My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes

by Gary Imlach

  Whether it was due to his age, a growing concern for what my mother wanted, unwillingness to disrupt our education, or a combination of the lot, home life began to get the upper hand over football. Starting with his departure from Everton, he turned down a number of jobs that would have meant another move: national coach of British Guyana (vetoed by my mother before any of us could get excited); assistant to Peter Taylor at Brighton (entertained, but eventually declined).

  The job we all would have moved for was a position on the coaching staff at Nottingham Forest. Brian Clough called, my father drove down, we held our breath, and he drove back. Clough had kept him waiting, like he kept everybody waiting, like he would have kept a delegation of Pelé, Puskas and Stan Matthews waiting. My father had sat and twitched and jingled his change, and eventually asked Clough’s secretary where he was. She made the mistake of telling the truth, which was that he was playing squash, and my father got in his car and came home. Clough called the next day to tell him the job was his anyway. My father told him to stuff it and hung up. Just as well for both of them, really. They’d managed to telescope into twenty-four hours a relationship that would have ended exactly the same way two weeks or two months later.

  That was the end of his chance to return to the ground where he’d played his best football and finish his career helping the next Forest generation play theirs. Instead, his final coaching job completed a different circle, one that led back to his first club. Some of the Blackpool players had recommended him to Dave Hatton, an ex-Blackpool player himself, who needed a veteran coach to help him in his first job as player-manager at Bury.

  When my father arrived back at Gigg Lane in the summer of 1978, twenty-four years after he’d left, Les Hart was still there. He had already been there fourteen years when my father first signed in 1952. Back then Hart was the Bury centre-half. Since, he’d been trainer, physio, then manager for a season, before retreating back into the brickwork. Les Hart saw my father leave the second time; the players presented him with a retirement watch and silver salver in March 1980, a few months after manager and coach had both been dismissed.

  Bury, at least, sacked my dad over poor results, although for some reason it went down in the boardroom minutes as a cost-cutting measure. To begin with, he and Dave Hatton had enjoyed solid support from the Bury chairman, Bill Allen. But Allen collapsed and died of a heart attack shovelling snow at the ground during the winter of their first season in charge. His successor, Ron Clarke, was more abrasive. In the directors’ lounge after one poor performance he asked my father whether the team ever actually practised taking corners during training. The reply was a short lecture on the respective job descriptions of club chairman and team coach, with emphasis on how little overlap there was between them.

  My father had been a clever player, and as a coach he was a good tactician. If things were going badly out on the field he could see the underlying reasons and knew what adjustments to make. But in life he lacked guile. He didn’t have the talent or the patience for office politics, he couldn’t compromise. Off the field his only tactic was being right, and when that failed he had nothing to fall back on. At Bury there was no arguing with the league table: nineteenth in his only full season there; six points from eleven games to start the next.

  My father was forty-seven when he left football for good, and except for trips to watch Mike play, I don’t think he went to another professional match. He followed the game in general and on television, but individual matches were things he’d only ever attended in order to contribute. Before finishing up as the groundsman at Littlewoods, he took an uninspiring job with a video-hire company and dabbled in the post-game career choice he’d declared all those years previously in the Forest Cup Final souvenir magazine: ‘a return to the joinery business’. Some of his work is still visible around Formby – garden gates, carports, front doors – the details logged in the back of one of his half-filled training books.

  In that pre-cup final questionnaire only two of the Forest team had said they planned to stay in the game once they’d finished playing: Jack Burkitt, although he was hedging his bets by ‘learning the lace trade’; and Billy Gray, who wanted to become ‘an FA coach or a school sports master’. In fact, the majority of them stayed in the game as long as they could, at whatever level they could. Only three of the side – Bill Whare, Jeff Whitefoot and Chic Thomson – walked away from football when they finished playing, and two of those walked into pubs, which perhaps doesn’t fully count as leaving. Chic became a social worker.

  Jack Burkitt coached at Forest then took the manager’s job at Notts County. He was trainer at Derby County when Brian Clough took them into the First Division, then left the game to run a post office. Billy Gray managed Millwall, Brentford and Notts County, where he employed my father, and eventually returned to Meadow Lane to end his career as head groundsman.

  Bob McKinlay (training to be a motor mechanic) was with my father and Jack Burkitt on the same FA Preliminary Coaching Course at Lilleshall in 1961, along with the likes of Noel Cantwell and Maurice Setters from Manchester United and West Brom’s Bobby Robson. Bob’s coaching career at the City Ground lasted only a few months, just long enough to be sacked when Dave Mackay took over as manager. He spent the rest of his career in the prison service.

  Tommy Wilson (to become a shopkeeper) managed Brentwood, then became a children’s group leader. Joe McDonald (sewing machine mechanic) was at Yeovil Town before leaving the game and the country for Australia. Johnny Quigley (running his own business) left the country for a spell but stayed in the game, coaching in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Roy Dwight (the confectionery business) had five years in charge of Tooting & Mitcham. He finally led them to the FA Cup 3rd Round giant-kill that Forest had denied them: in 1976 they beat Swindon to register their best ever cup result. He ended up as the manager of Crayford Dog Track in Kent, fielding occasional press enquiries about his more famous piano-playing cousin, Reg Dwight.

  The most frequent reminder of their playing days for the survivors of that team now is the steady trickle of requests they get from memorabilia collectors or, more likely, memorabilia traders. The men I went to see had all been visited by the same one, or had received sheaves of photos through the post from him to be signed and sent back. ‘God, this guy came round – I must have been here three hours signing autographs. It was the same the other night in the pub, some fella – “Are you Johnny Quigley, d’you mind if I send some photos and can you autograph them?” I said yeah.’

  If Chic Thomson had the best memory of anyone my father played with, Johnny Quigley had the fiercest. He had made his debut in the crucible of Forest’s 1957 game against Manchester United, supplying the cross for my father to score, and the intensity of that day never seemed to have left him. I’d been warned that he was in poor health, had recently suffered a stroke; there was speculation about how well he was managing to make a living, or whether he was making one at all. But we talked about football, and he spoke as though the adrenalin was still pumping through him from a game that had finished half an hour ago. His accent was as broad as my father’s, a proud Glaswegian, and the opinions came in staccato bursts.

  ‘Some runner your old man, I’ll tell you – he could fly, quickest thing I’ve seen . . .

  ‘The guy Baily – he was a genius, to me. And he could put the ball where your dad wanted it . . .

  ‘Joe McDonald, smoked all the time. Smoked under the shower, man, and never got the cigarette wet. Unbelievable. Good player, mind . . .

  ‘People think Cloughie made Forest a footballing team – Forest were a football-playing team long before Cloughie was invented . . .

  ‘It’s not the same passion. The crowd’s got the passion, but years ago the players used to have the passion as well. We was a part of the fans . . .’

  He was equally forceful on the subject of players’ earnings, the current state of the Scotland team and the regular attentions of the autograph merchants – although he always obli
ged them. ‘It’s not as if you sign one or two, there’s twenty, and the guy says, “Oh, this is the last three.” It’s not the last one, mind, it’s the last three. Some of the photographs he had, I’ve never seen them before.’

  Johnny Quigley had precisely two photographs from his days as a player. Both of them hung in the hall of his small, tidy flat, the only signs that the place had a long-term tenant. ‘There was an old lady, she came and said, “You were my favourite player, here’s a photograph for you,” and she gave me a photograph – Cynthia, she was called. I used to have an album, but when I parted with my missus she gave it to my lad Damon. I’ve never seen anything since. Photos of when I played with the juniors in Scotland before I came down here, but I don’t know what he’s done with it.’

  A lot of the Forest players hadn’t bothered to keep the Cup Final newspapers because the club had promised each of them a scrapbook. But the scrapbooks never arrived, and now they get knocks on the door and large manila envelopes through the post from people who own pictures of them that they don’t own themselves. And they sign them and send them back because that’s the courteous thing to do, and because it’s what they’ve always done, and because, I suppose, they’re being remembered, even if it is by someone who’s trying to make money off them. I wondered whether the men with the manila envelopes ever asked to see his medal.

  ‘I don’t know where mine is. When I left my missus, I left her with everything. I think my lad’s got the tracksuit and the jersey and that.’

  The other surviving members of the Forest team I talked to didn’t know where theirs were either: they’d been sold. I was shocked. I knew Bob McKinlay had sold his medal before he died, reportedly back to the club, although there was no medal on display at the City Ground and no record of them having one. Then there was the anonymous player in the Evening Post story that someone had cut out and sent to my father not long before he died. But I had thought they were the exceptions. In fact, there were no medals to see on my trip to Nottingham.

  Chic Thomson was happy he’d offloaded his. He and a few of his old Chelsea teammates had been approached about selling their 1954–55 League Championship medals at auction, and he’d decided to get rid of everything in one go. ‘I had two boys, three medals with Clyde, army medal, league medal, cup medal. Who gets what? I didn’t want to cause any trouble. I talked it over with Pat and chatted with the boys and said whatever we get we’ll split it down the middle and you can share it out.’

  He had sat at Bonhams and watched it all go. His cup final jersey, nicely framed, fetched £1,000. Someone paid £600 for his tracksuit top. The cup winner’s medal went for £3,500, no match for a league title at a big, metropolitan showbiz club: his Chelsea medal topped out at £13,000. By the time it was all added up, the material evidence of Chic’s career came in at a couple of hundred pounds under £20,000.

  ‘Pat had to go out because it was getting crazy. But I said to the lads, “I would have liked to have had a lump sum like that when I was forty-five.” It cleared the air. I was always a bit bothered about what we’d do with them.’

  I admired Chic’s elegant clean sweep of his football history, but it saddened me too. He hadn’t done it out of necessity, or for himself; it had been his choice, to provide for his sons. But there isn’t the son of a player with even half Chic’s achievements who would need that provision today. And the archaeology of his career, a single fabulous trove that held his whole story intact, was now scattered among strangers. My reaction was partly selfish, too, because his story was part of my father’s, just as my father’s was part of his.

  After its fifteen years or so in the daylight hanging on the living-room wall, my father’s medal had been back in its leather box long enough to form a greenish ellipse on the silk lining over the address of Fattorini & Sons, the Bradford gold and silversmiths who also made the FA Cup. I can’t think of circumstances that would have forced him to sell it. That is to say I can, but they fall into the emergency-lifesaving-operation-abroad-for-my-mother category. He’d have scuffled through an impecunious old age, if it had ever come to that, without the thought once entering his head.

  Johnny Quigley didn’t even have his history to sell if he’d wanted to. He followed me to the door, to drive home one last point.

  ‘It’s good to speak to a friend of mine’s son,’ he said, and gripped me by the hand.

  ‘It’s good to speak to you, John.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Capped

  INCLUDED IN THE SQUAD, picked for the first team, capped by your country. The escalating terminology of recognition in football culminates literally at the top. Footballers don’t play for their national sides, they’re capped. Caps are part of the language, the elite currency of the game. They’re the final, bluff-calling card in any dressing-room dispute: ‘Oh yeah? – how many caps have you got, then?’

  And as every schoolboy learns in his introduction to the fabulous world of football cliché, the only way to collect them is one game at a time. That’s the rule: a cap for every international appearance until the day the photographers arrive and ask you to spread them out on the living-room carpet, or in the back garden.

  But my father didn’t have one. It was like a trick question, a pub-quiz tiebreaker: ‘How is it possible to play for your country without getting capped?’ My father knew the answer: he was the answer. The only time I saw him court recognition of any kind was in his pursuit of a cap. He’d represented his country – at a World Cup no less – yet never received one. Now they were dishing them out to players with estuary English accents and suspiciously grafted-looking branches on their family trees. Players could pick up a cap for coming on ten minutes from the end of a pointless friendly. How come they all had caps and he didn’t? The explanation was depressingly straightforward. At the time he played, the Scottish FA – stereotypically thrifty in a way my father might have approved of in principle – awarded caps only for games against the other home countries.

  In fact, to be strictly accurate, they economised even on this basic token of recognition, handing out just one cap per player per year for all home internationals. My father’s World Cup teammate John Hewie appeared nineteen times for his country, including six home internationals in 1956, ’57 and ’59. He got three caps. ‘Yes, they’d give you one cap at the end of the season, and on it in gold braid you would have S v E, S v I, S v W for whichever countries you’d played against. The English and all the others got a cap for every game, so they were a bit stingy that way. They were totally different from the way the other countries ran themselves.’

  ‘I played five times, got one cap,’ said Jimmy Murray. ‘In fact, we never really got anything from the SFA over in Sweden. The Swedes gave us a piece of glass, a vase, and we had flannels and a blazer with the SFA badge on it, but that was it – nothing really to indicate that we’d ever been in Sweden.’

  Looking at the half-bleached-out VHS of Scotland’s final group game against France, it dawned on me that my father, contrary to what I’d always thought, hadn’t brought home his shirt. The one upstairs in the attic had his usual number 11 on it. But during the World Cup players wore shirts bearing their squad numbers, and despite the poor quality of the recording the 21 on his back was clearly visible. Getting a shirt, it turned out, was more difficult in many ways than getting a cap. The latter were only rationed, the former completely forbidden. Mentioning it to members of the 1958 squad was lighting the blue touchpaper of 45-year-old grievances.

  ‘You never got a shirt,’ Alex Parker told me. ‘Well I got one – against Hungary when we played them in Hungary. It was my first tour with Scotland and I hadn’t got a jersey. I mentioned it to Tommy Doc who was my roommate. He says, “Don’t worry Nosey” – he called me Nosey – “leave it to me,” and he nicked one. It was a white one, funnily enough, and that was me.’

  When Scotland lost 4–0 to England at Hampden in the April before the World Cup, Jimmy Murray swapped his shirt with Bill Slater, th
e England wing-half, at the final whistle. ‘When I got back into the dressing room Dawson Walker says, “Where’s your jersey?” I says I’ve swapped it with Slater, he says, “Well you’d better go and get it then.” So I had to go into the England dressing room – you can imagine how I’m feeling, getting whacked 4–0 – and ask him for my jersey back. It was a crazy situation. I got a white one in the end, you just had to stick it in your bag and hope you got away with it.’

  My father had obviously done pretty well in managing to spirit away a blue one. I reckon it had to have been from the friendly against Hungary at Hampden Park, before the World Cup squad numbers were handed out and while he could still escape the Scotland party and head home with it.

  So the shirt had been lying there all these years, preserving its navy blue in the dark of an attic trunk and declining to correct my assumption, maybe my decision, that it was a souvenir of my dad’s World Cup. The truth was more interesting, and the story of how he’d managed to smuggle it out of Hampden would only have magnified its value. The shirt was one more exhibit that hadn’t been called into evidence in time. Type another question in the unasked column and press the return key.

  But we had known about the cap. The cap, at least, had been talked over while he was still alive, although it had taken the prospect of death to reveal its importance to him. It should really have been a moot point. Going back through the records, I could see that from the World Cup trials on 3 February 1958, until Scotland’s elimination in the final group game against France on 15 June, my father had played in every Scotland game for which he’d been fit. Every game except the home international against England in April. If he’d played in that game he would have had his lone cap, tasselled and braided with the gold S v E, to back up his explanation to baffled visitors as to why he didn’t have any others. I can’t find any definitive explanation as to why he didn’t play in that game. It may have been because he’d cried off the previous Scotland fixture – the last of the trial matches – with an injury. Or perhaps the selectors, having already decided to take him to Sweden, wanted to use the opportunity to take a look at Partick Thistle’s Tommy Ewing, who was doing his National Service and hadn’t been available for the trials. The following year, of course, there’d be the press outcry about him being passed over for the same fixture, while he was playing so well in Forest’s cup run.