Britain was inevitably drawn into the conflict as a permanent member of the UN Security Council and in its new position as the junior partner in the military coalition with the United States. Young British men who had been conscripted into the armed forces as part of their National Service, and had been anxious to avoid a dangerous posting to British-ruled Malaya, where a Communist insurgency had broken out in 1948, were now faced with the prospect of having to fight in an even more terrifying war in Korea. Despite assurances to President Truman from the UN Supreme Commander, General Douglas MacArthur, that China would not enter the war, they did so, to Truman’s intense fury. To widespread astonishment Truman sacked the seemingly untouchable MacArthur. He could afford to. He wasn’t running for re-election in 1952.
The USSR might have accepted that the Allied airlift had broken its blockade of Berlin in 1949 but that same year the Soviets had detonated their first atomic bomb and the American and Western belief that the world was safe because only the United States had a nuclear capability was revealed as a false hope. Men who had gladly laid down their arms in 1945 were forced to pick them up again or watch their sons go off to fight and possibly die when the Korean War started five years later. The world was unsafe, there were spies everywhere and, as far as England was concerned, nothing was sacrosanct.
On the same day that England’s football team was defeated by the United States of America, 29 June, its cricket team was defeated at Lord’s, the home of cricket, by West Indies. This comprehensive victory for the Caribbean islanders by 326 runs was largely the result of the eighteen relatively inexpensive wickets taken by two quiet, unassuming – and until this moment entirely unknown – young spin bowlers called Sonny Ramadhin and Alf Valentine. By the end of the summer they were very well known indeed. Their heroic feats, immortalised in the ‘Cricket, Lovely Cricket!’ calypso composed by the Trinidadian Lord Kitchener (‘those two little pals of mine, Ramadhin and Valentine’) made the host country sit up and take notice. By the end of the summer they had helped the West Indies to clinch a famous 3–1 victory in the four-match Test series. A war-weary England might lose to a rampant, well-fed Australia without arousing too much internal criticism, but defeat at home to an upstart like West Indies suggested that the world was about to be turned upside down.
Two years before this triumph for West Indies, the Empire Windrush had docked at Tilbury and disgorged the first significant boatload of Caribbean immigrants. Many of them no doubt thoroughly enjoyed the discomfiture of their hosts in the Test series of 1950 when they realised the true nature of the ‘welcome’ that awaited them in cold, grey, drab Austerity Britain. The social disturbances that accompanied this first wave of Caribbean arrivals were confined to the few cities with growing numbers of black immigrants but, in the later summer of 1958, disaffected white youths began attacking black people in London’s Notting Hill. The riots continued for five nights with the police seemingly incapable or unwilling to impose themselves on the rapidly growing violence. As was revealed by government papers, the home secretary of the time, R. A. Butler, was assured by the police that the disturbances were not racially motivated. He chose to believe that the violence, as intimated by the police, was the result of both white and black Teddy boys indulging in their favourite sport of hooliganism. It was safer and easier to accept that recommendation than to examine the causes of racial unrest and do something about them.
The Notting Hill riots were a problem for a future Conservative government. In 1951, the unpopular post-war Labour government lost seats and confidence as its time started to run out. However, in the general election of February 1950 it still managed to gain over 50 per cent of the votes cast and widen its popular vote margin over the Conservatives to more than three million but, partly owing to boundary revisions, it lost seventy-eight seats, the Conservatives gained ninety and restricted Labour to an overall majority of only five seats – a poor return for the governing party given the nature of their 1945 victory and the reforming zeal of the Attlee government. However, there was no public appetite for more sacrifice and the outbreak of the Korean War placed a strain on the slowly recovering but still deeply fragile economy. With taxes bound to rise and depress the population still further it is perhaps surprising that in the circumstances Labour performed as well as it did.
The wafer-thin Labour majority of five seats inevitably affected the government’s ability to pass legislation in the House of Commons and eighteen months later Attlee was forced to go to the country again in the vain hope of acquiring a stronger mandate. His cause had not been helped by the resignation of Aneurin Bevan who in the 1950–51 Labour government had been moved from the Ministry of Health to the Ministry of Labour. When Hugh Gaitskell introduced charges for NHS dental work and spectacles in order to raise money for the new war effort, Bevan could not accept what he regarded as the wanton damage wrought upon his creation, the National Health Service, and retired to the backbenches. He was followed by Harold Wilson, the former president of the Board of Trade whose time in the sun was still to come, and by John Freeman, later to become a BBC television interviewer on the Face to Face programme. Wilson repaid this demonstration of solidarity by appointing him High Commissioner to India and successively British Ambassador to the United States.
In the general election of 1951, the Conservatives, still led by the seventy-seven-year-old and increasingly frail Churchill, were returned to office with an overall majority of sixteen. Labour, despite once again winning a majority of the popular vote, retreated into an opposition that was to last for thirteen years. Before it faded into history, however, the post-war Labour government produced one last hurrah – the Festival of Britain. After Britain began withdrawing troops from India in 1947 and from Palestine the following year, it seemed as if a country that had been struggling to prosper in the post-war world had started to wear its history like a burden to be shouldered rather than a garland to be proudly displayed. The Festival revealed to a surprised but largely enthusiastic Britain that the country was actually innovating. Its imperial glories might be fading in the rear-view mirror, but the prospect through the windscreen was one of optimism. This came as a revelation to nearly everyone, although not necessarily a pleasant one.
Particularly, it came as an unwelcome surprise to Evelyn Waugh (and most of the rest of his class) who denigrated the Festival as ‘monstrous’ in his novel Unconditional Surrender. They thought that there was little to celebrate in Britain although what was being celebrated was not their vanishing Britain and it came just as they thought that the country was returning to its senses, having taken leave of them in July 1945. The Festival wasn’t the Britain of the working classes who, as Michael Frayn wrote perceptively some ten years later, were nothing ‘more than the lovably human but essentially inert objects of benevolent administration’. The Festival of Britain in 1951, he went on to demonstrate, was the Festival of ‘the radical middle classes – the do-gooders; the readers of the News Chronicle, The Guardian and The Observer; the signers of petitions; the backbone of the BBC’.
Nothing became Attlee’s Labour government quite like its leaving of office. After six years of monochrome austerity, legislative worthiness and social bleakness, its farewell performance took place on the South Bank as the Festival of Britain crowned the summer of 1951 in a blaze of triumph. The Labour government of 1997 tried hard to copy its success with the ill-fated Millennium Dome but failed miserably. The 1951 Festival was conceived initially as a centenary celebration of the 1851 Great Exhibition but its real purpose was to release the creativity of British architecture and design and at the same time to give the long-suffering population a glimpse into the lifestyles of the future. It succeeded triumphantly. The eight million people who visited the site on the South Bank and the Pleasure Gardens in Battersea never forgot the experience. The press, which had been sceptical in the years leading up to the unveiling by the king on 3 May 1951, as it would be again in the weeks leading up to the opening of the Millennium Dome
in 1999, changed its tune and hailed the explosion of British talent that was on display. The BBC promoted the Festival untiringly. Everyone had been understandably worried lest the war in Korea become a third world war with the potential for nuclear holocaust. Somewhere in the triumphant Dome of Discovery or gazing in wonder at the Skylon or marvelling at the water mobile, the crowds which, against expectation, had continued to pour on to the South Bank of the Thames rediscovered their faith in the future of the country. The police were struck by the absence of both crime and hooliganism.
At the end of September, after a midnight cabaret from Gracie Fields, the Festival of Britain was closed to the sound of booing from Londoners and visitors who had so enjoyed its many delights. One of the first acts of the new Conservative government when it took office in late October was to tear down the buildings on the South Bank, erected especially for it, apart from the Royal Festival Hall, which had always been intended as a permanent legacy. The Conservatives had a different vision of Britain and most of the public took to it rapidly because prosperity was on its way, government controls were to be lifted, the shops were slowly being stocked with goods that people wanted and could now afford to buy. The Festival had been ‘a rainbow’, Frayn concluded – ‘a brilliant sign riding the tail of the storm and promising fairer weather. It marked the end of the hungry forties and the beginning of an altogether easier decade.’
The Dome of Discovery and Skylon at the Festival of Britain, June 1951 (The National Archives / Getty Images).
After the humiliation of their exit at the group stage from the World Cup in Brazil in 1950 the England football team resumed what it believed to be normal public service. In the 1950–51 season, only that 3–2 loss to Scotland marred an otherwise undefeated year and in 1951–2, despite a few draws, England remained unbeaten throughout. Although the friendly against Italy in Florence in May 1952 resulted in a 1–1 draw, only Wright and Finney remained from the eleven who had conquered their hosts in Turin in 1948. If the England team was therefore perceived to be weaker than it had been, its performance in the match in Vienna the following week resolved those doubts as they won with a famous goal by Nat Lofthouse eight minutes from time. Billy Wright remembered the game with great affection:
A proud gathering of British servicemen were present, enthusiasts and patriots who had converged on Vienna from stations all over Austria. ‘A win for us today could do more good for us than a thousand victories round a conference table.’ Having failed to beat us by science, the Austrians fell back on tactics better suited to a saloon-bar rough house. Ankle tapping, shirt pulling, elbow digging, late tackling… they used them all.
It was the nature of the winning goal that remained in the minds of all those who saw it and plenty of those who only heard about it. For Billy Wright it remained one of his favourite moments in an England shirt.
From an Austrian corner, Merrick caught the ball and threw it to Finney near the centre circle, who controlled and slipped it sideways to Lofthouse. He galloped from the half way line pursued by the fleet footed Austrians. As the goalkeeper advanced, Lofthouse hammered it past him as the pursuing pack enveloped him and Musil the keeper crashed into him and he was carried off. The ten men held out and at the final whistle a jubilant mass of British soldiers flooded onto the pitch and carried us on their shoulders to the dressing room.
‘We ain’t half pleased, mate,’ said one Cockney. We were so pleased to have given the British army boys something to cheer them up. We were carried back to our dressing room on the shoulders of cheering Tommies, who had come from their posts in Germany in their thousands.
Nat Lofthouse, who became known as the ‘Lion of Vienna’ after this performance, was the archetype of the heroic, unselfish English centre-forward who believed the primary purpose of his job was to give the goalkeeper and the centre-half who was marking him a hard, physical game. In fact, the ten men of Vienna didn’t remain so for long because the shaken Lofthouse soon re-entered the field of play and nearly scored a fourth England goal when he hit the post in the last minute.
Lofthouse was not a particularly skilful player but he was not a thug, at least not by the accepted standards of the 1950s. As far as he was concerned he played the game fairly and the real villains, predictably, came from abroad. In his book Lion of Vienna, published in 1989, Lofthouse recalled the utterly appalling behaviour of the Spanish football team during the 1–1 draw England secured in Spain in 1955.
Quite how tough they were we couldn’t begin to guess. I’ve never known anything like it. We were kicked all over the field. And they singled out Stanley Matthews for special treatment. I don’t think their left-back made one genuine attempt to go for the ball all afternoon. It’s a wonder Stanley didn’t break both legs. [It] was the first and only time the great Sir Stanley ever lost his cool on a football pitch.
People often ask me how we coped with tactics like that. We simply had to turn the other cheek. It was no good getting involved in a kicking match. And for me there was always national pride at stake. As we went out onto the pitch, our manager Walter Winterbottom would touch the white shirt and say quietly, ‘Don’t disgrace it, lads. Play hard but play fair.’ And we tried to live up to that. Yes, we had trouble with Latin sides over the years. They could all play the game but there was always something going on. I never relished playing against them… South Americans would never resort to anything like that. Even the centre-halves were comfortable on the ball and quite happy to play their way out of trouble. Even in their own penalty area. It was something completely new to me.
The problem with foreign players – if they weren’t lying down and appreciating the honour of being defeated by the country that had invented the game – was that they were either very filthy or very skilful. The combination of the two was impossible to deal with. Looking at the England football team of the early 1950s, one is inescapably reminded of Captain Blackadder in the trenches reminiscing about the military glories of the heyday of the British empire: ‘Back in the old days… the prerequisite of a British battle was that the enemy should, under no circumstances, carry guns… The kind of people we liked to fight were two foot tall and armed with dry grass.’
But then came Hungary.
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England’s proud record of never having lost to a foreign team on home soil had been in jeopardy for a while. Scotland had been winning at Wembley on an occasional basis for many years. The Republic of Ireland had beaten England 2–0 at Goodison Park in 1949 but somehow that didn’t count. The Rest of Europe – who had been crushed 6–1 in 1947 in the match held as a benefit for the cash-strapped FIFA – returned to Wembley in October 1953 in an exhibition match to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the foundation of the Football Association. This time the quality of the opposition – and the result – were very different from 1947. The only Hungarian on show was Kubala who had already transferred his allegiance to Spain but the presence of Hanappi and Ocwirk from Austria, Boniperti from Italy and the Swede Nordahl who had played in 1947 alerted England to the news that tactics on the Continent had moved on. Only a ninetieth-minute penalty, coolly converted by Alf Ramsey, gave England a scarcely deserved 4–4 draw. The following month the roof fell in.
If England didn’t know much about the Hungarians before 25 November 1953 they should have done. Hungary had been losing finalists in the 1938 World Cup and had provided many of the coaches for Italy’s Serie A. On top of that, they possessed three of the best club sides in Europe in MTK, Ferencvaros and the Hungarian army team Honved. Hungary had beaten Yugoslavia 2–0 in the final of the Olympic Games of 1952 in Helsinki, scoring twenty goals in five games. Stanley Rous had watched the Magyars in action in Finland and – once the idea had been approved by the Hungarian politburo – had set up an England v. Hungary game at Wembley.
Brian Glanville was expecting England to struggle against Hungary.
I knew they were in for it because I’d seen the Hungarians beat Italy 3–0 in Rome and I wrote in the o
ld Sport Express, ‘Look out, the Hungarians are coming’. There was an old sports editor of the Daily Telegraph called Frank Coles, a slob and a drunk, and he said, ‘What will they do in the middle of winter against an English team playing for points? The English team would run straight through them.’ A fat lot he knew.
Something of Captain Blackadder’s attitude to foreigners is apparent in a story Billy Wright later told against himself. As the two teams made their way out to the pitch side by side, the England captain couldn’t help noticing their opponents’ strange footwear: ‘I looked down and noticed that the Hungarians had on these strange lightweight boots, cut away like slippers under the ankle bone. I turned to big Stan Mortensen and said, “We should be alright here, Stan, they haven’t got the proper kit.”’
England’s footwear was the traditional heavy leather clodhoppers. In later years Tom Finney recalled the England kit with a shudder:
They had one size of shirt for everyone in the England squad. So if you were six foot two it strangled you and if you were my size it came down below your knees. Same with the socks. When you put them on they reached the top of your thighs. Then those boots… stiff leather, up over the ankles, bulbous toe caps. Felt like diver’s boots. When it rained and the shirt collected water and the socks were soaked we must have weighed a ton apiece. I don’t know how we moved.
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