Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  What these men achieved in public life nevertheless remains unsullied. The chances of it being revealed that Hillary and Tensing were actually helicoptered to the summit of Everest and that they faked their heroic climb to the top are non-existent. The British people in 1953 wanted to believe in the essential goodness of their heroes. They had recently fought a victorious war against a regime that was a byword for evil. The triumph of 1945, which left the nation mired in debt and mentally exhausted, stimulated in them a need for war heroes like Douglas Bader and Violette Szabo, and on the sports field the likes of Denis Compton and Stanley Matthews were similarly admired and loved. Tall-poppy syndrome was an illness that had not been diagnosed, for few manifestations of it had yet presented themselves.

  Of course, there were no camera phones around to provide visual evidence of player misbehaviour (although Matt Busby in the 1960s was kept remarkably well supplied with details of George Best’s nocturnal antics by an army of informants) and there were no twenty-four-hour rolling news channels and radio stations to be kept supplied with scandal masquerading as news. In those days, journalists maintained relationships with players which the media managers of the twenty-first century now prevent because they are so paranoid about the possibility of bad news stories involving the players for whom they are responsible. In a different age, journalists frequently placed personal loyalty to a player above professional loyalty to their editor who was hungry for a good story.

  The ubiquitous and shadowy media managers who now hide the players from public view behind electronic gates and tinted car windows do a severe disservice to the players and to the game, as well as to the integrity of the English language. People tend to assume that these players have something to hide and reporters therefore dedicate themselves to the noble task of discovering exactly what it is that the clubs and their employees are so desperate to keep hidden. Who among us could withstand that level of scrutiny of our private lives? Surely, at some point, someone will gasp ‘too much information’ and the cameras and sound equipment will thankfully be packed away. At the time of writing, however, that happy day appears some way distant. Steven Gerrard, an admirable player in so many ways, retired from English football in 2015 accompanied by hosannas of gratitude – but he will not go down in history as one of England’s great captains. Since Beckham resigned the captaincy in tears after the 2006 World Cup in Germany, England has not possessed a captain who has inspired the nation and his team-mates in the way that Moore and Wright were popularly supposed to have done.

  Wayne Rooney, the current England captain, knows from previous encounters with the tabloid press that every personal indiscretion he commits off the field of play while he is England captain will simply provide more fodder for the ravenous appetite of a slavering media. Whether such revelations are in the public interest or simply what the public is interested in is a moral dilemma which is unlikely to find a resolution any time soon. There appears to be no diminution in the fascination of the British public for evidence of the moral fallibility of their ‘heroes’.

  England football captains are the mirror of the culture of their times. If what we wanted in the slow tortuous haul back to economic stability during the 1950s was a shock-haired, smiling, cheerful Billy Wright, in the cool stylish 1960s our leader was the coolest man in the country, the graceful, unruffled and stylish Bobby Moore. Likewise, Gary Lineker’s England career tells us something about the social changes wrought under Thatcherism while David Beckham’s life reveals a Britain that would be unrecognisable to anyone who saw Billy Wright’s first match as England captain on 9 October 1948. It is likely that when he exchanged pennants with Johnny Carey, the captain of the Northern Ireland team, that highly prized ham which Wright had carried with him from Copenhagen was still being parsimoniously shared out and carefully replaced in his landlady’s fridge – in the event that she actually possessed a fridge. The likelihood is that the ham would have been kept in her larder under a tea towel. It was hard for footballers to become conceited when they were subjected to the same petty privations as everyone else. In Billy Wright, England found the perfect captain for the resumption of football in the post-war era.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE AGE OF BILLY WRIGHT

  Billy Wright celebrates his 100th cap for England after victory against Scotland at Wembley, 11 April 1959 (Keystone / Getty Images).

  In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film A Matter of Life and Death, David Niven plays an RAF pilot trying to fly back to base a badly damaged and burning Lancaster bomber after a mission over Germany on 2 May 1945. He manages to make contact with an American radio operator played by Kim Hunter and gives her the bare details of his life before bailing out without a parachute. ‘Age – 27; education – interrupted, violently interrupted; religion – Church of England; politics – Conservative by nature, Labour by experience.’ It’s rather an odd message to leave in the circumstances but then it’s rather an odd film.

  Nevertheless, as the results of the general election two months later were to confirm, Niven’s summary of his life would have been recognisable to millions of Britons after nearly six years of total war. Britain had changed out of all recognition from the country that had tried its best to appease Hitler in the late 1930s to the country which, as soon as Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, had had no choice other than to fight on until unconditional surrender had been achieved. It was generally believed that Churchill’s personal popularity, supported by a famous victory, would be enough to win his Conservative party a healthy majority.

  On 5 July 1945, less than two months after Germany had surrendered unconditionally and more than a month before Japan was to do so, the country went to the polls. The ballot boxes remained sealed for three weeks to permit the collection of those overseas votes which had been cast by men and women still in the armed forces. Although Labour won a landslide victory with an overall majority of 146, the result, in those days free of today’s ubiquitous if frequently wrong opinion polls, came as a surprise, particularly to Winston Churchill. Clementine Churchill, worried about the strain of continued high office on the health of her husband, called the result ‘a blessing in disguise’. Churchill growled that as far as he was concerned it was a blessing that was very well disguised indeed.

  On the evening of 26 July, having tendered his resignation as prime minister to the king, Churchill left Buckingham Palace in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. Almost as if it had been scripted by a Labour spin doctor in order to emphasise that things were going to be different from now on, fifteen minutes after the Rolls-Royce had purred away Mrs Attlee drove her husband in the family Standard Ten into Palace Yard. As revolutions go, it lacked the iconic symbolism of the storming of the Bastille in July 1789 but it said much about the Attlees’ marriage and provided an endearing view of the lack of importance they attached to the principle of ostentation in ritual. Theirs was a devoted marriage and nobody seemed to think it strange that the wife of the Labour prime minister was widely believed to have had distinctly conservative instincts. It is perhaps as well, however, that there were no spin doctors around at the time.

  During the election campaign, Mrs Attlee had sat patiently in the Standard Ten knitting the time away as her husband made his speeches from the hustings. Now she was driving Clem in his best formal clothes to kiss hands with the mystified monarch who had admitted that the result ‘had come as a great surprise to one and all’. The crowd of Labour supporters who lined The Mall cheered and shouted, ‘We want Attlee’, as the Standard Ten clanked its way towards Buckingham Palace. The new prime minister waved politely from the passenger seat. David Niven’s brief summary of his new political inclinations illustrated how Labour simply chimed with the zeitgeist of a post-war world in a way that the Tory party did not.

  There were two things that almost everyone who voted for Labour was agreed upon, male or female, middle class or working class: there must be no more war and there must be no return to the economic an
d social conditions that existed in Britain in 1939. For all their genuine admiration of Churchill as the man who had won the war, there was an ingrained belief in most of the electorate that he was more interested in foreign affairs than domestic concerns and that his party was still the party of inherited wealth, privilege and the dole. Those with memories which started before Dunkirk remembered Churchill as the man who, as home secretary in 1910, had sent the British Army to Tonypandy to help police crush the civil unrest of discontented Welsh miners. If there was some dispute as to how responsible Churchill was for the brutality that ensued, his role in it was never forgotten in that part of Wales. He had been the main architect of the disaster of Gallipoli in 1915, he had been the chancellor of the exchequer who had wrongly returned Britain to the gold standard in 1924; he had been appallingly rude to Gandhi, implacably opposed to Indian independence, and had chosen the wrong side in the Abdication Crisis. His warnings about Nazi Germany in 1938 were what everyone remembered, but placed in the context of his previously chequered political career, the rejection of Churchill at the polls in 1945 becomes more credible.

  There had been much grumbling about the controls imposed by his coalition government during the war but it was grudgingly admitted that they had succeeded in creating a fairer society. The Conservatives in office alone, without Labour as a wartime coalition partner, would, judging by their past record, be only too keen to return to the laissez-faire economics that had, it was widely believed, been responsible for their failure to deal with the coruscating effects of the Great Depression. The new Britain that everyone wanted to see rise from the ashes caused by the German bombs had therefore to include significant government intervention and legislation. Churchill, one of whose election radio broadcasts included the unfortunate combination of the words ‘Socialist’ and ‘Gestapo’, was not the man for this kind of job. Attlee was.

  The problem was that the nation was virtually bankrupt and what Attlee believed the Labour party had been elected to do was drastically to reform society at all levels. The railways and the mines were to be nationalised into new organisations called respectively British Railways and the National Coal Board; a National Health Service was to be formed; the recommendations of the Beveridge Report which had been published in 1942 had to be implemented to create a more just system of welfare in a society that would now care for its citizens from the cradle to the grave. Two years later, the Education Minister R. A. (‘Rab’) Butler announced that the secondary school system was to be subjected to the provisions of a new act that would transform the future social landscape.

  The 1944 Education Act started out with the most admirable remit. In place of the sprawling mess that included non-fee-paying elementary schools, church schools, public schools and direct grant grammar schools, there was going to be a system of state education that was uniform and entirely free to all children. Primary schools would run from the age of five till eleven. Secondary schools would take children from eleven to sixteen, two years beyond the current school-leaving age of fourteen. The secondary system would be a tripartite arrangement consisting of grammar schools for those children of an academic bent, secondary moderns for those less inclined to want to proceed to the sixth form and university, and technical schools for those with an interest in technology which was to be highly valued in the new technocratic Britain.

  This remaking of the British school system was a fundamental part of the new progressive egalitarianism that dominated public thinking during and immediately after the war. Children would now have opportunities based entirely on their abilities, not on where they were born or how much money their parents had. The Eleven Plus examination, and the allocation of school that followed the result of it, was to be the means that would reorganise Great Britain and make it fit for purpose in succeeding generations. Twenty years later, the division of children in this manner at the age of eleven was deemed to be unfair to an extent that bordered on child exploitation, but that should not disguise the admirable intention at the White Paper stage of the Butler Act.

  All this proposed government legislation had to be paid for with money the country didn’t have, particularly now that Lend-Lease had ended with the Allied victory. John Maynard Keynes was sent off to Washington to negotiate a loan from the only developed country with any money, but he found America unexpectedly unwilling to reward with cash the gallant sacrifices Britain had made in 1940 and 1941 and he returned home without the grant or gift that had been hoped for. Instead Britain had to make do with a loan of $4.33 billion at 2 per cent; that at least permitted Attlee to begin his revolutionary legislative programme, although many critics regarded the interest to be paid as punitive. Only Marshall Aid, which arrived to save Europe from Communism a few years later as part of the US-funded post-war recovery programme, kept the British economy afloat in these desperate years.

  People might have felt at the end of six long years of war, with all the sacrifices that hard-earned victory had entailed, that they were entitled to some of the fruits of that victory. Instead, the welcome arrival of peace did not diminish the queues, fill the shops with goods or end the rationing. In our age of obesity it is salutary to examine briefly what men and women in England were allowed to eat in a week in the year that football restarted after the war:

  1s 2d (6p) worth of meat

  3 oz bacon and ham

  8 oz sugar

  2.5 oz of tea

  2.5 pints of milk

  2 oz butter

  2 oz cheese

  4 oz margarine

  1 oz cooking fat

  1 egg (per fortnight)

  12 oz of sweets (per month)

  This food could only be bought after seemingly endless queuing. In newsreels of the time it is rare to find fat young people, which is perhaps the only positive note to strike as the full implications of rationing sink into our overfed and overprivileged minds.

  In 1950, when Jimmy Hill, future Coventry City manager and Match of the Day presenter, was playing for Brentford against a representative Dutch FA XI in Holland, he was confronted by an array of food whose amount and variety astonished a man used to the rigours of post-war British rationing. Hill and his hungry team-mates inevitably overindulged – to the extent that, at the start of the game, many of them could scarcely run. They managed a 1–1 draw but all they could remember about the trip was the food. They had never even seen so much food in their lives, let alone eaten it.

  Homes that had been destroyed by the Luftwaffe were not replaced, although the prefabs and the planned new towns offered hope to a small number of fortunate families. Houses were in desperately short supply and couples who wished to marry frequently had to continue to live with one set of parents throughout the 1950s. The impact of this difficult state of affairs on the marriage is displayed in Stan Barstow’s 1960 novel A Kind of Loving although it is one moment in John Schlesinger’s 1962 film version that stays in the memory, when Vic Brown (Alan Bates) has returned to the house after drinking to forget the strains being placed on his new marriage. Inevitably, he throws up over the back of the sofa, watched in horror by his house-proud and unforgiving mother-in-law (Thora Hird). ‘Disgusting!’ she says contemptuously. Britain was, and continued to be for the first six years after Victory in Europe and Japan, a country of exhaustion and drabness, its towns pock-marked by ubiquitous bomb sites, its population grateful for the gift of life and the cessation of hostilities, but it was still an unremittingly hard time for most of them.

  The war against Japan might have been finished by the slaughter caused by the atomic bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 but the rest of the world now lived permanently in the shadow of the hydrogen bomb as the nuclear capability of combatant nations proliferated in the 1950s. The Cold War made the possibility of world annihilation by mutually assured destruction a constant presence. Great Britain might have contributed a significant amount to the development of the Manhattan Project but she emerged from the Potsdam conference, at which Truma
n had told Attlee and Stalin of its success, as the least important of the three Allies who were henceforward replaced by the Two Superpowers. ‘I did not become the King’s First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,’ Churchill had gruffly informed Roosevelt when the latter wanted to know Churchill’s plans for the colonies after the war. Indeed he did not, but his immediate successor did.

  British people in the 1950s watched, frequently in tight-lipped disappointment, as their troops were evacuated from their former colonial territories. It was a changed world but not one our parents rushed to acknowledge. They had made sacrifices. It was important to them that their children knew how much they had sacrificed and that those children should themselves grow up in a spirit of similar selflessness.

  The working-class footballer of the post-war era played in a deferential society in which, like his parents before him, he ‘knew his place’. In this rigid social hierarchy, women were subordinate to men and children to their parents. The national anthem was still played in theatres and cinemas before or after each night’s entertainment, although the bolder sections of the movie audience in the late 1950s might walk out as soon as it started, which would never have happened before 1939. The anthem, like the union flag – before it was appropriated by football hooligans and the makers of kitsch underwear – was an object of veneration. Politicians, the church and the royal family were all afforded the greatest respect by a country that knew neither Jeremy Paxman nor Jeremy Clarkson. Doctors could pontificate in hospitals and surgeries without fear of physical violence. It was a world in which teachers rather than their pupils held the weapons of mass destruction even if they were usually a cane or a worn-out plimsoll. A flick knife was the most potent of teenage weapons and these tended to be used to slash the seats on the upper decks of double-decker buses, out of sight of the conductor. There was an almost unquestioning respect for family, education, government, the law and religion. In short, it was a long time ago.