State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Bob Stokoe claimed that in 1962 Revie (‘an evil man’) had asked him to forfeit a Second Division game when he was managing Bury. ‘He offered me £500 to take it easy,’ Stokoe said. ‘There were no witnesses. I said no. And when I said no, he asked me if he could approach my players. I said under no circumstances.’ And there were other shocking revelations. The former Manchester City manager Malcolm Allison claimed that Revie ‘used to leave three hundred or four hundred quid in the referees’ room, in an envelope’, while Alan Ball claimed that during the 1960s Revie had sent him weekly £100 bribes, hoping to persuade him to move from Blackpool to Leeds. Most damaging of all, Revie’s former goalkeeper Gary Sprake claimed that he had been a go-between in match-fixing operations against Wolves and Nottingham Forest. Since Sprake had been paid £15,000 by the Mirror and later retracted his story after being ostracized by his old teammates, some dismissed his allegations. But years later, Sprake not only retracted his retraction, but made fresh accusations, claiming that in 1965 Revie had tried to get him to ‘tap up’ two fellow Welsh players before a crucial match with Birmingham on the last day of the season.

  Revie’s former players were unsurprisingly furious at the allegations that their beloved mentor had been cheating throughout his managerial career. When the Sunday People claimed that Revie had used his captain Billy Bremner as a go-between, Bremner sued and won £100,000. The winger Peter Lorimer, who remained devoted to Revie, insisted that ‘if the boss tried to fix anything, we never saw it’, and pointed out that the Wolves match at the centre of the storm had ended with a beaten Leeds missing out on the championship. As Revie’s son Duncan later remarked, it was ‘ludicrous’ to imagine that Leeds triumphed by cheating, ‘because they won for at least ten years’. The irony is that if Revie did cheat, he was not very good at it. After all, Leeds were notorious for narrowly missing out on glory, and the quality of his team was such that he hardly needed to fix games anyway. When the police and the FA investigated the Mirror’s story, neither found a case to answer, while Mike O’Grady claimed he had been misquoted and not one referee came forward to corroborate Malcolm Allison’s bribery claims.

  The truth is that, in the absence of hard evidence, it is simply impossible to know whether Revie was genuinely corrupt, or whether the stories were concocted by his enemies amid the hysteria that greeted his defection to the UAE. Only two things are clear. One is that Revie, cheat or no cheat, was a superb manager who built a magnificent team, suffered from extraordinarily bad luck and was unfairly pilloried for leaving a job from which he was probably going to be sacked anyway. The other is that plenty of people at the time did think he was corrupt. Malcolm Allison was not the only man in football convinced that Revie was ‘crooked’. In September 1977, even before the Mirror’s allegations, Bernard Donoughue recorded having ‘dinner with Ted Croker of the FA, who told me some alarming corruption stories about Don Revie, England team manager’. A month later, at a Downing Street lunch for the Prime Minister of Spain, Donoughue found himself sitting beside the former Manchester United manager Sir Matt Busby. ‘More terrible stories about Don Revie’, he noted afterwards. Of course this hardly proves the allegations – and yet it is surely revealing that both Croker and Busby believed them.48

  No doubt many people would shudder at the thought of Don Revie as a symbol of British sport in the 1970s. It was, after all, a decade of heroes as well as villains: the figure skaters John Curry and Robin Cousins; the middle-distance arch-rivals Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe; the tennis star Virginia Wade, whose Wimbledon victory in 1977 was the perfect curtain-raiser for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. But the fact is that, thanks largely to football hooliganism, sport was increasingly seen in terms of failure and corruption. This was, after all, a decade in which two of the country’s most celebrated footballers, Billy Bremner and Kevin Keegan, were expelled from the Charity Shield match for fighting, and in which Manchester United sacked Tommy Docherty for an adulterous affair with the club physiotherapist’s wife. It was also a decade of sensationally incompetent Olympic performances, the nadir coming in 1976, when Britain won a grand total of thirteen medals, finishing behind the likes of Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. In track and field, Britain won just one medal (a bronze), while David Jenkins, who went to Montreal as the world’s number one 400-metre runner, contrived to finish seventh. His was merely one among many failures that made the 1970s, by and large, a decade of sporting disappointment. ‘When a fifteen is selected to represent England at Rugby football, we are defeated by all and sundry,’ lamented Air Chief Marshal Sir Christopher Foxley-Morris in 1975. ‘When an eleven is selected to play cricket against Australia, it is not just beaten but humiliatingly thrashed … On the playing fields of the world, we appear to have become the perennial losers, the predictable holders of all the wooden spoons.’49

  Even cricket, the game of village greens and summer shadows, of pristine whites and gracious losers, seemed to have succumbed to the prevailing malaise. For the first time in fifty years, England lost Test matches at home to India and away to New Zealand, while a string of defeats to the West Indies and Australia included the calamitous 4–1 Ashes fiasco in 1974–5, generally regarded as a low point in the national team’s fortunes. By this point, England had been deprived of arguably their best batsman, Geoff Boycott, who had gone into self-imposed exile in 1974, supposedly because he had lost his appetite for Test cricket, but more plausibly because he was aggrieved not to have been made captain. The selectors had their reasons, though, because Boycott was not only the most controversial cricketer in the country, but one of the most divisive sportsmen in any discipline, notorious for his single-minded self-centredness and dour, defensive presence at the crease. A coal miner’s son with fierce opinions and an extremely healthy ego, he had been appointed captain of Yorkshire in 1971 but was fiercely hated by many of his fellow players. Committee members and former players regularly called for his head, and five years later a dressing-room poll found that more than nine out of ten players wanted him to be sacked. It was somehow symptomatic of Boycott’s career – as well as the general flavour of cricket in the 1970s – that the club committee waited until just after his mother had died of cancer to dismiss him; it was also characteristic that he immediately went on the Parkinson show to denounce them as ‘small-minded people’, who ‘could have allowed my mother to be buried in peace’ but ‘could not wait’.50

  The Boycott saga was only one of a number of controversies that dominated the sporting pages in the 1970s. In previous decades, sport had offered a sense of escapism and reassurance in hard times, allowing people to take refuge from the rigours of unemployment and austerity in their appreciation of Jack Hobbs, Denis Compton, Billy Wright and Stanley Matthews. To be sure, sport in the 1970s offered plenty of pleasures – the sight of Gareth Edwards in full flow, of Kenny Dalglish banging in the goals, of Jackie Stewart closing in on the chequered flag, of Mary Peters nearing the finish line, even of Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks locked in bone-shuddering combat. Yet all too often it seemed to be infected by the same aggression, materialism and self-interest that had seeped into so many other corners of national life. Major events were often starkly politicized: the 1972 Five Nations championship was abandoned after Scotland and Wales refused to travel to Dublin for fear of IRA reprisals, the Olympic Games later that year were blighted by the murder of eleven Israeli athletes by Palestinian gunmen, and enormous controversy surrounded the so-called private cricket tours of South Africa organized by the promoter Derrick Robins, who attracted top-class English players such as Brian Close, Bob Willis and Tony Greig. In this context, not even the most politically indifferent spectator could keep up the illusion that sport was pure escapism, immune to the pressures of the modern world. When the Olympic organizers at Munich decided to continue with the Games after the murders of the Israeli athletes, The Times thought the decision was thoroughly ‘distasteful’. ‘What taste can be satisfied’, it asked, ‘with the significance of competitive sports w
hen a tragedy at once personal, shameful and symbolic, has occurred?’51

  The show went on, of course. But there was more suffering, more disappointment, more disgrace to come. And if there was one moment that summed up the disillusionment of British sport – and of so much beyond that – it came on 4 June 1977, when England and Scotland, the world’s oldest international football teams, met at Wembley to decide the Home Nations Championship. The atmosphere in the famous old stadium, now visibly crumbling and dilapidated, was very different from the buoyant enthusiasm that had greeted England’s World Cup triumph eleven years before. The atmosphere, one reporter wrote, ‘was overwhelmingly influenced by Scotland, and Scotch. It was at once powerful and obscene, and gave no comfort to England who might have been on Scottish soil.’ Only weeks earlier, the Scottish National Party – driven by bitter frustration with the major national parties and excitement at the potential benefits of North Sea oil – had made sweeping gains in the council elections. Now, as goals by Gordon McQueen and Kenny Dalglish confirmed the visitors’ superiority over Revie’s constipated England, Wembley seemed awash with Celtic triumphalism. That the quality of the football was generally poor – it was yet another match crippled by defensive tactics and endless fouls – bothered the visitors not at all. Even before the final whistle, said The Times, ‘thousands of Scots were struggling to be first onto the pitch’.

  Several months earlier, the Football Association had announced plans to install 8-foot-high metal fences around the Wembley perimeter, hoping to deter the pitch invasions that had spoiled so many major sporting occasions. But in a story that spoke volumes about British efficiency in the mid-1970s, the plan had been delayed. And as the final whistle blew that hot June afternoon, thousands of visiting supporters streamed drunkenly onto the pitch, and as one Scottish writer later put it, ‘began clawing at it with the relish of battle-high warriors picking over the booty on the bodies of the dead enemy on some ancient battlefield’. With their long hair lank and greasy with sweat under their tartan caps, their T-shirts sodden with beer, their flared jeans ripped and grass-stained, they looked like some invading barbarian horde. As they ripped and tore at the turf, as they clambered onto the goal-frames until the posts finally gave way and the goals symbolically collapsed beneath the jeering mob, the Corinthian spirit seemed a long way away. For the nation that had given organized sport and fair play to the world, it was a supremely humiliating moment. ‘There is only one consolation,’ said the Daily Mirror afterwards. ‘It won’t happen again. By the next time the Scottish hordes descend on Wembley the crowd will be caged in. In the long history of battles between the two countries the Wembley fences will be the football equivalent of Hadrian’s Wall.’ It was an ominous prediction, for, as events were to prove, metal fences brought terrible dangers of their own. But as reporters looked down from the press box and surveyed the scarred and battered sporting turf, the shattered goalposts, the field littered with beer cans and broken bottles, there seemed no alternative. As one of them quietly remarked, it had been ‘another afternoon of British rubbish’.52

  15

  The Last Days of Pompeii

  Heard that the government is to introduce a 3 day working week in order to meet the fuel crisis! Apparently everyone will lose wages in the process! And it applies to everything!

  – Kenneth Williams’s diary, 13 December 1973

  The whole country was in turmoil. That’s why I came up with the line ‘Look to the future now / It’s only just begun.’ That’s what everybody had to do. The country couldn’t have been at a lower ebb. In times like that, people always turn to showbiz.

  – Noddy Holder in Mojo, November 2006

  One fine day in July 1973, Joe Gormley, the president of the National Union of Mineworkers, came to see Edward Heath at Number 10. It was a secret meeting: as the two old antagonists sat in the garden and chatted amiably, only Heath’s diligent mandarin, Sir William Armstrong, knew that Gormley was there. Despite their bitter struggle the previous year, Gormley liked Heath and found him serious and approachable: a better listener, he thought, than Harold Wilson. And although Gormley made no secret of his ambitions for his men – his dream, he said, was for every miner to have ‘a good education for the children, a Jaguar at the front, a Mini at the back to take the wife shopping’ – he was no left-wing firebrand. Ever since he had first gone down the pit at the age of 14, Gormley had been steadfastly opposed to Communism, and for all his gruff, pugnacious style, he was a moderate, not a militant. Even as he was telling television viewers that the miners deserved more and were determined to get it, he was secretly passing information to Special Branch about his own union. As his handler later put it, ‘he was a patriot and he was very wary about the growth of militancy’.1

  By the summer of 1973, Gormley was seriously concerned about the ambitions of some of his colleagues on the NUM executive, which had shifted well to the left since the miners’ great victory a year earlier. Even though the government had poured more than £1 billion into the coal industry, reversing the policy of closing pits, the militants wanted blood. At the miners’ annual conference at the beginning of July, Mick McGahey said that he wanted to see ‘agitation in the streets of this country to remove the government’, while Arthur Scargill won cheers of approval when he pledged to destroy ‘the most immoral, the most corrupt government in living memory’. Ominously, the conference then voted to demand a massive 35 per cent wage increase, in clear defiance of Heath’s pay policy. But neither Heath nor Gormley wanted another fight to the death; the former could not afford another winter of power cuts, while the NUM leader had no desire to be outflanked by the militants. So when Heath secretly invited Gormley to Downing Street, he came willingly. And as they talked, Gormley explained that, although he was obliged to follow his conference’s instructions and to seek a 35 per cent deal, there might be a way out. What Heath should do, he implied, was to make a special arrangement for ‘unsocial hours’, so that the miners could have extra payments on top of the forthcoming Stage Three pay deal. That way, Heath could claim he had stuck to the pay policy, while Gormley could tell his members they had got a special deal. And as Gormley finished, he was pleased to see that Heath and Armstrong seemed to have taken the hint. ‘We never thought of that,’ he remembered them saying. ‘We never thought of that at all!’2

  It was not until three months later, when Heath unveiled Stage Three to the press, that Gormley realized they had totally misunderstood his meaning. Instead of the ‘unsocial hours’ loophole being reserved for the miners alone, which would allow the NUM to claim a great victory, it was potentially open to all shift workers. ‘I must say that I wasn’t best pleased,’ Gormley wrote. ‘I had gone there to try to solve our problem, not to help them run the country as a whole.’ And two days later, on 10 October, came an even bigger blunder. Gormley was in a difficult position: he did not really want a strike, but he needed to show his members that he was squeezing every last penny out of the government. But when the National Coal Board announced its answer to the miners’ pay claim, the terms were much more generous than many people had expected. Instead of trying to bargain with the miners – which would have given Gormley room to extract a few concessions and then claim victory – the Coal Board offered as much as they possibly could under the terms of Stage Three. Coming to a hefty 16.5 per cent, their offer was potentially the biggest increase the NUM had ever had without a strike. As the Coal Board saw it, this was the best way to avoid another battle: by putting all their cards on the table, right at the beginning, they would leave the miners with no choice but to accept. But as The Economist pointed out, offering such a ‘horrifying pay rise’ would only encourage the militants to demand even more concessions. The Coal Board had ‘left no room for negotiation and bargaining’, admitted Robert Carr, even though the time-honoured rituals of pay talks meant that the miners were bound to ask for more. Indeed, even if Gormley had wanted to accept the deal, the NUM executive would never have let him. So even as
the Coal Board bosses were congratulating themselves on their generous offer, Heath’s ministers were reeling in horror. Carr recalled that he felt a ‘sense of doom, as though a Greek tragedy was about to be acted out’. The government was ‘being manoeuvred again towards the same fatal field’, wrote Douglas Hurd, ‘still littered with relics of the last defeat’.3

  It is a myth – although an enduring one on the left – that Heath welcomed the thought of a return bout with the miners because he wanted revenge for 1972. In fact, he had done all in his power to mollify the NUM, and he was in no position to invite a return to hostilities. For while the events of 1972 had amply demonstrated the miners’ economic muscle, the Arab attack on Israel, launched just four days before the Coal Board’s offer, played right into the miners’ hands. The NUM was still considering the Coal Board’s offer when, on 16 October, OPEC broke the devastating news of their oil price rise, which changed the game completely. Not only did the oil shock put Heath’s counter-inflation policy under intense pressure, it left the miners in an even stronger position. Britain depended heavily on imported oil to meet its energy requirements; indeed, since 1972 the government had been quietly building up coal stocks by burning more oil instead. Thanks to the oil shock, however, the government could hardly rely on imported oil if negotiations with the miners broke down; indeed, with North Sea oil yet to come on stream, OPEC’s blackmail had left Britain more dependent on coal than ever. The miners had a knife to the government’s throat, and after years of redundancies they felt little compunction about using it. On 23 October, in a desperate but probably misguided attempt to handle the situation personally, Heath invited the miners’ leaders to Downing Street and begged them to put the national interest first. But he was wasting his time. After lunch, Gormley, looking ‘pale and drawn’, visited Heath’s study and told him that they had voted to reject the deal. Two days later the NUM executive called for industrial action.4