Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  Armfield himself had a superb tournament and was recognised widely as one of the best full-backs in world football, but his view of England’s performance wasn’t necessarily one shared by the press and the public. The British public’s perception of the performance of the England team was largely shaped by the press coverage. In 1962, television viewers did not have the luxury of live broadcasts of England’s games from which they could draw their own conclusions as to the quality of their team’s performance. The matches were recorded on film, the negative of which was then taken to Santiago, whence it was flown to Lima and then to Panama, entering the United States at Miami before travelling on to New York where it was processed. The film was then flown across the Atlantic and was transmitted by the BBC forty-eight hours after the matches had been played. When viewers finally got to see the black-and-white television pictures, they were fuzzy and – because they were sourced from just one or, at most, two cameras, whose operators did not always manage to follow the flight of the ball – hardly gave an accurate sense of the progress of the game.

  The significance of the role played by television in the English reaction to their football grew by leaps and bounds only after this tournament held in a faraway country about which we knew less than we knew about Czechoslovakia in 1938.

  Johnny Haynes never played for England again after that match against Brazil. Shortly after his return to England he was badly injured in a car crash on the promenade in Blackpool in which he broke both legs. He was only twenty-seven at the time and he recovered to offer Fulham another eight years of sterling service but it seems that, for all his cultured defence-splitting passing, he was not Alf Ramsey’s kind of player because he never picked him after he became England manager in 1963. It is undeniable that Haynes, whom Brian Glanville still describes as ‘petulant’, had had two disappointing World Cups, but he had been an outstanding player nonetheless. Ramsey thought that his natural ability was offset by his tendency to be witheringly contemptuous of players of lesser ability. It was not a character trait that would be likely to find favour with a new England manager who was looking to build an indomitable team spirit and a feeling of collective achievement. In Haynes’s absence after his Blackpool accident, Jimmy Armfield became the regular captain of England in the autumn of 1962, having already led out the national side in a World Cup qualifying game against Luxembourg in September 1961, played at Highbury, which England won 4–1.

  Armfield’s early life was even more deprived than that of Jimmy Hill. Born in 1935, he grew up in a very poor community in the Denton district of Manchester. When the war started and Manchester was subjected to Luftwaffe bombing, his mother moved to Blackpool, although his father remained temporarily in Denton and visited Blackpool when he could. But then an opportunity opened up:

  He heard about a shop near where we lived that was available for rent. I remember going in there for the first time. When we opened the door we could hear the mice scattering. We opened the cash tills and the drawers were full of mice. We then got a shop that had accommodation above it and he started a small grocery there and he stayed there till he was sixty-seven and I stayed there till I got married. My mother carried on being a machinist until she was seventy-six. She started cleaning when she was thirteen years old. Where we came from in Denton was rock-bottom. There was no electricity, there was no mattress on the bed; there were no curtains and no carpet on the stairs. You took a candle upstairs to the bedroom with you.

  Life improved for the Armfields when they moved to Blackpool, although Jimmy’s mother worked as hard and as long as she had in Manchester, leaving the house at 7 a.m. and not returning until the evening. The work ethic in the Armfield family was extremely strong. Jimmy, an only child, was alone for long periods of the day in the single room they called home. For the first year in Blackpool they didn’t have a radio so Jimmy read and read and read. It paid off in the sense that he passed the examination for Arnold School and, like so many bright working-class children, he now benefited from the excellent teaching and cultural opportunities that became available to him.

  I was one of the lucky ones. We had good teachers who were too old to be in the war and they had their heads screwed on. We had a man called Joe Brice who was a Doctor of Divinity who had started selling newspapers on the streets of Wolverhampton when he was fifteen. It’s a socialist ethic.

  I had no ambition to be a professional footballer. I’d done my O levels and I went on to do A levels in History, Geography and Economics plus a General Studies paper and I won a place at Liverpool University to read Economics. I thought the latter was common sense made difficult. I’d had the habit of reading because I was an only child. I must have read Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales twenty times. I still need to read.

  Liverpool University’s loss was Blackpool and England’s gain. Having developed rapidly through his National Service days in the mid-1950s, alongside Eddie Coleman, Duncan Edwards, Trevor Smith from Birmingham City and the Sheffield United pair Graham Shaw and Alan Hodgkinson, Armfield soon came to the attention of the England selectors. The manner in which he was informed of his first international call-up says much about the hierarchical nature of football at that time.

  When I first got picked for the Young England team, the trainer told me that the manager Joe Smith was looking for me so I went to see him in his office at the back of the stand. ‘I’ve been told you want to see me’ – I thought I was going to get a pat on the back but he said, ‘No. Why should I want to see you?’ Talk about being put in your place. So I started to walk out and as I reached the door he said, ‘Oh, there is one thing.’ He picked up a piece of paper from his desk. ‘I’ve got a letter here from the Football Association. They want you to play against Denmark in Copenhagen in about two weeks. I want you to go and thank Stan [Matthews]. Anyone can play behind him.’ Not a word of praise. I went back to find Stan and said the manager had asked me to thank him. He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘I’ve been picked to play for Young England against Denmark and the manager said it was because of you.’ Stan looked and me and smiled. ‘Quite right’, he said, ‘quite right.’

  Armfield believes that his grammar-school education made it easier for him to understand the somewhat bookish Walter Winterbottom than some of his colleagues. Jimmy Greaves, who made his full England debut on the same 1959 tour as Armfield, always claimed that he never understood a word of the tactical briefings that Winterbottom was so fond of imparting to his mostly bewildered players.

  Greaves didn’t pass the Eleven Plus and went to a secondary modern but his social background was not dissimilar from that of Armfield. He was born in Manor Park in east London in February 1940, but the family was forced to relocate to Dagenham when their house was bombed. Like most boys of his age and class he was brought up on powdered egg and milk and tinned corned beef. He was thirteen before he saw a banana. His family was fortunate to have an indoor bathroom, but actually filling the bath with water involved his father using a Heath Robinson contraption that pumped the water up the stairs from the downstairs boiler. For that reason a bath was a once-weekly occurrence. Summer holidays in the days of rationing were spent hop-picking in Kent. Being small and agile, Greaves was frequently woken by his father in the middle of the night to scrump apples from a neighbouring orchard which his uncle Fred loaded into his sidecar and drove back to London to sell on the black market.

  Nineteen fifty-five, the year that the fifteen-year-old Greaves was due to leave his secondary modern school, was a time of almost full employment. His parents, who had lived through the Depression of the 1930s, were therefore delighted at the prospect of young Jimmy being taken on as an apprentice joiner or plumber. His father came home one night to tell his son that he had had a word with a friend at The Times and there was a job waiting for him there as a compositor. Fortunately the Chelsea scout Jimmy Thompson, a diminutive man in a bowler hat who had been closely following Greaves’s schoolboy football career, arrived at the Greaves’s home in a r
ed Sunbeam Talbot and took Jimmy and his father out for tea at the Strand Palace Hotel. Neither father nor son had previously seen such magnificent furnishings. Shortly afterwards, Jimmy signed forms with Chelsea with the reluctant approval of his father who felt his son would have been set for life with a job as a compositor in Fleet Street or an apprenticeship with a plumber or a joiner.

  Greaves and Armfield, like Johnny Haynes, were part of a generation of players who still walked to work or took public transport. Greaves made his debut for Chelsea in the match against Tottenham Hotspur at White Hart Lane in the first match of the 1957–8 season. He travelled to Stamford Bridge from his home in Dagenham by bus and Tube. Chelsea had declined from the Championship-winning side of 1954–5, which had inevitably frustrated the fans. Following a 3–1 home defeat at the hands of a rapidly improving Burnley, John Sillett – who had been responsible for two of the goals – made his way to the bus stop a hundred yards from Stamford Bridge. His hope that all the Chelsea supporters had dispersed by the time he left the ground was dashed when he found four middle-aged fans waiting at the same bus stop.

  ‘Been to the match?’ one of them asked.

  The Chelsea defender nodded silently, knowing what was to come.

  ‘What about that bloody John Sillett?’

  ‘Yeah, bloody rubbish, wasn’t he?’ asked another one rhetorically.

  Sillett could only nod in agreement once again. The abuse heaped on Sillett intensified, to which the man himself could only keep nodding in eager agreement and pray for the merciful arrival of the bus. What makes the anecdote so revealing is that fans who had been watching Sillett play for several seasons didn’t recognise him when they met him in the flesh. They were used to seeing him from the terraces, fifty yards away. Without televised football to make the close-up of his face familiar to them, Sillett’s anonymity could be preserved.

  Jimmy Armfield could walk to Blackpool’s Bloomfield Road ground from the family grocery store:

  When I was living in the shop before I was married, my two best friends came to pick me up and we all walked together over Bloomfield Road bridge. I went into the Players’ Entrance, they went into the Paddock. After the game we walked back over the bridge and everyone’d be in the shop and my mother would point at me and say, ‘You! Inside! Now!’, particularly if we’d lost.

  Even after the maximum wage was abolished in 1961, Armfield’s wages were far from astronomical.

  I went up from £20 a week to £40. Johnny Haynes told me he was on £100 a week so I went back to my chairman and told him and they put it up to £50. I felt like a millionaire. My dad said that deciding not to take up that place at Liverpool University wasn’t a bad idea now. The most I ever earned was £55. It was that kind of wage that kept me in touch with the common man.

  The common man’s world, however, was also changing. By the middle of the 1960s it was estimated that five million Britons were taking their summer holidays abroad. Because of the post-war baby boom, half of the population was under thirty-five, a ticking time-bomb for the cost of social care at the start of the next century. The expansion of the economy and the general rise in the level of disposable income were leading to an increase in social mobility. Britain’s highly stratified class system certainly did not collapse, but there were perceptible shifts within it as the power of the new money began to make itself felt. Thanks to the grammar schools, which offered opportunities to bright children from working-class backgrounds, and the building of new universities, Britain was slowly becoming a more meritocratic country, even if the prevailing class system militated against the emergence of a truly egalitarian society.

  This revolution in society and in football was paralleled by a similar one in cricket. Cricket is frequently, and sometimes quite rightly, seen as a game administered by blinkered reactionaries. However, to put it in perspective, cricket made two significant innovations in the early 1960s which the Lawn Tennis Association, the Royal & Ancient, the Amateur Athletic Association, the Rugby Football Union and even the Football Association and Football League would have regarded as seismic. On 26 November 1962, to the surprise of nearly everyone and certainly that of the Duke of Norfolk and Ted Dexter, manager and captain respectively of the MCC party then on tour in Australia, the Advisory County Cricket Committee passed by twelve votes to seven a proposal by Glamorgan that the status of the amateur cricketer be abolished entirely. Given the fact that only four years previously the committee, which MCC had set up to examine the threatened status of the amateur cricketer, had returned a verdict that the preservation of the status quo was vital to the good health of the game, this rapid reversal reveals how far changes in British society had gone that even MCC was obliged to take note of them. From the start of the 1963 season, there would be no amateurs and no professionals in the old sense of the word. All the players would simply be cricketers and the absurd anomalies of amateurism were thankfully consigned to the grave.

  Nineteen sixty-three saw not only the first season without amateur ‘gentlemen’ on the cricket field but another, perhaps even more significant, change to the structure of county cricket. It was decided to experiment with a new limited-overs knock-out competition that would last one day only. Each side would have a single innings of up to sixty-five overs. Weather permitting, anyone who came to watch and stayed until the end of the day’s play would see a result. One-day cricket, like T20 cricket forty years later, was to be the salvation of the game for some time to come.

  It was also a landmark year in British social and cultural history. There is a well-advanced theory among historians that the disastrous invasion of Suez in 1956 prompted seven years of cultural turmoil which culminated in the extraordinary events of 1963, the year that effectively divides the British twentieth century in two. In those seven years, so the theory goes, Britain shuffled off the constricting attitudes of a class-ridden society and embraced a new social order that scorned the conventional notion of social deference.

  In 1963, the Beatles emerged in their full mop-top glory, most of the public took the side of the audacious Great Train Robbers against the police who were trying to capture a gang of thieves and revelled in the scandals revealed by the Profumo affair. That year, too, the now much-reviled and out-of-touch Harold Macmillan, though forced to leave office by illness, appeared to have resigned in the face of a satirical broadside issued by the stage revue Beyond the Fringe, the magazine Private Eye, the Soho-based nightclub The Establishment and ultimately the most powerful weapon of all, the television series That Was the Week That Was which began transmission in November 1962. The influence of this satirical programme, transmitted late on Saturday night, grew at the same rate as its delighted audience. Macmillan, parodied mercilessly by Peter Cook on the stage and slightly more kindly by Willie Rushton on TW3, resigned in favour of yet another Old Etonian, who still sat in the House of Lords, but in accordance with fashionable theory agreed to renounce his peerage. This change was symbolised politically the following year when plain Mr Harold Wilson from Huddersfield, with his stated predilection for H.P. Sauce and St Bruno pipe tobacco, led the Labour party to an electoral victory after which the Conservatives replaced Sir Alec Douglas-Home with Ted Heath, a man who had been to a grammar school.

  If Billy Wright had been the epitome of 1950s conformism and deference, a new spirit was starting to engage the captains of England in the 1960s, a decade in which much changed – though rarely to the extent promoted subsequently by popular myth. History, especially English history, tends to be the product of evolution rather than revolution. It is received wisdom that the 1960s was the decade of change, but the developments of that time would not have been possible without the changes that had taken place in the middle of the 1950s. Certainly the 1950s was a decade of social conformism, illustrated perfectly by the fate of the Wolfenden Report in 1957, which recommended significant liberalisation of the current legislation dealing with homosexuality. An outraged popular press called it a ‘Pansies Charter’ and t
he Conservative government, which had no doubt commissioned the report with the best of intentions, quickly buried it. It was to be another ten years before the country was thought to be ready for the reforms that appeared at the end of the 1960s but it seems unlikely that homosexual relationships between consenting adults over the age of twenty-one would have passed into law as early as 1967 had it not been for the innovative efforts of Wolfenden in 1957.

  Even so, the changes came slowly. A private member’s bill introduced by the Labour MP Sydney Silverman in 1965 abolished capital punishment, but it would not have been confirmed by the public had a referendum been held on it. When England won the World Cup in 1966, homosexuality and abortion were still illegal. It was just over twenty years after the end of the Second World War and English society had, of course, changed but not to the extent that is popularly suggested by current television documentary film-makers who did not live through those times. The pill certainly changed women’s lives but most teenagers in the 1960s were as virginal as their parents had been at the same age. Only married women were permitted to be prescribed the pill by their family GP. Unmarried girls who went to their doctor to ask to be put on the pill because they were in a relationship with a boyfriend were not only refused, but the doctor frequently told the girl’s parents of the request, to her utter mortification. The friends of girls who had been through such humiliation were hardly in a rush to experience it themselves. Teenagers in the 1970s certainly benefited from the pill, but that was another decade.

  The 1960s were the decade of the BBC’s The Wednesday Play – a series of TV plays which included Cathy Come Home and Dennis Potter’s Stand Up for Nigel Barton – and of the campy spy series The Avengers, a clever mixture of the stereotypical Englishman played by Patrick Macnee with his bowler hat and rolled umbrella and the sexually predatory Honor Blackman and Diana Rigg. At the start of the decade Ken Russell and John Schlesinger broke new ground with their films for the arts series Monitor, whose one hundredth programme, broadcast in 1962, was Russell’s celebrated drama documentary about the composer Edward Elgar. The previously unmentioned north of England became chic in television as well as films with the success of Coronation Street, set in a fictional version of Salford, and Z Cars, set in a fictional suburb of Merseyside. Pop music was showcased in the BBC’s Top of the Pops, which was first broadcast in January 1964, and on ITV with Ready Steady Go!, which had begun in August 1963, but which would last only until December 1966.