My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes

by Gary Imlach

  He was growing up in a period that saw football in general becoming massively more popular than it had been before or has been since. Attendances at Football League games reached their peak in the ’40s. But in Lossiemouth all there was to do was play. The covered market was the closest they had to an indoor pitch if the weather was bad; hosed down after the fish had all been auctioned off, but narrow and with a slope towards one end, where there was the constant danger of the ball going into the harbour and having to be fished out with a loop of rope.

  Football matches in the fish market were merely against harbour regulations. On Sundays, when even the swings in the playground were locked up to preserve the fierce peace of the Presbyterian Sabbath, they were against the express wishes of God. With golf prohibited too, the kickabout moved on to the fairways of the relief course after church. There was no dodging the ultimate spectator, but at least their elders were less likely to see them out on the links.

  ‘My earliest memory of your father – we lived at the top of the square and he lived at the bottom – was him crossing the square to school, and he always had a ball, a small ball, at his feet.’ Joe Campbell, five years my father’s senior, was measuring out the whisky and water – ‘I ration myself with this stuff, but not tonight, not tonight’ – and settling in to supply me with information. I was doing the rounds of Lossiemouth’s sitting rooms, some of which used to be obligatory items on the holiday agenda when I was a child. Unavoidable periods of detention between us and the beach.

  Our exact connections to some of our blood relatives were difficult enough to grasp on these once-a-year visits (‘You know Auntie Katie, well, she’s Dad’s auntie really, now her brother . . .’); anyone outside the family was usually just another set of kindly faces proffering plates of cakes. The generations were difficult to sort out too. My father was tanned from training and playing outside, yet it was hard to believe he’d been in the same class at school with some of the leathered, salt-cured faces that loomed over us. But although we couldn’t always tell who was who, it was clear to us as children that we were important members of this network of cheerful, heavily accented people, and it made no difference to them how long it had been since our last visit. We could walk the streets on the first day of our holiday, without my father, and be recognised as Imlachs by half a dozen passers-by in succession. There was a powerful force at work here that had nothing to do with football.

  Our annual return was celebrated in Lossiemouth not because my father was the local hero, but simply because he was local. Leaving Lossie was common; coming back a rarity. I sat with May and Slater one evening during my trip, watching an old video of the annual fishermen’s outing: ‘He’s away . . . aye, Joe, he’s away . . . he’s away, an a’ . . . they’re all away, those boys.’ The threat from the sea had receded greatly with the end of the fishing industry, but departure and death – synonymous everywhere – were still pointedly so here.

  Now I was back for the first time in fifteen years, sipping whisky and underlining my ignorance. Every question sounded like a guilty plea to the sin of omission on my part: I should know this stuff. And every casual aside ‘. . . aye well, as I’m sure he’ll have told you himself . . .’ came at me like an accusation: You should know this stuff. I criss-crossed the town on foot, making door-to-door enquiries: Donnie Stewart; Joe Campbell, who had helped run the St James’ youth club team; Johnny Archibald, my father’s coach at Lossie juniors and older brother of his teammate Eddie; Colin Tough, his earliest childhood playmate; Robbie Campbell, who was back on holiday having left to play professionally himself; Sandy Reid, who could have done the same but decided to stay.

  They all confided their various truths, which intersected at awkward angles with each other, or ran parallel, rival realities which couldn’t both have happened. Some were easy to sift out: the goal he scored for Lossiemouth when the dates show he’d long since turned professional. Others I was reluctant to check on, out of respect for the vehemence of the source, or the sheer pleasure shared between storyteller and listener. These men’s versions of my father, with their time-slips and game-shifts, were just as valid as the match reports in the Northern Scot.

  Laying out all the accounts, one on top of another, the young Stewart started to emerge from the shaded areas – a sort of Venn diagram of his early days and the intensity with which he willed himself beyond the confines of what was locally possible.

  ‘He practised,’ Donnie Stewart told me. ‘We played, he practised. If it was “three and in” he didn’t want to go in goal, so if he scored three maybe I’d go in goal. I was there to enjoy myself, he was concentrating, always trying to improve himself, dribbling a ball up to school and back to improve his control.’

  But who was he copying? The nearest professional team was seventy miles away in Aberdeen. Following football would have been more of an effort than playing it, and almost entirely a work of the imagination. There was radio commentary, but only for special fixtures like Scotland–England internationals. My father and his friends would sit round the wireless at home or in the back of Dominic’s Café, each supplying their own visuals to go with Raymond Glendenning’s plummy English commentary. Occasionally, newsreel highlights of big games would be shown before the main feature at the Regal Cinema in the square – the FA Cup Final, the Scottish Cup Final, Moscow Dynamo against Rangers on their 1945 tour of Britain. But they were exceptions. In the main, football was a game you saw in person or not at all.

  My father’s favourite player was George Hamilton – Gentleman George – Aberdeen’s cultured inside-right. But in order to idolise Hamilton, he first had to assemble him: watching for the Aberdeen results in the paper; scouring the match reports for telling detail of how Hamilton had beaten this man, or laid on that goal; cutting out the rare pictures. This was the raw material out of which he fashioned a professional game to follow and a hero to model himself on.

  Eventually, George Hamilton and the Aberdeen centre-half, Frank Dunlop, were booked into the Drill Hall in Elgin, the nearest town of any size, for a ‘Demonstration of Soccer Skills’. These tours were one of the few ways professionals could supplement their weekly wages. All the local boys were there, hypnotised by sheer proximity as Hamilton and Dunlop went through their routine: keeping the ball up, heading, passing, giving tips on tactics and training. But it was my father asking all the questions at the end, and taking the answers to heart. Work hard during the week, said Gentleman George, and Saturdays will be easy, and so he was out on the beach in the evenings running himself into the ground.

  George Hamilton’s visit to the Elgin Drill Hall would have remained the highlight of my father’s football education had it not been for the Second World War.

  In the ’30s two foreign institutions had come to the outskirts of Lossiemouth: the RAF and Gordonstoun. The latter was known locally as the German school after its founder Kurt Hahn, who’d smartly sidestepped the Nazis to pursue his dream of offering robust education for young men in the bracing setting of the Moray Firth. The future Duke of Edinburgh, yet to be groomed for the job of shaking hands and insulting minorities, was just another young aristocrat who’d been sent up to Scotland to have his character built. ‘I don’t think any of us had any great interest or animosity towards Gordonstoun,’ Donnie Stewart told me. ‘They were just strange people wanting to wear shorts and sleep in uncomfortable beds. We slept in uncomfortable beds, but we didn’t pay to do it.’

  The airforce base was a different matter, a focus of fascinated interest for the local children. It was from RAF Lossiemouth that the Lancasters of 617 Squadron, the Dambusters, took off for Norway carrying the Tallboy bombs that would sink the Tirpitz. It was the reason for the concrete blocks on the West Beach, lines of crude sandcastles from square buckets stretching out into the sea to defend against enemy landing craft. One day, a small group of boys stood by the shoreline and watched as the wing sheared off a Wellington shortly after take-off. The wing landed on one of the fairways of the
links course by the West Beach; the plane ditched onto the rocks and the crew was killed. My father and his friends spent the week liberating ammunition from the wreckage, dismantling the bullets and using the cordite to light fires on the sand.

  Another Wellington went down in a fir plantation during a training run. The pilot and the bomb-aimer both died and the navigator lost a leg, but the wireless operator was lucky. Stan Mortensen, not yet of Blackpool and England, walked away from the wreckage with only a head injury that needed a dozen stitches. Local folklore sometimes conflates the two crashes into a single story which features Mortensen, at the controls of his own plane, executing an emergency landing on the golf course and finishing up in one of the bunkers.

  It’s true that Stan Mortensen was in Lossiemouth, though, and he wasn’t alone. He had teammates in the army base not far away at Pinefield. In fact, the Second World War was responsible for producing a string of impossible football teams; teams that could only otherwise have existed in pub arguments and best-of lists. The cream of the English and Scottish leagues were in the services, and turned out as guest players for whichever local team got in first to claim them. The RAF played the Army, the British Services played the Scottish Services, an Aberdeen select eleven made up of Arsenal, Everton, Third Lanark and Raith Rovers men played anybody who could muster a side to take them on.

  It was like a vision of the future. Years before threatened players’ strikes, Bosman and European Court rulings, the war had blown a hole in the Football League’s restrictive transfer system. For a surreal and – in footballing terms – sublime few years, some of the best players in the country were effectively hanging around Highland League grounds, boots in hand, hopping from one foot to another in the hope of getting a game.

  Until Lossiemouth were admitted to the Highland League in 1946 – a cheer rang out one night at the Regal when the news was flashed up on the screen – the only organised football my father would have been able to watch was five miles away at Elgin. The nets at Borough Briggs were as much of a draw as the action on the field. He and his friends would take a ball of their own and kick into the back of one goal while the play was up the other end.

  But the war meant that suddenly he was offered the chance to see newsreel-quality football at radio-commentary length. Stan Mortensen turned out in Elgin colours against a series of forces select teams. In June 1943 the Morayshire Services played Aberdeenshire Services, giving him a close-up look at home-grown heroes like Eddie Turnbull, Willie Woodburn and Bobby Brown. The following year brought a proxy international – a British Army XI against the Scottish Services. Large gatherings were prohibited except in special circumstances, but security considerations were overridden by the need for fundraising. Warship Week in August 1944 meant that people could crowd into Borough Briggs with a clear conscience, knowing that their ninepence would be going towards buying a new frigate. Joe Mercer of Everton and England led the British Army. His ex-teammate Dixie Dean was up front for the Scottish Services.

  The line-up for the Victory in Europe match nine months later was even better. Stan Mortensen and Stanley Matthews – their careers yet to coincide at Blackpool – took the field together for the RAF against a Morayshire services team. The services had England’s Bert Williams in goal, Carlisle’s Bill Shankly, Frank Soo of Leicester, Charlton’s Harold Hobbs. Alongside Matthews and Mortensen were Stoke and England’s Neil Franklin and Leslie Smith of Aston Villa. More than 5,000 paid the shilling to get in, among them my thirteen-year-old father, in the queue early to make sure of a spot at the front where he could see.

  These fixtures were packed with people from his future: Eddie Turnbull would be a teammate at the 1958 World Cup; Stanley Matthews a regular opponent in the 1st Division; in 1959 he would play Joe Mercer’s Aston Villa side in the semi-final of the FA Cup; later Bill Shankly, who could virtually climb over the wall of his back garden into Everton’s training ground, would sit with him drinking tea and trading grizzled wisdom in the afternoons at Bellefield, when the players had left.

  Could this game have been the occasion that created the first chink in the outer wall of his ambition? This wasn’t a newsreel, it was an international fixture within a bus ride of his house, an actual game with the actual Stanley Matthews kicking into the goals he regularly played behind. If these players could come to where he lived, then maybe the return journey was possible.

  On my rounds I was carrying with me a couple of team photographs, the only football pictures I had of my father in his Lossiemouth days. I had no idea which team it was, but everybody I met knew straight away. ‘Oh, that’s the Rob Roys. Good God, look at the size of him!’

  My father was never very big – the tallest any of his professional clubs dared to list him at was 5'6'' – but in these pictures he looks ridiculous. Tiny, skinny, he’s more like the mascot than the team’s best player, the annoying nipper who keeps sneaking into the shot alongside his Brylcreemed elders and betters.

  The Rob Roys, it turned out, were a short-lived team formed to play in the Elgin Summer League of 1947, which, on the evidence of the picture, they’d won. The captain is being held rather uncertainly aloft by his teammates and in the space beneath him two young lads, their discarded bike just visible off to the right, are lying on the ground to get into the picture. My father, the top of his head comfortably cleared by the chin of the player behind him, looks like he belongs back there with them. The shoulder seam of his jersey is halfway towards his elbow and there’s little evidence of any underlying structure for the elastic of his shorts to hold on to. The date of the picture would make him fifteen – although he looks a lot younger – while the rest of the team are clearly young men.

  ‘Oh aye, they’re all two, three, four years older than your dad, fishermen, apprentices at Sutherlands engineering and that. But he was centre-forward, you know.’

  I had known this, that he’d started off at centre-forward, but looking at this picture it made no sense. The Rob Roys, one-season wonders that they were, had survived down the years thanks to a local photographer who must have been on hand for their final game. I’d been hoping that the picture was of the St James’ youth club team, a group of boys who had played their way into local legend.

  As well as my father there had been Robbie Campbell, an elegant centre-half who went on to play for Hearts and Cowdenbeath, and Eddie Archibald, who was an outside-right and signed for St Mirren. Sadly, the key witness to the birth of this team was dead. Everyone I went to see had plenty to tell me, but the conversations all began the same way. ‘The guy who could have told you stories galore just died last year – Joe Edwards. Joe was outstanding, a great fella, it was him that got all these boys together as a team.’

  It was the start of a pattern that seemed designed to underline to me how late I’d left the whole enterprise. His first mentor at Lossiemouth, his closest friend and best man at Bury, his best mate and roommate at Nottingham Forest; they’d all outlived my father, but not by long enough to tell me anything about him.

  Joe Edwards had been a useful Highland League player himself, but his knees gave out when he was still in his early twenties, so he decided to coach. Until then, football for players of my father’s age had been one long formless kickabout. Up to school, on the square, along the wide traffic-less streets, across the golf course, through the fish market, a fabulous free-for-all. Joe Edwards brought some order to it, with the help of Joe Campbell who was club secretary.

  According to the surviving Joe, his friend had made the change that effectively created my father’s career: ‘It was Joe Edwards who turned your father into a left-winger, because he was right-footed. It was Joe who saw it as a weakness that he couldn’t kick with his left and put him on the left wing. Left-wingers were rare – like butter y’know, they were a rationed item.’ From other people’s accounts it was less clear-cut; my father had decided on his own to start cultivating his weaker foot, setting himself the task of dribbling to school and back every day without
using his right. The basic facts, though, weren’t in dispute, except with my childhood certainties.

  I’d grown up knowing that there were key characteristics I’d inherited from my father: his height, his speed, his passion for football – and his position on the field. It was a source of pride that we both wore number 11, and that we were left-footed, valuable commodities in an overwhelmingly right-sided game. I suppose a little reflection would have yielded up the insight that I must have exercised some choice, consciously or not, in opting to play my dad’s position. But being left-footed was just something that had been passed down in the genes, no choice about that. Mike kicked with his left too; it was Steve who was in the minority out on the right.

  But left-footedness, it turned out, was something my father had simply willed into existence, along with the family football tradition. More than that, he’d done it so successfully, ingrained it so deeply, that somehow it had lodged in his DNA and become an inheritable trait, created from nothing, and passed on to his children.