Billy Wright was immediately impressed by the new man charged with the destiny of the England football team. He later ‘wrote’: ‘It is difficult at first glance to imagine Mr Walter Winterbottom as chief FA coach and manager of England’s International team. Walter has the look of a schoolmaster – as indeed he used to be – but as he sucks his beloved pipe he could easily be mistaken for a deep-thinking atom scientist.’
It is reading claptrap like this, even if the claptrap is understandable in the context of the time, that makes entirely credible Brian Glanville’s story of overhearing Arthur Rowe, the manager of Tottenham’s ‘push-and-run’ Championship side of 1951, remarking, ‘Billy Wright? Right nana.’ In fact, as a judgement on Wright as a player or captain that would be unfair and inaccurate. Rowe was almost certainly referring to Wright’s brief but calamitous spell as manager of Arsenal. Nevertheless, Rowe’s words also evince a contempt for Wright’s instinctive deference to authority. There is no doubt that the pipe-clenching, cerebral Winterbottom would have been regarded by Wright when he was a player and a captain as a man to whom he would be expected to listen most attentively and with appropriate respect. After saluting. Winterbottom had ‘a good war’, reaching the rank of wing commander in the RAF and working at the Air Ministry with overall responsibility for training PE instructors at home and overseas. He also ran coaching courses for the FA at grammar schools in London. In 1946, Stanley Rous, who was the secretary of the Football Association, persuaded the FA council to appoint Winterbottom as the FA’s first Director of Coaching and suggested he take on the additional responsibility of being the first England team manager. They were of course two distinctly separate jobs, but in the FA’s convoluted way of thinking it was assumed that because Winterbottom might be good at one he was also the right man for the other. He was a serious, rather scholarly, bespectacled man who might have played Barnes Wallis in The Dam Busters if the producers hadn’t cast Michael Redgrave, but it was as a thoughtful Director of Coaching that Winterbottom made his biggest contribution, mostly because he didn’t have an ignorant, self-important, self-interested selection committee looking over his shoulder all the time. Winterbottom set up the network of coaching schools which eventually gave coaching opportunities and inspiration to, among others, Ron Greenwood, Dave Sexton, Don Howe, Bobby Robson and Malcolm Allison.
England football manager Walter Winterbottom, November 1954 (Popperfoto / Getty Images).
Winterbottom had first met Stanley Rous on an experimental coaching course in 1937 and the two men had warmed to each other immediately. Rous was the third member of the triumvirate that ran the England football team in the Wright era but he was the man who wielded the real power. It was rather like the famous Frost Report sketch in which John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett, standing in descending order of height, delineated the British class structure. Winterbottom looked up to Rous because he had ‘innate breeding’ and Rous was his employer, but looked down on Wright because – although he was popular – he was only a player and had no education. Wright looked up to both of them, giving him a crick in his neck. Rous, meanwhile, looked down on both Winterbottom and Wright. He had fought in the First World War, had been a games master at Watford Grammar School and then become a referee, taking charge of the 1934 Cup Final. Brian Glanville, doyen of British football writers and accomplished novelist, knew him well.
Stanley Rous was a magnificent administrator, very honest, highly ambitious and a dreadful snob. He wasn’t even remotely interested in the troops on the ground. He ignored me for years, pretended he didn’t know who I was, but as soon as I wrote Along the Arno which was published in 1956 and got rave reviews he completely changed and he started buying copies and giving them to all his friends. Suddenly it was, ‘God bless you, dear boy’. You had to do something significant outside football before Stanley gave you any credit.
Billy Wright’s face fitted perfectly in the hierarchy of Rous, Winterbottom and the captain. Paul Fox, the BBC executive who introduced Wright to the world of television, noted the instinctively deferential attitude Wright displayed to them:
Stanley Rous, Secretary of the Football Assocation, 1948 (Topham Picturepoint).
Billy represented the best of football – he was good-looking and modest, a good honest decent footballer who respected his elders and who said yes sir, no sir and three bags full, sir. Billy knew that Walter was the boss and that he had a boss, Stanley Rous or the chairman of the FA so he knew his place in the pecking order.
If Winterbottom was the uncomplaining, put-upon civil servant and Wright the eternal schoolboy enthusiast and hero, then Rous was happy for them to become the public face of the England football team. He knew where the real power lay, because he himself wielded it – and for thirty years he never relinquished his firm grip on it.
England’s results in that 1946–7 season seemed to bear all the comforting hallmarks of pre-war, self-congratulatory dominance. Wales were defeated 3–0, Holland went to Leeds Road, Huddersfield, and were overwhelmed 8–2 and at the end of the season France were well beaten 3–0 in a match played at Highbury. The post-season tour in May 1947 started off badly with a 1–0 defeat in Switzerland but it had the merit of persuading the myopic selection committee that it might be a good idea if they played both Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney, two of the best players in the world, in the same side in the same match. A week later in Lisbon, a rampant England with a mouth-watering forward line of Matthews, Mortensen, Lawton, Mannion and Finney humiliated Portugal by ten goals to nil, Mortensen and Lawton scoring four goals each. England’s demolition of Portugal came at the start of what was to be a blissful summer: on the cricket field Denis Compton and Bill Edrich each scored over 3,000 runs, it seemed as if the sun was always shining and, briefly, the travails of the economy and the recent passing of the coldest winter in living memory, exacerbated by the lack of fuel for heating, were laid to rest. There was no television to beam England’s outstanding display in Lisbon back into British living rooms; the best that supporters could hope for was a few minutes on a newsreel that might be seen at the start of the following month in the cinema, but there was no disguising the pride that the country took from the 10–0 scoreline. Whatever the social and economic problems that afflicted the nation, it appeared that there was still an England football team of which to be proud.
Two weeks before the triumph in Lisbon, an ostensibly even more symbolic victory took place at Hampden Park in Glasgow, when a Great Britain XI overwhelmed the Rest of Europe by six goals to one. In 1946, the first post-war FIFA Congress welcomed back the four UK football associations after an absence of almost twenty years, following negotiations between the FIFA president Jules Rimet and his future successors, Arthur Drewry and Sir Stanley Rous. To help celebrate this momentous occasion, a match between a British team and one from the rest of Europe was arranged for the following year. Hard as it might be to appreciate with our jaundiced 2016 knowledge, one of the reasons that FIFA was so keen on the idea was that the organisation was financially embarrassed owing to the lack of competitive action during the Second World War. It was thought that the match might generate some desperately needed revenue. As a gesture of goodwill it was decided that the gate receipts from the game would be donated to FIFA. There is some dispute as to the official attendance which, though large, was not as large as the 135,000 who regularly crammed the terraces of Hampden for the far more serious clash with England. However, FIFA pronounced itself delighted with the £35,000 it pocketed from the match.
If Winterbottom was powerless to prevent the regular selection of the England team from turning into a political contest, on this occasion he clearly had no choice but to let the four associations get on with the job of choosing his team for him. It seemed inevitable that the team would include the two Derby County inside-forwards who had helped to win the FA Cup in 1946 – the Englishman Raich Carter and the incomparable Irishman Peter Doherty. In the event, neither was chosen. The final selection cont
ained five Englishmen, Swift, Hardwick, Matthews, Lawton and Mannion, all of whom were to feature in Lisbon a fortnight later; three Scotsmen in Billy Liddell, Archie Macaulay and the uncapped Billy Steel from Greenock Morton; two Welshmen, Tottenham’s fierce left-half Ron Burgess and the Wales captain Billy Hughes; and finally, in what must have been a political compromise, the Belfast-born Irish centre-half Jackie Vernon who was playing for West Bromwich Albion. Wright could not have complained about being left out of such a team but Neil Franklin, the skilful and widely admired Stoke and England centre-half, would have had reasonable cause to curse the political manoeuvrings.
The continentals had held a practice game, beating Holland 2–0 in front of 70,000 spectators in Rotterdam, before their Austrian coach Karl Rappan selected his squad and retreated to a training camp in Troon on the Ayrshire coast. Rappan’s team eventually comprised nine different nationalities, including the Republic of Ireland’s Johnny Carey, but although a big crowd turned up at Hampden on the day, the atmosphere reflected the game’s exhibition status and bore little resemblance to the cauldron of vitriol in which Scotland v. England matches were usually contested. It must have been strange and somewhat disconcerting for the Scots to look down on to their home pitch and find themselves expected to cheer for Stanley Matthews and Tommy Lawton whom they had traditionally abused. At least Great Britain were playing in dark blue, a hue not too distant from Scotland’s traditional shirt colour.
The Rest of Europe, who played in light blue (no doubt as a tribute to FIFA’s long-standing interest in the Boat Race) contained some fine players but very few of the names would have made an impact on the home spectators. They came from abroad and their names sounded funny. They weren’t visible on satellite television and none of them, of course, played for British clubs but, despite being handicapped by the fact that they were both foreign and unknown, the Rest of Europe side started the stronger and dominated the opening stages. An opening goal by Wilf Mannion, who was the star player on the day, was quickly equalised by the Swede Gunnar Nordahl. The game was eventually won and lost, however, during a remarkable four-minute period in the first half when Britain scored three times, including one from the penalty spot following a bizarre handball from Josef Ludl, the Sparta Prague striker, who dived full-length into the box, hand outstretched, to stop a Matthews pass. Now this, the crowd must have nodded sagely, was the sort of thing foreigners did or at least the sort of thing they did when they had been mesmerised by the Matthews magic. With the match effectively won by half-time, the British side eased off in the second half, although eight minutes from time the crowd was treated to a final goal by Tommy Lawton who rose in his inimitable style to head a Matthews cross powerfully past the France goalkeeper, Julien Da Rui, and give Great Britain a crushing 6–1 victory.
The Daily Telegraph patriotically declared that Great Britain had given their opponents a ‘lesson in football’ and ‘outplayed the cream of Europe’, while Pathé News loudly proclaimed the well-known fact that ‘British soccer is still the world’s best’. The football correspondent of the Glasgow Herald, however, offered a more cautious tone and felt the hosts had been flattered by the result, which owed much to the enterprise of Mannion and Steel up front rather than to any tactical or skilful superiority. Indeed, it was the quality of the finishing that was the real difference between the two sides, with Gunnar Nordahl in particular guilty of wasting three good early opportunities to put the visitors ahead with only Frank Swift to beat.
If FIFA took £35,000 from the match, the British public took something much more significant and possibly dangerous – a reinforced conviction that British was best. The overwhelming scoreline certainly suggested that British football had effortlessly reinforced its natural superiority, given the fact that much of that superiority was based on the idea that what happened when England travelled abroad did not count. They had to deal with foreign weather and foreign food and if Johnny Foreigner did by some underhand means manage to win the match it would all be reversed when the foreigners saw the white cliffs of Dover and tasted six inches of British steel – or alternatively tasted a full English breakfast in the era of rationing which would have left them gasping, feeling both full and hungry at the same time as wanting to revisit whatever had been mistaken for bacon and eggs which had known neither pig nor fowl.
At the end of the 1947–8 season, following regulation victories over Scotland, Sweden, Belgium and Wales, came what was long regarded as the most impressive result of England’s post-war renaissance – 4–0 against Italy in Turin in May 1948. It was a scoreline that slightly flattered England because it required some heroic goalkeeping from Frank Swift to keep a clean sheet against wave after wave of attacks from the Italians, who had won the last World Cup to be played, in 1938. Their team included six of the gifted Torino side which was to be decimated in the Superga air disaster the following year. The Italian captain, Valentino Mazzola, was one of those to die and in a tragic coincidence the England captain on the day, Frank Swift, was to suffer an identical fate nine years later when a plane carrying the Manchester United team crashed at Munich.
Perhaps the England players felt that the fates owed them something because all of them were disconcerted by the visible economic prosperity which they could not help but contrast with what they had just left behind in England. Wright’s recollections of the match begin with yet another ritual grovelling before the omniscient FA:
With typical Football Association thoroughness it had been decided that the players should prepare for the match against Italy at the delightful resort of Stresa, which nestles on the shores of Lake Maggiore, and a motor coach was waiting to take us from the airport through the Italian countryside to what would be our headquarters for ‘Operation Victory’. Italy was certainly an eye-opener for us! After years of austerity at home we were struck by the atmosphere of prosperity as we slowly drove through the streets of Milan. The men and women appeared well dressed and the shops looked better stocked than those we had left behind in England… at first sight Italy appeared to be a land of plenty. With a charm so typical of the man, Vittorio Pozzo, the grey-haired Italian journalist and still sole selector and team manager of the Italian national side, had a small sack of rice for every member of the England party. It may sound an odd gift, but at the time rice was as precious as gold dust at home.
By 1948 it was reported that Hiroshima, utterly devastated by the atomic bomb which had been dropped in August 1945, was already 85 per cent rebuilt. The British people had demonstrated clearly enough their willingness to make do and mend if the government was doling out the rations on a ‘fair shares for all’ basis, but it disturbed them mightily to see that the countries that had lost the war and killed many British soldiers while doing so, appeared to be enjoying the fruits of peace much more quickly than the British, for whom rationing was now more stringent than it had been in wartime. The national mood of grumbling that was to overturn the big Labour majority that had been acquired in the 1945 election was clearly already entrenched. Wright’s observation, although phrased in the positive, good-humoured spirit that the captain of England was supposed to convey in public at all times, nevertheless indicated some of the disillusion that had already set in back home.
Of course, Wright couldn’t help observing that the Italians’ obsession with style probably hadn’t done them any favours on the field. He noted their skin-tight shirts, and shorts so short ‘they would have raised eyebrows at Wembley’, but more self-defeating was the fact that none of them were wearing any shin-pads. England players might have been wearing baggy shirts and shorts that would have raised eyebrows for different reasons on the New Look catwalk at Christian Dior’s showroom but to an English defender like Henry Cockburn the sight of those unprotected Italian shins and calves was an open invitation to restage the Battle of Anzio. In this light the eventual 4–0 scoreline becomes a little more explicable.
The British public seemed to have good reason to exult in what appeared to
be a golden era for English football. The quality of players such as Matthews, Finney, Lawton, Swift, Mortensen, Mannion, Wright and Franklin, and the consistency of their results – particularly those victories against Portugal and Italy (and not forgetting their contribution to the triumph over the Rest of Europe) – all suggested that the following decade would be a good one for English sport and that England would be at the centre of the international game.
In 1948, the British public welcomed, in keeping with the age of austerity, the games of the Fourteenth Olympiad to London. The 1944 summer Olympics had been allocated to London but sadly most of the athletes were fighting on the beaches and fields of Normandy at the time. In October 1945, the chairman of the British Olympic Council, Lord Burghley (immortalised in Chariots of Fire by Nigel Havers leaping over hurdles topped with glasses filled with champagne), went to Stockholm and saw the president of the International Olympic Committee to discuss the question of London being chosen for the first post-war Games. As a result, an investigating committee was set up by the British Olympic Council to work out in some detail the possibility of holding the Games. After several meetings it was agreed that London should apply for the allocation of the Games in 1948. In March 1946, the IOC, through a postal vote, gave the summer Games to London ahead of its rivals Baltimore, Minneapolis, Lausanne, Los Angeles and Philadelphia.
After the initial pleasure of being awarded the Games had worn off, the realities of hosting such a competition in the social and economic conditions that prevailed in 1948 almost caused Britain to hand them over to the USA but it appears that King George was keen for the country to continue to act as host. Certainly the official report of the London Olympics shows that there was no case of London being forced to run the Games against its will, so despite the shortages and restrictions London pressed on. In stark contrast to the Games of 2012, the Austerity Olympics was budgeted at £743,000 but only cost £732,268. In 2016, that sum would pay Yaya Touré’s wages for less than three weeks.
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