In the next series of Till Death Us Do Part the ‘Scouse git’ made great play of the fact that England had won the World Cup playing in the red of the Labour party. Alf Garnett’s only response was to invoke the names of his beloved West Ham players, Hurst, Peters and, of course, Bobby Moore.
Although the commercial endorsements were nothing compared to what became available in later years, Moore’s name appeared on football boots, footballs, books and newspaper columns written by somebody else. His earnings from football shot up to £8,000 a year but that figure was dwarfed by the £15,000 he made from off-field activities. He bought a new Jaguar and a holiday home in Marbella. He and Tina ate in the best restaurants and a friend observed that Tina’s oven wasn’t used in the year after the World Cup. Almost daily their postman delivered invitations to the homes of the good, the great and the celebrity-obsessed. In the course of the social whirl that followed the events of July 1966, Moore liked to be seen out and about in the latest fashions. Indeed, his wife would later say that Moore had a touch of the feminine about him. By this she did not mean to impugn his heterosexuality, but she recognised that Bobby took an interest in clothes that was not necessarily widely shared by other footballers at the time. His obsessive neatness, which would now be categorised as OCD, ensured that if he did appear in those fashions he would be immaculately dressed.
Bobby Moore and his wife Tina, who is wearing an England football shirt, on a photo shoot in 1972 (Terry O’Neill / Getty Images).
Tina, much to her surprise – as she was used to being seen as Bobby’s appendage – was asked to appear in a television commercial for Bisto gravy without standing next to Bobby. Of course, when she and Martin Peters’s wife were asked to promote the concept of the local pub (‘Look in at the local’) it was firmly in the company of the two World Cup stars. Nevertheless, just as World Cup glory cast more stardust on Bobby Moore than it did on the other players so Tina Moore benefited from being the wife of the country’s great hero.
Billy Wright, captain of England for eleven years and for ninety matches, was never seen as a man whose endorsement could sell products. Denis Compton was the only sportsman of those post-war times whose name and appearance appeared to have a commercial value, but that all changed in the atmosphere after the World Cup win. The remaining years of Bobby Moore’s career have been described as England football’s golden age between the post-war working-class solidarity of the years of austerity and the point in the 1970s when the game started to suffer the torments of hooliganism. It was a revelation that more footballers than just Bobby Moore and George Best could sell products. The Manchester City midfielder Colin Bell became, briefly, the human face of Kellogg’s sugary breakfast cereal Frosties in partnership with the more durable mascot Tony the Tiger. Bell’s appearance in television commercials for Frosties revealed the distinct influence of the mumbling ‘Method’ acting style made famous by Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. Bell looked as though he would have been much happier being brought down from behind by Norman Hunter and was soon replaced in front of the camera by Bobby Moore, whom Kellogg paid £3,000 for a single Corn Flakes commercial.
For Bobby Moore these were the lotus years. After 1966, he, Martin Peters and Alf Ramsey were all honoured by the London Borough of Barking where they were born at the confluence of east London and Essex. West Ham United more than doubled his wages to £150 a week on a three-year contract with an option to extend for a further three years. Best, Law and Charlton were on more than he was but Manchester United’s home crowds, which frequently touched 60,000, were double those who paid to go through the turnstiles at Upton Park. Moore, along with the other twenty-one players in the squad, was awarded a £1,000 bonus for winning the World Cup, but it was taxed at 40 per cent so the final sum was £600. It was another step on his journey from the Labour-voting, working-class solidarity of his childhood to being an aspiring member of the Tory-voting middle class. There were failures along the way. Bobby Moore Jewellery went out of business in 1968, as did Bobby Moore Shirts & Ties – and a later investment with Mike Summerbee in a suede and leather company making menswear also collapsed – but by the time of the World Cup in 1970 his company, Bobby Moore Ltd, was turning over £22,000 per annum.
In 1966 Tottenham Hotspur tried hard to sign him, but West Ham would not sell and Moore remained in east London. Although Spurs won the FA Cup in 1967, they never regained the dominance they had displayed at the start of the decade and the teams that won the honours at the end of it were largely northern – the two Liverpool clubs, the two Manchester clubs and Don Revie’s rising Leeds United. From holding aloft a trophy at Wembley in three consecutive years Bobby Moore played out the rest of his ten years as a footballer with no silverware to show for his efforts. His visible achievements were his captaincy of a feared and respected England football team, and as a smiling, confident symbol of the time.
Like Ramsey, Moore was plagued by feelings of social inferiority. Ramsey dealt with the problem by appearing and speaking in public as little as possible. But Moore liked the limelight, so he had to develop a different strategy for dealing with the attendant nuisances of celebrity. With journalists he deflected their questions by getting in first with questions of his own. Patrick Barclay recalls:
When he looked at you, his eyes went straight into yours and he would say, ‘How are you? How’s the family?’ and so on. And when he asked you those questions he would wait for a reply. It was only when I read Matt Dickinson’s biography of Moore that I realised that he was such a private man that he was trying to deflect attention from himself, as well as being instinctively polite. He was the most charming man imaginable.
Nevertheless, Moore had to endure the daily attentions of bores who thought that their limited knowledge of the England captain – gleaned from the press and the broadcast media – entitled them to intrude into his private life. Time and again he was obliged to deny that he was dedicated only to the pursuit of money and pleasure, or that he was cold, aloof and insincere. Matt Dickinson has revealed that Moore suffered a daily barrage of rudeness, insults and snide comments and that he spent his life biting his tongue. On the field or off it, he almost never lost his composure, which is why his heroic status remains untarnished despite later revelations surrounding his private life.
Moore’s celebrity was even reflected in the cinema of the era, his name appearing on the side of a van in Peter Collinson’s film The Italian Job (1969). Slightly more surprisingly, the name on the other side of the van is that of Colin Bell, the young Manchester City player who had made his England debut as recently as 1968. The film tells how a gang of English thieves steal $4 million in gold bars from a security van in the centre of Turin and, having reduced the city’s traffic to gridlock, make their escape in the aftermath of an Italy–England football match. Although the game is never seen, it is reported that England have won (‘Look happy, you stupid bastards. We won, didn’t we?’) and, of course, the Turin setting recalls the famous 4–0 victory there in the salad days of 1948. The casting of Benny Hill as the expert who reprograms the master computer that controls all the traffic lights in Turin suggests that the film is nothing more than an enjoyable caper, but there are elements in it that are highly revealing of the Britain of 1969. Peter Hennessy maintains that The Italian Job is
a work of genius and it concludes with Britain’s gold and currency reserves teetering over an abyss. Fred Emney carrying a Union Jack bag puts a series of electrical devices in street bins in Turin designed to aid the confusion allowing the Minis to get away. He asks for directions and gets a torrent of impenetrable Italian in response and he just mumbles, ‘Bloody foreigners’. It’s built round the glories and the anxieties of the British people and football is central to that.
Charlie Croker, played by Michael Caine, develops the concept of the robbery but it is Mr Bridger (Noël Coward) who finances it from his cell in Wormwood Scrubs. Croker, who has just been released, returns to waylay Mr Bridger on his way
to the lavatory having been handed a soft toilet roll and that day’s copy of the Daily Express by a deferential prison warder. Bridger affects disdain for the Italian job and Croker tries hard to summon up the words that will motivate him – ‘Mr Bridger, this is important – four million dollars, Europe, the Common Market, Italy, the Fiat car factory!’ ‘Croker,’ responds Bridger slowly, ‘this… is… my… toilet!’
Bridger goes to see the prison governor to complain about the outrage of someone breaking into his toilet. He waves the governor (the traditionally befuddled John Le Mesurier) to a seat and tells him in no uncertain terms that
There are some things, Mr Governor, that to an Englishman are sacred. You are not doing your job properly. Her Majesty’s prisons are there not only to prevent people from getting out but to prevent people from getting in. You are symptomatic of the lazy, unimaginative management that is driving this country onto the rocks.
It is old-fashioned patriotism that finally convinces Bridger to give the Italian job his blessing and his support. An acolyte hands Bridger copies of the balance of payments reports for 1966 and 1967 along with the latest edition of the Illustrated London News which contains a photograph of the Queen. We follow Bridger back to his cell where we see that his walls are decorated with photographs of the Queen from her earliest days as a princess. He tells the acolyte that he has noticed that some of the younger criminals in E Block are not standing to attention when the national anthem is played. They are warned to do so unless they wish to incur his displeasure. Somehow, in Bridger’s mind, the Italian job is, as Croker suspected, an opportunity to show the world that British is best.
The symbols are the respective cars. The daring, skilful English getaway drivers pilot their Mini-Coopers up and down steps and through busy shopping arcades. The three cars are patriotically coloured red, white and blue. Pursuing them is a creaking, rust-coloured Fiat that is left for dead by the English Minis. It is a repeat of Francis Drake and the Sea Dogs in their manoeuvrable ships routing the unwieldy galleons of the Spanish Armada, only this time the purpose is not to save the realm but to proclaim the triumph of British engineering, or, rather, the spectacular success of the Greek-born designer of the Mini, Alec Issigonis.
Oddly, Fiat are thanked in the final screen credits because they co-operated with the film-makers, unlike the British Motor Corporation which did not, even though The Italian Job was the best piece of free product placement advertising it could have wished for. Managed successfully by the Agnelli family, Fiat continued to prosper in the 1970s and 1980s, helping its local Turin club Juventus to a position among the European footballing elite. The British Motor Corporation, which had been created out of a merger between Austin and Morris, was joined by Jaguar in 1966. The year before The Italian Job was released, BMC merged with the Leyland Motor Corporation to form British Leyland, which would eventually sink beneath the waves of its own troubled industrial relations created by militant trade unions and weak, incompetent management.
As news of the success of the daring raid filters back to Wormwood Scrubs, the entire prison joins in the celebrations. Mr Bridger makes his way down the iron staircase waving regally to the crowd as they bang their enamel plates rhythmically on the tables to the chant of ‘Eng-land Eng-land’, as the chant of ‘Bra-zil’ had been heard on the Football League grounds where Brazil had played in their group games in 1966. Although he is descending the stairs rather than ascending them, the triumphal roars that accompany him are naturally reminiscent of those that greeted Moore and the other England players when they went up to the Royal Box to receive the Jules Rimet trophy.
The Italian Job was, as the film’s producer Michael Deeley has freely admitted, the first Eurosceptic film. The English lads might have been rapscallions and thieves but they were English and they were daring and successful. The opposition were portrayed not as the sleek, stylish, licentious Italians seen in the films of Fellini, De Sica and Antonioni but as stereotypes who could have stepped out of a wartime propaganda film. The ending with the coach’s back half precariously balanced over a vertiginous drop down the Alps is one of the reasons that the film is so well remembered nearly fifty years after its making, although Troy Kennedy Martin, who wrote the script, didn’t write it and Peter Collinson didn’t direct it. It is a tease to the audience, perhaps a moral reminder that crime doesn’t pay such as might have been issued from the Hays Office in Hollywood in the 1930s. If that ending has a contemporary significance it is, as Peter Hennessy suggests, a warning that Britain’s gold and currency reserves were disappearing so rapidly they were almost out of reach. One of David Frost’s favourite jokes on The Frost Report was ‘The drain on Britain’s gold and currency reserves has stopped. They’ve all gone.’
Noël Coward symbolised the Britain in which Billy Wright had grown up. During the war Coward wrote, produced and starred in In Which We Serve (1942), which he co-directed with the debutant David Lean. The film is a hymn of praise to the wartime naval commander Lord Mountbatten, the future Queen’s uncle, to Mountbatten’s ship HMS Kelly (renamed HMS Torrin in the film) – and to the Royal Navy. Michael Caine symbolised the new Britain: he was young, blond, talented and good-looking and as such would have evoked memories of the England football captain. He was also the star of Alfie (1966), the film of a play by Bill Naughton about a flawed womaniser, which was released at the time of the World Cup and whose theme song, written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and performed by Cilla Black, was an instant hit. Moore delighted in sitting on the back seat of the team coach and singing it loudly, much to the discomfiture of the England manager sitting grim-faced at the front. Billy Wright would never have dared to display such lèse-majesté in the presence of Walter Winterbottom. The torch had indeed been passed to a new generation from Coward to Caine as it had been from Wright and Ramsey to Moore.
No matter how much they genuinely respected and needed each other, and how much they declared their admiration for each other in public, the relationship between Ramsey and Moore was always a slightly wary one. Never was the relationship subjected to a greater test than during the days of Moore’s incarceration on a trumped-up charge of shoplifting before the start of the World Cup in Mexico in 1970. The England party that left these shores after recording the World Cup song ‘Back Home’ was arguably stronger than the 1966 squad. In the first eleven Brian Labone, centre-half of the newly crowned champions, Everton, replaced Jack Charlton, while the two full-backs of 1966, George Cohen and Ray Wilson (possibly England’s finest ever such pairing), had given way to Keith Newton, also of Everton, and Terry Cooper of Leeds United. Tottenham’s Alan Mullery had come into the side instead of Nobby Stiles, and Manchester City’s Francis Lee, who was in the form of his life, played up front with Geoff Hurst instead of Roger Hunt. The squad itself had strength in depth with Peter Osgood, Colin Bell, Norman Hunter and Allan Clarke – who might have expected to play regular international football for another country – buttressed by the experience of Stiles and Jack Charlton. Ramsey knew that to defend the title of world champions in the hostile environment of Mexico, particularly bearing in mind what had happened after the Argentina game in 1966, was never going to be easy, but his preparations had been meticulous and he believed he had thought of everything.
Bobby Moore with team manager Alf Ramsey at the 1970 World Cup finals in Mexico (Popperfoto / Getty Images).
In the summer of 1969, when The Italian Job was on general release in England, Ramsey had taken the England team on a tour of South America to give them some experience of the heat and the problems of playing at high altitude which they would face the following year. After a 0–0 draw with Mexico, the party flew to Montevideo where they beat Uruguay 2–1. It was an excellent result, the gloss of which was tarnished when it emerged that the England players had refused to eat any of the food at the barbecue laid on by the host’s football federation. Jack Charlton had tried to digest something which turned out to be sheep’s kidneys and was vomiting for the whole of
the following day. Finally, in Rio, against the team which would be their main rivals in Mexico, England lost somewhat unluckily, having held on for most of the game to a 1–0 lead given them early on by Colin Bell. The Brazilians scored twice against an exhausted England in the last few minutes. Ramsey was by no means dissatisfied.
Mindful of the horrors of the food in Brazil in 1950 and the unfortunate confrontation in Montevideo in 1969, Ramsey ensured that his 1970 World Cup squad would eat and drink nothing but food that had been shipped to Mexico from England. Ramsey’s most recent biographer, Leo McKinstry, revealed that 25,000 bottles of Malvern water were sent and Ramsey negotiated with the frozen food company Findus to transport 140 lb of beefburgers, 400 lb of sausages, 300 lb of frozen fish and ten cases of tomato ketchup. Unfortunately, the Mexicans got wind of the importation because Findus were too keen to boast of their part in England’s future success and the hosts were predictably insulted. The Mexican authorities refused to allow any meat or dairy products into the country and the England team doctor had to go down to the quayside and watch his carefully planned supplies of steak, butter, sausages and beef burned in front of him. It might have been done on the grounds of public health but it must have felt like a twentieth-century version of a sixteenth-century religious persecution.
Four Lions Page 19
