My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes

by Gary Imlach

  So that was it. No debate about the wisdom of the deal, no look back at his Forest career, no statement from the manager thanking Imlach for his services and wishing him well at his new club, no farewell or fanfare in the papers. Perhaps it was because I knew what came next that I was hoping for some kind of public valediction.

  Three days after he dipped below the surface of Nottingham’s newsprint, my father bobbed up in Luton’s. The Luton News, ‘Every Thursday’ – a bad sign, his career was slipping back from daily into weekly instalments. The News’s chief football correspondent wrote under the name Chiltern and spelled my father’s name Stuart. The back pages that preceded his transfer were full of bad omens: the team had just been relegated from the First Division; it had no manager; the directors had misgivings about signing any players until a new man was in place; anyway, reports from the team’s pre-season foreign tour suggested their search for a left-winger had been solved from within – their own Mike Tracey was playing superbly.

  How dare they sign him – gamble with his career – when they could see the potential problems themselves. The Luton players were shocked, not that their board should want to buy the man who’d tormented them in the Cup Final, but that Forest had been willing to let him go.

  ‘I just couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t understand it. I personally thought what the hell’s Stewart done to warrant that, y’know.’ Ken Hawkes was Luton’s left-back in the Cup Final, but he’d been keeping half an eye on my father’s career for years. He thinks the directors were belatedly making amends for a mistake they’d made in 1952. Ken had been in digs at that time with another Luton player, Wally Shanks, brother of Willie Shanks, the scout who’d recommended my father to Bury. ‘Luton could have had him two or three months before he went to Bury. Dally Duncan, the old Scottish international, was manager and Willie recommended Stewart to Dally Duncan. Nothing materialised and the next we heard of him he was playing for Bury. Of course it left a bad taste in the mouth when Stewart was in the Cup Final because he could have been playing for us.’

  Although the move had been presented, as moves routinely were, as a fait accompli, the Luton News reported a slight hitch when the chairman, P.G. Mitchell, met his latest acquisition: the player wanted his wife to see the accommodation on offer before he signed.

  His wife, the wife. Just as club chairmen were too important to have first names, wives weren’t important enough. These days, players would be put up in a hotel or rented accommodation while the lengthy business of house-hunting went on. Then, the whole fraught procedure was reduced to a multiple-choice question at the end of an afternoon’s drive around an unfamiliar town – pick one from four. Rather like those bookclub subscription offers, with a list of uninspiring introductory titles from which you go through the motions of selecting one because that’s all there is on offer; the difference being that you had to live in your choice.

  Luton, when my father joined them, were an ageing team with low morale. The arrival of Sam Bartram as manager a month before the season started doesn’t seem to have improved the mood. Bartram had been Charlton Athletic’s goalkeeper for twenty-two years and was widely considered unlucky never to have been capped for England. In his first managerial job he’d taken York City from the Fourth Division up into the Third.

  ‘Poor old Sam’s dead now. He was a very good goalkeeper but . . .’ Ken Hawkes trailed off diplomatically. Albert McCann, the Luton inside-left, didn’t: ‘He was thick. When you were a kid at school you always stuck the dummy in goal, didn’t you? I’m being unkind because there are some very intelligent goalkeepers, but he wasn’t one of them.’

  In his first interview after taking over he made it clear where he thought the strength of the team lay: ‘In Bingham and Imlach we have what I consider to be as good a pair of club wingers as there is in the country and if the three men inside can grasp the opportunities they are bound to create I can see goals coming.’ By the end of October both of them had been sold, Bingham to First Division Everton, my father to Third Division Coventry. Faced with a group of veteran players sceptical of his managerial ability, Bartram had apparently decided to dismantle the team and start again.

  ‘He came in with the idea of cracking the whip and he just scuttled about eight players at the same time,’ said Ken Hawkes, who was one of them. Albert McCann fell out with Bartram and left too. The 1960–61 season was barely eight weeks old when my father signed for Coventry, and he had yet to make ten appearances in a Luton shirt. He’d gone from the First Division to the Third in the span of a dozen matches.

  Click-clack.

  Until this point I’d never really grasped the timescale of my dad’s career in its later stages. The list of his clubs had always had a natural rise and fall to it: Bury, Derby, Nottingham Forest – pause for a beat – Luton, Coventry, Crystal Palace. Nine syllables up, nine down. I knew the sequence of steps to and from the high-altitude plateau in the middle of his career, but I didn’t know the tempo. Discovering the abruptness of his decline was like coming across an old spool of cine film in the attic that showed him falling silently and inexplicably downstairs.

  The Coventry Evening Telegraph report of his signing sounds as puzzled as I am reading it that City had managed to land a player with First Division soil still on his boots. It dwells on his FA Cup and World Cup credentials, it shakes its head over the speed of his tumble down the divisions – ‘Thus the Scot will have played First, Second and Third Division football in the space of about two playing months!’ The paper’s account of the transfer itself (the Telegraph’s boardroom confidant wrote under the name of Nemo) adds personal detail to what would have been a routine piece of horse-trading for the time.

  The deal took place in a Chester hotel where Luton were staying after playing Liverpool in a midweek League Cup tie. Coventry’s manager, Billy Frith, had watched the game in order to give my father the final once-over. The club chairman, Derrick Robins – freshly installed on the promise of money for new signings – had driven straight to the hotel to oversee the negotiations. One of a new breed of forward-thinking club chairmen prepared to release their Christian names to the press, Robins sat with Frith and Luton’s P.G. Mitchell to thrash out the details. Only once a deal had been struck was the merchandise produced. According to the report, my father was roused from his bed around 1 a.m. to be informed that he had been sold.

  I can picture the scene: fresh brandies ordered despite the hotel bar being officially closed, cigars newly lit to celebrate, Derrick and Percy perhaps on first-name terms now: ‘Well, I think we have a deal, gentlemen, shall we get him up?’ Once again my father asked for time to discuss the prospective move with his nameless wife, although Nemo seemed to think this a formality. Woken in the early hours of a Thursday morning, he had signed by six in the evening and was in the Coventry side that Saturday. His first meeting with his new teammates would be in the dressing room at Highfield Road before the match.

  If the sheer speed of the move had distracted my father temporarily from reflecting on his plunge down football’s lift shaft, his debut must have brought it home to him. Coventry’s opponents were Bury. His first club had been relegated from the Second Division the same year he’d won promotion with Nottingham Forest. Now he was back down at their level – lower in fact, because Bury came to Highfield Road as Third Division leaders, while Coventry were closer to the bottom of the table than they were to the top.

  His debut ended in a 2–1 defeat which left City a point above the relegation places. Christ, he could have ended up in the Fourth Division, setting some sort of record: the man who played at all four levels of the professional game in the shortest space of time. Of course, I could read ahead and reassure myself that this wasn’t going to happen, but he couldn’t.

  Then again, it was me getting upset about it. Where he played was one of the things my father couldn’t control and refused to worry about. As far as I can tell, he slept soundly and looked forward to Saturdays.

  Chapte
r Twelve

  The End of the Maximum Wage

  MY FATHER HAD GONE to Third Division Coventry because he was sent. They had bought him because they could afford to.

  There was no mystery to it. The retain-and-transfer system lay across the league like a deadening fog. And players responded by limiting their own horizons too, as a pre-emptive strike against disappointment. The fact that most of them still felt a sense of privilege that they were paid to play football at all obviously helped.

  Tom Finney – as in so much else – was the classic example. Back in 1952, three years before Eddie Firmani signed for Sampdoria and five before John Charles’s famous move to Juventus, the Preston North End and England winger had been approached during a tour of Italy. The president of Palermo offered him a two-year deal: a £10,000 signing-on fee, wages of £130 a week, bonuses of up to another £100, a villa in the Mediterranean, a car and free travel between England and Italy for his family.

  Finney agreed to put the offer, which included a £30,000 transfer fee, to his club. The minutes of the next Preston North End board meeting preserve their official reply:

  The chairman reported that T. Finney had approached him regarding an offer received from an Italian club for his services. Unanimously agreed that the player be informed that we could not accede to this request. This player had been retained with the FA and was expected to re-sign for season 1952–53 on his return from holiday.

  Finney’s biography records his own stoic response:

  To be quite honest I didn’t expect North End to react any other way so I accepted the decision without too much fuss and decided the best thing to do was to try and put the whole business out of my mind . . . perhaps I was lucky in some respects that the decision wasn’t mine to take.

  Finney had been thirty when the Preston board blocked his move to Italy. He was thirty-eight when he retired at the end of the 1959–60 season, just as my father was being shipped off to Luton and the Players’ Union – by now the Professional Footballers’ Association – was drawing up the list of formal demands that would lead to the abolition of the maximum wage. In the intervening eight seasons his total earnings from Preston North End added up to less than the signing bonus he’d been offered by Palermo.

  Also around the same time that Forest were selling my father, George Eastham was being denied a move to Arsenal by his club, Newcastle. In a league where transfer requests were routinely turned down this would have been nothing out of the ordinary except that, unlike Tom Finney, my father and countless others up and down the country, Eastham didn’t shrug his shoulders and decide he’d better make the best of it.

  He appealed to the Football League to step in and arbitrate, but as far as the League was concerned it was strictly a matter between player and club. Eastham sat down for talks with his manager, Charlie Mitten. Irony must have hung like cigar smoke over their discussions in the office at St James’ Park, because Mitten was only ten years removed from the greatest contract-breaking scandal in English football history, the Bogotá Affair.

  Charlie Mitten was the left-winger in Manchester United’s first great post-war side, and like every other man in the League he’d been slack-jawed to see two Stoke City players, George Mountford and Neil Franklin, sign hugely lucrative deals to play in Colombia in 1950. On a US tour with United that summer he took a call from Franklin in his room at the team hotel in New York. Franklin passed the phone to Luis Robledo, the millionaire owner of Santa Fe in Bogotá, who made him the same offer he’d made the other two: £5,000 to sign and £5,000 a year. There was a plane ticket waiting for him at reception the following morning.

  When he broke the news to Matt Busby, his manager forbade him to go. But the difference between Charlie Mitten and Tom Finney two years later – apart from Finney’s heroic decency and sense of loyalty to Preston – was that Mitten didn’t need the permission of his club. England’s retain-and-transfer system was effectively part of a worldwide cartel, because no country affiliated to FIFA, the game’s governing body, would help a player break the terms of another member country’s contract system. But the Colombian league was operating outside FIFA’s jurisdiction and its two big clubs, Santa Fe and Millonarios, were racing each other to build multinational superteams.

  In the event, their imports were limited largely to malcontents from England and from Argentina, where there had been player unrest in 1949. Santa Fe and Millonarios had the likes of Alfredo Di Stéfano and Héctor Rial in their line-ups long before Santiago Bernabeu won European Cups with them at Real Madrid. At this remove Luis Robledo looks like a thoroughly twenty-first-century team owner, but his grand scheme and Charlie Mitten’s career in South America came to an end when Colombia was readmitted to FIFA. On his return to England Mitten was fined £250, suspended for six months, then sold by Manchester United to Fulham. After four years there he moved into management.

  So in 1960, fully rehabilitated and part of the football establishment, Mitten found himself sitting across the table from his younger, less cavalier self in George Eastham, while he tried to muster the conviction to play Matt Busby. Whatever might have passed between them in the privacy of the manager’s office, Newcastle as a club was adamant that Eastham should stay. If he refused to sign a new contract he would get no wages, and since the club retained his registration there was nowhere else he could legally play within the professional game. It was the same hopeless battle that players had been fighting and losing for decades.

  A Newcastle director boasted that he’d see Eastham shovel coal rather than let him leave the club. But Eastham did leave. He walked out in the summer of 1960 once his contract had expired, took a job as a salesman with a friend who ran a business in Surrey and waited. His quiet, dignified determination matched the eminent reasonableness of his case. As far back as 1947 the future Conservative Cabinet minister Walter Monckton QC had called the Football League terms of employment ‘The worst contract I’ve ever seen’. League Secretary Alan Hardaker – the man employed by the clubs to defend the system – agreed, although he could only say so years later in his autobiography: ‘They were fighting to keep a system of retaining players that was not only ludicrous but which, very clearly, would not stand up in law.’

  The problem for the Union had been finding a player on whose behalf to fight a test case. Mitten himself could have fitted the bill on his return from Colombia, but had decided instead to do his time and get back into the English game as quickly as possible. A few years later there was the Aldershot right-back Ralph Banks, who was being retained by his club without pay. But before the case reached court Aldershot neatly sidestepped proceedings by releasing him on a free transfer. In the slight, skilful, unassuming Eastham, the PFA finally had the perfect candidate for a challenge to the retain-and-transfer system.

  The edifice of English football was under a two-pronged attack from the forces of change as the 1960–61 season began. While the workers were massing at the back door shouting for the removal of the contractual leg-irons they’d been wearing since the turn of the century, television was on the front step with a chequebook. Both the BBC and ITV had made offers to televise live matches: ITV to the League for a featured game of the week, the BBC for a package of FA Cup games.

  With hindsight it looks like perfect timing, an opportunity to strike a deal with one in order to finance an agreement with the other. In fact, most club chairmen viewed television as scarcely less of a threat to their continued prosperity than the PFA. The ’50s have been filed in the collective memory as football’s heyday: black-and-white photos of Lowry paintings, with gapless terraces of endlessly repeating hatted heads, and the occasional locked-out stick figure climbing over the fence. The truth was that crowds had been falling from their post-war peak for most of the decade, and club chairmen thought television could only accelerate the decline. P.G. Mitchell at Luton was typical: ‘Why should we help breed a generation of armchair viewers for the game?’

  Before the start of the 1960–61 season
the FA had an offer on the table from the BBC of around £45,000 for six live cup ties. ITV was prepared to pay closer to £150,000 for twenty-six league games. Their proposal entailed delaying the kick-off of their chosen match until 6.50 on a Saturday evening. Coverage would start at 7.30, allowing ITV to catch the last few minutes of the first half, sell some advertising during half-time, then show the rest of the game without interruption. More importantly, they were prepared to guarantee the gate money.

  Alan Hardaker and the Football League’s president, Joe Richards, agreed the deal, and on 10 September 1960 Blackpool’s home game with Bolton became the first live league match on British television. The Big Game was to share the 7.30 slot with Saturday Spectacular for the rest of the season. This was football as prime-time entertainment. Billy Wright, the former Wolves and England Captain who’d already crossed over by marrying one of the Beverley Sisters, was signed up to do colour commentary.

  But the first Big Game was a flop. For one thing the main box-office draw, Stan Matthews, was injured and didn’t play. And ITV put their cameras high up behind the goal at Bloomfield Road rather than on the halfway line in the main stand. The critics complained that the commentators overpraised what everyone could see was a poor game, and talked about a packed house when the crowd was only 17,000 in a ground that held more than twice that many.

  The next live fixture on ITV’s schedule was Newcastle’s visit to Arsenal the following week. After Bolton’s dour 1–0 away win at Blackpool this was a spectacular 5–1 rout by the home side. But it was seen only by those who’d paid to go through the turnstiles at Highbury. ITV viewers got the Nat King Cole Show instead – Arsenal’s board had refused entry to the cameras. Spurs and Aston Villa, whose match was next on the list, declared their opposition too, and as Everton, West Bromwich, Wolves and Birmingham lined up behind them it quickly became clear that Hardaker and Richards had made a pact without the authority of their club chairmen. The deal collapsed, ITV withdrew their offer, and in the fallout from the whole affair the BBC did the same with their proposal to show FA Cup games.