My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes

by Gary Imlach

  Astonished silence.

  ‘Well, at the end of the ’61–62 season . . . I thought I’d signed Bobby Laverick before my first season. I’m just thinking, when I went to Coventry what time of the year was it?’ I fished out my photocopies and transcripts from Colindale to make sure. ‘Wednesday 29 November, so you took over halfway through that season.’ Then I read him the story of the simultaneous departure and arrival of my father and Bobby Laverick, complete with the quotes he gave to the Evening Telegraph.

  ‘Does that ring a bell?’

  ‘Well, it does. The fact that it wasn’t in my memory . . . how old was your dad at that time?’

  ‘Just turned thirty.’

  ‘Yeah . . . that’s amazing, so I would have seen him that season. In fact, in my mind the Coventry team that starts to take shape is the one with Bobby Laverick at outside-left. As I say, he played one game, it might have been two or three, then he was out of the side and I bought Ronnie Rees.’ He’s right about that. The records show a grand total of four games for Bobby Laverick in a Coventry City shirt.

  ‘It was like an instant decision. He was a well-built lad, a six-footer and well-muscled but he just didn’t use any of those attributes to help the team win. And that’s so funny because Stewart would have been there from November onwards . . . it’s a sort of blank. I can’t evaluate how that came about. Certainly I’d have rather had a 35-year-old Stewart than I would have had a Bobby Laverick.’

  Whether that was tact or the truth didn’t really matter. The greater and unavoidably insulting fact was that Jimmy Hill had managed my father for half a season – picked him, played him, dropped him, sold him – and had no memory of doing any of it. He didn’t even remember him as the other half of his first big transfer market mistake, an episode which had at least ensured that Bobby Laverick’s brief Coventry career wasn’t entirely lost to history. I made one last effort, reading him his cryptic quote about dropping my father for the Oxford game, but it yielded nothing.

  I had been braced for Jimmy’s ruthless evaluation of my dad as past it, or the gentler explanation that he was looking to rebuild with youth and couldn’t turn down a decent offer for a player who’d already turned thirty. But a ten-minute disquisition on the faults of the man he’d jettisoned my father to buy was hard to take. I thanked him and hung up.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Crystal Palace

  IN THE OPENING DAY’S press coverage of the 1962–63 season there’s a picture of my father that I’ve never seen before. I don’t suppose it’s one he would have cut out of the paper to keep.

  He’s lying on the ground in scene-of-the-crime posture, as though he’s waiting for someone to come and chalk round him before carting him away: on his side, left arm out along the turf away from his body, right arm down towards his boots, mouth open in pain showing the gaps in his teeth.

  According to the match report he’d played thirteen minutes of his debut game for Crystal Palace before being felled by ‘a wince-inducing nowhere-near-the-ball tackle by brawny Burgess’. Brawny Burgess was a Canadian, and from the look of the line-up in the paper he was Halifax Town’s right-half. A quick rummage in the records turns up a first name, Mike, and a career as an inside-forward that bounced around the lower divisions from Bradford Park Avenue to Aldershot. That’s all I know about him, except that he signalled the beginning of the end of my father’s playing career thirteen minutes into the 1962–63 season.

  The move to Palace had looked like a promising one. My dad might still have been in the Third Division, but he was going to be playing for one of England’s finest post-war managers: Arthur Rowe. In 1951, Rowe’s Tottenham Hotspur had won the League Championship through the elegant geometry of ‘push and run’. His teams kept the ball on the ground and kept it simple, passing and moving in a constantly self-reconfiguring game of join the dots. Billy Walker had built his Forest side on the Arthur Rowe model. He’d even bought one of Rowe’s championship team, Eddie Baily, to play inside my father on the left. Yes, he was still in the Third Division, but he was going to be playing stylish football for a sympathetic boss.

  Some of the hardest characters in the game turn out elegant, sophisticated teams, but Arthur Rowe wasn’t one of them. At Tottenham he’d suffered a nervous breakdown after winning the League title, and left for the position of chief scout at West Bromwich Albion where pressure was less likely to get the better of him. Palace eventually persuaded him back into management and, despite the more physical environment of the lower end of the League, he’d taken them out of the Fourth Division playing the same kind of football that had worked in the First.

  ‘He didn’t like the term “push and run”,’ John Jackson, the Palace keeper, told me. ‘He preferred “give it and go”. One day he had us in the office and he had a bit of trelliswork, a bit of fencing. He said, “Look, football’s like this” and he marked it with Biro on one bit and on another bit and he moved it and said, “Look how the pieces move in conjunction, that’s how I want you to play football” – simple, very clever.’

  Any expectations that moving up a division would provide a more civilised climate for Arthur Rowe’s passing game had already been given a good kicking the previous season, Palace’s first after promotion. Still, the Halifax Town match of 18 August 1962 seems to have been particularly brutal, even by the prevailing standards of Third Division clogging. Perhaps its ugliness was magnified because it came on the opening day of the season when – no matter how bad the previous year – a long summer of waiting fills the stands and the press box alike with hopeful amnesiacs. Whatever the reason, the reports were universal in their condemnation.

  Bodies hit the deck regularly and after one tackle ex-Scottish international Stewart Imlach stayed down. And it had to be a hard tackle to make this tough bundle of energy roll in agony on the ground. Imlach limped through the rest of the match. On Monday morning he phoned Mr Rowe to say the thigh is still painful and fluid is forming on the knee.

  It was a month before my father managed his second game for his new club, and his knee gave out midway through it. On 20 September, the day after my younger brother was born, he arrived home on crutches. My mother, confined to bed, had to get up to undress him and help him wash. After another six weeks of treatment a friendly was arranged against London University for him to prove his fitness in advance of Palace’s 1st round FA Cup tie. Once more his knee broke down. With a new baby to look after, two other small children and yet another new house in a new city where she knew nobody, so did my mother.

  ‘He came home on crutches again. I think I was in the middle of getting Mike ready for bed and I just screamed. I put Mike down on the carpet and put my coat on and went out.’ While she walked the streets of suburban Croydon, my father stood over his youngest son like some helpless sitcom character, unable to bend down and pick up the bewildered child. The club checked him into hospital for cartilage surgery.

  My mother remembers the kindness of Arthur Rowe, who knew that she was stranded and would call round in his car to pick us all up and take us to visit my father. But Arthur Rowe was on the verge of putting the baby down on the carpet and walking out himself. In the end, Palace, a family club run with paternal kindness by the chairman, Arthur Waite, recognised the symptoms and helped him to the door. At the end of November, with both team and manager struggling, they issued a statement:

  The many injuries and misfortunes that have befallen the club this season have had a very adverse effect on Mr Arthur Rowe’s health. The directors have therefore sent him away to recuperate until he is fit to resume office. Indeed by now he is well on his way to putting many thousands of miles between himself and club worries. We are sure the gentlemen of the press who were given evasive answers to their questions on Wednesday will forgive us and appreciate that it was only done to protect one of the greatest gentlemen in football.

  ‘Arthur was a worrier.’ Terry Long saw Palace from the Fourth Division into the First over the course of eighteen
years as a player with the club. ‘He liked you to play the right way, push and run all the time, and if that went bent there was nothing to fall back on. He didn’t have the crunchers or what have you in the team.’

  The man who took over from Rowe was his assistant, Dick Graham, a good goalkeeper for Palace until crippling back problems ended his career. ‘Dick . . .’ John Jackson was laughing as he flipped through the available descriptions in his mind ‘. . . was a different guy altogether.’

  ‘Well, Dick was a bit of an animal,’ is how his fellow keeper, Bill Glazier, put it, not without an undertone of admiration in his voice.

  With Palace struggling at the lower end of the table, Arthur Rowe’s elegant trelliswork was instantly dismantled in favour of a style more suited to surviving the brawny Burgesses of the Third Division. For the third time in as many clubs, my father suddenly found himself playing for a manager who hadn’t signed him – and, in this case, probably had no use for him.

  ‘Stewart was a player that Arthur Rowe liked because he was quick, he was sharp, he would give it and he would go,’ Terry Long told me. ‘Whereas Dick wanted lumpers and kickers and chasers and fighters, which Stewart wasn’t built for. Dick had us lump it up the front to people like Cliff Holton and Peter Burridge, people who could battle and fight and knock things down.’

  ‘I had to, I had to . . .’ Dick Graham’s voice wavered a little down the phone line as he justified himself forty-odd years after the fact. ‘I was convinced we had to play a more direct game. It didn’t go down very well.’ Not least with his own players. But Dick Graham was far more radical than his route-one approach suggests. His management philosophy was one of unsettling the opposition in any way possible, even if it meant unnerving his own team in the process, and his spell in charge at Crystal Palace was one of the strangest episodes in the club’s history and my father’s career.

  He would play centre-forwards in the heart of the defence and wingers at full-back. When players did line up in their familiar positions he switched their shirt numbers around to fool the opposition. He refused to name his team until minutes before the kick-off, even to the people who were in it. And anyone who questioned his methods could find themselves not just dropped but cut out of club life completely.

  ‘You never knew what was going to happen with Dick,’ says Terry Long. ‘You just sat there and he’d say, “So-and-so take a shirt, so-and-so take a shirt,” until he got eleven and the rest of us disappeared up into the stand to watch it.’

  In fact, Graham was using his first management job to test a long-held theory. ‘You see, I realised that players change a lot in the lower divisions. Say you’re in Division 3 and you play Swansea – the next season they could all be different players. So the easiest way to identify players was by their number. The centre-half would look and say, “Who’s number 9 – that’s who I’ve got to mark, he’s the centre-forward,” and I broke that down. My centre-forward would probably have number 5 on his back – and it worked. It did prove my little theory that players are used to following numbers, but I used to get slated.’

  In order to implement his system, Dick Graham had to change the way teams were printed in the match programme. Until then, the traditional way of presenting the line-ups had been in team formations that showed every player’s position. He had the Palace programme print the teams as a simple list. His refusal to name a team at all until he absolutely had to eventually brought about a change in Football League rules.

  ‘He and Jimmy Hill hated each other, they really did,’ said John Jackson. ‘We went to Coventry and he took twenty players away with us. It wasn’t a very big dressing room and he said, “No one leaves the dressing room until I say so – even those that aren’t playing.”

  ‘In those days an old boy used to come to the dressing room, knock on the door and ask for the team sheet, or the team changes from the programme. Dick opens the door and he says, “I haven’t got it quite ready yet, have you got theirs?” and the guy says no. He says, “Go and get theirs and then come back.” So this went on all the way through, right till kick-off. We went out on the pitch and some of the guys who hadn’t been picked were up in the stand sitting behind the press box. All the reporters were going, “Who’s the number 7, who’s the number 4?” – this was both teams – and at half-time they were still arguing about who was on the teams.’

  After the game there was uproar. The Football League instructed Palace to discipline their manager. But Graham knew the rule book better than the people who’d issued it. Once they’d acknowledged that there was no regulation obliging him to declare his side in good time, the League set about creating one: team sheets were to be handed to the referee no later than half an hour before kick-off. Graham, a classic stickler, observed the new rule to the minute. Plenty of others who’d never caused the management committee a moment’s bother were caught out by the change and got fined.

  Training at Palace was no less strange than match day and considerably tougher. Dick Graham had the team train in army boots. He’d seen Sonny Liston on television wearing them to skip rope. Players ran with rucksacks full of sand up and down the terracing until they collapsed. Their pulses were taken to check recovery rates and to weed out anyone who’d gone down early to avoid further punishment.

  George Petchey was one of the senior players and later became coach himself. ‘Dick didn’t have a training programme, he just did what he thought on the day. Consequently everyone was sitting round waiting to see what we were going to do, whether we needed boots, training shoes or whatever. The way he made me first-team coach was he came and said, “George, you’re taking them this morning.”’

  John Jackson: ‘He said, “I’m not going to do so much training from now on and I’m going to announce your new coach: it’s George Petchey.” And George is sitting there in his strip ready to train and he thought, bloody hell what’s going on, I’m now the coach.

  ‘George took us out and did the usual warm-up and Dick’s standing up there – you could step out of the offices into the stands and look out over the ground – and he’s watching the training and all of a sudden, like, he appears and says, “Oh, get to the back, George, and join in,” and George is no longer the coach. He did crazy things, that’s just how the man was.’

  Dissenters went into internal exile. Terry Long was one of them: ‘He made up his mind that there were players that didn’t like him. We were just not part of the regime and he thought we were anti, so he wouldn’t let us change in the dressing room with the rest of them, we had to go in the referee’s room. Now, the referee’s room wasn’t very big, just a bit of a bath and a very narrow room and five or six of us had to change in there.’

  In there with him was one of our neighbours, Roy Summersby, who lived in an identical club house to ours a few doors away and played golf with my father on their days off. As captain he’d gone round his teammates collecting signatures on a letter of complaint to present to the chairman. When the manager found out he was removed from the dressing room, then from the club altogether – shipped off to Portsmouth without ever playing another game for Palace.

  For the first four months of the Dick Graham regime my father was a bemused spectator. His recovery from cartilage surgery was slow, painful and – although he wouldn’t realise it until his playing career was over – never destined to be anything more than partial.

  ‘It was Radley-Smith,’ said my mother.

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Radley-Smith, he was a Harley Street specialist. It was him that made a mess of it, he left a bit in. That’s why Dad was still having trouble when he was at Everton.’

  I remembered the charity match knee-locks and the daily gamble of the lean forward to change channels on the television in the pre-remote control era. My dad, I discovered, had been operated on by a Brentford FC director. Eric Radley-Smith was a board member and consultant surgeon to the club. Half the repaired knee joints in the League south of Watford were his handiwork. But he
’d left a bit in. After the second, remedial operation a decade later, my father had been in plaster up to his thigh and couldn’t drive. He’d taken to his bike, pedalling one-legged with his left while holding the right out at an angle to avoid the rotation of the empty pedal on the other side.

  In the early months of 1963, though, he was straining to get back to what he believed would be full fitness before his first season with Palace became a complete washout. He needn’t have bothered. Regardless of when it was handed in, my father’s name didn’t appear on another Palace team sheet. Perhaps he’d ended up in the referee’s room.

  ‘Everybody fell out with Dick Graham at some stage, you had to,’ said John Jackson. ‘He used to hammer players, and it put players together because everybody got hammered. If he had a pop at someone after a game, we’d all be in the bath and someone would say, “Ah, take no fucking notice of him, he’s an idiot.” And it tended to pull players together – against the manager.’

  Whatever he was then, Dick Graham now is a kindly and courteous 82-year-old, in constant pain from his back, but nonetheless keen to tell his own version of the story that everybody else is telling about him. In Dick’s account he was a reluctant manager who’d been happy coaching and suffered from the stress of suddenly having to take over from Arthur Rowe. His approach had been born out of the situation Palace were in, not some brutal football philosophy. He’d been misunderstood.

  The Palace players I’d spoken to – the best part of a team’s worth – all seemed to have misunderstood him in pretty much the same way. The raw conflicts of their memories had been gently poached in his, and came out now as ‘disagreements’. But I wasn’t calling him up to cross-examine him. I just wanted to know what happened between him and my father. According to Dick Graham, nothing but football.