Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  The social and political conditions that prevailed in Britain at the end of the 1940s were satirised to memorable effect in 1949 in perhaps the finest of the classic comedies produced by Ealing Studios in the immediate post-war period. Passport to Pimlico, although undoubtedly making reference to the contemporary Berlin blockade, was essentially a very English story about a district in London which discovers that it is actually not part of the area governed by the LCC but belongs to the medieval state of Burgundy. When children inadvertently set off a bomb left over from the war, the explosion reveals a buried cellar containing artwork, coins, jewellery and an ancient document written on parchment. Margaret Rutherford plays the expert historian Professor Hatton-Jones who authenticates it as a genuine document, a royal charter from the time of Edward IV that ceded the house and its estates to the last Duke of Burgundy when he sought refuge there during the time of the Wars of the Roses. The new Burgundians realise, to their delight, that the British government no longer has any legal jurisdiction over them and that Pimlico is therefore not subject to rationing and other bureaucratic restrictions.

  Their delight, however, is quickly tempered as the district is instantly flooded with entrepreneurs, crooks and eager shoppers. A noisy free-for-all ensues, which the old-fashioned neighbourhood PC – now the Chief Constable of Burgundy – finds himself unable to handle. Then the British authorities close the ‘border’ with barbed wire. Having left England without their passports, the bargain hunters have trouble returning home – as one policeman replies to an indignant woman, ‘Don’t blame me, Madam, if you choose to go abroad to do your shopping’, a line that would have sounded comically absurd in 1949, before the era of the booze-cruise and cross-Channel shopping trip.

  The Burgundians decide that two can play at this game and stop an underground train dead in its tracks. ‘The train is now at the Burgundy frontier,’ explains the oleaginous Raymond Huntley, an agent of the newly formed Customs and Excise department who asks the bewildered passengers on the District and Circle Line if they have anything to declare. The infuriated British government retaliates by blockading Burgundy (just as the Soviets were doing to the Western sectors of Berlin in 1948) and the residents are invited to ‘emigrate’ to England. But the Burgundians are ‘a fighting people’ and, though the children are evacuated, the adults stand fast. In one of screenwriter T. E. B. Clarke’s most felicitous speeches, Mrs Pemberton (Betty Warren), married to Arthur (Stanley Holloway), sticks her head out of the window to berate a neighbour who is thinking of giving up the fight, ‘Don’t you come that stuff, Jim Garland. We’ve always been English and we’ll always be English; and it’s precisely because we are English that we’re sticking up for our right to be Burgundians!’

  Pimlico is now deprived of electricity, food and water, which, for film-goers, would have carried an uncomfortable whiff of the real-life austerity of the government of Clement Attlee. Inevitably, the common sense and ‘Dunkirk spirit’ of the British comes to the rescue and ordinary, kind-hearted people begin throwing food parcels across the barrier in an improvised ‘airlift’, echoing the one that ended the Berlin blockade. A helicopter drops a hose to deliver milk and pigs are parachuted in. The government comes under public pressure to resolve the problem and, in the end, Pimlico returns to British rule, having loaned the British government the proceeds of the buried treasure unearthed by the bomb. All ends happily but with the street party, arranged to celebrate the end of Burgundian rule in Pimlico, spoiled by a torrential downpour.

  Passport to Pimlico is a delightful film, still fresh and funny today, painting a bold portrait of a vanished London, much as Hue and Cry did. Underlying the comedy, however, is a sense of boiling frustration at the petty restrictions of life in Britain in 1949. These restrictions were as much a feature of the lives of footballers as they were of the rest of the population. The maximum wage had its merits – no player would leave a small-town club for a big-city club for an extra pound note in the wage packet. It kept Finney at Preston and Matthews at Stoke and Blackpool for the duration of their careers. Such democratic niceties proved insufficiently robust for Charlie Mitten at Manchester United and Neil Franklin at Stoke City when Bogotá came calling. The Colombia Football Association had been expelled from FIFA for doing exactly what Chelsea, Manchester City and the rest of the Premier League have been doing for years – crawling the kerbs of the football world and waving large wads of cash out of the driver’s window.

  In 1950, the maximum wage would have been £12 a week during the season for a professional footballer in England. Neil Franklin, England’s skilful ball-playing centre-half, was offered by the Santa Fe club a £2,000 signing-on fee and £60 a week in wages along with a ‘villa’ (rarely a house) and a motor car. During his last match for England in front of the traditional 135,000 at Hampden Park, he was heard to observe bitterly in reference to the marching band that left the pitch as the players entered the arena, ‘Look at that lot. They’re all on bigger money than us.’ No wonder the financial incentives dangled by Bogotá were so inviting. It was money Franklin could never have expected to earn had he continued his career in England so he seized it eagerly, as did the Manchester United outside-left Charlie Mitten, who was on just £10 a week. But perhaps neither Franklin nor Mitten appreciated the extent of the vindictiveness they would face from their clubs and the football authorities.

  Franklin had applied for a transfer from Stoke City and had been kept waiting for three hours by the club’s directors before they would even allow him into the boardroom to discuss it. Around the same time Danny Blanchflower was transferred from Barnsley to Aston Villa for £15,000. He was told to sit in the kitchen of a Barnsley hotel with a cup of tea as the chairmen of the two clubs haggled over his price as if he were a piece of meat. His sole demand was that the training during the week at Villa included the use of a football because he never saw one at Barnsley until Saturday afternoon. Nobody in football was therefore surprised that Neil Franklin felt attracted by the bait held out to him from Bogotá. They were just surprised when he decided to take it.

  Inevitably perhaps, in neither case did their time in South America pan out in quite the way the players had anticipated. The life, even in the sunshine, was so foreign that neither family settled and within months they decided to return – like the Burgundians of Passport to Pimlico – to the whips and scorn of life in Austerity Britain. In South America, Franklin and his homesick wife lasted just six games; Mitten made it through the season but eventually they both had to face the wrath of the men who felt they had betrayed their birthright. There was no mercy shown, even by their managers Bob McGrory and Matt Busby, who had been impoverished players in Scotland and England and knew precisely what a life of financial hardship professional football could entail. Franklin was suspended indefinitely by Stoke, but after six months he was sold to Second Division Hull City. He never regained his England place and faded into obscurity via spells at Crewe Alexandra, Stockport County and Macclesfield Town. As for Mitten, he was banned for six months by the FA, who also fined him six months’ wages. As soon as he was available for selection for Manchester United again, Busby, who had ostracised him after his return, sold him to Fulham.

  Franklin had fled Britain for the lotus land of Bogotá in a mysterious midnight flit that seemed to be the model for the flight to Moscow the following year of Burgess and Maclean. He announced that he would not be available to play in the World Cup in Brazil that summer because his wife was due to give birth. This was a surprising reason in an era when men were rarely present at the birth of their children, that sort of thing being regarded as ‘women’s business’. All became clear, of course, when Franklin emerged blinking in the sunlight of Bogotá. Without him, the England football team struggled to find a replacement centre-half for four years until a chapter of accidents led Billy Wright to move to that position himself.

  With Franklin still in it, the national team won all its fixtures in the 1949–50 season, including a 9–2 th
umping of a hapless Northern Ireland, and England travelled to Brazil in 1950 for their World Cup debut in good spirits. Walter Winterbottom, however, was not best pleased that his star player, Stanley Matthews, was being sent by the FA on a goodwill tour of Canada just before the most important tournament in world football was due to start on the other side of the globe. The Blackpool winger arrived in Rio de Janeiro after England had won their opening match against Chile 2–0, but in time to play in their second group match against the United States in Belo Horizonte on 29 June. The chairman of the England selectors, the very same handsome Mr Arthur Drewry who was so fulsomely praised by Billy Wright in the Prologue, was in sole charge of selection for England in the 1950 World Cup. By trade, he was a Grimsby fish merchant and, armed with all the football knowledge that is traditionally associated with the fish business, he told both Winterbottom and the agitated Stanley Rous that he never changed a winning team and that Matthews would have to wait his turn. Mr Drewry was to become president of FIFA from 1955 until his death in 1961. He served concurrently as the chairman of the Football Association. He was a scrupulously honest man.

  The general level of professionalism at the Football Association can best be illustrated by the fact that nobody had bothered to check the nature of the food that would be served to players who were used to conventional English cuisine. They were staying in the Luxor Hotel overlooking Copacabana Beach and were expecting food in keeping with the Luxor’s luxurious reputation. Nobody in the England party would clearly be particularly inconvenienced by badly cooked food served in very small portions as that was basically what they were used to back home, but what they were served up in Brazil defeated the hardiest of English stomachs. The captain later wrote gulpingly:

  Breakfast for the continental, of course, is little more than coffee and rolls. But we all preferred our customary eggs and bacon, toast and marmalade and it was arranged on arrival in Rio that we should all have this meal in bed. The Brazilian notion of bacon and eggs, alas, didn’t exactly tally with ours. I sat up eagerly in bed the next morning – to be faced with one of the most unappetising sights I’ve ever set eyes on. The eggs had been cooked in black oil (still clinging to the edges) and the bacon looked like ham of doubtful quality. Jimmy Dickinson was sharing a room with me and I’m afraid neither of us could even look at the meal, let alone eat it, without shuddering.

  Legend has it that Mr Winterbottom endeared himself to his players by marching into the hotel kitchens and attempting to do the cooking for the team. In the unlikely event that this story is true, sadly it did nothing to offset the humiliation awaiting them in Belo Horizonte. Alf Ramsey was one of the players concerned and it must have significantly affected his decision in 1970 to be meticulous about food preparation when he was in charge of England’s World Cup preparations for Mexico.

  While the laziness and amateurishness of the FA’s preparation was unforgivable, there were problems beyond even the FA’s ability to control. The game against the United States was scheduled to be played in Belo Horizonte, three hundred miles inland from Rio. The coach ride from the airport to the team’s base sixteen miles from Belo Horizonte involved negotiating 167 hairpin bends on a road that was barely clinging to the mountainside out of which it had been carved. The players were housed in a series of wooden huts in a miners’ camp. The match itself was played on a cramped, narrow pitch pitted with tiny stones which negated England’s strength down the wings. The stadium was still being built and the dressing rooms were so dirty that Winterbottom ordered his players back on the coach and the team changed in a sports club a ten-minute drive away. It was unsettling, undoubtedly, but no more so than when a First Division team was drawn to play a non-league side in the third round of the FA Cup.

  That fount of footballing wisdom Mr Arthur Drewry may be excused a certain amount of overconfidence in his selection for the match against the United States. After all, England – who still believed they had the best team in the world, even if recent events had caused this judgement to be called into question occasionally – were playing a bunch of part-timers, boosted by three immigrants in Joe Maca from Belgium, the captain Ed McIlveney from Scotland (and former right-half for Wrexham) and the man who scored the goal heard around the world, Joe Gaetjens from Haiti. Gaetjens later returned to his native country and joined the resistance to the Haitian dictator François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier but was arrested and allegedly murdered by the ‘Tonton Macoutes’ – Duvalier’s feared secret police – in prison; an unhappy end to a life that contained at least this one glorious moment. A hard cross was heading straight for the arms of the Wolves goalkeeper Bert Williams when Gaetjens tried to duck out of the way but the ball flicked off the top of his head and deflected into the net just inside the near post.

  The Haitian’s goal came eight minutes before half-time. It seemed highly unlikely to most observers that a forward line of Tom Finney, Wilf Mannion, Roy Bentley, Stan Mortensen and Jimmy Mullen would not, in the second half, simply change up into third gear, cruise past the inexperienced defenders, equalise immediately and then help themselves to a hatful of goals. A relieved Stan Mortensen thought he had done exactly that when he turned a low cross into the net and trotted back towards the centre circle, only to see an American defender back-heel the ball out of the net, kick it clear and the referee wave both arms to indicate ‘Play on!’ This wasn’t the end of Mortensen’s interesting afternoon, as his captain later recalled:

  Joe Gaetjens scores the only goal of the game during the USA’s World Cup group match vs England, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 29 June 1950. The unhappy goalkeeper is England’s Bert Williams (Popperfoto / Getty Images).

  Mortie raced on to a through-pass from Wilf Mannion. He evaded Charlie Colombo, America’s centre half and was left only with the goalkeeper standing between him and glory. Mortensen, however, had not given a thought to the defenders behind him; come to that neither would I in similar circumstances. The Americans obviously did not relish the possibility of Stanley getting the equaliser. Racing up from behind, one of the American defenders threw himself full length to bring down Mortie with the finest flying tackle ever seen outside Twickenham. The free kick – as is so often the case – brought no reward.

  Later, a Mortensen header from a Ramsey free-kick appeared to have crossed the line but the referee disallowed the goal. The American goalkeeper, Frank Borghi, had started his sports career as a baseball catcher but abandoned it to drive the hearse for his uncle’s funeral parlour. In that second half he was hit in the face three times by hard shots that seemed destined for the back of the net. It defied belief when, two minutes from the final whistle, he made a miraculous save from an Alf Ramsey free-kick that seemed certain to bring England a face-saving draw. Even that stoic, phlegmatic Tottenham full-back permitted himself an expression of despair in this moment. England had spent almost the entire game camped in the American half of the field.

  Of course the Americans had played bravely and far better than anyone, including themselves, had expected. The England forward line had created the dozens of chances that it was expected to do – it was just that none of them were converted. The match finished England 0 United States of America 1. Over forty years later the Sun would headline another England defeat by the same opponents YANKS 2 PLANKS 0, but that was to be somewhat unfair to a country that was, by then, making serious strides towards being a competitive international football team. In 1950, the press was hardly kind to either the underachieving players or the manager but the castigation was better deserved. The only conceivable response to this freakish result was the one constantly given by Spitting Image’s Jimmy Greaves puppet – a bewildered look followed by the platitude ‘Funny old game!’

  Despite the unfortunate events in Belo Horizonte, England’s defeat of Chile meant they could therefore still progress from the group stages if they could defeat Spain in the last of their group matches. The last time they had played Spain had been in 1931, when England had won 7–1, but that pre-w
ar thrashing was hardly a guide to current form. Despite a widely shared belief that the freak result of Belo Horizonte would never be repeated, in fact England once again lost 1–0 in a game in which they largely dominated. This time both Matthews and Finney were selected. Mortensen and Milburn, who had been expected to fill their boots in the Brazilian sunshine, failed to score, and the England football team went home at the end of the group stage to face headlines with which their supporters were to become increasingly familiar over the years. Wright’s captaincy and Winterbottom’s management, inevitably, came under particular scrutiny. While the headlines did not compare for savagery with those that would greet later England managers, both Walter Winterbottom and the Wolves skipper knew perfectly well that they were not among the most popular men in the country at the start of July 1950. Still, Brazil was a long way from England and most newspapers allocated this foreign competition only a limited amount of space. It wasn’t as if England had been beaten at home by Scotland, after all.

  Four days before the calamity at Belo Horizonte, on 25 June, Communist North Korean troops had crossed the 38th Parallel, surprised the South Korean army (and the small US force stationed in the country), and captured Seoul within three days. The United States believed that the only political response to Communist aggression wherever it occurred in the world was an instant military reaction. It responded by pushing a resolution through the United Nations Security Council calling for military assistance to South Korea. The Soviet Union was not present to veto the resolution as it was boycotting the Security Council at the time. So, with the resolution confirmed, President Truman rapidly dispatched US land, air and sea forces to Korea to engage in what he termed a ‘police action’ on behalf of the United Nations.