Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  FOUR LIONS

  The Lives and Times of Four Captains of England

  Colin Shindler

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

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  About Four Lions

  Four Lions explores the changing landscape of postwar England and its national game through the careers of four iconic England football captains: Billy Wright, Bobby Moore, Gary Lineker and David Beckham. Between the eras of Wright and Beckham, huge shifts in wider society were accompanied by seismic changes in the world of football as television transformed the way in which the game is financed and consumed.

  In England, unlike any other country where football is played, the man with the captain’s armband embodies the nation – these ‘Four Lions’ represent half a century of historical change. When Wright first captained his country in the late 1940s, rationing was still in place and he was living in digs with a landlady; World Cup-winner Moore personified the social mobility of the 1960s but never found a role beyond football; the telegenic Lineker hung up his boots to become the face of BBC football; while in the tattooed body of Beckham can be read the impact of commercialization, corporate sponsorship and the twenty-first century cult of celebrity.

  From the rude awakening of England’s twin defeats by Hungary in 1953, through the glory days of 1966 and the serial disappointments of the decades that followed, Colin Shindler’s winningly nostalgic narrative combines sporting memories with shrewdly observed social history.

  This book is dedicated, with love, to the partners of my children: Susan Subbiondo Shindler and Joel Reid

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  About Four Lions

  Dedication

  Prologue: Of Captains and Captaincy

  Chapter 1: The Age of Billy Wright

  Chapter 2: The Age of Bobby Moore

  Chapter 3: The Age of Gary Lineker

  Chapter 4: The Age of David Beckham

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  About Colin Shindler

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  OF CAPTAINS AND CAPTAINCY

  Billy Wright leads out England against Hungary at Wembley, 25 November 1953 (Popperfoto / Getty Images).

  At the last count there have been 109 captains of the England football team since Cuthbert Ottaway led out his men to play Scotland on 30 November 1872 in the first ever international match. Not all of them became legends of the game. Who now recalls Arthur Grimsdell? Or Basil Patchitt? Or Charles Wreford-Brown? Who even remembers that the honour once devolved to Trevor Cherry and Colin Bell apart from the players concerned and their close family? If you think about England captains, two names come instantly to mind, provided you were watching football before the start of the Premier League. Billy Wright and Bobby Moore each captained the side on ninety occasions over a ten-year period. A book about the captains of England has to start with those two. Arguably more contentious is my choice of the other two – Gary Lineker and David Beckham.Third on the list of longest-serving England captains is Bryan Robson who skippered England on sixty-five occasions, more than any other player apart from Moore and Wright. He was an inspiration to both Lineker and Beckham and would, on the face of it, be a more logical candidate for inclusion than Lineker, having captained the side in fifty more matches than his erstwhile team-mate. It isn’t just an aversion on the part of this author to spend more time than is strictly necessary in the environment of Manchester United that consigns Bryan Robson to the Outer Darkness. The criterion for selection to this Inner Conclave is based on the captains being somehow representative of their age. Robson was a fist-pumping captain of the old school and does not satisfy the strict entry requirements.

  Even Kevin Keegan would appear to have a better claim for inclusion than the former Leicester City, Everton and Spurs striker. Keegan stands eighth in the list of England captains with thirty-one matches as skipper out of a total of sixty-three games played. Uniquely, he is the only captain who has also managed his country, apart from Alf Ramsey who filled in as captain for three matches during the reign of Billy Wright. It is certainly possible to argue Keegan’s cause as an innovator. In fact, it could be said that Keegan did all the things that Lineker did but he did them ten years earlier. He moved from an unfashionable club, in his case Scunthorpe United, to the heights of international football; he moved abroad to play in Germany in the late 1970s at a time when the most recent precedents who had gone in search of European glory had been Jimmy Greaves and Denis Law a decade and a half previously, both of whom had returned home as fast as they possibly could. In contrast, Keegan became European Footballer of the Year twice. Unlike George Best, he took a thoughtful stance on commercial endorsements and on the direction of his career off the pitch. However, he ended up as a manager, just as so many players had done before him. Lineker on the other hand carefully planned an entirely new career after retirement and he planned it in the media with the help of his agent, whose significant influence on the lives of footballers beyond his own client list will be fully demonstrated in subsequent pages. That’s why Lineker makes the cut and Keegan doesn’t.

  David Beckham needs little justification to be asked to sit at this table. If Lineker was known nationally and in parts of Spain and Japan during his playing career, Beckham was known globally. There has never been a captain of England like David Beckham. Having survived the dark days of 1998 and the public opprobrium that followed his dismissal in the defeat by Argentina in that year’s World Cup, Beckham was made captain of England in 2000 by Peter Taylor and confirmed in office the following year by Sven-Göran Eriksson. Clever manipulation of the media and shrewd commercial moves by his management team in conjunction with his own fierce resolution combined to change his personal circumstances to an astonishing degree. Beckham’s celebrity (fame is not a strong enough word to describe his position in contemporary culture) is so powerful that it is impossible to imagine a situation occurring in which he would be targeted in the way that Bobby Moore was before the start of the World Cup finals in 1970 when he was falsely accused of stealing a bracelet from a gift shop in a Bogotá hotel.

  Beckham is not English in the way that Wright, Moore and Lineker were as captains. He belongs to the world and the affection for him is as intense, possibly even more so, in those countries where he is visible only as an image on a television set, computer screen, tablet or mobile phone. Beckham does not represent the England of Churchill as Wright did, or the England of Harold Wilson as Moore arguably did. His gold leaf-covered statue has been placed at the altar of a revered Buddhist temple in Bangkok. It would be absurd to imagine Billy Wright, or indeed any other English footballer, being accorded such deification. It is hard to think of a country in the world that doesn’t know of David Beckham or of a country that wouldn’t welcome him in the extravagant way in which the world’s Roman Catholic communities greet the Pope. Research commissioned by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and major international institutions based in Britain indicates that David Beckham appears on every list of the three most recognised British names. He may not be selling too many shirts and associated tat in the so-called Islamic State but that’s about the only place on earth where he might be accused of stealing a bracelet. From the stop press of the Wolverhampton Express & Star where Billy Wright first saw his name as captain of the England football team to an altar in a Buddhist temple in Thailand is a journey only sport can provide. Through the lives of these four men we can trace the contours of the cultural landscape of their country over the past seventy years.

  The four captains evoke almost instantly an ima
ge that defines them. For Billy Wright it might be the photograph of him exchanging pennants with Ferenc Puskás; for Moore it is almost certainly one of him holding the Jules Rimet trophy; Lineker is seen almost every week during the football season in the studio of Match of the Day and then of course there is Beckham whose image is ubiquitous from wearing sunglasses to the notorious photograph of him in his underpants exhibiting his tattoos. Mention of this last poster might give the impression that this book is simply the statement of a prejudiced, old-fashioned, myopic traditionalist that the world is going to hell in a handcart. That might still be the impression that is conveyed at the conclusion of this story but that is certainly not the reason the book was written, although the author’s prejudices no doubt shine through.

  In his G. M. Trevelyan Lectures delivered in Cambridge in the Lent term of 1961, which later became the basis of a popular and briefly highly influential work of historiography called What is History?, the Marxist historian E. H. Carr mused on the relationship between the historian and his subject:

  Study the historian before you begin to study the facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what is already done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by that great scholar, Jones of St. Jude’s, goes round to a friend at St. Jude’s to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog. The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.

  In other words, by referencing different images from the ones quoted above, different captains or even different facts from the lives of the same four players, it would be possible to construct an entirely different narrative of the pattern of post-war English social history. Possible – but pointless.

  I first became aware of football around the age of five or six, during the time of the Suez crisis – a not entirely coincidental collision of facts of which E. H. Carr would no doubt quickly approve. It was, as subsequent pages will detail, a time that demonstrated to the world that Britain was no longer the Great Power she had been before the outbreak of war in 1939. My generation of baby boomers was taught in primary school that national pride was extremely important and was to be found in the British triumph in the Second World War with particular reference to the dark days of 1940 when We Stood Alone. We could also point to the profusion of pink on the maps of the world which decorated our classrooms and which boasted still of the extent of the British Empire, now slowly dissolving into the more politically acceptable concept of the British Commonwealth.

  We had conquered Hitler’s Germany and we had conquered the world’s tallest summit, Mount Everest. Despite the fact that the two men who reached it were a New Zealander and a Nepalese sherpa, it was, after all, Sir John Hunt’s expedition and he was a jolly fine example of British pluck, spirit and entrepreneurial organisation. Almost as importantly, we had recently conquered Lindsay Hassett’s Australians, regaining the Ashes for the first time in nineteen years. The first England football match I became dimly aware of was the 7–2 crushing of Scotland at Wembley in 1955 and the following year’s 4–2 victory over the rising stars of Brazil. At the end of that 1954–5 season, England went on tour and won 5–1 in Helsinki and 3–1 in Berlin against West Germany who were, at the time, the world champions, having won the 1954 World Cup by defeating the popular favourites, Hungary. The Germans called it ‘The Miracle of Bern’. We remembered who had won the century’s two world wars. The victory in Berlin seemed an appropriate reminder to the Germans not to get above themselves.

  Those of us fortunate enough to be born in the years after 1945, who grew up after the end of rationing, who received non-repayable grants to fund our time at university, who started looking for work when full employment was not a historical or possibly mythical concept and who bought our houses before the house-price inflation of the 1980s and 1990s, have a particular view of life, history and sport shaped by exactly those experiences. For all the scepticism I now feel for the English Premier League and its soap-opera excesses, I know perfectly well that a ten-year-old boy today, who is as in love with football as my generation was in 1960 will, in forty or fifty years’ time, pine nostalgically for the days of 2016 when real footballers played for the love of the game or some such mystical nonsense. It is the consequence of history and the consequence of the natural process of ageing.

  I am of the generation that lived through 1966 and 1970. I was seventeen when England won the World Cup and nineteen when Manchester City won the First Division League Championship. Both events seemed to me to be entirely logical if not predictable. I had lived through dark times and had emerged triumphant to bask in the sunshine of victory. If I had learned anything from the story of the Second World War, it was that this was how the narrative went. A similar feeling arose when I first read Herbert Butterfield’s book The Whig Interpretation of History. Butterfield’s general theory was that nineteenth-century historians were inclined to present the past as the inexorable march of progress towards enlightenment, citing in particular the growth of constitutional government, democratic freedoms, progress in science and widespread economic prosperity. The Industrial Revolution gave the British economy a head start and the astonishing acquisition of other people’s lands and natural resources gave the country an empire that stretched around the globe, ruled by a handful of men who had been educated at English public schools.

  Yes, there were problems caused, it was generally agreed, mostly by the ambitions of the Kaiser and Hitler, although some were also caused by the feckless Irish and other unreliable foreigners. Then there was the ingratitude of the working classes and of the colonial peoples who mysteriously did not seem to appreciate the manner in which Britain had so nobly shouldered the White Man’s Burden. However, that burden, like the Whig interpretation of history, always held out the promise of a Happy Ending, as in a Hollywood film. When Bobby Moore held aloft the Jules Rimet trophy and when the whistle blew at St James’s Park (as it was called then) on the last day of the 1967–8 season to proclaim Manchester City’s ascendancy it was not only a joyous experience for me but in some way it felt to me as if it had been divinely so ordered.

  Of course, nothing lasts in sport and it is the change that is the real problem not the absurd belief in some kind of Golden Age, as people in the inter-war years harked back to a non-existent Elysium before the outbreak of war in 1914. The eras of Billy Wright and Bobby Moore might not have been a Golden Age, but the 1950s and 1960s were decades in which football was played in a different spirit from the relentlessly hysterical and frequently unsavoury atmosphere on the pitch and in the stands that exists today, for all the so-called ‘gentrification’ of football and the specious nonsense talked about the football ‘family’.

  Football in the 1960s probably contained just as many insalubrious characters as it does today. Those who knew football men like Alan Hardaker do not recall them with any fondness. Hardaker ran the Football League as a personal fiefdom and ordered Chelsea to pull out of the new-fangled European Cup in 1955 because he believed that they shouldn’t get mixed up in some fancy foreign competition when their job was to play English football with English players for English spectators. We might wonder at the ineptitude of the current FA but nobody could seriously want to return to the days of Bert Millichip or Harold Thompson. Burnley supporters of a certain age might pine for their wonderful championship side of 1960 but would they welcome back their neighbourhood butcher and petty dictator Bob Lord, who was their chairman for twenty-five difficult years?
Those of us who have little time for the over-mighty rulers of Abu Dhabi certainly have no wish to return to the days of Peter Swales, and even those Manchester United supporters who love United but hate the Glazers probably wouldn’t be that thrilled to have Louis Edwards – what is it about the meat trade? – reinstated in the Old Trafford boardroom. The choice is a stark one: the trivial ambitions of local tyrants weighed against the geopolitical and financial ambitions of multi-national corporations, Russian oligarchs and Middle Eastern dictators.

  In the years between 1966 and 1970 when, as indicated above, I was more in love with football than at any other time in my life, England were world champions and were developing a team to play in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico that looked as though it might be even better than the team of 1966. The era of rationing and austerity into which I had been born but of which I had little memory was long gone. Abortion and homosexuality were tolerated for the first time by parliamentary legislation. The laws on obscenity were relaxed and the Lord Chamberlain’s Office no longer acted as the censor of stage plays, thereby – as Kenneth Tynan remarked – dragging British theatre kicking and screaming into the second half of the eighteenth century. The early 1960s appears in retrospect to have been a golden time for the British theatre and British television. British films, too, were benefiting from the terminal decline of the old Hollywood studio system and for all the boom-and-bust nature of the British economy, people were far more prosperous and generally better off than they had been at any time in the 1950s. Despite the fact we all recognised we were living ‘under the shadow of the Bomb’, it seemed to my teenage self to be an era of boundless optimism. The strength of the England football team was a significant factor in that heady feeling.