My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes

by Gary Imlach

  I’m familiar with the medal ceremony from the highlights tape we’ve had at home for years, so mentally I’ve all but switched off by this point, certain that I’ve seen anything new that there is to see from the ’59 Cup Final. Then I’m ambushed by a moment I’m sure my father wouldn’t have remembered and wouldn’t have recounted if he had. Halfway up the steps he breaks ranks, bends to pick up a dropped rosette and hands it to one of the fans leaning over from their seats to clap the players on the back. It may not be a rosette, it’s hard to see, but it’s white and the fans lining the steps are all Luton supporters, wearing straw boaters in support of the Hatters.

  This time I can’t help but reach for the remote control. If I had to pick an image from the ninety-odd minutes of the afternoon preserved by the BBC, I’d settle for that one: my father, minus false teeth, jogging up the steps of the Royal Box towards the Queen and the pinnacle of his career, then stopping to pick up something dropped by a fan – a fan of the other team most likely – and handing it back to him.

  On television, his medal moment takes place behind the classic Cup Final shot of the victorious skipper holding aloft the trophy. When he comes into view, not yet past the last dignitary in the receiving line, he’s already opening the small leather present the Queen has given him. ‘It’s all right,’ says Kenneth Wolstenholme, ‘it’s in there, Stewart.’

  Chapter Ten

  Man on a Train

  IT MUST BE A newspaper picture. A free print from one of the photographers who covered the team, when free prints were all that was needed to keep the press–player relationship harmonious. I’d like to know who took it, but the copyright stamp has faded now and the photo itself doesn’t seem to have made it past the picture desk, at least not into any of the papers I’ve searched.

  The post-cup final editions had been full of the usual stuff: the captain with the cup; his teammates jigging on the Wembley turf with the accessories (as third in line up the steps to get his medal it always seemed to me as a child that my father had won the lid). A couple of days later there were the aerial shots of the homecoming crowd, the team smiling and waving at them from an open-top bus. The departures from the standard template showed Roy Dwight surrounded by his teammates in hospital, or being wheeled off the coach to huge cheers.

  But this is a shot worth its space on any inside page. It could be a movie still. Down the wood-panelled corridor of an old-fashioned rail carriage, my father is walking towards the camera like a perfect scale model of Cary Grant. He shows no signs of the previous night’s celebrations. His Forest cup final suit is immaculate, his tie is unloosened, his cigar echoes the angle of his splay-footed gait, and he’s looking straight out of the frame into the future as he carries a tea tray back to the dining car.

  The shot was probably posed – behind him you can just see a reporter leaning against a compartment door, his notebook partly shielding his face – but it doesn’t matter. It captures my father at the high point of his career and perhaps his life. The dazed joy of the post-match pictures from Wembley has been replaced by a kind of assured aura. The readers’ poll in the Daily Herald had declared him Man of the Match. Stan Matthews, the boyhood hero he’d queued to watch in a wartime exhibition game, had declared him Man of the Match. On the front page of the Sunday Express. A week later he’d be on the same train heading south again to pick up his award at a gala dinner in London.

  He’s twenty-seven. He looks like a man walking into the rest of his life (via the dining car) with supreme confidence. Of course, he doesn’t know what I know looking back at him. That in a year’s time he’ll be sold to the team he’s just helped to defeat, Luton. That by then they will have been relegated to the Second Division. That a change of manager will see him sold on within months to 3rd Division Coventry City. That chance and circumstance will send him click-clacking down the league like a wooden acrobat in a Victorian child’s toy. A figure which looks secure enough at the top, but only needs a gentle nudge to send it tumbling with unstoppable momentum.

  Chapter Eleven

  Forest, Luton, Coventry

  ‘I OFTEN WONDER WHAT WAS in Billy Walker’s mind after the Cup Final because that team was broken up so quickly it was unbelievable . . .’

  Chic Thomson sits across the room from me and shakes his head. I’ve heard the same thing from other members of Forest’s ’59 side. I haven’t heard what he’s about to say next though. ‘The biggest surprise was sitting in the Savoy Hotel on the Monday morning after the match. Bob McKinlay, your dad and myself went to have a cup of tea. And Billy Walker came in and spoke to your dad and said, “Stewart, I want you to go to Sheffield United.” And he walked away then – that’s all he said – Bob and I, our mouths were down here, your dad didn’t say anything. Then we all looked at each other and said the man’s crazy. Your dad had just got the Man of the Match award, he ran his guts out. I couldn’t believe it. We sort of laughed about it, but within about twelve months Tommy Wilson, your dad, Roy Dwight didn’t play – didn’t really come back from the broken leg – Joe McDonald, myself all sort of taken off the . . .’ His sentence peters out like the team did.

  This man has the sharpest and most comprehensive memory of anyone my father played with in his whole career. Perhaps it’s something to do with being a goalkeeper: the solitary, watchful presence at one end of the field – the pitch spread out in front of him wider than it is long. The goalkeeper is a kind of super spectator, with a heightened perception and a telescoped view, knowing that he might be called on to join in at a second’s notice.

  There’s no one with whom I can check Chic’s memory of that incident at the Savoy; he’s the only one of the four men who were there still living. If the plan to sell my father to Sheffield United was a serious one, it never came to anything. Forest’s more immediate priority was to cash in on the team’s collective worth with a post-season exhibition tour of Portugal and Spain.

  In Spain the team played four games in seven days, three of them in the last four. To avoid the heat they kicked off at 10 p.m. in Valencia and had to be at the airport at 7.00 the next morning. In his hotel room at 2.15 a.m. – the time is underlined at the top of the postcard – my father writes home that the team will go straight to bed when they reach Madrid for a couple of hours’ sleep before playing Athletico. They got thrashed 6–1. Athletico fielded a handful of guest players including Barcelona’s brilliant Hungarian, Ladislav Kubala. The crowd was lower than expected due to bad weather – only 45,000 instead of the 75,000 who’d turned out in Valencia – but it was still lucrative business for Forest.

  The final game, in Cadiz, hadn’t been on the original tour itinerary. The players were tired, but Cadiz were a Second Division outfit; one last easy opponent and then they could get home and bask in the afterglow of the FA Cup win. Cadiz, though, was just the venue. It turned out that Billy Walker had committed to a match against Athletic Bilbao, who’d just won their own domestic cup competition. Instead of a day’s souvenir shopping for their wives and children before heading home, the exhausted Forest team found themselves on another plane south for a game being sold to the public as a serious contest for Anglo-Spanish bragging rights.

  They protested, but the tickets had already gone on sale. A handful of Forest players cried off with injuries and Bilbao won comfortably, 3–0. It was an unnecessarily sour note on which to end the tour. As the party gathered at the airport for the flight home, Chic remembers Billy Walker approaching my father with a package that he wanted carrying through customs for him. He waved away questions about what might be in it, but once his back was turned a small group of players gathered round my dad to open it, and found it stuffed with pesetas.

  ‘Now we always made sure when we went abroad that we got so much a game and if we won there was a bonus and they paid for our laundry – and he used to fight that, Billy Walker, it was terrible trying to get the money off him. But this was an extra game and we weren’t being paid for it – he’d said, “Oh no, it’s all,
y’know, gratis.” And we said, “What’s Stewart got in his bag?” And eventually he gave us a little bit of it each, but he was a terrible man that way.’

  When my father got home there was a club-crested envelope waiting for him. Nominally from the man who’d just asked him to carry foreign currency through customs, it was his contract offer for the following season.

  29th May 1959

  S. Imlach Esq.

  In accordance with the rules of the Football Association and Football League we now have pleasure in advising you of the terms for the 1959/60 season which we are prepared to offer you when your present contract runs out on the 30th June 1959:

  1st team Reserves Summer

  £20 £15 £15

  As we mention, the present agreement ends on 30th of June and your acceptance (or non-acceptance) of the terms offered to you must be in my hands at least seven days before then. Failure to return the forms enclosed properly signed where marked (or non-acceptance) will result in your getting no wages from this club after that date.

  Sign the forms, in ink, in all those spaces marked ‘X’ before returning. By the way, details of the date for the commencement of training for the 1959/60 season will be posted to you around the end of June so make sure that we have the appropriate address to which we can send this notice.

  Yours sincerely,

  W.H. Walker,

  Manager

  I’ve got the letter in front of me. The club apparently hadn’t got round to ordering new stationery, or was thriftily working its way through existing supplies, because the letterhead bears the singular legend ‘English Cup Winners 1897–8’ alongside the quaintly informative ‘Colours – Red Shirts, White Knickers’ and above both the Club Secretary’s and Manager’s home telephone numbers.

  It’s a pro forma covering letter, the same one all the players would have received. It’s impossible to take offence at its tone because it has no tone, it’s just a piece of business correspondence. But still my skin prickles with indignation reading it because, even allowing for the restrictive template of 1950s etiquette, it exposes the true nature of the relationship between club and player. Beneath the camaraderie and club spirit, the gung-ho team talks and appeals for loyalty, the committee men in the dressing room slapping backs and handing out frillies for the wives, here’s the real relationship: master and serf.

  ‘Terms we are prepared to offer . . . must be in my hands . . . non-acceptance will result in your getting no wages . . .’ Couldn’t they at least go through the motions? Make some nod towards the great emotional tribal dance that had just taken place. Some acknowledgment of the glorious effort these men had put forth in red shirts and white knickers. Couldn’t they just recognise in passing that this addressee in particular had run himself into the ground and been singled out for his part in football’s annual showpiece game? Of course not, and it’s hopeless naivety to think otherwise.

  In any event, I don’t imagine that my father bothered reading the body of the letter; the formalities wouldn’t have changed from one season to the next. What mattered were the figures and these evidently hadn’t been to his liking. He was scarcely out of the first team during his time at Forest, yet whenever he was, even if it was through injury, his wages dropped by 25 per cent. In the off-season it was the same.

  After a three-season run which had brought promotion, First Division consolidation and Forest’s first cup win of the century, my father might have expected to be offered the best of the bad deal that was available to him. But £20, £15 and £15 was the opposite, pretty much the least the club could plausibly offer. Anything more than a £5 drop from the basic wage would have been getting insultingly close to the legal minimum of £8 a week. Over the previous twelve months he had been arguably Forest’s best player, yet the club wasn’t even offering him the maximum off-season wage of £17. Whether he’d asked around in the dressing room, or whether his dissatisfaction at the offer was entirely self-generated, he turned it down.

  I know this because there’s an undated second contract offer preserved in the same envelope as the first; identical covering letter, different figures. On this one his summer retainer has been increased to £17 and his reserve-team wages to the same amount. For the reserves, though, the red typewritten £17 has been altered to £20 in blue Biro, with Dennis Marshall’s signature next to it. Finally, and for what I believe is the only time in his career, my father was going to be paid the maximum wage available to a professional footballer.

  His first season as a fully remunerated Forest player was a poor one. It started in August 1959 with defeat in the Charity Shield by Wolverhampton Wanderers and ended one spot above the relegation placings. With Roy Dwight’s recovery from his broken leg taking longer than expected, my father spent the first two months of the season on the right wing. Along with a couple of injuries of his own, he also hit the first sustained loss of form in his career and found himself dropped. When Forest faced Reading as FA Cup holders in the 3rd round on 9 January 1960, Johnny Quigley was the only surviving member of the Wembley forward line from eight months earlier. My father finished with thirty-one appearances, not bad but still his lowest in five seasons with Forest. His insistence on getting the maximum, in or out of the first team, paid off in a dozen of his wage packets.

  There was no haggling come contract time at the end of the 1959–60 season. When the retained list was published Bill Whare, right-back in the Cup Final team, wasn’t on it. He was one of seven players released, with another two put on the transfer list. Only twenty-four players were retained compared with thirty-three the season before, but that wasn’t what made the headlines.

  ‘FOREST TO PAY PLAYERS BY RESULTS’ was the back-page lead in the Nottingham Evening Post the week after their final game. One bad season in five had given the upper hand back to Billy Walker and he was hitting out with it: ‘At Forest we pay good money. We have a right to expect a good return for our money. This new scheme means players in the first team will receive £20 a week – the maximum we are allowed to pay at the moment. If a player falls into the reserves then he does not deserve top money and we shall pay him £17 a week.’

  Billy Walker was hardly going out on a managerial limb; Arsenal had done the same thing the previous season, guaranteeing top money to only five of their international-packed team. But he didn’t stop at wage cuts. He also curtailed players’ rights to earn money outside the game. Those with part-time winter jobs had to give them up before the club would re-sign them. With his Wall’s Ice Cream signs and his joinery work, my father was facing a drop in income on and off the field.

  What I found remarkable about this story is how little story there was. Having read the initial piece in the Evening Post of 17 May, I had settled in to my seat at Colindale for a week’s worth of bitter back-page wrangling. But there was nothing. No row, no repercussions, no follow-ups at all in the days after the announcement. The original article had carried a single quote from an unnamed first-team player: ‘It seems a little hard that after good years we have a wage cut as soon as we run into a bad patch.’ That was it. If there was any serious fallout from the decision to cut players’ wages it was kept within the club, thanks partly to the relationship between the management and the local press.

  As in Bury and Derby, the team beat writer on the Football Post in Nottingham operated under a pen name. And as in Bury and Derby the price for access was acting as a largely unmediated conduit for the views of the club. The Evening Post writers did have real names, but they were no more hard-hitting.

  National papers were keener to exploit footballers as personalities, and less reliant on the goodwill of a local team. Post-game quotes were still a rarity in the nationals, but features and player columns had started to appear. They were uncontroversial, by and large, but they were enough to rattle the Football League. At consecutive AGMs in 1958 and 1959 the League Management Committee had discussed a McCarthyesque-sounding proposal to outlaw ‘journalistic activities’ by players. In the end t
hey had delegated the power to clubs, which in most cases amounted to the same thing.

  Two weeks after the wage-cut announcement, the Post’s back page carried the starkest possible confirmation that the paper enjoyed a closer relationship with the club than its employees did:

  IMLACH MAY GO TO LUTON

  Terms have been agreed between the clubs for the transfer of Stewart Imlach, Nottingham Forest’s Scottish international outside-left, to Luton Town. Imlach is to be contacted today . . .

  Imlach is to be contacted today? So the Nottingham Evening Post was officially informed about the deal before my father. Surely the first he heard of it can’t have been when he picked up the paper? ‘No, I think Den came round to tell him,’ said my mother. ‘The club certainly didn’t say anything to him.’

  ‘Your dad was astounded,’ Dennis told me. ‘They used to do a lot of that, football clubs did. You really were a chattel to be bartered. The two clubs would have agreed – even to the extent of what date they were going and how much money the player would get at Luton as distinct to Forest. Some just threw up their arms – your dad probably did – and said, “Oh well, bugger them if they don’t want me.”’

  The suddenness with which my father disappeared from Nottingham’s sporting radar I found quite shocking, like having a favourite character in a serial abruptly killed off with no satisfactory explanation. The first story breaking the news of his transfer was the only one in the Evening Post. It ran on a Monday, there was nothing on Tuesday and by Wednesday the fans’ attention was already being directed elsewhere: ‘REDS MOVE QUICKLY TO SIGN ARSENAL ATTACKER LEN JULIANS.’