by Gordon Banks
This being a time of National Service, the show relied heavily on mothers requesting a current hit – usually one of sugary sentimentality sung by the likes of Dickie Valentine, Eddie Fisher, Vera Lynn and Alma Cogan – for their squaddie son. These requests usually ended with a plaintive message, along the lines of, ‘1954 is not too far away’ – the given year usually being two years hence, the duration of National Service. The addresses of the squaddies were always announced as care of their British Forces overseas posting number: BFPO 271 Cologne, BFPO 32 Cyprus, BFPO 453 Gibraltar – code words for faraway places that were a mystery to me, other than that it was where soldiers lived.
This weekly reminder to the nation that Britain still had a military presence abroad, served to maintain the misplaced notion that we were still a major power in world affairs when, in truth, the days of the Empire were long gone.
BBC radio, though changing, still managed to convey a sense of a past in which class distinction was prevalent. This was exemplified by Family Favourites, the presenters of which had plummy voices that set them apart from me and everyone I knew. Presenters such as Cliff Michelmore, Muriel Young and Ian Fenner, while sounding sincere and never patronizing, were indicative of a system that didn’t allow anyone from Tinsley, Attercliffe or any other area I was familiar with, to work as radio presenters. While some people may have been broadening their horizons through military postings abroad or emigration, the expectations of the Sheffield folk I knew still never extended beyond the steelworks or the pit. No one ever told us there was a world out there waiting for us too.
Family Favourites was followed by an hour of comedy, which I loved. First was the Billy Cotton Band Show, a mixture of amiable humour from Alan Breeze and Bill Herbert, novelty songs and danceband tunes from the veteran Billy Cotton Band. Billy always began his introduction to the programme by announcing the week’s guests, such as pianist Russ Conway, then, more often than not, making some comic reference to a football match of the previous day. This was especially the case if England had played Scotland, as one of his resident singers was Kathy Kay, a Scottish lass with whom Billy would indulge in playful teasing if England had been triumphant. Billy’s opening lines would then be interrupted by a heavenly voice shouting, ‘Hey, you down there with the glasses… get orn wi’ it.’ Billy’s response would be his catchphrase, ‘Wakey! Wakey!’ bellowed at the top of his voice, at which his band sprang into action by playing his signature tune, ‘Somebody Stole My Girl’, popularly known as ‘Tan, tanner, rah, rah, rah…’
The Billy Cotton Band Show’s mix of variety show humour, from Alan Breeze and Bill Herbert, and well sung ballads was universally popular. The band members, seemed to me to be older than God; many of them, I was later to discover, were indeed getting on in years and had been with Billy since he first started his band back in 1925. The show always ended with a spectacular instrumental version of something like ‘The Dambusters March’ or ‘On the Quarter Deck’. Even in variety shows we were constantly reminded of Britain’s military past. In so doing, the myth of Britain still being a superpower was perpetuated in the minds of the people.
Billy’s show was followed by another half hour of comedy. Series came and went over the years, but one of my favourites was the Clitheroe Kid. Jimmy Clitheroe was a man whose height was no more than that of a small boy, which was the character he played in the show. With his piping, precocious voice, Jimmy was full of mischief and a constant source of distress for his grandfather, played by Peter Sinclair, his sister (Diana Day) with whom he had a love-hate relationship, her goonish boyfriend, Alfie Hall (Danny Ross) and his long-suffering mother, played by Mollie Sugden. I loved listening to Jimmy’s escapades and antics, and the fact that they took place in a working-class family, in the north of England, helped me to identify much more with this character than the Just William books about a mischievous prep-school boy from the Home Counties.
People were nowhere near as sophisticated as nowadays and this was especially true where entertainment was concerned. Our gullibility in believing a man in his forties was actually a 13-year-old schoolboy was as nothing compared to our unquestioning acceptance of the concept of Educating Archie, a series that featured Peter Brough and his dummy, Archie Andrews. A ventriloquist on the radio!
When Dad got back from the pub we would all sit down to our first course: a large piece of Yorkshire pudding over which was poured a generous helping of Mam’s wonderful gravy. After that Mam would serve the Sunday roast proper. As Dad carved the beef or lamb, Mam would place before me a plate comprising carrots, potatoes, both boiled and roasted, and other vegetables (fresh, never tinned) of the season: in mid-winter, sprouts and turnip, in spring, cabbage and cauliflower, in summer, new potatoes and baby carrots. Autumn would bring parsnips and butterbeans, though there always seemed to be peas, carrots and cabbage of some description. Broccoli I never knew existed, still less mangetout or courgettes. As for spinach, I’d only seen that in Popeye cartoons.
Sunday dinner was the highlight of the week and Mam always followed it with one of her homemade rice puddings for ‘sweet’ (not dessert). This was served piping hot in a white pudding bowl, the rice topped with a milky skin sprinkled with nutmeg, over which my brothers and I would squabble as we could never agree on whose turn it was to have this treat. Heavy, sweet puddings ‘saw you off’, in Dad’s words. He would not have appreciated a light dessert such as mousse, trifle or ice cream. The alternative to rice would be sago (which my brothers and I used to joke looked like frogspawn but, in keeping with everything Mam made, tasted delicious), tapioca or semolina – the latter always accompanied by a large dollop of strawberry jam dropped in the centre which, when stirred in with a spoon, turned the white porridge-like pudding, shocking pink. Dad would then complete his Sunday dinner by eating the rest of the Yorkshire pudding, over which he would spread a spoonful of strawberry jam. I never knew whether our neighbours Mr Cooper or Mr Dobson had similarly quirky eating habits to be indulged in the privacy of their own homes.
Life in Sheffield ground to a halt on a Sunday afternoon, as I suppose it did in every other provincial city and town. I would spend that quiet few hours playing in the street, on the bomb sites, or else listening to the wireless, until teatime, when another ritual arrived at our table. The Sunday salad.
We always had a salad for Sunday tea. After the treat of the roast dinner, tea was a great anticlimax: limp lettuce, totally without flavour, tomatoes, spring onions and cucumber when in season, all accompanying boiled egg cut into slices, luncheon meat or, the perennial favourite, Co-op tinned salmon. This drab meal – a sure sign that Monday was just around the corner – was followed by its only redeeming feature, a dish of tinned pears, peaches or apricots with Carnation milk. Probably in the knowledge that a salad would hardly fill the stomachs of her four livewire boys, Mam always made us eat a slice of bread and butter to fill us up. It was as if, along with the sinful pleasures of tinned fruit in its glorious syrup and Carnation milk must come the inevitable repentance of sliced white bread and a scrape of butter.
Looking back, while all our meals were home cooked and nourishing, I also ate a lot of things that are now considered unhealthy: bread and dripping, chips, fatty bacon and chops. Yet I never put on weight because I was always playing and running about outside, where the bomb sites were my adventure playgrounds and a piece of cinder-strewn wasteground was Bramall Lane or Hillsborough. I was no different to any other raggy-arsed lad in this respect.
We ate well, but money was tight. Even the purchase of shoes was considered a luxury. Dad was always thinking of ways to make what little money he earned at the steel foundry go further. It may have been an anachronism in 1940s Sheffield, but I wore clogs to school to which my father, in an attempt to extend their life, had fixed steel bars across the soles. You might have thought that going to school in such old-fashioned footwear would make me the butt of childish mockery. Far from it. My clogs made me very popular, since teams of two schoolmates wou
ld take me by the hand and drag me across the school playground to see who could make the greatest number of sparks fly. Perhaps my exceptional reach as a goalkeeper was the result of being constantly pulled by the arms about that playground.
Football and train spotting apart, the other great love of my childhood was the cinema. In those days before television, every area of the city had its own cinema and I reckon there must have been more than twenty in Sheffield alone. Our local fleapit, situated next to Tinsley Working Men’s Club, rejoiced in the name of the Bug Hut. There I would sit spellbound on a Saturday afternoon, the main feature being either a Gene Autry or Roy Rogers cowboy film, or a comedy starring the likes of Arthur Askey, George Formby or Old Mother Riley. The matinees would be packed with row upon row of grimy kids. In winter the boys wore balaclavas or cub caps on their heads, raincoats buttoned to the collar over short trousers, the girls in pixie hoods, cotton dresses and grey knee-length socks. All pals together.
My oldest brother, Jack, suffered chronic kidney problems and also had a bone-marrow defect that affected his legs. Jack never grew above five feet tall and for much of his childhood was confined to a wheelchair. I used to push him to and from the Bug Hut. When we arrived I would wheel Jack down to the front then take one of the sevenpenny seats some rows back. I remember on one occasion being so engrossed in the film that when it ended I headed straight home without him. When Mam asked me where our Jack was I ran hell for leather back in the direction of the Bug Hut. There he was, only fifty yards from the cinema and all alone, slowly cranking the wheels of his chair towards home. My eyes filled with tears when I saw him, but any sadness for his predicament quickly evaporated when he looked up and caught sight of me.
‘Where the bloody hell have you been? You bloody daft ha’p’orth,’ he bawled. He had a way with words, our Jack.
When I was about eleven years old, my dad, having had enough of working his fingers to the bone for a pittance, decided to branch out on his own. He left his job in the steel foundry, bought two ramshackle lorries and set up his own haulage business. He worked impossibly long hours but the business never really took off because those old lorries were forever breaking down. After only a few months, during which time Dad had spent more time with his head under the bonnets of those lorries than in the cabs, the business folded. Undaunted, he decided to launch a new business, one he knew plenty about – gambling. For a number of years Dad had supplemented his meagre income running an illegal book on horse racing. Licensed betting shops were still to come, the only legal place to bet in the late forties being the racetracks themselves. Given that most people I knew considered a trip from Tinsley into Sheffield City Centre a major journey, a day out at the races was virtually unheard of. Dad, knowing the steel workers liked a flutter, reckoned he was on to a winner opening up his own betting shop, and he wasn’t wrong.
We moved from our Tinsley home to Catcliffe, a mining village on the Sheffield–Rotherham border. Our new house adjoined a series of railway arches. Dad decided one of the arches would be ideal for his ‘flapper’ betting shop so, by the light of the one dingy bulb, we cleared it out, cleaned it up and helped him install the spartan fittings he needed to get the shop started.
The business did well, but there was a risk in running an unlicensed betting shop. Fortunately, the local policeman who patrolled the village knew everyone and everyone knew him. Should we kids step out of line, he’d clip us around the ear, but we knew better than to run home and complain. To do that would have invited another, much harder clip around the ear from Dad. The local Bobby drank with Dad and the other men of the village, either miners or steel workers, in the working men’s club. Many was the time, only a matter of an hour after doing so, he’d be called upon to bring peace to the home of one of his drinking pals as a result of what he would euphemistically call ‘a domestic’.
I remember one day being in the betting shop when the Bobby called to inform Dad a raid was imminent.
‘Let everyone know, Tom,’ he told my dad. ‘But make sure there are enough in, so as not to arouse suspicion.’
Such raids would result in a court appearance where Dad would get a ticking-off and a £40 fine. The shop would quickly recoup the money and Dad viewed these occasional court appearances as a small price to pay for our increased standard of living. In return for the tip-off the Bobby would make a Christmas detour to the shop where Dad would hand over a bottle of whisky and a large turkey that naturally had to be handed in as lost property.
The shop that did so well for us as a family, however, also brought tragedy upon us. One day in the early fifties Dad had left my brother Jack in charge. Having closed up the shop, Jack was heading home with the day’s takings when he was set upon by two robbers. In spite of his disability they beat him up badly and made off with the money. As a result of his injuries Jack spent weeks in hospital, his health deteriorated and, tragically, he died. He was a great guy, a loving brother and we were all devastated at his passing. Nothing – home, family, business – was ever the same again. For the first time in my life I experienced the loss of a loved one. I grieved for months, mourned his loss for years and miss him to this day.
That our Jack’s assailants were eventually caught by the police and given lengthy jail sentences was no consolation to me for losing a dear brother and a great friend.
My childhood football heroes were always goalkeepers. On my infrequent visits to Hillsborough or Bramall Lane it was always the goalkeepers who captured my imagination. Keepers such as Wednesday’s Dave McIntosh, a Girvan-born Scot whose centre parting was old-fashioned even in the early fifties, and United’s Ted Burgin, a Sheffield lad like me and my inspiration that one day I too would be good enough to play for one of my local clubs. McIntosh and Burgin apart, there was Manchester City’s Bert Trautmann, unique in that he had been a German prisoner of war who had stayed on in Britain to make a career for himself in football. A worthy successor to the great Frank Swift, Bert had been signed from non-league St Helens Town and developed into one of the best goalkeepers of his day. I used to marvel at his anticipation, courage and agility, attributes also of another boyhood hero of mine, Bert Williams of Wolves and England, who proved to me that you didn’t necessarily have to be tall to be a good goalkeeper. Another favourite was Blackpool’s George Farm. In the fifties, Blackpool, boasting the great Stanley Matthews, Stan Mortensen and Jackie Mudie, were the equivalent of Manchester United today. Their appearance always ensured a full house. Understandably, most turned up to see Matthews weave his magic, but the attraction for me was George Farm with his unorthodox style, catching the ball with one hand over and the other underneath it. But what interested me was the way he’d shout instructions to the defenders in front of him. Farm took it upon himself to organize his defence, which was very unusual for a goalkeeper at that time.
At the age of fourteen, my appearances in goal for my school side earned me a call-up for Sheffield Schoolboys. I was thrilled and honoured to have been chosen to represent my city, but my memories of playing for Sheffield boys are tainted by the fact that I was suddenly dropped without explanation after about seven games. The teacher in charge of the team never told me why or offered any words of consolation. In fact he never spoke to me again. It wasn’t in me to complain, so I simply accepted my lot and concentrated on playing for my school until the day came when I took that big step out into the adult world.
I wasn’t a great scholar and on leaving school in December 1952 I got a job as a bagger with a local coal merchant. It was dirty, hard, physical graft conducted in all weathers. My job involved shovelling coal into large coarse sacks, swinging them on my back from where I would heave them on to the back of a lorry. Though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, the work served to make my upper body and arms muscular, which is a great advantage for a goalkeeper.
I was fifteen, still developing physically, and the eight-hour day bagging coal left me tired out by the weekend. I was still in love with football, but by Satur
day I felt too exhausted to do more than watch the many amateur teams that played in our area. (I was earning less than three pounds a week, and once I had paid my mother board and lodging, there was little left for trips to see United or Wednesday.) One Saturday afternoon I wandered down to the local rec. to watch a team called Millspaugh. I was standing on the touchline waiting for the match to start when the Millspaugh trainer approached me.
‘You used to play in goal for Sheffield Boys, didn’t you?’ he asked.
The Millspaugh goalkeeper hadn’t turned up. Would I fancy a game?
My fatigue vanished and I immediately raced home to collect my football boots. The trainer gave me a goalkeeper’s jersey, but no shorts or football socks – the players, it seemed, provided their own. It was too late to go back now, so I played in my working trousers and everyday socks. I still recall the bemused looks on the faces of my new team mates as a puff of coal dust shot up from those trousers as I blocked a shot with my legs.
The game ended in a 2–2 draw. I felt pleased with my first taste of open-age football. I was only fifteen and most of the players were in their middle to late twenties. I must have impressed the Millspaugh manager because after the game he asked if I would like to be their regular goalkeeper. Without hesitation I said yes.
After less than a season with Millspaugh, Rawmarsh Welfare invited me to sign for them. Rawmarsh played in the Yorkshire League which was a much higher grade of football. I made my debut in an away game against Stocksbridge Works. Any thought I may have had of making my name in what was then the highest non-league level of football in the county was quickly dispelled when we lost 12–2. Following a second game, a 3–1 home defeat, the Rawmarsh manager let me down gently, saying, ‘Don’t bother coming again.’
The following Saturday found me back on the touchline watching Millspaugh at the local rec. Once again the trainer approached me.