Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  There sat Harold Macmillan, with his cabinet all gathered around him on sofas, all looking slightly shifty and uncomfortable. He explained to the viewers that he intended to give them an end of Parliament report and then called on each Minister in turn to speak. ‘Derry,’ he said turning to Chancellor Heathcoat Amory, ‘a word about the economy. I think we’re doing quite well, don’t you?’

  However, the Tories soon discovered the unfortunate consequences of such an approach, sorted themselves out, abandoned the BBC and enlisted the help of Norman Collins at ATV. Macmillan then pulled off a famous virtuoso performance, spinning a globe of the world and talking in masterly fashion about his involvement in world affairs. Forty-eight hours later the Conservatives won the election with an overall majority of a hundred seats.

  For all its hauteur, the BBC was facing considerable pressure from a new commercial rival, Independent Television, which was launched in the London area on 22 September 1955. The BBC and its supporters reacted with predictable outrage as audiences abandoned the latest talk on hats or archaeology on BBC Television to absorb the hospital soap opera that was Emergency – Ward 10, the comedy of Alfie Bass and Bernard Bresslaw in The Army Game (a sitcom about National Service) and the seductive California sunshine that suffused the popular private eye series, 77 Sunset Strip. The scriptwriters of BBC Radio’s The Archers, hell-bent on destroying ITV’s eagerly anticipated first night, had ignited a fire at Brookfield stables which killed the character of Grace Archer. Phil Archer’s young wife died in vain, however, for the march of ITV was unstoppable. Audiences voted with the switch on the front of their new twelve-inch sets. The result was a landslide. In 1960, the advent of Coronation Street on Granada Television demonstrated that the complacency that had infected the BBC from its days as a monopoly was actually destroying the viability of the Corporation.

  The ITV companies’ only interests were ratings and a commercial profit for its shareholders. The BBC disdained to chase ratings, as a consequence of which the proportion of the viewing public that watched BBC Television slumped to 28 per cent by the end of 1957. On that basis the BBC simply could not justify the licence fee and so a battle began for the soul of the nation, a battle which continued to rage through the age of the video cassette recorder and time shifting, through the satellite and cable age and into the age of the podcast, streaming and the Internet. In 1953, when the BBC was forbidden by Buckingham Palace to show a close-up of the queen at the moment that the crown was placed on her head, the live broadcast on the American channel NBC cut to a commercial of the network’s celebrity chimpanzee, J. Fred Muggs. For BBC loyalists, this disgraceful affront to the dignity of the sovereign was symbolic of the threat to traditional British values that the new commercial television would represent.

  As the British economy stabilised in 1958 and the newly built transmitters carried Gunsmoke and Huckleberry Hound to all parts of the country, ITV’s ratings soared and the advertising revenue poured in. The BBC was helpless to resist the rapid ebbing away of its audiences. It didn’t know how to compete against an organisation that valued innovation and commercial success. It remained steadfastly British, scorning the easy path to audiences by buying American series or making programmes like the Americans’.

  ITV, particularly ATV Network led by Val Parnell and Lew Grade, knew perfectly well what audiences didn’t want. They didn’t want those BBC lectures that were supposed to be ‘good for them’. They didn’t want Rediffusion’s programmes with Sir John Barbirolli conducting the Hallé Orchestra or even ATV’s own live production of Hamlet which played to less than 10 per cent of the audience and was mercifully terminated in the final scene when it overran. Master Control went to a pre-arranged commercial break and never returned to see if Hamlet had a happy ending. Nobody complained.

  Grade knew exactly what it was that audiences did want – Rawhide and Cheyenne, Maverick and The Untouchables. If the programme had to be British, nothing beat Sunday Night at the London Palladium but preferably with a big American star at the top of the bill. The BBC had fought and lost. ITV was here to stay. One of the few battlegrounds where the BBC could exert some form of superiority was sport. The people who ran the big sporting institutions were ‘BBC people’ and they regarded ITV as rude, crude and unwelcome interlopers. This was where Peter Dimmock and BBC Sport came into their own, as Paul Fox recalls:

  Stanley Rous at the FA was a gentleman and Dimmock got on with Stanley so we had the FA Cup final live from 1953 onwards. Dan Maskell knew everyone at the All England Club so we got the Wimbledon tennis and Dimmock and Peter O’Sullevan knew everyone in the racing world so that was available and rugby became available because the RFU welcomed us as did the AAA for athletics. The Grand National was difficult and it wasn’t televised until 1960 because Aintree was run by a lunatic woman called Mrs Mirabel Topham, a former Gaiety Girl, and her mad nephew. Dimmock laid siege to her. One year after the BBC had been televising the Grand National for a while she chucked us out and decided that the commentary would be done by the Daily Mirror. It was a total disaster and next year we were allowed back in. What helped the BBC was the great commentators – O’Sullevan, Maskell, Dorian Williams. Lew Grade tried, ITV started World of Sport but in the late 1950s and early 1960s it was sewn up by Dimmock. He’s the hero of this story.

  Peter Dimmock, Head of BBC TV Outside Broadcasts, January 1960 (Topfoto).

  The one sport which remained resistant to the lure of television was football, which annoyed the television executives because it had exactly what their schedules demanded – wide popularity with endlessly repeatable content. Wimbledon was transmitted for seven hours a day but it was only for twelve days a year. The Grand National lasted just twenty minutes. League football had forty-two matches a year but the Football League wasn’t selling its precious fixture list. Alan Hardaker, secretary of the Football League, sat in his office at Lytham St Annes and rejected approaches from both the BBC and ITV. Not even the fabled charm of Peter Dimmock could persuade him to change his mind. Stanley Rous might have been a gentleman but the gruff Hardaker assuredly was not.

  Instead of football, what BBC Sport got was rugby league which, along with a mud-splattered sport called moto-cross – involving a bunch of unidentifiable motorcycles scrambling up and down mud banks – dominated the Saturday-afternoon sports programme Grandstand until 4.40 p.m. when David Coleman grabbed the lip mic and read out the football results as the teleprinter clattered out the news from grounds across the country. When Grandstand was first broadcast in 1958 the ubiquitous Dimmock had been the presenter, but he had to read his script off a teleprompter (the only one in the country at the time) because he couldn’t remember a word. Coleman was younger and more in keeping with the presenters of the new decade.

  The hunger for football on the small screen was palpable, but Hardaker’s fear that televised football would result in crowds deserting the terraces for the telly was sufficient to prevent anything beyond the Cup Final and the occasional representative game from being shown live. During the 1950s it was reported that attendances at Football League grounds declined by 3.8 million, a huge drop from the admittedly unsustainably high crowds of the immediate post-war years. Various explanations were offered: it was now the age of the family, the five-day week, the saloon car and the television set. Billy Wright was always convinced that television would be a help to the growth of football in England, not a hindrance. In The World’s My Football Pitch he wrote: ‘During the 1960–1 season, BBC and ITV both tried to do deals with the Football League but failed. Figures as high as £150,000 were bandied about. A live game every third Friday would be good. Soccer cannot fight television; it must therefore use it.’

  In fact, Wright was not quite correct. A deal was indeed done between ITV and the Football League to show the second half of twenty-six matches. The first match to be thus broadcast, between Blackpool and Bolton Wanderers in front of a half-empty Bloomfield Road, was shown to a small audience on the evening of 10 Septem
ber 1960. Unimpressed, Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur then refused to allow the cameras into their grounds to televise their matches against Newcastle United and Aston Villa respectively. ITV then withdrew from the deal and broadcast The Nat King Cole Show instead. There was no appetite on either side for a renewal.

  Match highlights were shown on TV even before the advent of Match of the Day in 1964. The Saturday-night television programme Sports Special, introduced by Kenneth Wolstenholme, included coverage of three matches which could not be announced in advance, just as the identity of the matches for which second-half commentary was broadcast on the radio on Saturday afternoon could not be revealed until 3.45 p.m. in case people chose to listen rather than pay to go to the ground and watch. The film of the matches was flown by helicopter to a laboratory which had to develop the film before it could be edited so, with sweat trickling down their collars, the production team and presenter frequently started the live programme without the edited film having been threaded on to the telecine machine.

  Such was the success of Sportsview that the BBC with that sense of originality that has always marked it out as the finest public service broadcaster in history came up with another programme in the same genre. It was designed to appeal to children, so they called it Junior Sportsview. Not even Peter Dimmock with his Battle of Britain pilot’s moustache could pretend that he was a natural presenter of a programme for children from six to sixteen, so the BBC went looking for a new face. The first one they tried, on Paul Fox’s recommendation, was the Tottenham Hotspur captain, Danny Blanchflower. Unfortunately, as Fox recalled,

  Danny Blanchflower didn’t want to do it. Blanchflower was the best, a natural TV performer. He had the face, the personality and the nous but he was never that interested in television so we chose Billy Wright who was. It helped that he was married to Joy who understood TV. He wasn’t that good and at ATV they got him off camera as soon as possible.

  Marriage to Joy Beverley changed Billy’s life. He claimed later that he had not even thought seriously about marriage until 1954, when he was thirty, and it took him another four years before he eventually tied the knot. They had met when he had been asked to show Joy’s son by a former marriage round Molineux. He admitted that, to his own surprise, he had kissed Joy goodbye on their first meeting. ‘That putting it mildly was quite out of character with my normal self.’ Football, to say nothing of society as a whole, was not as devoted to the formal farewell kiss as it is today.

  Nevertheless, the possibility of a blossoming relationship between the captain of the England football team and Joy Beverley – who, along with her twin sisters Teddie and Babs, made up the popular singing trio known as the Beverley Sisters – sent the press into the sort of frenzy we certainly would recognise today. To the couple’s dismay one newspaper decided to splash a story about Joy’s first marriage which angered both of them because ‘that story represented journalism at its worst’. The couple eventually decided to get married on Sunday 27 July 1958 at Poole Register Office when the sisters were appearing in a summer show in Bournemouth. Despite their best attempts at maintaining the secret, somehow it leaked out. By the time the bridal party of two cars got to the register office on the Sunday morning the whole press pack along with hundreds of curious onlookers were waiting outside. To the bride’s dismay, the aerial was snapped off her car. The honeymoon took place in Stratford-upon-Avon and lasted precisely twenty-four hours. Joy went back to the show in Bournemouth and Billy returned to pre-season training in Wolverhampton.

  Billy Wright poses with his wife Joy Beverley and her sisters Teddie and Babs at his wedding, 27 July 1958 (PA Photos / Topfoto).

  For the last season of Billy’s career he and his new wife were the Posh and Becks of 1958. Victoria Beckham might have risen to fame on the back of a singing career but there the parallel with Joy Beverley Wright disappears. Posh Spice’s first big hit as a member of the Spice Girls was ‘Wannabe’. Joy’s was the sisters’ cover version of ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’ and, six years later in 1959, ‘Little Drummer Boy’. Brian Glanville was not a fan: ‘You couldn’t have been the showbiz couple of the decade if you were married to one of the Beverley Sisters. They were dreadful. Give me the Andrews Sisters any day.’

  However, for all the vocal limitations of the Beverley Sisters there was an undoubted glamour now attached to the captain of the England football team which went beyond the realm of football. It was nothing compared to what was yet to greet the other three captains but it certainly indicated the way in which the England football captain could be recognised by more than just his achievements on the field.

  In that 1958–9 season, Tom Finney and Nat Lofthouse both made their last appearances for England. In April, Billy Wright won his one hundredth cap as England defeated Scotland 1–0 at Wembley with an acrobatic header from Bobby Charlton. At the end of the game Wright was carried towards the dressing room on the shoulders of Ronnie Clayton and Don Howe, but still he showed no inclination to call it a day. The time when an England player would retire early from the international game in order to concentrate on extending his club career was many years distant, which meant that when England went on their summer tour of North and South America Billy Wright was still in the firing line as they lost all three matches against Brazil, Peru and Mexico.

  Jimmy Armfield made his debut in the match in the Maracanã and Jimmy Greaves in the 4–1 defeat by Peru. Greaves, inevitably, scored the England goal but when the team arrived in Los Angeles for the final match of the tour against the United States, they were under siege from withering criticism in the press. Only too aware that the memory of the 1950 World Cup fiasco was fresh in everyone’s minds, England began as if determined to repeat it. The Americans had an early goal disallowed but then took the lead after eight minutes through a goal scored by their captain Eddie Murphy. As the teams emerged for the second half the score was only 1–1, but a further seven goals in the last forty-five minutes, including a hat-trick by Bobby Charlton, ensured there was to be no repeat of the Belo Horizonte nightmare. It was Billy Wright’s last match for England though not even he knew it at the time.

  In June 1959, Billy was invited to open a new leisure complex in Saffron Walden by the town’s MP and current home secretary, Rab Butler. It was Butler, according to Wright in One Hundred Caps and All That, who raised the question of retirement. Butler thought it was a jolly good idea to go out at the top though, of course, he didn’t, losing the prime ministerial selection process in 1957 to Harold Macmillan and in 1963 to Alec Douglas-Home and not retiring from politics until after Labour was returned to power in October 1964. Of course, Butler never played in a pre-season match and found he no longer had the pace that he had formerly been able to command. Wright played in the Wolves pre-season match, traditionally the Whites v. the Colours, and told Stan Cullis soon afterwards that he was retiring with immediate effect. As the home secretary knew, it was the right decision.

  Wright left the game with gratitude for the memories and the opportunities it had given him. Born in Ironbridge, the son of a worker in the nearby Coalbrookdale iron foundry, Wright lived a life of glamour and excitement that would not have been available to any other boy:

  I’ve heard the calypso boys of the West Indies in their right and proper setting, watched the Mountains of Mourne slope down to the sea from my bedroom window, drunk the health of Her Majesty the Queen under a spreading palm tree, bargained with smooth tongued spivs in Rome, been buffeted around in a plane by gale-force winds over the Alps, climbed the Eiffel Tower, bathed in the fabulous five-mile sweep of the millionaires’ Copacabana Beach, ridden on the Big Wheel of the Harry Lime film in Vienna, gazed upwards at the skyscrapers of New York and been driven by a speed-crazy coach-driver through little Portuguese villages. All this I owe to football.

  Billy Wright left school at fourteen and did not have the opportunity to become upwardly socially mobile through what became the conventional working-class method of escape of the Eleven P
lus examination and the grammar school. Football was one of the few avenues open to him to progress and certainly one of the very few that could provide him with the opportunity to enjoy the lifestyle described above and the mixed blessings of a celebrity marriage.

  However, Billy Wright’s career was significantly different from that of a regular first-team player at a First Division club of the era. Whatever the level at which he played, an English footballer in the 1950s could not, legitimately, exceed the maximum wage. A year after winning the FA Cup at Wembley in May 1959, Nottingham Forest were involved in a First Division relegation dogfight alongside Leeds United, Luton Town and Birmingham City. Before Forest’s vital match at Stamford Bridge, the Chelsea captain Peter Sillett gathered the other ten players together in the snooker room, away from management eyes and ears. He informed his team-mates that he had been approached by two Forest players who were prepared to give the Chelsea players £500 to deliberately lose the match. It would have worked out as a tax-free sum of £45 a man; that was more than two weeks’ wages for the Chelsea players. They took a vote. The result was an 11–0 verdict in favour of rejecting the offer out of hand. The match ended in a genuine, hard-fought 1–1 draw. Forest finished the season just one point above Leeds United who were relegated along with Luton Town.

  Honest in respect of the illegal bribe, for some professional footballers who were desperate to supplement their meagre wages petty theft was nevertheless a way of life. As a groundstaff boy, Jimmy Greaves worked for John Battersby, the Chelsea secretary, who was in charge of issuing the luncheon vouchers worth two shillings and sixpence (12.5 pence). The brothers John and Peter Sillett, so admirable in their refusal to countenance the illegal offer from the two Forest players, suggested to the young, impressionable Greaves that he liberate a few luncheon vouchers, which Greaves did from time to time in return for a few welcome shillings. Greaves knew that the Silletts would then trade the stolen vouchers down at a café called Charlie’s for cigarettes. Battersby was a heavy smoker so the young ground-staff boy’s first job every morning was to run down to the local café and buy forty Senior Service for Battersby. ‘Snozzel’ Sillett would then waylay him and give him the black market packets of Senior Service bought with the luncheon vouchers liberated from Battersby’s desk drawer in return for the cash Battersby had just handed to Greaves. Life at Stamford Bridge in those days was, Greaves later said, ‘like Harry Lime’s Vienna’.