. Both Swift and Bartram were students of the style of Harry Hibbs – now nearing the end of his career – and sought advice from him on how it was all meant to be done. But notes taken, they moved far beyond the role of humble ‘custodian’.
Two weeks after my dad’s nineteenth birthday the war was declared, an occasion as stressful at that age as playing in the Cup Final. After listening to Chamberlain’s announcement, he went out in the back garden where his dad grew the vegetables and, as the phrase has it, broke down. His father followed and tried to help: ‘That’s OK, son, there’s nothing to worry about,’ he might have offered. ‘I passed through the Menin Gate and the various battles of Ypres. Nasty explosion at the Somme, of course, and this open hip wound still plays up. But I survived – when most of the Beds and Herts were wiped out, they made me sergeant major for a day till reinforcements arrived.’ But, in that moment, my Bedfordshire grandfather opted to stay quiet.
For two years my father’s bricklaying had him on such essential works as building the Tempsford aerodrome. A Stuka came for a few minutes one afternoon and strafed the hundred or so of them working up the sheer face of the cooling towers at Barford. The bombing of London had prompted my mum’s move to the country and they got married after he was called up into the Royal Signals. In Greenock he and several thousand others were put on ships which sailed west almost as far as Iceland. They weren’t told where they were going, up to the point the boats turned to plunge south. Through the Bay of Biscay the weather was so rough the convoy’s members were rarely in sight of each other. Maybe the conditions were a problem for the German U-boats as well. The next convoy out a fortnight or so later lost a third of its number. My dad’s ‘never saw a seagull’. Straight, more or less, from Sandy, Bedfordshire, he arrived at the Saharan fringes of North Africa, landing with the army in Algiers in 1942.
Across Algeria and Tunisia, the task of pushing back Rommel and his Afrika Korps allowed little opportunity for football or any other game but was carried out in a spirit not seen elsewhere in the war. The British troops viewed Rommel as a ‘good bloke’, a German but a fair one. This marked him as a man apart from the madness of his Nazi teammates. It didn’t mean whatever wit and cunning the ‘Desert Fox’ had could match ours. Near the Tunisian coastal town of La Goulette, shortly before my dad sailed from Cap Bon for Italy, he watched thousands of captured Germans march into their prison camp. This they did in immaculate order, seemingly perfectly according to character. Then they fell into weird nights behind the wire, when their mood alternated between crazed merriment and near riot.
The British army’s attitude to the enemy appeared to be as much a worry to the top brass, even after the Germans had been defeated in Africa and the Sicily landings completed. Maybe the official view was that the soldiers’ achievements might go to their heads. My dad’s company was called together in the almond grove where they were camped near Syracuse and, in line with a War Office directive, bawled out for their apparent misconceptions about Rommel. Not that they took a great deal of notice; there had to be some lone symbol of decency even in the worst of worlds.
All in all, my father said, he was lucky. His brother Reg was sent to Burma. At Kohima the British were besieged for weeks, separated by the width of the High Commissioner’s tennis court from the Japanese screaming at them on the other side. My uncle had injured mates pleading with him to shoot them and put them out of their misery. He was lying wounded in a makeshift hospital himself when the Japanese stormed it at one door and caught up with him after he’d got out the other. Injured by a bayonet thrust, he feigned death in the long grass.
In comparison, the Royal Signals was a doddle. My father had to master Morse Code and spent much of the day tapping it out. He’d applied for the Royal Engineers, thinking it wanted people from the building industry. In relief, when that came to nothing, his dad explained he’d have been constructing Bailey bridges across rivers and repairing phone lines in no man’s land, under what the army liked to refer to as ‘hot fire’.
But events had a way of springing themselves upon you, pulling you suddenly in. You had to beware of the unguarded moment. The German attack on Bari harbour in December 1943 came when we had got ‘too cocky’ and confident of victory. Everyone saw the single German spotter plane circling very high and watched the anti-aircraft fire chase it away. They thought no more about it till at night the aerial assault came in. The harbour was floodlit; the twenty-boat convoy, recently arrived was being unloaded. Two ammunition carriers went up and took fourteen other ships with them. One explosion, like the crack of a large whip, threw my dad 15 feet across his room, door and windows with him; this was 6 miles away along the coast in Santo Spirito. A chance hit,’ wrote Churchill, ‘30,000 tons of cargo lost.’ He didn’t mention the thousand killed among the Italian dockyard workers, merchant seamen and Allied military personnel. In the yard next morning victims, dead and alive, had turned yellow. The medics had no idea for days what they were dealing with, till word went around that General Eisenhower had ordered a consignment of mustard gas. Not that we’d have used it without cause, mind you. We just had it in case the Germans used it first.
During a plague of typhus in Caserta, north of Naples, my dad’s unit was billeted in the abandoned royal palace, with its water cascades and hanging gardens, while for several weeks the Allied advance was held up by the battles for the monastery at Montecassino. Driving through the streets in a truck, he saw an old man fall over and die. Some soldiers who ventured out on the town in their free time suffered the same fate. Sometimes there was nothing to be done, except withdraw, observe and wonder what it was that made such things go on in the world. A degree of separation, if there was a choice, afforded a perspective that was lost on the unthinking crowd. On Piazzale Loretto in Milan, he saw the bodies of Mussolini and his mistress hanging from their heels and urinated on by an angry mob. Weeks before, the same crowd might have been cheering them.
After the war, soldiers rarely volunteered their recollections. They only came out over the years. Experiences had either been too awful, mundane or similar to those of many others to merit earlier mention. Besides, the cities at home had had the bombs. Even Sandy High Street was machine-gunned by a German fighter, my nan having to launch herself into a shop doorway with baby and pram. Anyone who went on about moments they had endured abroad in face of the enemy, or how many of them they’d injured or killed, would have been a suspect personality. Few, too, were asked. Until prompted, my dad said little more than he had seen the eruption of Vesuvius, from Caserta, filling the sky with black smoke for three weeks in March 1944. As in the time of Pompeii, the prior impression had been that it was extinct. Further north in Siena he began to learn Italian by walking out from the city’s fort and reciting door numbers. He came home speaking the language well, one among very few of the quarter of a million Allied soldiers in Italy to do so.
Talking about the football, rather than the war, was easier. Games were played between stages of the Allied advance up the Italian leg. My father played in goal for 15th Army Group HQ and was nicknamed ‘Flash’, though only, he insisted, after his white blond hair. You changed in barracks or tents and, if playing away, went by army truck. Match locations ranged from the landing strip in Syracuse, to Rome’s Dei Marmi stadium, encircled by statues of emperors and gods. In the Comunale stadium in Florence, England were to draw 1–1 some seven years later and maintain their unbeaten record against Italy. In Bologna, my dad occupied the goal where David Platt volleyed the last-minute winner past Preud’homme of Belgium in the 1990 World Cup. His reports of the games he played in suggest he’d have probably saved it.
As for the spectacular moments, the most memorable was reserved for when the army had moved far north to the Yugoslav border to fend off Tito’s claim to Trieste. It was made in the small stadium in Monfalcone, on a baked-earth goalmouth full of large stones. A brisk advance by the opposition down the right-wing forced him to cover his front post. But the ball swung over to the fast-advancing centre-forward, who volleyed it hard towards the far corner. A Liverpudlian, naturally vocal, the centre-forward was shouting for a goal from the moment he hit it. My dad made it across the full 8 yards of his goal, diving to push the ball away with his right hand. The save was unique in anyone’s recollection, though others may have emulated it since.
Immediate thoughts of self-congratulation were tempered by the impact of the goalmouth surface on his knees. As my dad pulled himself up in pain, his opponent – driven by a fit of frustrated expectation and Adriatic sun – rushed in, yelling and hammering him with his fists around the shoulders and head. This incident was ‘comical’, which left me with the impression goalkeepers were not averse to gaining pleasure from the annoyance of others. But they also performed an important public service. Contrary to a common prejudice that it was keepers who, by virtue of their role and isolation, were insane, they showed that it was out there, in the wider, collective world, where madness was to be found.
At the start of the war, Frank Swift had signed up as a special constable in Manchester. He was put to directing city traffic, an ill-advised move, since his presence was more likely to attract a crowd than clear it. One congested day on Market Street, with his efforts achieving nothing, he waved a cheery ‘bugger this’ and went home. Like many top footballers, he became a trainer to younger soldiers who were about to be shipped abroad. My dad was trained by Roy Goodall, the Huddersfield Town and England half-back, and passed out as a PT instructor. This qualified him for a comfortable home assignment in one military gym or another but before one arose he was en route for Africa. Again, he said, he was fortunate. Many of the younger trainers who were at first kept back from service abroad, found themselves later pitched on to the beaches at Normandy.
Football at home ticked over, with teams raised from whoever was on hand on any given Saturday. Sam Bartram played in two successive wartime Cup Finals, one for Charlton, the other as a guest for Millwall. As the war moved towards conclusion, opportunity arose to put on exhibition matches for the troops abroad. Victory in Europe was on the point of being declared as my dad’s unit progressed to Florence, when it was announced Frank Swift was due in town. He was to play for a team led by Joe Mercer, the Everton half-back, against that of Wolves captain, Stan Cullis. It was to be an occasion for great celebration, till on the morning of the game, my dad and fellow signalmen were told to pack their kit and advance up country to Bologna. VE Day was an anti-climax. Each soldier was issued two bottles of beer, which he and his mates poured over their heads: ‘Bloody stupid, really.’
Full international games were under way at home more than a year later. It was obvious to many that the choice for the England keeper lay between Swift and Bartram. In conversation their names were mentioned in the same breath. Yet, in an era when the average forty-year-old didn’t have a tooth to talk of, at thirty-two they weren’t young. The England selectors had dallied with the idea of jumping a goalkeeping generation. Ted Ditchbum of Tottenham Hotspur, ten years younger, was the object of their attention. He had played well in big wartime games against Scotland and Wales, which suggested he was in for a promising international career. Unfortunately for Ditchbum, the Royal Air Force thought so as well. When he was posted to the Far East for two years, the selectors’ hand was forced. By default as much as instinct, they tossed the keeper’s yellow jersey, undersized for the part, into the huge grasp of Frank Swift.
He played commandingly in the first seventeen internationals after the war. For two, he was selected as England’s first goal-keeping captain. What he described as his own greatest day was when he led the team against Italy in May 1948. Originally England were to play Czechoslovakia but after February’s communist coup in Prague, the fixture was rearranged. The team went by air from Northolt, a dozen journalists in tow, among them former players like Charles Buchan, ex-Scotland and Arsenal and then of the News Chronicle. The mode of transport, however, was sufficiently novel for the Daily Herald’s man to opt to go by boat and train. The weather deteriorated over Switzerland, where the captain felt it necessary to stop and change planes. Swift described the rest of the journey over the Alps in a twin-engined Dakota as a ‘bit of a snorter’ and said he wasn’t the only passenger relieved to get off again.
The match was on Juventus’s ground in Turin. World Cup holders from before the war and in front of their own 85,000 crowd, the Italians were expected to win. While England had given themselves three days to prepare, the home team had been undergoing three weeks’ intensive training. Continentals clearly took this kind of thing very seriously. Furthermore, where England’s training in Stresa was open to view, recorded Swift, Italy’s was ‘at a mountain hideout’. In the England dressing room, there was no concealing the pre-match tension: ‘We knew what we were up against and changed quietly.’ Come the moment, Swift was unable to find the words for a captain’s speech of encouragement. Instead, each member of the team filed past and shook his hand.
Outside all was turmoil: loudspeaker announcements, with adverts and exhortations to the crowd, aeroplanes promoting everything from newspapers to cordials, and others swooping low over the pitch with cameramen on board shooting the scene. Hordes more photographers joined Swift in the middle for the toss. ‘Some standing on ladders, which they toted across the field, some lying on their stomachs,’ he said, ‘all of them arguing and gesticulating.’
England’s response to the apparent anarchy was to score almost immediately. Stan Mortensen raced to the byline and beat the Italian keeper Valerio Bacigalupo from what seemed an impossible angle. This was to the ‘astonishment and chagrin’ of the crowd, said Swift, which prompted their team to storm back. ‘For twenty minutes they threw everything at us with bewildering inter-passing and brilliant speed.’ Shots, overhead kicks, headers, the lot ‘flew at me from all directions’. Probably the most startling was from the Italian centre-forward, Gabetto. Eight yards out, he didn’t turn or take aim but back-headed the ball. A British keeper couldn’t have anticipated that kind of thing and the surprise and speed of it beat Swift. The ball hit his crossbar and bounced down just in front of the line, near enough to have the crowd screaming at the referee to give a goal. When play switched to the other end, Swift invited one of the photographers crowding behind the net to step around into the goalmouth so he could show him where the ball had landed. The fellow accepted the offer and quickly took a photo of the spot. His colleagues would have followed, said Swift, if the Italians hadn’t been straight back on the attack.
The England captain stopped everything he had to, though handed the compliments to his team. His defence was ‘rock-like’, not least Jack Howe of Derby County in his first international, ‘and incidentally the first man to play for England wearing contact lenses over his eyes’. By contrast he was sniffy about the Italian defenders, who sometimes ‘indulged in acrobatic antics while clearing the ball’. England’s forwards left the Italians dumbfounded with their simplicity of approach, namely the way they cracked the ball into the net with first-time volleys and after quick one-pass movements. But most of the honours won from England’s near incredible 4–0 victory went to Swift. It was acknowledged as his finest game in the finest England performance ever. Hitherto there was no question that Britain had the finest keepers in the world. In Turin Swift proved to be the finest yet seen.
The England selectors may even have agreed at the time. But it didn’t take them long to think again. The following season, little more than six months later, Swift was dropped. He competed for his place with Ted Ditchbum for a couple of games but, soon after, seemed to have been overcome by the affront to his pride. He stood down not only from the England line-up, but from football altogether.
The decision to drop him could have been put down to the passing years but it was not so much Swift’s age, more his style that was cracking on. The selectors were an aged crew themselves, a panel of half a dozen or so club directors or other luminaries from the football establishment. There was a picture of one of them, Arthur Drewry, in my encyclopaedia. He had the brushed-back grey hair, nervous smile and starched collar look of a Neville Chamberlain. He and his colleagues sat in learned committees, their anxiously awaited, often haphazard and mysterious decisions worthy of a puff of smoke when finally revealed. But they did what they believed was for the good of the game and chose those whom they felt were the right type.
Before the war, Swift had never been considered ready for the England team, yet he was the national character for the moment. He had acknowledged that the pressures of life were enough to get anyone down but embodied the spirit of ‘get up and get on with it’. He, as much as any popular figure, symbolised the people ‘smiling through’. Swift waved and laughed to each member of the crowd. To those going off to Africa, Sicily, Normandy, or wherever, this said, ‘It’ll be all right, son’. They didn’t know it would, but it was the best they had. With luck, and the right distance between them and the explosion when it came, they might even survive to get their medals from the king.
For my father and the other soldiers in Florence, Swift was to arrive almost at the very moment of victory. In person, not just in spirit, he was going to be on hand to begin the celebrations with them. Swift’s team won 11–0, so no one would have seen him do much goalkeeping. But you could bet when the ball was up the other end, he’d have been turning to chat with the squaddies behind his goal. My dad said it took him several years to get over the disappointment of missing that game.
Still, Frank’s elevation to the England team meant he was on hand for the party back home. As the returning soldiers ejected Churchill from Downing Street, so they went to be entertained by Swift between the posts. As a keeper able to put on a show, there was no one more perfect for the occasion. Long after Swift retired, my father and anyone who spoke about him continued to do so in terms which raised him to the status of a giant and friendly god, who made you hardly able to believe your luck that he was on your side.
By the time I heard about Swift, revision of the record had been going on for a while. My encyclopaedia made what sounded like noises of approval, yet didn’t throw its compliments around. Swift was ‘massive’ and had ‘exceptional height and reach’, features which represented no great achievement on his part. Harry Hibbs, after all, had not enjoyed such natural advantages. Swift was also ‘likeable’. There had been nothing to say whether Hibbs, Hardy and Scott had been likeable – or even whether to be likeable was a good thing. They were no doubt the soul of decency as people but their virtue as keepers was in their hardly being noticed. With Frank there was little chance of that and here lay the problem. ‘Swift might have been the greatest goalkeeper of all time,’ intoned the encyclopaedia, ‘but for a tendency to showmanship.’
He had been great for the fleeting post-war moment of celebration but deemed inappropriate for the dour times which set in. People were expected to get back to where they’d been. Women from the Naafi or the Land Army – like my mum’s sister, Olive, who’d driven a tractor, worked with the Italian prisoners in Sandy, and even had an Italian boyfriend – were wanted back in the home. Men were required in the jobs that would reconstruct the nation. Men and women were wanted back in stable relationships; Brief Encounter urged them to forget their Little flings. Everyone had to knuckle down to austerity. With a large part of the harvest being sent to Germany, there was bread rationing, something that hadn’t happened throughout the war.
Abroad it was all going haywire. India demanded and gained independence. This was serious, although in the popular mind explained by the usual muddle-mindedness of foreigners – the half-naked fakirs in loin-cloths’ that Churchill referred to. Really threatening was that the Russians had the Bomb. When Moscow Dynamo had come to tour Britain a few months after the war it was amid great public excitement. They met Rangen in Glasgow, with demand to see them so high that tickets priced at three and sixpence were touted for as much as £1 outside the ground; 90,000 people crowded into Ibrox for the 2–2 draw. But the Russians’ tour had transmitted early signals of suspicion. They said there weren’t enough flags, flowers and music to greet them. In London they wouldn’t sleep in the guards’ barracks they were given saying the beds were too hard. (How soft had the feather mattresses been during the siege of Leningrad?) They decamped to the Soviet embassy. Churchill spoke of the Iron Curtain descending from the Baltic to ‘Trieste on the Adriatic’. Churchill made his speech in the USA, among friends; his mother was American. But the USA wasn’t on our side over the empire, not least when Palestine broke up and Israel emerged. They wanted us out, for the ‘freedom’ of others, and to slip in themselves. We were being pushed back again. These weren’t Swiftian times to be bouncing around gleefully off your line.
When Swift was dropped from the England team, his response was, in character, more dramatic than it strictly needed to be. A little more than a year after his greatest international game, he retired. Manchester City could not believe he was giving up and kept him registered for another five years to ensure he didn’t play for another team. But he sought more security than was possible in football. A giant of a keeper, he went off to be a sales rep, for Smallman’s the Manchester confectioners.
He, at least, had relished his international career. His old rival, Sam Bartram, did not win the honour. The general view was that he was kept out of the England team by Swift’s brilliance. Then, when Frank was being lined up for replacement, it was easy to pass over Sam as too old. But short of his one appearance for England Possibles, he had not been in with much of a chance. Near deified by the fortnightly 60,000 or so who turned up to enjoy his performances at the Valley, Bartram never overcame the objections of those who watched in judgement. He was condemned by them as too sensational and for playing to the gallery. His bravery in the way he threw himself at forwards’ feet – normally a commendable feature of a keeper’s game – earned him the criticism of being a ‘danger to football’.
I heard my dad talking with his brother Reg about Bartram by the coal fire in the waiting room on Sandy station. My uncle was seeing us off after one of our monthly weekend visits – dismal night, the late Sunday train, with a probable change at Hitchin or Three Counties. Bartram was good for times like this. My uncle recalled a game against Birmingham City near the end of his career when he had left his goal to take a penalty. He ran non-stop from his own area to hit the ball, which struck the crossbar with such force that he had to chase hilariously back again after it. Sam was a great laugh like that, the shame being the selectors couldn’t see the joke.
In Swift and Bartram the selectors may have noticed something like the unruly ghost of ‘Fatty’ Foulke looming from the grave. Swift they had gone along with as an exception to the desirable rule. To have sanctioned a second showman would have risked established tradition. Protective of the nation’s sterner values, Bartram was where they drew the line. He had to get by with the unofficial title of ‘England’s greatest uncapped keeper’. He played till 1956, by when he was forty-two. At the Valley they named a set of gates after him. Seeking a living, like Swift, out of the English love of humbug and sherbet lemons, he ran a sweet shop and tried football management, without huge success.
I got his autograph on the platform forecourt of St Pancras station on a Saturday morning when he was manager of Luton Town. Had Luton been a big, as opposed to Fourth Division, club, this wouldn’t have been possible. The station would have been alive with big kids who pursued the signatures of the stars and gave any younger kids present a hard time. Bartram was tall, with a big face, wrinkled forehead and wave of sandy hair. He signed my book in front of the cafeteria, as his team grabbed cheese rolls and cups of tea before taking a train somewhere north for their afternoon game. I was aware that here was the man who had been Frank Swift’s chief rival, England’s greatest uncapped keeper. Not so long ago, that had made him one of the finest in the world, and I was surprised more people in the St Pancras steam and grime didn’t give some sign that they recognised him. He was the type who’d have happily called and waved back.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_2801832d-a1ea-533d-baff-856650b43433)
In Swift’s Succession (#ulink_2801832d-a1ea-533d-baff-856650b43433)
The Swift succession played to an unprecedented audience. More than 41 million fans attended the stadiums of the nation in the 1948/9 season. Most of them were prepared to stand on exposed and crumbling terraces for the sake of an afternoon’s entertainment and they established a record that would never be beaten. With so many potentially critical eyes on them, the England selectors replaced Frank Swift by stages. In discreet British fashion, they dropped a hint here and there to prepare the crowd.
Putting Ted Ditchbum of Tottenham Hotspur between the England posts represented a return to reality. He was in Swift’s commanding physical mould at just under 6 feet 2 inches, but his style was different. Ditchburn, fearless and agile, generally did not embellish things. He was solid, consistent and, as such, more within the tradition.
A year and a bit younger than my father, he was of the generation that came to maturity in the war and had to become serious while still very young. There was no time for any of the old inter-war mood of trying to put the bad times behind you – they were on you before you knew it. Ditchburn came from Gillingham near the naval dockyards of the Medway and had volunteered for the Royal Air Force at the start of the war when he was eighteen. Younger keepers gave a new edge to the question of fitness. It was not something you had for the sake of your game or personal pride, but a matter of national necessity. Physical Training became such a high priority that it crossed the frontiers of fanaticism as PT boys were rolled off the wartime production line. Ted Ditchbum was the first of them to occupy the England goal.
Off the field at Spurs he was the players’ representative, at a time when there was talk of a strike for wages higher than the going rate of about £10. The club board threatened to put amateurs in the team. But Ditchbum was not one for ill-discipline or unchannelled aggression. He had a talent for boxing. It went with being a PT boy. If you were expert on ropes and wall bars, likely as not you could handle yourself with your fists. When done properly, it was a fine individualist art – its rules had been laid down by the gentry – which stood you in good stead against the instincts of the mob. It had for my dad when cornered by a bunch of yobs by the Roman arena in Verona. They were yelling the usual stuff about ‘British troops go home’ and edging in. So he put up an orthodox guard, left paw well forward ready to jab the first to make a move, and shouted back in Italian that they should keep coming. Good-in-a-crowd types, they backed off. Ted Ditchbum could have been a boxer, like his father had been, but he chose football and played his first game for Spurs in 1941.
Ditchbum’s military record contained an important element of sacrifice. On the verge of regular international selection, he’d been sent to India in 1944 when the call came for a dozen PTIs – physical training instructors, or so it was thought. He arrived to find the need was for Parachute Training Instructors. Once there he had to stay for two years, thus giving up the opportunity of individual honour and playing for his country for the relatively mundane duties which went with serving it. He returned to find someone else had his place in the team, but didn’t sulk and went out and played well week after week for his club. Ditchbum was made of the right material.
Fog in north Islington meant his international debut against Switzerland at Highbury had to be postponed for a day. A 6–0 victory was duly recorded the following afternoon. My dad’s youngest brother, Bim, who was eighteen and came down from Sandy by train for all the internationals, said all the action was around the Swiss keeper’s goalmouth. While the fans were fired by the moment, Ted Ditchburn had nothing to do.
It was logical to give him another run out in the side, a proper opportunity to show his international worth. For the time being, however, the selectors didn’t feel they had another one available. The function of matches like that against the Swiss was to help plug the gaps between the truly important international games. These were the home championship contests, between ourselves, the British, playing our game. Scotland were the chief opponents, but Wales and Ireland could never be taken for granted. Their players, with few exceptions, played in the English league, the ‘finest in the world’. Foreign international teams were brought over for the delectation of the masses, the fun part of a bread and circuses exercise. With the basics of daily sustenance now in such short supply, their role was all the more significant. Like Christians in the Colosseum, they provided a chance for the lions, without excessive exertion, to keep themselves in trim. No team from abroad had managed so much as a draw against England on home soil.
In the last ten games between England and Scotland either side of the war, each had won four, with two drawn. Swift was chosen, the selectors still not ready to forsake his experience and make his execution too blatant. That was largely taken care of in the match itself by the Scots keeper, Jimmy Cowan, of Greenock Morton. Few people in England had heard of him but, at Wembley and with a performance that was the highlight of his career, Scotland won 3–1. Swift, by comparison, looked jaded. He was at fault with one of the goals and injured a rib when one of the Scots forwards had the temerity to shoulder-charge him. The selectors felt more justified in replacing him.
On the 1949 post-season tour of Scandinavia, they chose Ditchburn for the reasonably stiff task of facing Sweden in Stockholm. Sweden were remembered as gold medallists at the London Olympics the year before. Nevertheless, most of them were still mainly amateurs. From undiscovered centres of footballing excellence like Norr- and Jönköping, Swedish players likely passed the their days as steambath masseurs and cross-country ski instructors. In four previous internationals they had not got within two goals of England.
Captain Billy Wright made the first mistake when, having won the toss, he elected to play into the setting sun. It dipped slowly below the Swedes’ crossbar for much of the first half and into Ditchbum’s eyes at the other end. On the high ball particularly he did not ooze confidence. Worse, as England lost 3–1, he was held to have abused that placed in him by the selectors. He had been invited into their high-risk strategy of toying with the public mood as they displaced Swift. Now they’d been embarrassed. Swift was brought back against Norway, for an easy final international of his career. Ditchbum the selectors sniffly dropped from the reckoning.
They knew they’d find support among the fans. Ditchbum’s popularity on his home ground at White Hart Lane was unconditional but Swift’s enormous national following would have had its fair number of sceptics whoever was replacing him. My dad’s first reaction to mention of the Spurs’ keeper’s name was to scoff. If pressed, he would concede that Ditchbum was a ‘good keeper’, but given my understanding that British keepers were habitually brilliant, it followed that all of them were at least ‘good’. To say so was hardly a compliment.
Spurs were top of the Second Division and the most exciting London team of the season. As well as Ditchbum, they had full-back Alf Ramsey and inside-forward Eddie Baily, both pushing for places in the national side. Ron Burgess was captain of Spurs and Wales and the year before had played left-half for Britain in their 6–1 win against the Rest of Europe. They pulled crowds of more than 50,000 to White Hart Lane fifteen times during the season. The attendance for the visit of Queens Park Rangers was 69,718. Your arms were pinned to your side, my dad said. Lift them to applaud or wave around and you wouldn’t have got them down again.
The game in October was another one-sided contest in which Ditchbum had very little to do. On one occasion when he did – out of character and bored out of his mind – he jumped a little extravagantly at a shot which needed only a simple catch, and spilled the ball. Under no pressure, he retrieved it hobbling in his 6-yard area. He even put on a bit of a smile to the packed terraces. This worked well enough for the Tottenham faithful but my dad was near apoplectic. In his view, the Spurs’ keeper was not only an unworthy pretender to Swift’s national selection, but also a poor imitator of his style. ‘He should have stuck to goalkeeping, not clowning around,’ he said. ‘He could never do it like Frank could.’
Spurs won but their constant attacks managed only a single goal – a lucky bounce off Baily’s shin. QPR’s keeper, Reg Allen, otherwise stopped everything: ‘The finest display of goalkeeping seen by any man,’ said my dad, adding that it finally got him over missing Swift in Florence three years earlier. Allen, a former commando, had spent four years in a harsh German prison camp, which later caused him bouts of heavy depression. He left the field at the end of the ninety minutes, to an enormous ovation from the crowd, with head bowed and an embarrassed, barely detectable smile. Manchester United bought him soon after for £10,000. the first five-figure fee paid for a keeper (inexplicably, centre-forwards were going for three times the price).
One of Allen’s best moments in the match caused the crowd to surge forward for a better view. A steel barrier buckled and spectators fell in front of my father in a heap. If any more had gone down there’d have been injuries and quite possibly a disaster. But thanks to a bit of luck, and several years of army PT, he stayed on his feet. When he got back home, I’d been crying most of the afternoon and my mum had been left holding a three-month-old baby for the sake of a game of football. It was a natural enough moment to leave off watching it for a while.
After England’s defeat in Sweden the selectors went for Bert Williams of Wolverhampton Wanderers. He had played in one wartime international while still on the books of Walsall, a Midlands club of limited ability and such uncertain geography that in the 1930s it bounced between the Third Divisions South and North. Walsall’s greatest moment had distracted focus from Hitler’s ascent to power. In the winter of early 1933, and within the shadow of the laundry chimney at the side of their ground, they’d taken Arsenal to the cleaners, 2–0, in the Cup. The two seasons before the war, as Williams was finding his feet in the team, Walsall had been on more familiar form and at risk of dropping out of the football league altogether.
Walsall’s manager in the late 1940s was none other than Harry Hibbs. If old Harry saw something in Williams, the selectors reckoned they might, too. In his wartime international against France in 1945, he’d made a mistake in the first couple of minutes and the French had scored. But he had retained his nerve, recovered from the setback and played well in the rest of the game. Stan Cullis, returning from his role as a wartime entertainer of the troops to become manager of Wolves, bought him for £3,500 and Williams was elevated to football’s top flight, the English First Division.
Blond-haired and of the same age and frame, Williams looked like my father in his army photo wearing uniform and shorts in Algiers in 1943. At the age of fifteen Williams had been only 5 feet 2 inches tall and built himself up with exercises, which included dangling by his arms from door frames. He grew 8 inches in two years. He was another PT boy, a former instructor at the same RAF camp as Ted Ditchbum. A high-class sprinter, he could speed off his goalline for crosses, or to get down at the feet of onrushing forwards. His saves were often dramatic; he covered huge distances with his dives. These midair gyrotechnics were certain to raise the spirits of a crowd, and have a similar effect on the eyebrows of the selectors. But if he wasn’t their automatic choice, he had an undeniable quality. There was no doubting his seriousness.
Williams was shy and quietly spoken. In no picture I saw of him was he smiling, but since he looked like my dad I imagined he did. From Staffordshire, he lived several miles from the Wolves ground, a distance he would walk each training and match day on his toes and the balls of his feet. His reckoned that to rest back on your heels left you ill-prepared for sudden attack. He had a tortured look and masochistic edge. His training programme comprised a tireless stream of handstands and somersaults into mud. He’d round things off with a full-length dive on concrete.
Williams was the ideal compromise for the England goalkeeper’s job. He had enough of what, from their varying perspectives, the selectors and fans wanted. The sharp shift from Swift to Ditchbum – triumph to reality – had been too much. Williams borrowed from both styles and was perfect for the transitional times. He mixed drama with dour necessity. He was the first keeper I heard my dad describe as ‘spectacular but safe’.
The turn of phrase aptly described the country’s view of itself. It was obvious to anyone with a brain that by standing alone from the fall of France to Pearl Harbor we’d saved the world but, as obviously, that Britain was no longer the dominant player. As the Russians and Americans carved up the world between them, it wasn’t certain how we fitted in. But we could still lead by principled example and were still able to show the world ‘a thing or two’, even give the enemy ‘a bloody nose’. Alert on our feet, we could get out there, sharply off our line if necessary, to save this new world from the dangers it was creating.
Bert Williams played his first full international as the Soviet Union was being persuaded to lift its siege of Berlin. For nearly a year the US air force and the new England keeper’s own RAF had airlifted in water and other basic supplies in defiance of the Soviet blockade of the west of the old German capital. The Soviets had tried to strangle the place. In taking them on, we dared them to shoot us down. They didn’t have the nerve, and we held ours. This was what we were like. We did the spectacular when we had to, to keep the world safe.
At the same time, the Amethyst, a British boat sailing up the Yangtze river in China, was fired upon and besieged for weeks by communist troops. Why it was calmly steaming through a country in midst of revolution was unclear; it was also beside the point, as the Royal Navy made repeated attempts to rescue it. Finally, it just slipped away and, under cover of darkness, got back to safety, brilliantly, as you’d expect and to rapturous cheers at home. The enemy were ‘caught napping’, resting back on their heels. Like Bert Williams, we wouldn’t have been. We were the types prepared to dive on concrete – piece o’ cake these Chinese.
Just a few days after the flop against the Swedes, Williams was drafted into the team for the season’s last international. Three weeks earlier he had played in Wolves’ FA Cup Final success against Leicester City. A nerveless performance in the 3–1 victory over France in Paris secured his place in the England team. It also tidily completed the otherwise messy process of the Swift succession.
The new era got off to a shaky start, however, early the following season. As with Williams’s old club Walsall, the uncertainty owed something to geography. In September 1949 the Republic of Ireland came to play an international at Goodison Park, which posed the question ‘Who are they?’ England played Ireland every year but that was the north of the island. This team were more rarely taken on and went under the title ‘Eire’. Few people knew how to pronounce it: was it ‘Air’, or ‘Air-rer’? As it turned out, it rhymed with Eamon de Valera. Even few Irish people used the term, preferring simply ‘the Republic’.
Still it was convenient in a way because it emphasised to us the foreignness of the place. For reasons best known to themselves, they had gone their own way and wanted to be different. In the war, for example, they stayed neutral even though Irish regiments fought with the British army. De Valera refused to give Churchill guarantees, my mum would recall, that German U-boats wouldn’t be allowed to use Cork harbour. You never really knew where you were with them. They weren’t people who stuck to clear-cut lines; the edges were always slightly blurred.
Some of their players had played for both ‘Ireland’ and ‘Eire’. Johnny Carey, their captain, was a case in point. In the Protestant north of the island, football was played on Saturday, Sundays kept sombrely free. In the south they went about things in the chaotic-but-fun, Catholic-continental way of lumping church and football all into the Lord’s day. Some Irish footballers had played for both the island’s national teams in the same weekend.
Not that Eire’s team was cracked up to be much. Most of them played in British league teams but back at home football came a poor third in popularity after Gaelic football and hurling. Their 1949 team was a suitably makeshift outfit. It had three goalkeepers. Tommy Godwin of Shamrock Rovers was to play between the posts on this occasion, but Con Martin upfront had also won international honours in goal, and Carey had played a league match for Manchester United when the regular keeper had cried off late before the game.
The fact that they won the match, therefore, was cause enough for English disillusion. But it went further than seeking reasons and scapegoats for the 2–0 scoreline. If this Ireland was the alien ‘Eire’, then England had lost their proud record of never having succumbed at home to a foreign side. Hadn’t they?
The problem was deftly solved in a Celtic rather than Anglo-Saxon way. The edges were blurred and the lines made less clear-cut. Sure, weren’t we all a bit Irish anyway? In my family there had been Great-great Granny Smith, with her one eye and caravan in Sandy around the turn of the century. But, fundamentally, it was noted that nine of the winning team played in the English or Scottish leagues, including both the goalscorers: Martin of Aston Villa and Peter Farrell of Everton. At Goodison Park Farrell was on his ‘home’ pitch. Keeper Godwin was an exception, but he soon won a transfer to Bournemouth in the Third Division South, and you could hardly get more English than that. No, whatever they were – and forget the signs in landlords’ windows saying ‘No dogs, Blacks or Irish’ – they were not foreign. After a nasty scare, England, it was decided, had kept their home record intact.
Two months later against Italy at White Hart Lane, there were no ambiguities about the opposition’s national status, but many nasty scares. In front of a 70,000 crowd – Ditchbum, ruefully, among them – it was Bert Williams’s finest game. Despite the cold, misty afternoon, the Italians tiptoed through the England defence and pounded his goal. The spectators watched in amazement, the Italian players with their heads in their hands, as Williams saw them off. One shot he diverted with his legs, while diving in the opposite direction. England managed a couple of effective breakaways near the end to win 2–0, but Williams took the credit. Italian newspapers nicknamed him ‘II Gattone’, ‘the cat’ (to be exact, ‘the big cat’, such had been his presence).
The performance placed Williams second only to Swift in the ratings of post-war English, and arguably British, goalkeepers for much of the next two decades. But in a key sense, it was almost immediately forgotten. Although Italy had made England look inept for most of the game, the final score encouraged the thought that we were ready to advance off our lines, at least with a quick dash to take on the newly emerging threats caused by upstarts, the lot of them, who needed to be put in their place.
Before the World Cup arranged for Brazil in 1950, the tournament had been staged twice in the 1930s, then war intervened. British teams had shunned it; as a notion dreamed up by a Frenchman, Jules Rimet, it was a bit of a cheek. Foreigners had created a competition which presumed to anoint the champions of ‘our game’. Sensible analysts knew who the world’s champions were. They were the annual winners of Britain’s home international championship, the toughest international competition in the world.
The World Cup illustrated just how like foreigners it was to go organising fancy events with fancy titles. They always had to show off. When you played them, before kick-off they presented things like elaborately tasselled pennants. Even when Moscow Dynamo came in 1945, they had taken the field with great bouquets of flowers for each of their opponents. The British players looked lost, the crowd laughed. What was the point? All insincere gestures and flashing smiles (well, in this case, maybe not the Russians), foreign teams tried to wheedle their way into your affections, then turned on you and got nasty once the game started. They were people who weren’t what they appeared to be. Play them on their grounds and, like as not, they’d fix not only the match ball, but also the referee.
England went to Brazil in keeping with the new spirit of international cooperation and comradeship. Having fought with, or against, each other we had to live together, rather than, as after the First World War, retiring to our respective corners, in effect to prepare for the next conflict. Something else had also begun to gnaw away at us. There was no need to announce it to everyone, but perhaps we had something to prove. The World Cup was creating an alternative pole of development which others might come to regard (wrong though they would be) as the true yardstick of greatness. We wouldn’t have been wrong to stay away, but would not have wished our actions to be misinterpreted as shirking a challenge.
When England turned up in Rio de Janeiro in June 1950 they were greeted as the ‘kings of football’. The arrival of the inventors of the game was an endorsement of the competition. The England party regarded it less seriously. Most arrived ten days before the competition’s start, allowing little time for the players to acclimatise. Their first game was to be with Chile in the coastal humidity of Rio, the next against the United States in the rarefied mountain air of Belo Horizonte. Four players, leading lights like Stanley Matthews among them, came via a post-season tour of Canada and arrived just three days before the opening match.
Conditions confirmed the party’s suspicions of what living abroad must be like. From a country blessed with the Broadstairs and Blackpool B&B, the players were scathing of their hotel on Rio’s Copacabana beachfront. Egg and bacon breakfasts were obtainable, but served in black oil, not wholesome melted lard. Players survived on bananas, risky in itself. When the first bananas, not seen since the 1930s, arrived in Britain after the war, there had been reports that a young girl of three had overdosed and died eating four of them. Alf Ramsey was the first to go down with a bad stomach, a bilious episode that was to colour Anglo-Latin American relations on and off for the next thirty or forty years. English pressmen on the trip also warned against whom, not just what, you could trust. The players were urged not to give autographs. Some Brazilians had, only to find they’d signed subversive ‘communist’ petitions.
The first game before a thin crowd of 40,000 at the Maracanã stadium (capacity 110,000) saw England players suffer from the surprisingly thick air. They gulped from a cylinder of oxygen at half-time. Surprisingly, in a foreign land, rain then fell to make conditions a little more familiar and a 2–0 win was scratched out of a patchy performance. The manager, Walter Winterbottom, and captain, Billy Wright, thought there should be changes for the second game against the USA, but the decision was in the hands of the one selector on the trip, the Neville Chamberlain look-alike Arthur Drewry. He chose to change nothing. The USA was a small footballing nation about which we knew and cared little. Thus, he waved his sheet of paper with the England line-up before an expectant world. There were to be no changes; a case of peace in our team.
Other factors were also blamed for England’s subsequent performance. The stadium at Belo Horizonte had been built for the World Cup but was a rickety structure. With a capacity of only 20,000, it summed up the players’ feelings that this was not a serious competition. The surface, recently laid, was a scrubby desert of tufts of tall grass, interspersed with bare earth. Any of the 111 pitches just created from the east London rubbish dump at Hackney Marshes-with so many posts and crossbars it had caused a national shortage of white paint – might have been better.
Neither could the USA be regarded as serious combatants. One of their better players was a Scot named McIlveney, who’d played in Wales but, after seven games for Wrexham in the Third Division North, had been given a free transfer and emigrated. Keeper Borghi’s first sporting love was baseball. The centre-forward Joe Gaetjens was from Haiti, a place few had heard of except in lurid discussions about voodoo. Several of the US team took the field in a zombified state. Imagining they would have little to celebrate after the match, they’d stayed up to party through the night before.
Surreal forces, whether brought to bear by Haitian Gaetjens or not, played no minor part. When England’s forwards prepared to shoot, the ball stood up on the long tufts of grass, to be scooped, with uncanny regularity, high over Borghi’s bar. No one was quite certain what magic fashioned the USA’s winning goal. Bert Williams appeared to have a shot from the left covered but Gaetjens somehow got to it with the faintest of headed deflections. People wondered, had he touched it at all?
The British press hit upon the analogy of the defeat at Gallipoli in the First World War to convey how England had been routed in distant parts. When a loss to Spain meant ejection from the tournament, Dunkirk was the obvious parallel. Britain’s first expeditionary force to a World Cup rapidly evacuated hostile territory, the instinct of the England team, officials and the press to get away as quickly as possible, back to the safety of home. They didn’t stay to study the form of those who remained in the competition and missed the eventual final between Brazil and Uruguay. The view was that there was nothing to be learned from places where the conditions for football were never right, nor from the teams which played there. If they weren’t out-and-out cheats (the Football Association toyed for a while with the idea of protesting that the US team had contained ineligible non-Americans), then they were as good as. An official report darkly pointed to how the Brazilians had cancelled all league matches for months before the competition. The Uruguayans had been together for no less than two years. This was typical of such people. They got together in darkened rooms to concoct their plans. If that won them games, well, it showed what a state the world was in. Doubtless in the estimation of Monsieur Rimet, Uruguay’s victory in the final was magnifique, but it wasn’t football.
What did the World Cup mean, anyway? ‘Even if we’d have won it,’ said Stanley Matthews, ‘the public would have said it was “just another cup”.’ What had happened was in a remote part of the globe. Unlikely defeats had happened before in those sorts of places, where climatic and other quirks allowed Johnny Foreigner his occasional day. Losing to the USA at football was as humiliating as Gordon going down to the ‘mad Mahdi’ and his whirling dervishes at Khartoum. That had been in the desert. The pitch at Belo Horizonte was much the same and the Americans had played like a team possessed. But it was also distantly forgettable. It wouldn’t happen at home. England turned back on itself from its failed beachhead in Brazil, bruised and ready to draw its line in the sand.
The assault began almost immediately, in the irregular shape of Marshall Tito’s ‘partizans’, with Yugoslavia’s visit in the late autumn. Yugo-, or Jugoslavia as it was often written, had beaten England 2–1 in Belgrade before the war, one of their players rugby-tackling an England forward in the penalty area to prevent an equaliser. The war had confirmed Tito and his mountain men as a belligerent bunch. The British soldiers called them the ‘Jugs’, which rhymed with ‘mugs’ and sounded funny. But the Jugs were definitely no mugs. When the British forces were based there during the stand-off over Trieste, anyone tempted to go looking for wine and women in the hills behind Gorizia was in serious danger of never coming back. Partizans came down into Trieste, marched off groups of Italians and shot them. A stealthy band paddled across from their Slovenian haven to my dad’s camp around the bay one night and removed and made off with the tyres of seventeen jeeps. Now the Yugoslavs came from the depths of Serbia and Montenegro to the dim hinterland of Hornsey Road to snatch a 2–2 result at Highbury. Thus, Islington, and a site but a mile up Upper Street, and through Highbury Fields from our street, took its place in history: it saw the first draw by a foreign team on English soil.
Just under a year later the venue and the score were the same, only this time the French were the opposition. It was more perplexing. France had regularly played against England since 1923 but usually in Paris when the English selectors felt like a jaunt across the Channel. Taken with the game against Yugoslavia, it suggested a pattern was developing. Foreign teams need no longer be fodder for the cannons of the England forward line. The two drawn games also meant England were only one slip or stroke of ill-luck away from losing their home record. Control of events was ominously slipping out of our hands.
This was clear in the war in Korea, where the Americans and Russians were dictating events. In addition to 40,000 British troops, the Labour government under Clement Attleee sent along twenty-five warships, but they were under American command. Thanks to my dad’s extra year facing the partizans, he was spared the call-up. His younger brother, Bim, was bound for Korea, till at the last moment India was persuaded to join in by sending some medics. My uncle’s ambulance division went to sweat it out in Hong Kong. The Chinese were a range of hills or so away from his base at Sek-kong and assumed to be ready, on an order from Moscow, to sweep down in their millions. Many soldiers had to be treated for depression and some committed suicide. All you could do was wait. The tension, he said, was awful.
I came downstairs and heard a report on the wireless one morning that British troops in Korea had been attacked on somewhere called the Imjin river. This sounded like my dad’s name, Jim, and a funny thing to call a river. They’d fought off the attack, which was to be expected. But what was alarming was that the assault had been carried out, the broadcaster said, by ‘communist gorillas’. My parents were at work, so I asked my grandparents what this meant and picked up the impression that communists got up to all sorts of tricks. Thereafter, gorillas kept cropping up everywhere.
In Malaya they killed someone called the British High Commissioner. In Kenya, they’d been stealing from white people’s houses in Nairobi. Here they’d formed an armed band with the frightening sounding name of ‘Mau Mau’. It was said they got together in the jungle in secret to ‘swear oaths’. This wouldn’t have done round our way. With the exception of people much further down the street, you didn’t go around swearing oaths. Why were they like this? It was said they wanted the white man out of Africa, yet it was we who did things honestly and openly, wasn’t it? The British police and army, for example, were doing their straightforward best to deal with them. The gorillas, on the other hand, in Asia, Africa or wherever, did things in an unreasonable and underhand way. Reports of their activities suggested that now everything was against us, even the animal kingdom.
Soon after the France match, Bert Williams suffered a shoulder injury which threatened to end his career. Given the gravity of the global situation, there could have been few worse times for it.
