Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  On the same day that Sheffield Wednesday’s fans rioted at Oldham, a welder, Osborne Swaby, was walking down Leyton Road in Walthamstow in north-east London with his young daughter, Jennifer. A bus rumbled towards them, carrying Grimsby fans who had been watching their team play Leyton Orient, and as it passed, the fans ‘dropped their trousers and bared their bottoms’. When Swaby yelled that there were small children watching, one man jumped off the bus and grabbed him. ‘What’s the matter with you, you wog?’ he said. Then he hit him with a hammer. At that, Jennifer screamed: ‘Don’t hurt my daddy!’ So the man from Grimsby hit her, too. This was a pretty dreadful tale in every respect. But the key word was surely that three-letter insult: ‘Wog’.35

  Against this background, it was hardly surprising that football had few defenders. ‘It is impossible not to notice the racism and obscenities’, wrote James Walvin, who loved football but hated the ‘general atmosphere of menace and unpleasantness’. Indeed, by this point many sportswriters agreed that the game was doomed to a long, shabby decline. In the broadsheets, obituaries for the working man’s ballet were very common. Most agreed that the game had completely failed to adjust to the loss of its massive post-war audience or to offer compelling reasons to keep coming. The Guardian’s Patrick Barclay was typical in drawing a damning contrast with American sports, with their futuristic stadiums and friendly crowds, where spectators were treated as valuable customers rather than as escapees from a maximum-security prison. Like many writers, he saw this as a reflection of Britain’s class-ridden backwardness compared with its cousin’s forward-thinking optimism. ‘I cannot see’, he wrote in 1979, ‘why football should escape the general, apparently inexorable decline of Britain.’36

  The Times thought so too. ‘Football is sick’, wrote its sports editor a year later, ‘and the illness may be terminal.’ The situation was ‘desperate’, agreed the Guardian’s David Lacey. The game was ‘like an ageing car whose exterior bodywork has been washed and polished while the inside rust has been ignored’. It would take only one tap to bring complete disintegration. And although Hugh McIlvanney, the greatest of all British sportswriters, thought obituaries for football had become a cliché in their own right, he admitted that the game’s woes were more ingrained than ever before. McIlvanney still thought football the best game ever invented. But it was time to admit that it had no ‘God-given right to a special place in our society’.37

  The most ominous vision of football’s future came not at a glamorous club like all-conquering Liverpool or forward-thinking Tottenham, but in a town that had once been synonymous with the game’s industrial heritage, built on coal and steam, bricks and steel. For more than a century, Wolverhampton Wanderers had dominated the imagination of the men who toiled in the foundries and furnaces of the Black Country. ‘In those days’, a local reporter remembered:

  no working man in Wolverhampton would go home when the Saturday lunchtime hooters went. They would all take their sandwiches and queue to get into the ground from 12.30 and wait happily two hours for kick-off. Local manufacturing was reliant on Wolves – no joke, if the team won you could guarantee production would be up the following week, and down if they lost.

  Like many Victorian institutions, Wolves were rooted in the religious culture of urban England. Formed as a church-school team in 1877, they were one of the twelve original members of the Football League. For much of the twentieth century the men in the old gold shirts had been one of a handful of teams with a genuinely nationwide following. ‘Wolverhampton Wanderers grew out of the very bedrock of the English game’, wrote the Guardian’s Frank Keating, ‘and it is not too fanciful to call them a national institution.’ Even their grand old stadium, Molineux, stood ‘like some sort of medieval cathedral, four square and proud at the very heart of the town, the very centre of the community’. Fittingly, their golden age had come in the 1950s, the Indian summer of British manufacturing, when they had pioneered floodlit matches against the top European sides. But what happened to Wolves in the early 1980s could hardly have been a better metaphor for the fate of industrial working-class Britain.38

  Wolves had entered the new decade in a distinctly battered state. With gate receipts falling, Molineux was in a dreadful condition, and new safety legislation meant at least one stand was in danger of closure. In a bid to break out of the cycle of failure, the board spent a record £3 million on a new stand with 9,500 seats and forty-two executive boxes, gambling that this would radically transform their fortunes. It did, but not in the way the directors hoped. As interest rates headed through the roof, the club’s debt became increasingly unsustainable, while the board discovered that spending money off the pitch was no substitute for investment in the team. Visiting in May 1982, the journalist David Lacey wrote that Molineux was:

  a monument to frustrated ambition and the inability to marry a glorious past to an uncertain future, with the present lost somewhere in between. Approach the ground from the east and the new stand, all tinted glass and executive suites, suggests lasting affluence. Arrive from the west and the old main stand, with its grubby brickwork and dusty corners, pines for the days of Mullen, Hancocks, Broadbent, Swinbourne and Wright.

  He was talking about Wolves. He might have been talking about Britain.39

  In May 1982 Wolves slid into the Second Division with debts of £2.6 million. What followed was the most catastrophic decline in British football history, from which this great club took decades to recover. In July, after Lloyds had run out of patience with the club’s failure to meet its £1,000-a-day interest payments, Wolves called in the receiver. With only days until the deadline, it seemed likely that the club would simply cease to exist. Even the local council declined an offer to buy the ground, pointing out that, thanks to government cuts, they had no money to spend. Most experts predicted that it would be turned into houses or a supermarket. In a town already scarred by the collapse of manufacturing, it seemed the cruellest blow imaginable.

  At Molineux, the club advertised a ‘survival fund’, with a barometer showing a £500,000 target. But when an Observer reporter visited the West Midlands, she found it stuck on zero. No wonder, she thought. The area seemed chronically depressed, while the infamous new stand, ‘submerged behind vast new developments and ring roads’, looked like ‘a cardboard box abandoned in a builders’ skip’. Even Billy Wright, who had captained Wolves and England in the 1950s and was now head of sport at Central Television, seemed thoroughly pessimistic. ‘It’s heartbreaking,’ he said. ‘Unemployment is already higher in the West Midlands than in the rest of the country, so it’s already a very sad area, and if Wolves goes it’ll be even sadder … The only club I had since I was a boy – it’s part of my life. Half my body will die if Wolves dies.’40

  Three minutes from the deadline, a consortium led by the former Wolves striker Derek Dougan stepped in to save the club. As one of television’s most outspoken pundits, Dougan talked a good game, promising a £21 million stadium redevelopment that would include ‘a supermarket, condominium, a trade centre, high technology units and a youth centre’. But like one or two other grand redevelopment projects inaugurated in the early 1980s, his castle was built on sand. In reality, he was merely the front man for two reclusive Pakistani brothers, Mahmud and Mohammad Akbar Bhatti, who were interested not in the club but in the supermarket. That a working-class institution had fallen into the hands of foreign-born investors was a sign of things to come, though nobody realized it at the time. In any case, when the council turned down their application for planning permission, the brothers lost interest, and Wolves continued on a slide unprecedented in football history, plummeting from First to Fourth Divisions in successive seasons.41

  By now Wolves had been transformed from a national institution into a national joke. By the spring of 1984, fewer than 7,000 people were turning up to watch, and this in a stadium that had welcomed more than 60,000 people before the Second World War. A year later, the club had no chairman, no chief executive, no m
anager, no money and vanishingly little hope. A year after that, attendances were down to barely 3,000, total debt had reached £1 million and annual interest payments had hit £100,000. At Molineux, only two of the four stands were open because the others had been declared unsafe. The local football writer Pat Murphy thought the story ‘would interest a soap opera mogul’, but it was more Crossroads than Dallas, and even that was being generous. In the end, salvation came from the unlikely combination of the Labour-run council and the supermarket giant, Asda, who agreed to cover Wolves’s debts in return for a store behind the stadium. But the nadir came in the autumn of 1986, when the former champions of England were beaten 3–0 in the FA Cup by Chorley Town of the lowly Multipart League. Never before had any major club sunk so low. Indeed, even in an age when so many great Victorian institutions seemed under threat, it is hard to think of a more striking example of mismanagement and decline.42

  ‘Dark days in the Black Country,’ wrote the Guardian’s Frank Keating after the Chorley match:

  You wander round Molineux, famous home of a famous club, and all you get is the feeling of one of those ghostly deserted ranches which cowboys came across in the West. Signs creak wonkily on rusty hinges, shrubs grow out of gutterings, ancient graffiti mocks faded dreams, paint peels. It is the colour of sad, yellow ochre, self-scorning the celebrated old gold shirts made famous when Wolves were men and they blazed trails across the world a quarter of a century ago.

  Rust, graffiti, sadness, ghosts: here was the language of countless articles in the 1980s, mourning the deserted buildings that had reverberated with so many working-class voices in the nation’s industrial heyday. ‘It’s a desolation now,’ remarked one local reporter, who had missed only two home games since the Second World War. And for Stan Cullis, who had captained the team in the 1930s and 1940s and led them to three league titles as manager in the 1950s, things were so bad that he no longer bothered going.fn4 ‘My Wolves was not only a football club, you see, it was the very integral part of its community,’ he said sadly. ‘We considered ourselves far more than footballers: we were carrying a banner for the town and its people … Quite frankly, when I go there now, it’s like going to a foreign place.’43

  In football, and in so much else, this was to become a familiar refrain.

  10

  A Bit of Freedom

  Thousands of people in council houses and new towns came out to support us for the first time because they wanted a chance to buy their own homes.

  Margaret Thatcher, 15 May 1979

  These council house buggers have obviously got jam on it … If you seriously think a few quid on the rent is going to hurt these spongeing sods you must all be mad.

  ‘Denis Thatcher’, in Richard Ingrams and John Wells, Dear Bill: The Collected Letters of Denis Thatcher (1980)

  You could hardly find a more ordinary street than Amersham Road. Walk past its mock-Georgian front doors and neat front gardens today, a dog barking in the distance, a woman passing on the other side with her shopping, children playing in the little park up ahead, and you might be in any suburban street in England. But like all streets, Amersham Road has a history. A few minutes from the main road leading east from Romford into Essex, Amersham Road was built as part of the gigantic Harold Hill estate after the Second World War. With the capital bursting at the seams, planners had earmarked the farmland north of Romford as the perfect spot to house more than 25,000 people.

  At first residents lived in prefabricated houses constructed by German prisoners of war, but by 1958 the estate was finished. Here, in this planned community of wide streets and neat brick council houses, was post-war Britain in microcosm, a monument to the modernizing ambitions of the age. For the next quarter of a century, everything changed, and nothing changed. Families came and went. Children played in the streets, went to school, got their first jobs and moved away. Infants became teenagers; young parents became grandparents. The streets filled with cars, the living rooms with televisions, the kitchens with fridges. Hemlines rose and fell, hairstyles came and went. On Amersham Road, life went on as it had since the beginning. And then, on 11 August 1980, the Prime Minister came for tea at Number 39.1

  When Mrs Thatcher’s car pulled up outside the front door of Number 39, she was greeted by a gaggle of demonstrators clutching placards and shouting about unemployment. But when she made it inside, there was a warm welcome from the house’s new owners, James and Maureen Patterson, their daughter, Leisa, and their twin boys, Martin and Vernon. The Pattersons had lived in Amersham Road since 1962, having rented Number 39 from the Greater London Council. But now, after eighteen years and a deposit of just £5, the house was theirs. They were the 12,000th tenants to buy their home from the GLC, and it had cost them just £8,315, the equivalent of about £50,000 today. And as Mrs Thatcher handed Mr Patterson the deeds, she seemed thoroughly delighted. Here was a household after her own heart, ambitious, hard-working and admirably independent-minded. ‘Don’t you think this is lovely?’ she asked the cameras, indicating the Pattersons’ shiny new kitchen units. Mr Patterson gave an embarrassed half-smile, while some of his children looked as though they wished the ground would swallow them up. But when Mrs Thatcher was in full flow, there was no stopping her. ‘Now, Mr Patterson is a handyman, and he’s put in all these. He’s done the garden, and the shed outside …’2

  Years later, long after the Pattersons had left Number 39, the Prime Minister’s visit was seen as a symbol of her revolutionary commitment to the sale of council houses. Decades on, newspapers still sent reporters to Harold Hill to gauge opinion about the impact of her most celebrated policy, the Right to Buy. The irony, however, is that the Pattersons’ newfound status as proud homeowners had nothing to do with Mrs Thatcher, since the GLC had been selling council houses since the late 1960s. In streets like Amersham Road, the signs of change were already abundantly clear: joiners fitting smart new doors, decorators with tins of brightly coloured paint, double-glazing vans parked in the drive, even new gates to keep strangers out. ‘There was a ceremony everyone seemed to have, when they would go out and change their old council wooden gate for a wrought-iron one,’ one resident later recalled. ‘That was how they announced they’d bought.’3

  Conceived as the embodiment of Clement Attlee’s Britain, Amersham Road had now become a symbol of a very different political moment: an age of aspiration and self-improvement, in which hundreds of thousands of families broke free from the embrace of the state; but also an era of widening inequality, the headlines full of cuts, shortages, benefits and homelessness. Even at Number 39, the Pattersons’ story was touched with sadness. A few years after Mrs Thatcher’s visit, their marriage broke up, leaving Maureen to pay the mortgage on her own. ‘If I’d foreseen the end of my marriage I’d never have bought. I got trapped there without enough cash to cover bills,’ she told the Telegraph. ‘I was desperate in a house I couldn’t manage and wished I’d never bought. It broke my heart when I had to sell.’

  But Maureen refused to blame the Prime Minister. ‘I don’t blame anyone,’ she said. ‘It was my decision to make that investment.’ Indeed, she still had warm words for the woman who came to tea that day. ‘She was an icon to me,’ she said wistfully. ‘She was a lovely guest.’ What Maureen remembered especially fondly was that, after looking around the house, Mrs Thatcher had turned to her and said: ‘This is not a house – it’s a home.’ Nothing could have pleased her hostess more. ‘I was so proud,’ Maureen said. ‘She had Downing Street and Chequers, but Number 39 was just as special to me.’4

  The Right to Buy did not begin with Margaret Thatcher. The place to start is 1923, when the Conservative MP Noel Skelton argued that the ‘true answer to Socialism’ was something he called the ‘property-owning democracy’. The idea caught on. Only three years later, the leader of the Tory group on Leeds Council told his opponents that if people owned their own houses, ‘they turn Tory directly. We shall go on making Tories and you will be wiped out.’ And although the ideal o
f home ownership receded a little during the great council-house-building surge of the late 1940s, it never disappeared. By the end of the following decade the Macmillan government had given local authorities the freedom to sell houses to their tenants, and throughout the 1960s many Labour MPs, as well as Conservatives, talked of home ownership as the ultimate goal of housing policy. Indeed, Edward Heath presided over the sale of tens of thousands of council houses, with more than 34,000 changing hands in 1973 alone. There was no shortage of potential owners; the only problem was that many local councils were reluctant to sell. This was where the Right to Buy came in.5

  The irony is that, although the Right to Buy is usually seen as Mrs Thatcher’s personal project, aimed squarely at the skilled working-class voters of Middle England, she was initially very sceptical about it. As Heath’s Shadow Environment Secretary after the first election of 1974, she had to be cajoled into offering discounts for council-house buyers, because she was worried about alienating middle-class Conservatives who had saved up to buy private homes on the open market. But she gave in. That October, the Conservative manifesto promised a ‘right to purchase’ to any tenant who had been renting for at least three years, at a discounted price ‘one-third below market value’. And in an article for the Telegraph, Mrs Thatcher offered a preview of some very familiar themes. ‘The greatest ambition of many people is to own their home,’ she explained. ‘In the Conservative party we must have as our prime objective a big increase in home ownership. If some greater financial incentive is required we shall have to be prepared to give it. It is better to help people towards self-reliance than State-reliance.’6