by Gary Imlach
My mother had been dreaming of a small place of their own in Bury. Instead they had only a bedroom to themselves, with no lock on the door. ‘There was Ken Oliver and his wife, their two children and her elderly mother. Their lad, Keith, was a little sod. Dad nearly murdered him a couple of times because he kept coming in. We hadn’t brought much with us from Bury because we didn’t have much. But there was a mirror and hairbrush that I’d had a long time and he smashed the mirror. We used to come back and find him bouncing up and down on the bed. He was just a little lad, I suppose.’ They made friends with Terry Webster, the young Derby goalkeeper, and his wife, who’d been on the club’s housing list themselves and had given up waiting.
The problem with the house my parents had been promised was that it was occupied by another player, the captain, Bert Mozley. Bert was a Derby legend. Born in the town and apprenticed at the Rolls-Royce engine factory, he’d signed for the club after the Second World War and racked up over 300 appearances for them at right-back. He might have won more than his three caps for England if it hadn’t been for injury and the emergence of Tottenham’s Alf Ramsey. He was the epitome of the local boy made good, at a club filled with local boys. When he joined in 1946 there were seven first-team players born within a fourteen-mile radius of the Baseball Ground.
In 1954, at the age of thirty-one, Bert Mozley was approaching the dilemma that all professional athletes face at the end of their accelerated career trajectories: what to do next. If the status conferred by his captaincy of the club turned up no better offers, he knew he could always go back to work for Rolls-Royce. Then, out of the blue, he got the offer of a job in Canada, running a hotel. It was one of a chain owned by a man called George Davis, who’d played for Derby at the turn of the century before emigrating to make his millions. Bert had met him on an England tour of Canada a few years earlier, and now the old ex-Ram was offering him the chance of a new life in Calgary.
Taking the job, though, would mean asking for his release from the club. ‘I had a meeting with the board of directors and I told them what I thought, and they said, “Well, we wish you all the luck in the world, Bert, and if Derby ever come over we hope we can stay in your hotel.” Then when it came time to pick up my benefit from them they said, “Oh no, you broke your contract.” I said, “I came to meet you in the boardroom and you gave me your permission,” but they said, “No, you broke your contract so you don’t get the money.”’
Benefit money was a sort of loyalty bonus that built up in annual increments, in recognition of footballers’ short working lives and lack of security: £500 after five years’ service with the same club and another £750 after ten. These sums were taxable. Players could opt for a benefit match instead, but that was a gamble. The proceeds were tax-free, but the cost of staging the game had to be deducted, so the size of the crowd was crucial. Bad weather could easily cost a player his pension nest egg.
In practice, many clubs simply ignored the accrued benefit agreement, paying players what they felt they could afford, or paying nothing at all except to those who kicked up a fuss. Bert Mozley, a one-club man his entire career, was a season away from his £750 benefit. The board refused to pay it, or even the portion of it he’d earned. ‘They offered me a hundred pounds. A hundred pounds after ten years’ service, nearly. I was really disappointed. You play your heart and soul out for the club in the town you was born in – I loved playing for Derby County – and that’s what they do to you.’
The man refusing Bert Mozley his benefit money was the chairman, O.J. Jackson, who ran a construction business and also owned a large store in the centre of Derby. His involvement with the club brought him more public recognition than either of his business ventures, but he was no closer to the captain of his team than he was to his site foreman. ‘He lived up past me and I remember one week we were playing in London and we had to catch the one o’clock train on the Friday. I got down to the bus stop and it was pouring with rain. He came past in his car with his wife and they just waved. He wouldn’t stop to pick you up – and we were going to the same place. Once when we got back late after a night game his housekeeper who’d come out with the car said, “Oh Mr Mozley, we’ll drop you off,” and oh, he was mad, he didn’t like that.’
As Bert Mozley’s dispute with the board dragged on through the season, my parents were without a house of their own. On the field my father was having an anonymous time in an underperforming team. Derby, who had spent all but one of the previous twenty seasons in the First Division, were struggling in the bottom half of the Second. Bert handed over the captaincy to my dad for the day when Derby played Bury in October. He scored in a 2–2 draw, but missed a couple of chances that could have won the game and perhaps made him feel that the move had been less of a mistake. Mistake is my word, though. He wouldn’t have looked on it as a mistake. How could he? He hadn’t been party to the process that had taken him there.
Just before Christmas 1954, Bert Mozley was finally granted his release by the Derby board, although they retained his registration in case he should ever return to England. He was due to sail to Canada on 8 January 1955, with his wife to follow once he was settled. Aware that public sentiment was on Bert’s side, the directors issued a statement a few days before his departure: ‘Had Mozley completed his service he would have received his second full benefit of £750. However, when he asked for his release so that he could sail for Canada . . . he stated that he would leave even if permission were not granted. The directors have allowed Mrs Mozley to stay on in a club house and rent free for a period of three months even though the house is urgently required for another player.’
Three months. It looked as though the board’s self-proclaimed magnanimity was going to keep the Imlachs out of their first marital home for almost the entire season. Then Derby signed another Scot and their priorities changed.
‘They gave the house to Jock Buchanan.’ My mother’s voice rose with indignation as she broke the fifty-year-old news to me. Buchanan was an inside-forward from Clyde, one of a handful of signings Jack Barker made over the course of the 1954–55 season as Derby looked increasingly likely to go down into the Third Division. By February a certain amount of desperation was setting in. A new forward who could save the club with a clutch of late-season goals would be a godsend. And if the only way to get him was to promise him a house – even if it was the same house that had been promised to the last prospective saviour of the club six months earlier – then so be it.
My mother was distraught. Jack Barker told her not to worry, he’d find them another house. ‘Well, he showed us this horrible place. Bert Mozley’s was a nice modern house. This was old and dark and dingy, it was awful. None of the other players were living in a house like that.’
I knew this story, it had had a few airings over the years. This was the day my mother attacked the manager of Derby County with her handbag.
‘What made you hit him?’
‘We were in his car – Jack Barker’s – and he said, “Right what d’you think?” and I said, “No I don’t like it.” Well he started prodding me, saying, “You’d made up your mind before you went in there that you weren’t going to have that house,” so I just whacked him. I says, “Don’t you point at me. You might be his boss but you’re not mine.” I can’t believe I did that.’
Looking at her I can’t quite believe it either.
‘I whacked him and got out of the car, and of course Dad had to get out and follow me. We went straight round to Terry Webster’s and the two of them sat down and drafted his transfer request.’
Jack Barker was already under pressure from the board over results. The last thing he needed was to have to explain away a sudden transfer request from a player he’d signed at the start of the season to help improve them. The following day he called round to apologise, but it was too late. My father may have known his place in football’s feudal hierarchy, but his sense of right and wrong was absolute. Once he’d made up his mind, the keys to the chai
rman’s house with fixtures and fittings included wouldn’t have been enough to change it.
The uncurious Evening Telegraph reported the barest facts: ‘Imlach, who was married last summer, told us that he had decided to seek a move because of housing difficulties. Mr Cyril Annable, the Derby County Secretary, had no comment to make about the reason for the winger’s request.’
This was typical provincial sports journalism of the time. The football beat writers almost always operated under a pen name – Ranger, Free Forester – and in exchange for the access granted to them by the club, they contrived to overlook almost everything which that access allowed them to see. My father finished the season in the reserves as a result of his transfer request, losing the appearance money that made up a substantial portion of a first-team player’s wage, and missing the last few defeats that made relegation a certainty. The Friday after all hope of staying up had been lost, the inevitable announcement from the Baseball Ground was the signal for the Evening Telegraph headline writers to give full reign to their creativity: ‘JACK BARKER RESIGNS: POST TO BE ADVERTISED’.
My father’s dispute with Derby County was personal and particular. But it coincided with a growing dissatisfaction among footballers in general. The same week that he put in his transfer request, the Players’ Union went public with the latest in a series of attempts to persuade the Football League to improve their contracts. Jimmy Guthrie, the union chairman, had sent the league a document containing the signatures of almost all his 2,500 members, attacking the way they were treated by their clubs. It made all the newspapers, but it made no real difference.
The problem for Guthrie and his colleagues was that the men who ran the Football League viewed the Players’ Union as an organisation in the same way that the men who ran the clubs looked on their players individually: with the arrogance of owners. That was no real surprise, of course, since the men who ran the Football League were the men who ran the clubs.
There was a Joint Negotiating Committee comprising the Union, the Football League and the FA. But the two governing bodies flatly refused to discuss the players’ key demands. In April 1955 Fred Howarth, the League Secretary, wrote to the union prior to a meeting of the JNC: ‘With regard to the agenda, I am to inform you that the league has decided to take no part in any discussion with regard to item 5, namely, Contract of Service, if the points to be raised are such as have already been dealt with.’ The union wrote back outlining suggested areas of debate. Howarth told them that most of the items had already been covered, ‘in some cases more than once’. Any attempts to raise the banned issues at meetings, he warned the union, would see the proceedings closed down by the chairman.
The maximum-wage system had been in effect since 1901, and by 1955 it had been nudged up to £15 a week by negotiation and government arbitration, usually in the face of opposition from the league; the £10 signing-on fee was as old as the maximum wage and hadn’t increased in over half a century. Bonuses were the same £2 for a win and £1 for a draw that players had earned in 1920, the year they were introduced.
But in talking to my father’s contemporaries I’m struck by how little any of it seems to have been a source of real dressing-room dissent. With a cup of tea on the arm of the sofa and the scrap albums out, it would only take a mention of the retain-and-transfer system to set them off on a litany of ancient complaint and pickled grudge. But when it came to wages there seemed to be some kind of extension of the wartime spirit in effect – they were all in it together, working-class lads banging their heads on the same ceiling.
Except for those who went abroad. In that summer of 1955, while my father was waiting to see who might buy him from Derby, Eddie Firmani left Charlton for Sampdoria in a move that must have echoed round the dressing rooms of the Football League like a drill through a bank-vault wall. It broke the British transfer record, which had stood since 1951 when Sheffield Wednesday bought Jackie Sewell from Notts County for £34,500. Sampdoria paid only £500 more to Charlton for Firmani, but it was the comparison of personal terms that dropped jaws.
Sewell had received the standard £10 signing-on fee, and as Britain’s most expensive player was presumably earning the maximum wage of £15 a week and £13 during the close-season. Firmani’s signing-on fee was £5,000, or roughly six years’ salary for Sewell. That was before his weekly wages of £100, the free apartment, the generous bonuses – and the knowledge that when his contract expired, after two years, he’d be free to sign with whom he pleased.
A couple of months after Firmani’s transfer, Jimmy Guthrie told this tale of two footballers to the TUC annual conference in Southport. Against the wishes of some of its committee members, the Players’ Union had decided to affiliate to the Trades Union Congress in search of increased leverage against the immovable objects of the FA and the Football League.
Guthrie opened his speech with a piece of melodramatic grandstanding:
Mr Chairman and delegates, I stand here as a representative of the last bonded men in Britain – the professional footballers. We seek your help to smash a system under which now, in this year of 1955, human beings are bought and sold like cattle. A system which, as in feudal times, binds a man to one master or, if he rebels, stops him getting another job. The conditions of the professional footballer’s employment are akin to slavery.
His performance went down well in the hall, but badly outside it. Many of Guthrie’s members were more upset by his description of their contracts than the contracts themselves. The footballers of the ’50s were heroes of the working class. Hundreds of thousands paid to watch them every week. Their photos were in the new magazines, hand-coloured like American film stars. These pictures and the one being painted by their union leader couldn’t both be true. Faced with a choice, plenty of players preferred the inaccurate flesh tones they saw in Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly to Jimmy Guthrie’s grim black and white.
Derby finished the 1954–55 season as they had the previous one, by announcing wage cuts across the board. Despite having had his request for a transfer granted by the club, my father’s name appeared on the list of retained players; if he wasn’t sold by June when his old contract was due to run out, he’d have to sign the new one for less pay. A week after the announcement he played his final game for Derby County, a friendly against Third Division Chesterfield to raise money for the Derbyshire FA. They lost 7–0.
Chapter Five
Two Games against Manchester United
DRIVING NORTH. I DON’T own a car so hiring one usually means an occasion. The last time I’d set off out of London up the M1 it had been a midnight scramble to find a rental place open, after the call from the hospital to say he was dying. I remember passing the overnight road crews resurfacing the carriageway and wondering why they were still out working. Had nobody told them? Listen, lads, he’s never going to drive this stretch of motorway now, you might as well pack up and go home.
This time, though, I ignored the left fork onto the M6 and kept going – back to West Bridgford where I was born, part of Nottingham’s post-cup final baby boom.
My parents had landed there as grateful refugees from Derby in the summer of 1955, and settled into a club house a brisk walk from Forest’s City Ground. This is where he’d been happiest, where he’d stayed the longest – five seasons – and where he’d played his best football. I was met in reception by Les Bradd, who had been a player across the River Trent at Notts County when my father returned to Nottingham to begin his coaching career there in the late ’60s.
Les was a classically strong, Yorkshire-bred centre-forward, who still holds County’s goal-scoring record. Now he works for their neighbours and rivals as Corporate Sales Manager. Forest’s history is part of his patter, part of the spiel he uses to entertain clients on match days. Every picture on the wall, every cup and pennant in the trophy cabinet comes with a verbal caption. There’s nothing glib about the delivery though, he’s articulate and enthusiastic – you can tell it all still matters to hi
m – and his passion for the game glints in the historical detail: here are Frank and Fred Forman, the first brothers to play together for England, in the 1898–99 season, their caps behind glass in the boardroom; here’s Forest’s first cup-winning team from 1897–98, proudly showing off the trophy – before the game.
It’s a great story. At the photographer’s request, Nottingham Forest and their opponents, Derby County, had each posed with the cup before the game kicked off so that there’d be a suitable picture of the winners whatever the result. Perhaps he had another engagement to get to and couldn’t wait until the final whistle. Or perhaps it had more to do with nineteenth-century standards of photographic etiquette. Portraits were formal occasions demanding one’s best clothes, so the idea of showing the teams in their post-match disarray might have offended late-Victorian sensibilities. And the story didn’t end there. In black and white, the photographer feared that Forest’s red shirts wouldn’t stand out sufficiently well from the foliage in the background, so he had them borrow Derby’s white tops for the picture.
Fabulous. So Nottingham Forest’s first great moment of triumph was captured for posterity before the fact and in the colours of the opposition. Somewhere, I presume – unless the wet plate was destroyed at the time for the sake of propriety – is a fading team picture of Derby County posing in proud anticipation with a trophy they never won.
From reception onwards the walls at the City Ground are largely covered in the bright red of the Brian Clough era, and on the basis of proportional representation there’s no arguing with a League Championship and consecutive European Cups. Among all the colour, the black-and-white images from the ’50s stand out like newspaper front pages. In the Legends Room – a members-only club where fans can get a drink and a chicken balti pie for £2 surrounded by Forest history – there’s a giant blow-up of the 1959 FA Cup-winning team. But something’s wrong with the symmetry. My father’s in his usual place, seated at the front, but the hierarchy of heights has been interrupted to place Roy Dwight in the middle of the back row, dwarfed by centre-half Bob McKinlay on one side and goalkeeper Chic Thomson on the other. Les tells me it was the only place Dwight could stand to hide the thigh-high plaster cast on the leg he’d broken at Wembley after scoring Forest’s first goal in the final. Behind glass in the Trophy Room there’s a replica of the cup itself, small and bottom-heavy so that it looks like an ornamental coffee pot, and a framed copy of the cheque representing Forest’s share of the Wembley gate receipts: £11,402 6d, dated 11 June 1959 and drawn on Barclays Bank, Pall Mall.
