My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Prologue: Memorabilia

  1 Son of

  2 Leaving Lossiemouth

  3 Retain-and-transfer. Bury 1952–54

  4 Club House: Derby 1954–55

  5 Two Games against Manchester United

  6 World Cup

  7 Giant-killing

  8 Players’ Pool

  9 Watching the Cup Final on Television

  10 Man on a Train

  11 Forest, Luton, Coventry

  12 The End of the Maximum Wage

  13 A Telephone Conversation with Jimmy Hill

  14 Crystal Palace

  15 Coaching

  16 Capped

  17 Final Score

  Epilogue: Homecoming

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Gary Imlach started out writing for national newspapers at the age of eighteen. He has worked for the BBC, ITN, CNN and Channel 4, and he presents ITV’s coverage of the Tour de France and American Football. He is also the producer of several documentaries. This is his first book.

  MY FATHER AND OTHER WORKING-CLASS FOOTBALL HEROES

  Gary Imlach

  Prologue:

  Memorabilia

  WHAT WERE MY CHANCES of finding him in here?

  The Galleon Suite of the Royal National Hotel in Bloomsbury didn’t look immediately promising – perhaps a hundred trestle tables overflowing with the results of a hopelessly imprecise search-engine query: football, the past.

  The Silver Jubilee edition of the Giant New Year Programme Fair was being held on what would have been my father’s seventieth birthday. It had seemed like too much of a coincidence to pass up when I’d seen it advertised, an apt way to mark the milestone that death had deprived him of by a few months. Now, though, I was feeling an almost pre-match tightening of the stomach. I wanted to reassure myself that he was here, alive and well in posterity among the community of the collected.

  It was a large and catholic community: programmes; pennants; Ronaldo phonecards; a picture-disc single of Kevin Keegan singing in German; Eusebio posed in a series of photographs with celebrities from around the world; fourteen home-made Arsenal scrapbooks covered in brown paper.

  And here were the collectors’ cards, telling their head-shot history of the game as sold and swapped down the decades. Cigarette stars of the ’20s in their arms-folded, portrait-studio formality, the hand-coloured post-war heroes of The Wizard and The Hotspur, the soft perms of the ’70s. Malcolm Macdonald and Trevor Francis were there in 3-D, their skin tones strangely rendered, as though some period polyester had infiltrated the photographic reproduction process.

  There was a smell – damp garages and back bedrooms – not all of which could be accounted for by the merchandise. The dealers and their customers, interchangeable for the most part, had the look of men banished from the parts of their homes accessible to visitors. I felt like an impostor at a secret-society reunion, lacking the necessary passwords and arcane knowledge. At the stalls enquiries were made less out of a genuine intention to buy than the urge to display a greater familiarity with the item on offer than the person selling it. Historical facts were vouchsafed. There was banter of a sort.

  ‘Back again, eh?’

  ‘’77–78, I’m sure of it . . .’

  ‘No I’m telling you, ’78–79.’

  ‘Are you doing Potters Bar on the 20th?’

  These were men (there was the occasional wife or glum daughter) bonding over a century of soccer history. And progressively happier the further back into it they went.

  ‘We used to get these European Cup Final programmes in the ’70s and you’d struggle to get pennies for them,’ one stallholder reminisced.

  ‘Yeah, no one was interested then.’

  ‘Remember when it was still fun to go to the games, before we got promoted?’

  In front of one stall, a photographer was posing an old boy with his purchase.

  ‘And I’ll be in Four by Two magazine, will I?’

  ‘That’s right mate, Four Four Two.’

  The magazine itself had already passed into the realms of the collectible: one stall was selling back copies from 1999. Another customer was explaining his particular interests to a Belgian dealer who had a selection of postcards featuring the football grounds of Europe: ‘I like the aerial views.’ Then, fearing incomprehension, ‘VIEW AH-RIEL,’ pronounced in the Continental manner.

  The past here seemed to be not so much another country as a garden shed in the suburbs. Surely this wasn’t a love of football, just nostalgia and a love of collecting, which chance or childhood might as easily have pointed towards model trains or Northern Soul. I felt the need for some fresh air. But first I had to find my dad.

  It wasn’t as though I’d never seen any evidence of his career. There was a trunk full of it in my parents’ attic, stuff that nothing on display in the Galleon Suite could touch. We used to haul it down regularly when we were kids. Later, less often, on return trips home. There was his Scotland shirt from the 1958 World Cup and his Nottingham Forest FA Cup Final kit from the following year: red V-neck cotton shirt with white trim; white silk shorts with red piping; red-topped white socks; white tracksuit for the walk out of the tunnel, with a zip pocket at the breast embroidered in red – NFFC Wembley 1959. There was his winner’s medal.

  In the year before my father died, someone had sent him a cutting from the Nottingham Evening Post. One of his teammates was selling his medal anonymously at auction, embarrassed perhaps to share the circumstances that had brought about the sale. Another item from the trunk in the attic held a possible explanation. The Forest Cup Story was the official souvenir magazine published in the weeks before the final, and the centre pages were given over to profiles of the players. Along with the usual litany of family details, hobbies and favourite food, each man was asked about his post-football career plans. Chic Thomson, Goalkeeper: probably a return to the dry-cleaning business, building machines; Bob McKinlay, Centre-Half: training to be a motor mechanic; Tommy Wilson, Centre-Forward: to become a shopkeeper; Stewart Imlach, Outside-Left: a return to the joinery business.

  My father and his teammates came from the same stock as those who packed the terraces every week to watch them. And they knew they were heading back into that community when their playing days were over – perhaps more accurately, had never really left. Any of them with foresight enough to see the ephemera of their jobs as the venerated relics of a future global cult could, by now, have been making a killing on the memorabilia circuit.

  As I walked around I recognised a few items from home. The 1959 FA Cup Final programme was priced at £25, the 1958 World Cup Tournament brochure £350. There were commemorative postcards featuring each of the Swedish host cities, the kind of thing my father might have sent home: ‘Hello Love, Just a few lines . . .’ There were first-day covers too. I bought one for my mother. It was all circumstantial evidence, though. I was after the man himself.

  I finally found him among the collectors’ cards, part of a series by a German company. ‘Im Londoner Wembley-Stadion ein volles Haus (100,000 Zuschauer!),’ read the caption on the back. ‘. . . konnte die Mannschaft von Nottingham Forest den Pokal durch einen 2:1-Erfolg über Luton Town erringen.’

  On the front, the hand-tinted figure of my father stands in profile in the Royal Box. Ahead of him Jack Burkitt, the Forest Captain, is holding aloft an unfeasibly yellow FA Cup for the grinning approval of the Duke of Edinburgh. Behind him his teammates are lining up to do what my father wi
ll do in just a few seconds: shake the gloved hand of a youthful Queen Elizabeth and accept his medal.

  What had that moment been like for him? Why didn’t I know? Why had I never asked him this simple question? In fact, how had I managed to let him die without properly gathering together the details of his career, his life story?

  It should have been there that the reproaches rained down on me, standing in a room full of the packaged past. The realisation that there was probably a Forest fanatic at one of the stalls, some Scottish football completist, one of the milling, trainspotting crowd I’d been so dismissive of, who had a better grasp of my father’s career than I did. Thoughts of how I’d relied on the items in the attic instead of sitting down and talking to him. How the edited highlights and their supporting props had come to stand for his whole career.

  But as I stood there holding his picture in its protective plastic sleeve none of this occurred to me. All I was thinking about was not subjecting the old man to the indignity of haggling for him. I paid the asking price and left.

  Chapter One

  Son of

  MAY 2ND 1959 TO MARCH 12TH 1960. Ten months, however much you squint at the calendar. It was close, but no Man of the Match cigar. Apparently I couldn’t trace my origins back to a room at the Savoy, hadn’t been the result of a joyous, post-cup final victory celebration. Almost, but not quite.

  Around the age of twelve or thirteen, once I was old enough to make the tentative connection, I’d tried stretching the facts, cooking the biology books. Discovering that the human gestation period was forty weeks, not thirty-six, had been a breakthrough; the realisation that lunar months weren’t their calendar equivalents a deflating setback.

  I was born on a Saturday. There was a minute’s silence at the City Ground before kick-off. A few hours after I’d arrived the Forest President George Cottee had definitively departed, buried in a service thoughtfully arranged to give the mourners plenty of time to be in their seats before three o’clock. During Sports Parade on the BBC’s Light Programme, Eamonn Andrews gave both events a mention in his build-up to the afternoon’s football coverage. By the time the news had ricocheted through kitchen windows, over garden fences and off the houses, untouched by telephone wires, of the estate in Bury where my mother’s parents lived, they were being congratulated on the arrival of their first granddaughter. Football, media, misrepresentation; here was a child destined to grow up into a sloppy sports journalist. Forest, playing in black armbands, went down 3–1 at home to Spurs.

  The Cup Final connection was too much of a good story to let go of completely, though, the idea that I could retrospectively place myself into the defining day of my family football history in a sort of embryo-cameo role. Perhaps it was part of trying to compensate for the fact that I’d never really seen my dad play, or had the chance to play with him. The only exceptions were the charity matches he regularly appeared in after he retired.

  For a young boy just coming to terms with the game these could be confusing affairs to get a handle on. Were they serious, or just Sunday kickabouts? (Both.) Wasn’t it against the rules for a player to change sides after ten minutes? (Depends how famous you are.) Who was that out-of-breath fat man? (Difficult to say: could be an ex-international centre-half who’d since opened a pub, or one of the organisers intent on kicking a big name before high blood pressure forced him off at half-time.)

  My father enjoyed these matches enormously, but in earnest. I remember him being astonishingly fast; he seemed to be competing in a different kind of game altogether from some of the more languid ex-players, many of them quite a bit younger than he was. One thing puzzled me: as he ran his jaw seemed to be yanked open with every stride, as if it were invisibly attached to one knee. It was almost as though the standard mechanics of air intake couldn’t provide the oxygen demanded by his sheer relentlessness, and so he had to scoop up extra as he went, snapping down the wing like a crocodile. It was fascinating to watch, and must have mesmerised the odd full-back in his playing days. He himself was unaware of it and completely uncurious when it was pointed out. A shrugged ‘Oh?’ was all my mother got out of him on the subject, and we never discovered either the cause or the effect. If it was part of his internal combustion process it worked. Before his joints stopped him running altogether, he stayed fast and fit through middle age. In fact, with the cruel exception of his last two years when disease took the matter out of his hands, he cut exactly the same figure through decades of family and newspaper photographs: short, trim, feet at ten-to-two, carrying no more excess weight than a ballet dancer.

  Steve, my older brother, would take his boots and sometimes got a game, or part of a game, in place of one of the advertised ex-pros who was still at home nursing a hangover, or had forgotten the vague commitment he’d made months ago in some players’ lounge or other after a match. Almost as often, Steve got on as a substitute when my father’s knee locked and he had to be helped off grimacing. We were used to the sight. It happened regularly, although less heroically, at home when he bent forward to switch channels on the television – a legacy of the incomplete cartilage surgery which had signalled the slow end of his playing career in the early ’60s.

  On the stretch of living-room wall between the TV set in the corner and my father’s armchair next to the music-centre hung his Cup Final mementoes, three framed items in flying-duck formation. There was a photograph of him shaking hands with the Duke of Edinburgh before the game – ‘Another bloody Scot!’ – one of him receiving his medal from the Queen afterwards, and between them the medal itself, set into a square of dark velvet.

  They’d been a decorative constant against the changing wallpaper of half a dozen club houses since 1959: Nottingham, Luton, Coventry, Crystal Palace, back to Nottingham and on to Everton. These last two stops were coaching jobs, first as assistant manager at Notts County under Billy Gray, his old inside-left from the Forest cup-winning team, then at Harry Catterick’s School of Science, in charge of the youth sides to begin with, then working his way up to first-team coach.

  Later, when he moved on to Blackpool and Bury, the photos and the medal stayed put, my mother finally having tired of packing them and the rest of the contents of the house every couple of years and recreating family life in a new town, with new neighbours, new schools and the long list of responsibilities that fell to her because my father was busy fulfilling his responsibilities to football.

  Eventually the cup final display, in its unfashionable diagonal, had to come down. My father had been pictured in the papers standing in front of it, and there’d been a couple of recent break-ins along the street. The medal went in a drawer in my parents’ bedroom with his penknives and golf tees, the pictures rejoined the rest of his career in the attic. By then my brothers and I were busy with the gruelling work of being sullen teenagers, and years of familiarity had made the three small squares and their contents almost invisible. Still, their sudden disappearance from the fixtures and fittings of family life registered as a loss.

  For a nine-year-old newly arrived on Merseyside in 1969, though, there was more kudos in having a current member of the Everton coaching staff for a father than a cup-winner from before I was born. Formby is a small coastal town on the way north to Southport, still a popular spot for Everton and Liverpool players who don’t fancy the posher parts of the Wirral. We’d been parachuted in that summer as marked men. Our footballing heritage was very much a sidebar to the big news that we were Goodison insiders; something our school friends could go home and ask their dads about, if they remembered.

  Besides, our father’s achievements were all safely in the record books. We took pride in them, but there was nothing we could do to influence the outcome of games already played and trophies long since held aloft on open-top buses. The ’69–70 League Championship, though, was up for grabs, and we knew we had to do our bit. The same clothes every week, the scarf on the same way, the standing and shouting of exactly the same phrase of exhortation to the defence every
time Everton conceded a corner: who knew what variables might affect the result one way or the other? Best to cover all the bases just to be on the safe side.

  This was part of the responsibility that came with what, across the playground, must have looked like tremendous privilege. At school the only other football offspring our age were the children of the Liverpool centre-half Ron Yeats, and they were girls. So, alone among our peers, we had the secret knowledge. We knew what cars they drove, what their training numbers were, what they ate before matches. When Alan Ball signed a contract with a Danish company no one had heard of and became the first English player to wear white boots it was big news – all our mates were talking about it. But we knew something else: that Alan Ball didn’t actually like his new boots and rarely wore them; that his highly visible Hummel were, in fact, usually a pair of Adidas 2000 with a fresh coat of Dulux. We’d seen them. Our dad had painted them. We had a pair of his stiff and creaky Hummel rejects hanging up in the garage for any friends who didn’t believe us.

  In retrospect, half a dozen seasons edit down into one endlessly looping football-themed episode of Jim’ll Fix It. Here we are at the training ground, matching famous faces to their flash cars; struggling to respond to the sudden, unexpected attention of an England international saying hello, making a joke we don’t understand; then playing on the same five-a-side pitch the first-team squad has just vacated, kicking the same balls, dyed orange by the all-weather surface.

  And here’s the match-day sequence of us arriving at Goodison Park: pulling past the onlookers into the officials-only car park; out of the car, past the autograph hunters, across the pitch and down the tunnel to the players’ lounge for sandwiches and Sam Leitch’s Football Preview; at the table next to us, Ball, Harvey and Kendall, the finest trio of midfield wives in the country; players themselves suddenly appearing, worryingly close to kick-off, and switching channels to check the racing results; impossibly famous faces, made more unreal by their framing of collars and kipper ties, instead of the crew-necked royal blue in which they’d soon be emerging from the tunnel to the protestant-marching-beat-in-mufti of the Z-Cars theme. Here’s Freddie Starr, wild-eyed and panting from the warm-up room, lifting his shirt and sweat-printing the shape of his back onto the blue leatherette of every chair in the lounge.