Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  The world of football was also stratified along social lines. Nobody wanted to run a football club for the money that could be made out of it. Money wasn’t important but prestige and power were. Football was still the glory game that bred heroes, not the arena for conspicuous consumption that feeds on its own media hype. The only large car in the car park belonged to the chairman. Players still knew what the inside of a bus looked like even when they were the captain of the England football team. It was the era of the maximum wage and contractual serfdom. The talented youths who chose football over cricket or other sports did not do so because the financial rewards were so disproportionately large and indeed football clubs and county cricket clubs encouraged players who were good enough to play both sports professionally to do so.

  Managers were former players who invariably hadn’t been able to save anything from their careers and still lived from one weekly pay packet in a sticky brown envelope to the next, usually in a small terrace house owned by the club. They, like their trainers, were just grateful to be allowed to continue to earn a wage from the game they loved. Trainers, those track-suited men who sprinted on to the field when summoned by the referee to attend an injured player, were most unlikely to have any medical knowledge. The players themselves were on a lower level and the juniors or apprentices led an existence that most managers thought scarcely worth acknowledging except for that brief moment when their signature as a schoolboy might be sought by a rival club.

  The Football League did not resume its traditional fixture list until the 1946–7 season but such was the clamour for an immediate return to normal sporting life that the summer of 1945 featured a series of five ‘Victory Tests’ played between a combined Australian Services XI and an English national side. These cricket matches were significant not so much for the crowds which predictably poured in to see the five three-day games (Lord’s claimed that 93,000 entered through the turnstiles at one of the matches, the highest recorded attendance at any three-day game) but for the manner in which they were played. England and Australia had fought out some grim Test matches in the 1930s. The ‘Bodyline’ series of 1932–3 gave added credence to Orwell’s dictum about the high seriousness in which professional sport was played, but these Victory Tests were played in a spirit of sportsmanship that nobody who witnessed them could recall seeing in Test matches of previous years. Denis Compton was still on overseas service, but England were able to select Hutton, Washbrook, Edrich, Ames and Hammond. For Australia, the skipper Lindsay Hassett was the only player with Test match experience. Appropriately, perhaps, the series ended with honours even, with two wins apiece for England and Australia and one match drawn.

  It is the essential contention of this book that sport holds up a mirror to the society in which it is played and nothing could better illustrate the new world landscape than the visit of Moscow Dynamo to Britain in the autumn of 1945. They played four matches against Chelsea (3–3), Rangers (2–2), Third Division Cardiff City (which finished 10–1 to the visitors), and to their great joy they beat Arsenal 4–3 in farcical conditions when fog drastically reduced visibility. It was a bad-tempered tour, full of the diplomatic manoeuvrings which were shortly to become a hallmark of the Cold War, and it led George Orwell to write his famous essay in Tribune in which he described sport as ‘war minus the shooting’.

  Despite the onset of the Cold War, Attlee was determined that Britain’s broken economy would not stop him attempting to create the New Jerusalem. It was believed that the past six years of death and deprivation had been to no purpose if, at the end of it all, the country returned meekly to the status quo as it had existed in 1939. For a few years after the end of the war, even in the midst of food rationing, housing shortages and widespread bereavement, there was a high moral seriousness about life in Britain that was not to endure. The BBC, whose Light Programme and Home Service had played their part in uniting the nation during the war years, now established the Third Programme, ‘the envy of the world’ and its successor, the estimable Radio 3. It was also the time of the Workers’ Education Association which opened up new vistas for soldiers whom life in Depression Britain would have consigned to the scrapheap. Other institutions to make a similar impact included the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA) and the Arts Council, which grew out of the wartime Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. Did this seriousness have its roots in the lack of alternative forms of entertainment? Certainly cinema attendances and football and cricket crowds were never as large as they were in the immediate post-war years. In the mid-1950s, with the end of rationing, the beginnings of commercial television and the start of the ‘affluent society’, this high moral seriousness faded, but in the years after 1945 there was a curiosity in the country as to how they could create something new and worthwhile. It might have been a drab and deprived time yet it produced some of the greatest British films ever made. These were the years that saw the making of Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Odd Man Out, Fallen Idol, The Third Man, Black Narcissus, Henry V, Hamlet, The Red Shoes and the best of the Ealing comedies.

  Ealing’s Hue and Cry, starring Harry Fowler, Jack Warner and Alastair Sim, was filmed on the streets of London in 1946 and can be seen today as an almost documentary record of what the centre of the British Empire looked like after the war. The film is an enchanting story of a group of East End kids who foil a gang of robbers who are using a children’s comic to communicate their plans. Looking at it today, its most distinctive feature is its use of bombed-out locations in London’s East End and Docklands whose rubble-strewn sites become the background for an adventure story. The children include only one girl – who is just about tolerated by the others in the manner endlessly repeated in boys’ stories before creeping feminism enforced a change. If the film is known today at all, it is probably for its climax, which depicts hundreds of boys from all over London converging on a handful of unfortunate petty criminals. In keeping with Ealing’s tendency in the last years of the war to foster inclusive images of British society, the children are mostly working-class, and include, in the interests of the unity of the British Isles, a young Scottish boy. Scottish stories and characters regularly appear in Ealing comedies – one only has to think of Whisky Galore and The Maggie, although one can safely ignore Scott of the Antarctic. The social demographic of Hue and Cry was fundamental to the ethic of Ealing Studios and the success of their films indicates that the philosophy was shared by their audiences. Nevertheless, what one retains after a viewing of Hue and Cry, apart from the pleasure of a rattling good yarn, is an appreciation of the physical devastation unleashed on London and other major cities by the Luftwaffe.

  Christopher Isherwood was visiting from his home in America at the time and his comments, as quoted by David Kynaston in Austerity Britain, paint a similar portrait:

  Plaster was peeling from even the most fashionable squares and crescents… In the Reform Club, the wallpaper was hanging down in tatters. The walls of the National Gallery showed big, unfaded rectangles, where pictures had been removed and not yet re-hung. Many once stylish restaurants were now reduced to squalor… London remembered its past and was ashamed of its current appearance.

  It wasn’t just the cities that were so badly affected. The entire country might not have been bombed but the impact of drabness and greyness was ubiquitous. Fay Weldon arrived in Britain as a fifteen-year-old from New Zealand in 1946 and wrote poignantly over half a century later of her bitter disappointment at the first sighting of the Mother Country which was not the iconic white cliffs of Dover but the somewhat less iconic grey docks of Tilbury at dawn:

  Where were the green fields, rippling brooks and church towers? Could this be the land of Strawberry Fair and sweet nightingales? Here was a grey harbour and a grey hillside, shrouded in a kind of murky badly woven cloth which, as the day grew brighter, proved to be a mass of tiny, dirty houses pressed up against one another, with holes gaping where bombs had fallen, as ragged as holes in the heel
s of lisle stockings. I could not believe that people actually chose to live like this. The greyness was so vast, as far as the eye could reach.

  There is no doubt that it was widely believed that the sooner football and cricket resumed a full programme of competitive action the better it would be for the country. That general belief notwithstanding, the Football League decided to postpone restarting its competition until the autumn of 1946 but the FA agreed to reintroduce the FA Cup in 1945–6, although for this one season it was played in an unfamiliar format of two-legged ties throughout the competition. It was won by Derby County and, as in 1933 and 1934, the losing side, this time Charlton Athletic, returned to Wembley the following year and won. That following season of 1946–7 saw not only the start of a proper full Football League fixture list but also the resumption of international matches, and in the first one, which was played at Windsor Park, Belfast, Billy Wright made his England debut at right-half. Apart from Tommy Lawton and Raich Carter, everyone on that England team was making his full international debut, although some of them, including Frank Swift and Laurie Scott, had made appearances in wartime internationals.

  Unlike established players like Scott, Wilf Mannion and Stan Cullis who lost six years of their international careers to the war, Wright was just fifteen and had only been on the Wolves ground staff for a year when war had broken out. It was later discovered that, possibly because of the rationing which tried hard to dole out ‘fair shares for all’, the health of the nation actually improved during the war and certainly Wright’s future career benefited from his time as a physical training instructor. He was initially assigned to work in a tyre factory but preferred to be ‘lost at sea’ than stay there so he applied to the Royal Navy but, as was the way with so many young men who preferred the navy to the hard slog of the army, he was sent to the army’s Infantry Training Centre at Aldershot. He emerged as Sergeant W. A. Wright of the Shropshire Light Infantry in the peak of physical fitness, which left him well placed to begin his full-time professional football career with some advantages.

  Men who knew Billy Wright in the early part of his career tended to say the same things about him – that he was a shy boy, initially underweight, cheerful, polite and respectful, but above all he conveyed a bubbling enthusiasm for the game and never gave less than his best. He was well behaved, a good listener and eager to learn. There are elements of the young David Beckham in this description of Wright, although it is entirely possible that every young apprentice, desperate to make good in the game, would exhibit those qualities and not all of them would go on to captain England. He was never regarded as an outstandingly skilful player but his wholehearted commitment was noted by other players. It was this quality that persuaded both Stan Cullis and Walter Winterbottom to mark him out as a future captain for Wolves and England.

  It wasn’t just the outbreak of war that nearly aborted Wright’s embryonic playing career. Within a few months of his joining the ground staff at the start of pre-season training in July 1938, the Wolves manager, Major Frank Buckley, had told him that he was simply too short and slight ever to make it as a professional in such a physical game. Fortunately, the Major was convinced by the trainer, Jack Davies, that Wright was big where it mattered – in the heart. He rescinded the decision and set him up in digs ‘in a real home at Tettenhall and with a real family’. ‘Mr and Mrs Arthur Colley became like a second mum and dad to me,’ wrote Wright in one of his many autobiographies. He remained in these lodgings until he met Joy Beverley when he was in his early thirties and his term as captain of England was nearly at an end. The influence of the landlady was all-pervasive in a country short of housing and in a society which did not permit young people much domestic autonomy prior to marriage.

  Billy Wright at home with his landlady, Mrs Colley, 1950 (Popperfoto / Getty Images).

  One advantage of his wartime posting as a PT instructor was that Wright could continue to play for Wolves in the rudimentary ad hoc football programme that was set up to give a deprived population some sense of sporting pleasure. However, in a 1942 League Cup semi-final against West Bromwich Albion, Wright hobbled off the field with a painful ankle injury. An X-ray the following day revealed a bad fracture and the diagnosis was that Wright’s career as a professional footballer was over at the age of eighteen. Fortunately, surgeons had recently developed the technique of inserting a pin into the broken bone to hold it together and Wright was the recipient of an innovative piece of surgery that allowed him to continue to play. It is likely that this incident, which so nearly ended his career before it had properly begun, was sufficiently traumatic to convince Wright that he needed to give the game his total and undivided attention.

  He went dancing in the evenings as many young men did because that was the obvious way to meet girls. Billy had been told that he needed to improve his balance as a player and that dancing would be a good way to do it so he went to the Palais de Danse less for romantic reasons than to take part in a late-night training session. Even so he would stick to orange juice and be back home and tucked up in bed – alone – by 10.30 p.m. Billy’s behaviour may sound almost priggish to twenty-first-century ears, but it was not uncommon in young people in the early post-war era. Marriage was the only socially respectable context for sex. During the war years, when nobody knew what the next day might bring, moral strictures had eased: young people were not prepared to die in battle – or in the rubble caused by a German bomb – without having experienced the mysteries and ecstasies of sex. With the advent of peace, however, pre-war social norms soon reimposed themselves.

  It was not uncommon for Billy to go out with Mrs Colley for an evening together at the pictures, rumours of which today would send tabloid hacks and photographers crazy with excitement. But Mrs Colley, particularly after Billy’s own mother died of cancer when she was still in her early forties, maintained a strongly maternal watch over her young lodger. Girls might have come calling but few got past the doorstep of the Colley house in Tettenhall. Mrs Colley would certainly have approved when Wright decided to follow the advice of a Wolves director, Arthur Oakley (who was also a vice-president of the Football League), and study English and engineering (a rather eccentric combination, one can’t help observing) at a daytime educational institute after morning training. Wright was conscious that he had left school at fourteen and was anxious to catch up on the education he had missed. It chimed well with the sense, common to so many men at the conclusion of the war, that they had to make the best of whatever opportunities came their way. Without wishing to impugn Wright’s motives in any way, it cannot but have helped his desire to be noticed by the England selectors. In the weird, amateurish way in which England teams were selected before Alf Ramsey assumed complete control on taking over the manager’s job at the end of 1962, having a man like Arthur Oakley mention to the people who mattered that this young chap Wright seemed to be made of the right stuff couldn’t possibly have harmed his cause. By this time of course his football had improved rapidly, partly due to the fitness which came as a consequence of his wartime duties as a physical training instructor.

  Just as cricket had eased itself back into its stride in the summer of 1945 with those Victory Tests against the Australian Service XI, so football did something similar during that rather odd first winter of peace. Billy Wright was first picked to play for England as an inside-left, partnering his club-mate Jimmy Mullen in a Victory international against Belgium in January 1946 but Frank Soo failed a late fitness test and Billy took his place as right-half, the position he then retained for the next eight years or so. The Arsenal left-half Joe Mercer was the England captain that day and the manner in which his half-back partner calmed the nerves of the debutant made a big impression on the future England captain. Over the eleven years of his own captaincy Wright was to replicate those words and the concern many times. England won the match 2–0. When full internationals resumed with a match against Northern Ireland in front of an enthusiastic crowd of 57,000 at Windsor Park
on 30 September 1946, Wright was in a new half-back line which also included Neil Franklin of Stoke City and Henry Cockburn of Manchester United. There was also a new captain, George Hardwick, Ronald Colman lookalike and Middlesbrough left-back, who was to remain as captain for the next twelve matches until a knee injury caused his retirement from international football. Hardwick had the interesting record of playing all of his thirteen international matches as captain.

  The match against Northern Ireland ended in a thumping 7–2 win, a highly satisfactory start for the Football Association and their new ‘manager’ Walter Winterbottom. The partnership between Wright and Winterbottom, like the subsequent one between Bobby Moore and Alf Ramsey, was to be the fulcrum of the England team for more than ten years. Moore and Ramsey worked well together without doubt and there was considerable professional respect between them, but it would be fair to say that there was also a certain amount of personal disengagement. Ramsey had been a professional footballer who retired just before Moore made his debut for West Ham United so the two men knew enough about each other for a certain amount of familiarity to breed a little contempt. Winterbottom had played briefly as a half-back for a not very good Manchester United side in 1936–7, but in the following season he made only four first-team appearances and his playing career was ended by a spinal disease. Fortunately for his future career prospects, Winterbottom had also been training as a teacher. After graduating from Carnegie College of Physical Education in Leeds, he became a lecturer there.