My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes

by Gary Imlach

  ‘No, there were no bonuses at Forest,’ Chic Thomson told me. ‘At Chelsea, Ted Drake had an illegal system. If you’d had a good result, when you turned up on Monday he had a great big plate-glass window in his office and he used to bang on it – and when you walked in he said, “Oh, I owe you some money,” and he used to give you an extra ten or twenty out of his drawer, so those things went on.

  ‘When Ted Drake called me in to say Billy Walker at Forest had expressed an interest, he warned me, “He’s a rogue – if he can get you for nothing he’ll get you for nothing, so fight your corner.” When I came to Forest I discovered that there was only Eddie Baily and I getting the top wage that first season, which was surprising.’

  It was standard practice for clubs to skim the top few pounds off the maximum wage and call them ‘appearance money’ so that any player injured or in the reserves wasn’t costing them more than absolutely necessary. My father, desperate to leave Derby and with limited experience of wage negotiations, would have accepted this happily. It was only canny veterans from the big London clubs who knew to insist on top money regardless of whether they were in or out of the team.

  The fact that clubs well down the food chain like Forest could afford the maximum, although they did their best not to pay it, meant that the powerhouses of the First Division had healthy surpluses. Inevitably, some of them used the cash to subvert the system, even as their chairmen voted year in and year out to preserve it for the good of the game.

  The classic example came to light at Sunderland in 1957. For years the club had been operating an illegal bonus system using money disguised in the annual accounts as payments for straw to cover the pitch in bad weather. Between them the League and the FA botched the commission of inquiry, exceeding their powers and handing out bans to players and directors that were later overturned in court. But the affair revealed the nonsense of a system that made criminals out of club officials, and brown envelopes the only means of paying players even a fraction of their true worth. In case any underlining were needed, the newspaper coverage of the scandal was punctuated by John Charles’s transfer to Juventus. His reported signing-on fee was £10,000 – exactly a thousand times what a player could legally be paid in England.

  But no club would volunteer to pay extra money out of sheer munificence. A player had to ask. My father was in the quiet majority of footballers too naive or straight to think of posing the question. He wasn’t even on the perfectly legal maximum wage except when he was in the first team. Still, he was in the first team most of the time, earning appearance money and win bonuses, which meant his income in the off-season, when he was paid only a summer retainer, would drop by around 30 per cent.

  In early May, as the Forest groundstaff began painting the stands and preparing the pitch for the following season, my father crossed the river to Meadow Lane where the Co-op had its central depot close to Notts County’s stadium. He signed on as a joiner and spent his summer as part of the maintenance staff, walking the floor with his toolbag over his shoulder, on hand for any repair jobs that might be needed by the bakers or the milkmen.

  What? Every now and then some routine detail of his story seemed to slip its moorings and become unplaceably strange, like a familiar household object stared at for too long, or glimpsed suddenly from an unusual angle. Which generation was this we were talking about, again? What century?

  Imagine this: the Chief Executive of the FA calling a plumber – and forty-five minutes later parting the net curtains to see David Beckham ringing his doorbell in overalls. It could never happen, except on television, a stunt for Children in Need or some yet-to-be-invented reality game show. But in 1955 it did happen, without generating a single paragraph in the papers. Alan Hardaker of the Football League opened his door one Saturday morning to find that the country’s finest outside-right had come to fit his new sink: Tom Finney of England, Preston North End and Finney Bros plumbers and electricians. When he was at Tottenham, Eddie Baily had made a literal crossing of the divide between player and spectator. With fellow internationals like Bill Nicholson he spent his summers in the stands at White Hart Lane scraping a season’s worth of accumulated grime off the tea bars where the fans queued for a half-time drink and a pie.

  In truth there wasn’t that much of a divide to cross. My parents’ club house was in Abbey Road, a short walk from Dennis Marshall’s and Bob McKinlay’s and Jeff Whitefoot’s. It was a nice enough neighbourhood, but nothing special. He walked to the ground on match days, a little earlier than the fans, and cycled to training during the week. If any of the seats at the City Ground needed mending he’d go home at lunchtime and come back with his tools. In the afternoons he could sometimes be seen out on his bike with a Wall’s Ice Cream sign balanced on the handlebars. He had a sideline with the Notts County goalkeeper, Jimmy Linton, hanging them outside sweet shops and newsagents. My father and his teammates were a visible presence in the community, and if they were venerated it was from close range.

  As a winger, he always had a closer physical relationship to the fans than most of his colleagues. At Bury one woman used to put toffees on top of the perimeter wall adjacent to where he lined up for the kick-off and, having no pockets, he was obliged to eat them to avoid giving offence. But there seems to have been something more to it than just proximity. Something about his demeanour that endeared him to the crowd.

  After he died, I came across a fan’s obituary on the Internet, a tribute to him from a man who’d paid the child’s price at the turnstiles for that Manchester United game in 1957. Despite emigrating to Canada – or perhaps because of it – his emotional ties to the club remained strong and his memories fresh. As an eleven year-old, he’d stood on an orange crate in the same spot every week – bang on the halfway line opposite the tunnel where the players came out. He used to pray that Forest would win the toss and attack the Bridgford end first, so that my father would start on his wing.

  On the days when the gods smiled, our hero ‘Stewie’ would sprint across and line up in what was then the traditional left-winger’s position, hugging the touchline and inches from my nose, when time permitted signing autographs, having a few quick words of banter and always waving and giving a cheery nod to those of us close by.

  Even when the reverse was true, the second-half line-up inevitably saw the same response from a player who always identified with his audience, and who appreciated the need to translate those skills and the ability he possessed into industrious efforts to induce entertainment.

  ‘The thing is, Dad used to go . . .’ My mother cast about for the right words. ‘When he got on the pitch he’d go absolutely berserk,’ was what she eventually settled on. I asked Den about it. ‘He was very popular with them and I think it was because (a), he was very small, and (b) he was energetic – he looked like he was going to run after the ball.

  ‘An outstanding thing about your dad was that, if it was a rainy afternoon and the kids were hanging about outside the dressing room wanting their autograph books signing, he would never walk past any of them. He’d stand there and sign them, and the pages were getting wet and he was getting wet and the other lads would be in the tearoom. I used to admire him for that and he used to say, “Well, they’ve all paid to come in” – a real old-fashioned way of thinking, and I’m sure there are some players that do it now.’

  I’m sure there are, but not as sure as I am that I’m drifting off into hagiography as I try to get a sense of him as a working pro. He sounds like a sawn-off cross between Roy of the Rovers and Alf Tupper, the Tough of the Track. But this – as far as I can make out through the anecdote-filtering process that automatically kicks in when people speak to the sons of dead friends – is how he was as a player. At home he had a short temper to go with his quick humour, and almost no patience whatsoever. His small-town morality could curdle into petty indignation. Later in life, when he’d run out of major points of principle to make stands over, he’d make them over minor traffic infringements. He once terri
fied a teacher by tailing her all the way into her school car park to point out exactly how she’d misbehaved at a roundabout. But in the dressing room and on the field his role in the cast of characters that makes up every football team was the chirpy Scot. The decent, honest, humorous Scot, who always gave 100 per cent. And he was, and he did.

  Until quite recently, Forest’s 1959 Cup Final team had still been pretty much intact, sufficient numbers for a reunion. Now there were fewer alive than there were dead: just a handful of front rooms to visit. I felt a tremendous warmth in all of them, a welcome that was entirely down to him.

  As ever the memories varied. The bus was late getting to Wembley on Cup Final day, or it was on time. The bonus for winning was £25, or £50, or nothing. But they were the variations among those who could remember. In Nottingham, as in Bury and Derby, there were the distressing cases of men with glorious pasts and no access to them. All history and no memory. It struck me that Alzheimer’s might seem somehow less cruel in the young. To reach an age where the body fails and the accumulated memories of a lifetime are one’s chief consolation, then to have them scattered irretrievably, as the mind fragments like a faulty hard drive, seems a double punishment.

  The first sign was usually a wary wife, screening the calls. ‘I’m awfully sorry . . .’ the conversation would begin, ruling another batch of eyewitness testimony to my father’s career inadmissible. I thought about leather balls with no waterproofing, multiplying their weight in the rain; every cross my dad pulled back from the byline arriving in the box like a blow to the head from a heavyweight.

  Even among those who could remember, their wives could often remember more. I sat and watched men listen, open-mouthed, to stories about themselves which they could no longer haul to the surface, recited word for word by women who’d heard them repeated so often over the years that they knew them as well as nursery rhymes.

  The first player I called on had his scrapbooks out ready for me. We sat and talked – generalities to start with. Then I asked him about playing against Manchester United, and the tragedy of Munich in 1958.

  ‘I can’t remember, what happened about Munich? Refresh my memory about what happened about Munich . . . Oh of course – I’d forgotten that . . . that had gone right out of my mind.’

  But he was bluffing. He still didn’t remember it. I could tell from the way he spoke and the look in his eyes. He carried on, doing his best to give me what I’d come for, and perhaps trying to reassure himself that this had been another momentary lapse. His wife chimed in, ‘It’s sad that you’ve come now, because he’s got serious memory problems.’ It was, but I was happy just to be there, having tea and spending time with men who’d spent so much time – and so intensely – with my father. I stayed and talked, listening to the stories he could remember, and steering round the rest.

  Before the adrenalin had subsided that Saturday in October 1957 after the first, fabulous game against Manchester United, many Forest fans, and probably quite a few players, must have scanned the fixture list to underline the return game.

  It was 22 February 1958, sixteen days after United’s plane crashed at Munich on the way home from a European Cup tie in Belgrade, killing most of the side that had played at the City Ground. Forest were their first opponents in the League after the tragedy. The makeshift United team, under assistant manager Jimmy Murphy, had played one other game, beating Sheffield Wednesday in the fifth round of the FA Cup. The Forest line-up showed two changes from the team that had played four months earlier. Eleven Manchester United shirts – two of them worn by survivors, the rest bearing the numbers of the absent dead and injured – ran out in front of their home supporters. There were 66,123 people at Old Trafford, the biggest crowd since the war. Before the kick-off and at half-time the collection boxes were passed along the terracing and through the stands.

  ‘They wanted us to take part in a memorial service before the match – you know, out on the pitch.’ Chic Thomson had no cuttings around him, no props or prompts, he was back at Old Trafford, in the away team dressing room. ‘We couldn’t do that, we’d never have been able to play afterwards. It would have been too much for the players.’

  In the end, it was decided to leave the two sides in their dressing rooms while the Dean of Manchester conducted an interdenominational service in a snowstorm that conjured up unavoidable images for anyone who’d seen the television pictures of the crash. Eventually the game began. After thirty-two minutes Forest’s centre-forward, Tommy Wilson, chased a poor United clearance out to the right and cut the ball back to the edge of the box. As the play had moved to the other wing my father had instinctively drifted in from the left to fill the gap. From twenty yards out he drove the ball past Harry Gregg into a silent net. Forest 1 Manchester United 0. It was the first goal against them since the crash.

  What was he feeling as he ran back to the halfway line? In my father’s book, giving anything less than 100 per cent would have been an insult to the opposition and to the game. ‘Just do your best,’ that was his one-size-fits-all advice in any situation that called for fatherly guidance: ‘Just do your best, Gaz, that’s all you can do.’ Knowing that he’d done his job to the best of his ability would have been my father’s vaccination against any consequences. But actually scoring against the stricken team was something else. Did he play the rest of the match secretly hoping for an equaliser, something to save him from being the man who beat Manchester United when they were down? Whether he did or not, the equaliser eventually came. United played a surging, emotional second half, urged on by a single continuous roar of collective will from the crowd. Sixteen minutes from the end a corner dropped into the Forest penalty box and Alex Dawson forced it in. Forest held on for the last quarter of an hour and the game finished 1–1.

  ‘All the league people came into our dressing room after the game, and Jimmy Murphy who was standing in for Matt Busby went round everybody and thanked us for our attitude during the game – that we hadn’t sort of retired, if you like,’ said Chic Thomson.

  ‘What could you do? You had to play hard. Anything else wouldn’t have been right.’

  Chapter Six

  World Cup

  I’M UP IN THE ATTIC sorting through my dad’s things. Envelopes, boxes, old suitcases pulled into parallelograms by the shifting weight of programmes and cuttings inside. The lack of order among the accumulated evidence of his career was always one of its big attractions. Nobody really knew what was up here nor exactly where it all was. He certainly didn’t, and I don’t remember him ever going up to look.

  The jumble meant there was always the chance of a big find. Some item – perhaps a whole suitcaseful – that had been neglected for just long enough since the last time anyone else had stumbled across it, that it could legitimately be submitted for peer review as a new discovery. The whole business of going up into the attic had been a bit of an expedition, requiring stepladders, a torch and a careful tread on the crossbeams so as not to put a foot through the ceiling of my parents’ room. Later on, my father converted it into an extra bedroom which became mine. But the suitcases and trunks were still shut away, under the eaves, and ‘rooting about’ – not far behind banging doors on my mother’s list of antisocial behaviours – was discouraged for fear of startled birds taking a wrong turn out of the nest, and emerging, terrified, from the cupboard doors to flap and shit all over the furniture.

  So, I’m up here sorting through his things. It’s tempting to leave them as they are, all stashed in their various hiding places like a treasure hunt, so that we can keep discovering, enjoying and forgetting them in a happy amnesiac cycle. Somehow, though, I feel obliged. It doesn’t get much pamphlet-space in the bereavement guides, but there’s a shocking amount of housework that comes with death. Jumble-sale worries, bin-bag decisions, unfaceable wardrobes and toolboxes. So this is a bit of a cop-out; no rows of reheeled shoes to deal with up here, none of this stuff is going to the charity shop. It just needs sorting – club, country, progra
mmes, photos – so that we know where to find him now that he’s gone.

  Here’s an item I haven’t seen before. Or if I have, it was long enough ago that I can happily rediscover it now. It’s my father’s player identity card for the 1958 World Cup, although the fashion for making the year an integral part of the title – Sweden ’58! – hadn’t yet caught on. According to the legend across the top of the oversized pink oblong in its plastic holder, this is the ‘VIth World Championship – Jules Rimet Cup’. My father obviously hadn’t had a recent photo to submit for it, because he’s still sporting the classic ’50s footballer look – slicked-back, centre-parted – when in fact he’d already swapped it by then for the crew cut I always remember him wearing, an inch-high, perfectly levelled brush of the kind only Japanese gymnasts seem to be capable of producing these days.

  He used to say that he’d cut his hair to improve his speed, which I’d always taken as one of his jokes, but quite a few of the cuttings in the suitcase mention his obsession with weight and streamlining. This is a player who took the cane struts out of his shinpads to make them lighter and less bulky. He trained in spikes. He trained on the way to training and back again, on his bike. Billy Walker called him ‘The fastest man, with the ball, that I have ever seen.’ A year later at Wembley his haircut was distinctive enough that the Duke of Edinburgh stopped to ask him about it (it was only when he’d reached Chic Thomson three men along that he finally became exasperated with the number of Scots in the team). On his World Cup ID, though, my father still has his heavy, old-fashioned hair, and the corner of the photo is rubber-stamped FIFA, to guard against any foreign chancers turning up in Stockholm with their boots, an impenetrable accent and cleverly deconstructed shinpads like they’d read about in the papers.