by Gary Imlach
Armed with the homecoming parade itinerary from the Nottingham Evening Post of Monday 4 May 1959, I parked in one of the grim side streets that attach themselves to train stations. As I got out of the car, I saw that what had looked like a junk shop as I’d driven past was actually a shabby football memorabilia place. It seemed like a good sign, which was more than could be said for the sign itself: ‘Programme World’ – the words were arched over a grimy globe – and underneath ‘Est. 1978, Anything To Do With Football, The Older The Better’. There were a couple of small bikes for sale outside – possibly the authentic childhood property of Nigel Clough or Garry Birtles. In the window was an assortment of videos and a Manchester United table lamp.
‘1959 Cup Final? No, duck. We might have one or two bits, but I wouldn’t know where to start.’ From the tone of the woman behind the counter I understood that starting was not something she undertook lightly, and certainly not for just anyone who walked in off the street. I headed to the station.
At the London Road railway bridge near the Eastcroft depot, children hung over the parapet in an attempt to get a glimpse of the team as their train pulled in from London.
That would have been my father’s first hint of the reception awaiting him and his teammates. The station looks now pretty much as it did then. The platforms have tented wooden roofs painted white like marquees for a summer fête. The structural support is all I’s and T’s and X’s of Derby steel in dark gloss. As they arrived they’d have passed under the boxed-in footbridge that connects the platforms, with its lattice of supporting struts, like a row of kisses, or a filled coupon.
Hundreds saw the team arrive at the Midland Station two minutes early – at 6.19 p.m. They were welcomed by stationmaster Mr Gordon Rogers wearing top hat and tails for this special occasion.
The tour began five minutes ahead of the 6.45 schedule. Small children on Queen’s Drive used the playing field swings to get their only possible view of the team.
I was really taken by the image of these children, hopelessly blocked by the backs of adults six deep at the roadside, then suddenly appearing above them at the apex of their swing for a split-second’s grandstand view, the parade going by as a sequence of snatched stills. But the Queen’s Drive swings were gone, along with the tall gabled boarding houses where people had hung out of the windows to see the players pass by. It’s an ugly dual carriageway now with little to see; a few light industrial units and a Porsche garage with a well-stocked forecourt, where the ’59 team’s modern-day equivalents might window-shop over the heads of the crowd.
Forest’s wasn’t the classic open-top bus – the Corporation hadn’t been able to find one – it was a single-decker coach with two cut-outs in the roof. My father was at the back, in the slipstream of the continuous cheer breaking ahead of him over the figurehead of Jack Burkitt who, in photographs at least, hadn’t let go of the Cup since he’d left the Royal Box.
In Carlton Road near the Corporation transport depot one supporter was watching the parade who had never seen the Forest team in person. He was 19-year-old Brian Cole, a cripple who was wheeled to his vantage point in an invalid carriage by friends two hours before the procession was due to pass.
He waited patiently for the heroes he had seen only on a television screen. ‘I should like to get Stewart Imlach’s autograph,’ he told our reporter, ‘but I don’t suppose the coach will stop.’
The transport depot where Brian Cole had sat waiting for my father is dwarfed by the National Ice Centre, and the traffic runs four lanes wide in the opposite direction to the route of the homecoming parade. I stood with my back to the posters advertising Atomic Kitten and Barney’s World and squinted at him across the road.
On a side street just off Carlton Road was the Euro Sports Bar – ‘All Major Live and Exclusive Events Shown on the Big Screen’. I imagined the customers nipping outside with their drinks for a quick look as the coach passed, then ducking back inside to check that it was really happening, on one of the three large projection screens. On this afternoon Manchester United and Southampton were being ignored by fewer than a dozen customers. A couple of hyperactive kids zoomed between the tables while their parents ate lunch surrounded by carrier bags. Saturday was shopping day.
On the walls was an interior designer’s sporting iconography: giant blow-ups of Ali landing a punch on Frazier, and the Grand National field clearing Becher’s. The football pictures weren’t as big but there were more of them: Pelé and Bobby Moore swapping shirts at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico; Maradona using the hand of God to beat Peter Shilton when the competition returned there sixteen years later. Domestic football was represented by Vinnie Jones and Paul Gascoigne, frozen together as scrotum-grabber and grabbee, long before Jones turned his thuggery into celebrity and Gazza’s talent for the game was undone by his lack of talent for life outside it.
Things could have been worse – a US theme with baseball uniforms and NBA vests in glass cases – still, it was a depressingly off-the-peg decor. We could have been anywhere. Nearer the bar, away from the prime wall-space and well down the scale of print sizes, there were nods towards history and geography: a fish-eye shot of the City Ground and a signed picture of the Brian Clough-era Forest team. Nothing from 1959. I headed back out to rejoin the parade route.
In the long Alfred Street men had climbed hoardings to get a vantage view of their heroes. Alfred Street primary school yard was full of children as though it was playtime during school hours.
One of the most impressive home-made banners was that of Miss Evelyn Cox of 100 Alfred Street South. A keen Forest supporter, she spent all day on Sunday embroidering the names of the whole team on a piece of white silk which read ‘Welcome To The Merry Men’.
The Coxes were long gone from Alfred Street. In fact, Alfred Street was only barely hanging on itself: concrete bollards and child-friendly pedestrian zones had split it into three non-contiguous stretches. Forest’s homecoming parade route had been town-planned out of existence. I pressed on, sticking as close to the line of yellow-highlighter on my A–Z as the dead ends and diversions allowed.
Banners with the paint still wet were being waved in the boulevards. Saucepans and frying pans were being beaten from the upstairs windows of many of the flats.
At the top of Mansfield Road three men played loud and long on four-foot hunting horns. A coach from Hull had been halted by the crowds and the occupants – all women – were cheering as loudly as anyone.
Alfred Street, in fact most of the route to this point, had been working class. On the climb up to Mansfield Road, the terraces disappeared and the houses, and the spaces between the houses, grew bigger. Now, these handsome villas would be well within the budget of Forest’s first-team personnel, even if they might be a little staid or too close to town; then, they would have been the preserve of committee members, or the manager.
From the top of the hill the coach, with a rear escort of fans on bikes and on foot, started a wide anticlockwise loop downwards, back into the city centre.
At the foot of Derby Road a 25-piece brass band swung onto the head of the procession. It was the Bestwood Black Diamonds, one of whose members, Norman Brown, had sat up into the early hours of the morning writing out the band parts to the Robin Hood theme tune from memory.
In Lenton Boulevard rosettes the size of dinner plates were worn, and schoolgirls who had never before used lipstick in their lives put some on to match the Forest rosettes on their dresses.
Several parents had dressed their children in South Sea Garlands of red and white tissue paper . . . cats with ribbons round their necks were clutched by their young owners. The team were greeted by a bevy of monster balloons painted with brilliant slogans by Mr W. Storey and waved by his wife and three little girls. ‘Actually I don’t really care to watch football myself,’ Mr Storey told a reporter. ‘I would rather just listen to it on the radio.’
This was a community event that involved the whole community, like a royal jubilee; it
wasn’t just about football. Two hundred thousand people had turned out to honour eleven of their own, men who would eventually be absorbed back into the crowd when their time was up. Not yet though. The future prison officers, publicans, social workers and groundsmen smiled and waved at a multiplied mirror image of themselves slipping by in second gear. Up at the front, the man behind the counter at the post office still held onto the cup.
The procession swept down Long Row into the square, the loudspeakers started to play Robin Hood and the crowd exploded into a roar of welcome that drowned out every other sound.
Policemen joined arms and tried to keep back the hordes of people as they surged forward towards the centre of the square. People leaped on the traffic island in Long Row to escape the crush.
My father would have recognised people on his way round. The crowd was huge, but Nottingham wasn’t. The bus had already made one unscheduled stop; my mother had told the driver where she’d be standing, holding Steve up to wave. By now she was inside the Council House, where there was going to be a civic dinner once the team arrived. Still, there would have been friends and neighbours shouting to him from the roadside, and the height of the coach kept the players close enough to the crowd to make out individual faces. Chic Thomson spotted his father, who was supposed to be back at home in Perth, standing on a bollard in Market Square.
I parked as close as I could and approached the square on foot. It’s the heart of the city’s shopping area; I must have gone there as a child with my mother. But it was years since I’d been back to Nottingham, and if I’d ever stood in front of the Council House I hadn’t connected it to the Cup Final.
It was a standard Saturday afternoon scene: shoppers, teenagers gathered in small groups, a couple of skateboarders. Nobody was paying me any attention, why should they be? Still, for some reason I felt self-conscious. Then I realised – and I’m not sure how I’d managed to keep the information from myself all the way round the route – that I was about to imitate my father, take up his position on the left of the twin line of players that I’d seen in the photographs and walk down into the sunken central plaza as he had to, the stereo roar from the massed banks of fans on either side.
While the Forest players stepped down from the coach, ambulance men and police officers carried fainting women and children to safety as they collapsed against the railings. The St John ambulance brigade with 28 members on duty in the square reported over 50 cases of people fainting in the crowd.
I took my hands out of my pockets. In the pictures he looks as though he’s marching . . . Christ, surely I wasn’t really about to do this.
Just then, I registered something out of the corner of my eye, on one of the cast-iron municipal rubbish bins dotted round the square. I seized on the distraction – anything to delay this ludicrous commemorative fifty-yard walk – and as I recognised the familiar crest, it struck me for the first time that Nottingham and its team shared a coat of arms. The team of my dad’s era that is; sometime in the 1970s the club adopted a cartoon Sherwood Forest oak as its logo. But the city’s had never changed and, now that I’d noticed it, I suddenly had the impression that the whole town centre had been branded by the ’59 Cup Final team, rather than the other way round. The bin, the bus shelters, the pavement in front of the Council House itself all bore the team crest: twin stags supporting a red shield with a walled castle above. Beneath it was the motto that they also shared, and which I’d never before stopped to read. My Latin isn’t up to much, but it didn’t need to be: Vivit Post Funera Virtus – Virtue Lives on after Death.
In the right frame of mind, you can find special meaning in the contents of a fortune cookie, or a Christmas cracker, but Virtue Lives on after Death? That wasn’t a civic motto, it was a family one, a tombstone inscription. From Cornwall to Caithness, there’s no county or city or borough council with anything remotely as personal. Take a look sometime: they’re all industry and prosperity and marching forward together. Virtue Lives on after Death. I felt slightly concussed.
In the distance I could hear a football crowd singing, getting closer. This was too much. Being sucker-punched by the street furniture was one thing; auditory hallucinations were beyond a joke. I turned towards the sound and saw a group of Notts County fans enter the square, loudly differentiating themselves from the rest of the Saturday afternoon crowd as they cut a path through the city centre on their way to Meadow Lane. They weren’t there to provide a soundtrack to my sentimental journey, they were giving the full treatment to that old terrace standby sung to the tune of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’: ‘We hate Nottingham Forest . . .’
There was no maintaining the portentous mood after that, thank God. I did the walk anyway – more of an amble in the end, nobody watching would have wondered what I was up to – and stood beneath the grand façade of the Council House, looking up at the balcony where my father stood with his teammates to greet the crowd.
By then the first few of the thousands began to drift away up the surrounding streets saying, ‘Well, I saw them.’
Postscript
In February 2006, following a campaign which attracted the support of leading figures in Scottish football, the SFA issued a posthumous cap to Stewart Imlach, and to more than eighty other Scotland internationals who had never received one.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to many people for their time and their help in the researching of this book:
Lossiemouth: Johnny Archibald, Joe Campbell, Robbie Campbell, Jimmy George, Sandy Reid, David Stewart, Donnie Stewart, May and Slater Scott, Colin Tough, Robert Weir
Bury: Les Bardsley, Peter Cullen, Tom Daniel, Cyril Fairclough, John Forrest, Enid Gleadall, Dave Hatton, Eric Massey, Richard and Eleanor Vipond
Derby: Bert Mozley, Terry Webster
Nottingham Forest: Eddie Baily, Les Bradd, Hazel Burkitt, Jimmy Linton, May McKinlay, Nottingham Forest Football Club, John Quigley, Karl Pridmore, Ken Stevenson, Brian Tansley, Geoff and Rita Thomas, Chic and Pat Thomson, Mike Tinkley, Jack Wheeler, Jeff and Nell Whitefoot
Luton: Seamus Dunne, Ken Hawkes, Albert McCann, Brendan McNally, Dave Pacey
Coventry: Dickie Dowsett, Lol Harvey, Jimmy Hill, Mick Kearns, Brian Nicholas
Crystal Palace: Bill Glazier, Dick Graham, John Jackson, Terry Long, George Petchey, Reverend Nigel Sands, David Selby, John Sewell, Roy Summersby, Jess Willard
Scotland: Craig Brown, Danny Burn, Eric Caldow, Doug Cowie, Bob Crampsey, Tommy Docherty, John Hewie, Jim Hossack, Graham Leggat, Dave Mackay, Robert McElroy, Jimmy Murray, Alex Parker, Eddie Turnbull, Brian and Janet Turner, Ian Wheeler, Bob Wilson, Fraser Wishart
Everton: Erlend Clouston, John Connolly, Jack Connor, Martin Dobson, Ronnie Goodlass, Darren Griffiths, Colin Harvey, Chris Hassell, Eric Harrison, Howard Kendall, Brian Labone, Jim McGregor, Dave Prentice, Ian Ross
PFA: Carol Brown, Gordon Taylor
BBC: Peter Dimmock, Chris Graham
Formby Artisans: Bill Caunt, Ken Jones
Historical detail: John Harding, Andy Ward
More than anyone else outside my family, Dennis Marshall was an inexhaustible source of information and advice. John Pawsey got the book off the ground. Tristan Jones got it into shape. Matt Rendell set the standard, then did his best to help me match it. Finally, thanks go to my brothers, Steve and Mike, and most of all, with love, to my mother, Joan.
For permission to reproduce previously published and unpublished material, the author and publishers make grateful acknowledgment to: Guardian Newspapers Limited (Don Davies’ Manchester United vs. Nottingham Forest match report © Guardian Newspapers Limited 1957); Nottingham Forest Football Club (Stewart Imlach’s contract); and the Nottingham Evening Post (May 1959 homecoming report). For permission to reproduce photographs the author and publishers make grateful acknowledgement to: Bolton Evening News (p.3), Bury Times (p.3), The Scottish Daily Express (p.4, p.5, p.6, p.7), Nottingham Post Group Ltd (p.8, p.12), Barratts/ALPHA/EMPICS (p.13), Daily Mail (p.7). Every effo
rt has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders, and the publishers will be pleased to correct any omissions brought to their notice at the earliest opportunity.
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Epub ISBN: 9781446483732
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