Yet at the time of the game against Hungary there was a profound mistrust of foreigners and their streamlining ways. Foreigners wore clothes and ate food that was different from ours. We preferred to stick to what we knew and felt comfortable with. And that applied also to the way in which we played football. Kenneth Wolstenholme, observing Puskás juggling the ball with his left foot just before the kick-off, wondered whether the Hungarians were going to deploy such wizardry during the game itself, and, if that were to be the case, whether England might find these foreigners a tricky proposition. If there was any English superiority in the comment it took precisely sixty seconds for it to vanish without trace. Hidegkuti, the Hungarian number nine, puzzled the England centre-half Harry Johnston by hanging back in midfield from the kick-off. When he eventually received the ball on the edge of the England penalty area after England had clumsily lost the ball from their own throw-in, he was, of course, unmarked. He took three quick steps and blasted the ball past the stunned England goalkeeper, Gil Merrick. The photographers, who had gathered, as they traditionally did, round the goal of England’s opponents because that was where they were expecting all the action to be, exchanged nervous glances. Could they have chosen the wrong end?
Billy Wright exchanges pennants with Hungary’s Ferenc Puskás at the start of England’s traumatic game against Hungary, 25 November 1953 (Popperfoto / Getty Images).
After twenty-seven minutes, England were already 4–1 down but it was the third goal which summed up England’s play that afternoon. The outside-left Czibor found acres of space down the right wing. Alf Ramsey, who would have marked him had he come down the left wing as he was supposed to, had no idea whether to follow him or leave him. Czibor then picked out Puskás in the inside-right position. Billy Wright, as Geoffrey Green memorably described it in The Times, came over to challenge the Hungary captain but was left sprawling on his bottom ‘like a fire engine heading to the wrong fire’ as Puskás dragged the ball back easily with the sole of his left boot before thumping it into the roof of the net. It was so easy that it was a shock to everyone; even the Hungarians who could scarcely believe that the Old Masters of world football could be humiliated so easily. They played like champions and with the bearing of champions – so much so that they were sent off from Victoria station with the cheers of the fair-minded English public ringing in their ears. In Budapest, the entire Communist Party hierarchy assembled to greet the triumphant Magyars, alongside thousands of delighted Hungarians in and around Keleti station. The players were publicly honoured with the People’s Order of Merit and secretly rewarded with cash. It was, the Hungarian Communist regime seemed determined to emphasise, a triumph not just for eleven players and for the nation of Hungary, but for an entire ideology.
Malcolm Allison, who had been present at Wembley that dank November afternoon, was profoundly impressed by what he had seen. Many of the young coaches who would begin to have an impact on English football in the 1960s felt similarly. Winterbottom, as a serious student of the game, soon recognised how far behind the English game was now lagging, but his anxieties had no impact on his employers at the Football Association. At the end of the decade Billy Wright wrote:
I am quite sure that if managers and players of this country had allowed themselves to be influenced by Walter seven or eight years ago much of the heart searching now taking place at League level would not have been necessary. He has met with a great deal of resistance, both active and passive, and while I do not wish to apportion blame, it remains a fact that the march of tactics did pass us by.
When the rematch took place in Budapest in May 1954, Stanley Matthews was not selected. Instead his place went to the Portsmouth right-winger Peter Harris, whose only previous international game had been against the Republic of Ireland in the defeat at Goodison Park five years previously. At centre-forward was the ineffectual Fulham player Bedford Jezzard. England lost 7–1.
That same month saw the release of perhaps the most durable of the many British war films made in the 1950s. The Dam Busters re-created the RAF’s 1943 ‘Operation Chastise’ to destroy the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams using ‘bouncing bombs’, which flooded the Ruhr and Eder valleys. A paean to British – and imperial – courage (the crews of 617 Squadron including many men from Canada, Australia and New Zealand), the film attracted large numbers of cinema-goers, most of whom would have remembered the raid even if they didn’t know the details. The Dam Busters makes no attempt to disguise the heavy losses sustained during the operation: when Guy Gibson meets the scientist Barnes Wallis who had invented the bouncing bomb on the morning after the raid, the two men are both aware that whatever they managed to destroy of the dams and the industrial infrastructure of the Ruhr, it came at a heavy cost in the lives of the air crews.
Barnes Wallis takes off his glasses and wipes them, muttering that the price was too high and if he had known at the start how many would perish he would never have begun his research. Gibson protests that all the men knew the risks and all the men who died would have done it all over again even knowing they would not return. His words are of some comfort to the scientist who suggests Gibson must be exhausted and that he should get some sleep. Gibson smiles wryly and says softly that he has some letters to write first. This poignantly understated admission that he now has to inform the families of the men who have lost their lives rather undercuts his previous assertion – which was intended to raise Wallis’s spirits – but is a fitting ending to a film that celebrates rather than glorifies British and imperial heroism. Today we tend to associate the film with the stirring and upbeat qualities of the march composed by Eric Coates and used as its theme music, but in fact the film is much subtler than a jingoistic tale of British heroism and invention, which is how it is seen in retrospect by ignorant England fans waving their arms about like aeroplanes. The Dam Busters, The Colditz Story (1955), The Cruel Sea (1953), Angels One Five (1952), Reach for the Sky (1956), Ice Cold in Alex (1958) and Carve Her Name with Pride (1958) were the best of a genre that proved consistently popular during that decade because by and large the portrayal of the British in these films as a self-sacrificing, dutiful and stoical people pretty much reflected how their audiences saw themselves.
The lingering impact of the war might have made British people more stoic than they are today in a time of comparative peace and absolute prosperity, but the war had been won and it was still popularly believed that England was supposed to win sporting as well as military battles. The second heavy defeat at football by Hungary, a Communist nation, caused some profound soul-searching. Hitler’s Olympic Games in 1936 had demonstrated the propaganda effect of victory. Britain needed a win somewhere if only for the sake of parliamentary democracy. The winning back of the Ashes in 1953 gave some hope that the England cricket team was starting to recover after the ravages of war with the added benefit of Bradman’s retirement, but that battle was traditional and only sporting with no Cold War overtones. The key ideological battles of the mid-1950s in this respect took place at Molineux in Wolverhampton, on the athletics track at Iffley Road in Oxford and at the White City stadium in west London. What gave them added significance is that they took place in the presence of television cameras.
On 6 May 1954, running for the Amateur Athletic Association against his old university, Roger Bannister won the mile race in a time of 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. Chris Brasher, who was to win Olympic gold at Melbourne in the 3,000m steeplechase, set a fast first lap before handing the pace-making job over to Christopher Chataway. The weather at Iffley Road was not ideal for record-breaking – a 15mph crosswind with gusts of up to 25mph meant that Bannister nearly called off the attempt but when he burst past Chataway and raced for the line he carried with him the hopes of the nation. When Norris McWhirter announced the winning time he could only get as far as ‘Three minutes…’ before the rest of the detail was drowned out by the cheering of 3,000 spectators who had gathered in the hope of watching history being made. The Australian John Landy set a
new world record of 3.57.9 the next month but the young doctor from Oxford would always be associated with the supreme achievement of being the first to break the four-minute barrier.
In May 1954, Paul Fox was the editor of a new midweek sports programme on the BBC called Sportsview. Bannister’s achievement was perfectly timed to help establish the show, as Fox recalls:
We had a piece of luck with Sportsview because our third edition coincided with the Bannister four-minute mile. Norris McWhirter tipped us off that Roger was going for it that evening in Oxford so we had the Outside Broadcast camera there. I knew Roger well enough to have a car waiting for him to bring him back to the studio in London. He broke the four minute mile about six o’clock and by half past eight he was in the studio in London. It was a genuine scoop. I knew that gang – Bannister, Chataway, Brasher, the coach Franz Stampfl and so on. Chris Brasher became a Panorama reporter when I was editor of the programme.
Chataway became one of the first ITN ‘newscasters’ when Independent Television News went on the air and the reason that people knew him was that he had made his mark as an athlete first. The Soviet long-distance runner Vladimir Kuts had beaten both Chataway and the ‘Czech locomotive’ Emil Zátopek (triple Olympic gold medallist in Helsinki in 1952), to win the 5,000m at the European Championships in September 1954 but on home territory Chataway thought he could win. The Evening Standard arranged an athletics meeting between London and Moscow at the White City stadium for October 1954 which was effectively Great Britain v. the USSR. Kuts always tried to break the field by setting out at a terrific pace, but on this occasion Chataway managed to stay with him. However, on the last lap, Kuts was showing no signs of tiring and Chataway seemed unable to close the gap of two yards no matter how desperately he tried. With 200 metres to go Kuts was still leading as he was when the runners came round the bend and into the home straight for the last time.
The atmosphere was electric, for the race was being run not just under floodlights but under a travelling spotlight. All the anxieties of the atomic age, with its ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation, seemed to possess the full house of 60,000 spectators as they willed Chataway on. With eighty metres to go it seemed impossible but somehow, from somewhere, Chataway found a last reserve of energy. He kicked on and with less than ten metres to go he caught Kuts. Two metres from the finishing line he passed the Russian and broke the tape first as the crowd at the White City and the British public watching at home on television went wild with delight – not so much at Chataway’s new world record of 13.51.6 – a full five seconds faster than Kuts’s old record – but at the realisation that a major propaganda battle had been won. Unfortunately, just as Landy had soon broken Bannister’s record, so Chataway soon surrendered his new world record back to Kuts who then went on to win both the 5,000 and the 10,000m at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956. However, it was Chataway’s performance at White City in October 1954, witnessed by millions of British television viewers, that lingered longest in the memory of British people. To them the Olympic gold medals were neither here nor there. An Englishman had triumphed over an intimidating foreigner – and a Commie to boot – through guts and determination. Paul Fox remembers that Chataway won more than the undying affection of the British sporting public that night:
1954 was the first year we ran the programme Sportsview Personality of the Year and it ensured that Chris won it and not Roger. It was done in conjunction with the Daily Express and Chataway was presented with the trophy at the Savoy Hotel by Field Marshal Montgomery. It didn’t have the status that Sports Personality of the Year does now.
Chris Chataway beats his Russian rival Vladimir Kuts to break the 5,000- metres world record at White City, London, 13 October 1954 (Keystone / Getty Images).
Prompted by Fox and the Head of Outside Broadcasts and Sportsview presenter Peter Dimmock, the Corporation was slowly learning that televised sport presented some distinct advantages. Fox recalled:
Sport was regarded at the BBC as ‘below the salt’ but it got audiences. News was top of course. However, Dimmock was well regarded at the BBC because he had made sure the Coronation had been a success. Churchill didn’t want it televised, the archbishop of Canterbury didn’t want it televised but in the end Peter did enough to persuade the duke of Norfolk, who was the Earl Marshal, that it was a good idea. He took him to the Abbey because what they were all really scared of was the lights would be too strong for a twenty-seven-year-old woman in an unbelievably stressful ceremony. And of course he left the lights off and turned them on when he needed them, took the close up and apologised. ‘Oh sorry wasn’t I supposed?’… etc. Too late. Dimmock also had direct access to Sir Ian Jacob, the Director-General, but Jacob didn’t know a football from a rugby ball and didn’t much care. Neither did Cecil McGivern [BBC Television Controller of Programmes] so they allowed Dimmock free rein.
A key moment in the history of sport on television was the 1953 Cup Final (immortalised as the ‘Matthews Cup Final’) which was broadcast on 2 May, a month before the Coronation. Many families who were planning to buy their first television set for the Coronation bought it early so that they could watch the Cup Final. Dimmock and Fox knew that sport was a growth area for television and Sportsview, an innovative sports magazine programme, quickly became a staple of midweek viewing.
Sportsview started because I wrote a memo to Peter Dimmock saying what we need is a weekly sports news programme. We started with a fortnightly programme. Four weeks after I had written the memo it was on the air. Dimmock was a driver and the best idea I had was that he should present it. Peter was good at it and he knew the football people which enabled him to bring all the contracts to the BBC. Peter was the key organiser for Wimbledon and Ascot and all those places. That was because people had seen him on the air introducing Sportsview. Then we dreamed up Grandstand during the Commonwealth games in Cardiff in July 1958. Three months later it was on the air. Peter presented the first three programmes when it went on air in October 1958 and then David Coleman took over.
The influence of television on sport and of sport on television became one of the main shaping factors in the cultural life of Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century it is perfectly apparent that television dictates to sport because of the money it can provide or withhold. In the 1950s and 1960s, as television slowly began to acquire the broadcasting rights to big sporting events, frequently granted with some reluctance and much suspicion, it was the big dramatic sporting clashes that people remembered. The BBC wanted television rights both to keep them out of the hands of the ITV companies which were just starting up and to increase the number of television licence fee-payers. ITV, in turn, wanted them because this meant larger audiences and allowed them to charge more for commercials.
In the autumn of 1954, Wolverhampton Wanderers, under the captaincy of Billy Wright, played evening matches under floodlights against three sides from Eastern Europe, but it was the first two games, which took place around the time of the Kuts v. Chataway race, that captured the public imagination. This was partly because of the successful results but more importantly because they were seen on television. Wolves had won the First Division League Championship in May 1954 and their new floodlights were to be inaugurated with evening matches against the best of opposition from Europe. On 13 November, Spartak Moscow were crushed 4–0, which whetted the appetite for the match against Honved a month later. The army club included six of the Hungary national team which had beaten England so humiliatingly in London and Budapest and the way the Hungarians began the match at Molineux suggested that another hammering was on the way. After throwing flowers to the Black Country crowd who certainly had never witnessed such an entrance when the likes of neighbours West Bromwich Albion came to Molineux, Kocsis and Machos gave Honved a two-nil lead after fifteen minutes of a first half which they entirely dominated. Conditions deteriorated during the second half of what was a filthy December night, as a result of which the Hungari
ans’ close-passing game broke down as the ball simply would not roll through the Wolverhampton mud.
Wolves themselves started sending long, high balls into the space behind the visitors’ defence and profited accordingly. Johnny Hancocks pulled a goal back from a penalty early in the second half and constant Wolves pressure was rewarded when Roy Swinbourne equalised with fifteen minutes left. Like Vladimir Kuts, the Communist footballers could not withstand the pressure exerted by the forces of democracy and the crowd ecstatically acclaimed the winning goal thumped home by Swinbourne. It was a night that lived long in the memories of those who saw it live or on television, for it assuaged a great deal of the hurt that had been inflicted by the two overwhelming defeats for the national side. A headline in the Daily Mail, with traditional understatement, described Wolves as the Champions of the World, a statement that would have been greeted with some surprise at Real Madrid.
Billy Wright, whose captaincy of his country had attracted severe criticism, redeemed his reputation with an outstanding display. He was now playing at centre-half for both club and country, having switched from right-half where he had been ensconced since the restart of football after the war. Brian Glanville, who had been sceptical about Wright as he struggled in the early 1950s, enthusiastically welcomed the switch.
He was a far better player after 1954 when he switched to centre-half although he was not very tall. He was an incredible defender. Syd Owen and Laurie Hughes had played there but Hughes got injured in the Charity Shield in 1950 and we were always struggling after that until Billy Wright moved there.
Wright’s change of position took place during the World Cup finals in Switzerland in 1954. Given that their last warm-up game before the tournament was the disaster in Budapest, England’s fairly anonymous performance in the 1954 World Cup could be accounted a reasonable one. A 4–4 draw against Belgium was followed by a 2–0 win over the hosts but they were then well beaten by Uruguay 4–2 and returned home having reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup for the first time. Wright’s move to centre-half was one of England’s few bright spots of the tournament. His reputation as a player really rests on the consistently impressive performances he was to give in that position for the rest of his career.
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