Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  According to the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, the winds of change were blowing through the continent of Africa at the start of 1960. Different but equally significant winds of change were starting to sweep through class-conscious Britain. Underpaid, resentful English footballers were about to initiate their own startling social and legal revolution.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE AGE OF BOBBY MOORE

  Bobby Moore holds the Jules Rimet Trophy aloft after England beat West Germany 4–2 in the World Cup final at Wembley, 30 July 1966. (Popperfoto / Getty Images).

  The England football team did not go into a steep decline when Billy Wright disappeared from the international stage he had graced since 1946. In fact, for a brief period it was both settled and successful, before, of course, the World Cup came along and England once again failed to perform.

  The leadership of the side was initially taken over by Ronnie Clayton, the Blackburn Rovers captain and right-half, who had already played alongside Wright in thirty games for England. However, despite being ten years younger than the Wolverhampton Wanderers centre-half, Clayton’s international career ended after just five games as captain when Bobby Robson displaced him as the England team’s right-half. The captaincy now passed to Johnny Haynes, who had been an adornment of the English game since 1950 when, as a diminutive fifteen-year-old schoolboy, he had dominated a game at Wembley against Scotland Schoolboys, watched by an admiring television audience. It was another small harbinger of the growing fateful relationship between football and television.

  Despite playing Second Division football for Fulham, by October 1954 Haynes had progressed to the full England team, where he became the creative hub of the midfield, stroking long elegant cross-field passes with either foot. Wright admired him enormously.

  I think [he] is destined to become one of England’s great captains. His leadership has grown in leaps and bounds in a very short space of time, and now we find him emerging as a constant source of inspiration not only to the young players in the England side but to youngsters all over the country.

  Haynes’s greatest moment probably came at Wembley in April 1961 when he was the captain of an England side that put nine goals past the hapless Scotland goalkeeper Frank Haffey. That was the England team that suddenly seemed to have found itself. Ron Springett in goal; Jimmy Armfield and Mick McNeil of Middlesbrough at full-back; a half-back line of Robson, Peter Swan and Ron Flowers and a forward line that boasted the skills of Douglas, Haynes, Greaves and Charlton together with the Spurs battering ram of a centre-forward, Bobby Smith. For the first time since the days of the Busby Babes, England had a settled, successful team and could look forward with some optimism to the World Cup in Chile in 1962.

  Johnny Haynes was not only the captain of England but the highest-earning footballer in the land. Tommy Trinder, the Fulham chairman, had publicly announced that he would very much have liked to have paid Haynes £100 a week but unfortunately the maximum wage was capped at £20 by the Football League. In 1961 the pay cap was abolished and Trinder was obliged to put his money where his mouth had been. Haynes’s new-found riches did not immediately change his lifestyle, however, as the football journalist Patrick Barclay noted:

  When Beckham became one of the first £100,000 a week footballers I went up to Edinburgh to talk to Johnny Haynes because he’d been the first £100 a week footballer. He said even when he was on that £100 a week and the highest paid player in Britain he was still travelling to matches by Tube to Hammersmith, then he would get a bus up the Fulham Palace Road. Occasionally fans would say, ‘Have a good game today, Johnny!’ The irony is that even though they were ‘one of us’ I regarded the players of those days as being on a pedestal in a way that I never regarded the Beckhams and players of today.

  The maximum wage crumbled in the face of a threatened strike by the players. Britain was already getting so used to the increasing incidence of strike action that ‘the British disease’ eventually became the term associated with low industrial productivity and irresponsible industrial action. A BBC television sitcom called The Rag Trade, written by Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney, first appeared in 1961. It focused on the lives of a group of working-class women who were employed in a clothing factory named Fenner Fashions, run by the permanently harassed Harold Fenner, played by Peter Jones, and his much put-upon assistant, played by Reg Varney. As in the recently successful Boulting Brothers film I’m All Right, Jack (1959), management was painted as either venal or incompetent and the workers were shown to be self-centred and ideologically hidebound.

  In the film, there was a brilliant performance of no little depth by Peter Sellers as the shop steward, Fred Kite, in awe of the workers’ paradise known as Soviet Russia (‘all them cornfields and ballet in the evening’), but in The Rag Trade the character of the shop steward was played strictly for laughs. The belligerent Paddy Fleming (Miriam Karlin) revelled in the power she wielded over the bosses with the blast on her whistle and the screech of ‘Everybody out!’, a catchphrase which caught on quickly. Invariably, the girls all responded instantly and production stopped entirely while some petty labour dispute was resolved. Both The Rag Trade and I’m All Right, Jack worked because the audience recognised the reality of Britain’s current industrial relations behind the comedy.

  In 1956, Johnny Haynes’s Fulham colleague Jimmy Hill was voted chairman of the Players’ Union in succession to Jimmy Guthrie and soon changed the name of the organisation to the more white-collar-sounding Professional Footballers’ Association. Everyone in the game knew that at this time, after five years with one club, a player qualified for a benefit worth up to £750 which was taxed at the standard rate – unlike professional cricketers, whose benefits were not taxable. In 1948 Cyril Washbrook collected the tax-free sum of £14,000 at Lancashire and in 1961 Brian Statham was awarded a similar amount. In those days, footballers looked at cricketers with financial envy.

  This was just one of the twenty-two points of outstanding difference between the PFA and the Football League who represented the clubs, the players’ employers. In 1960, the maximum wage was £20 a week during the season and £17 in the summer. The clubs also controlled their players’ destinies through the ‘retain and transfer’ contract system. If at the end of his contract a player did not wish to re-sign on the terms offered to him, his club could simply retain his contract and not pay him anything. He could not be transferred except with the club’s consent. In the wage negotiations of 1960 it was later revealed that the PFA would have settled for a maximum wage of £30 but the intransigence demonstrated by the Football League pushed them towards strike action. The PFA also wanted their players to have the right to move at the end of their contract but, unlike the situation that arose after the Bosman decision in 1995, they did not expect freedom of contract to come without a fair fee being paid to the selling club by the purchasing club.

  Hill and the PFA Secretary, Cliff Lloyd, feared that if the Football League and the clubs accepted a small increase in the maximum wage, the overwhelming majority of players would sign and forget about the principles behind the strike. When the Football League refused to negotiate seriously the members of the PFA started to see the sense in a strike. The PFA, like Actors’ Equity, was at the time a weak union because its members knew that their services were far from indispensable. A ‘bolshie’ actor could be replaced as easily as could a ‘bolshie’ football player. Actors and footballers wanted to work, whereas workers on an industrial assembly line did not necessarily feel similarly. As the character Arthur Seaton says in Alan Sillitoe’s contemporary bestseller Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, ‘All I’m out for is a good time – all the rest is propaganda.’

  The crucial PFA meeting took place in Manchester in December 1960. Jimmy Armfield was the Blackpool PFA representative:

  Cliff Lloyd rang me at home the night before and just said, ‘Make sure you get him there tomorrow.’ I knew what he meant. I had to get Stan [Matthews] to the meeting because all the p
layers looked up to Stan. The fact that he and Tom Finney were there changed the meeting. We were all British and we’d been through the war and through the hard times. Not everyone was committed to the strike at first. A lad got up and said, ‘My dad’s a miner in Chesterfield; he works five and a half days a week for £8 a week. I’m on £12. I’m earning half as much again as my dad. I can’t go on strike.’ Tommy Banks [the infamously hard Bolton Wanderers left-back] got up and said, ‘Son, thee, me and all on us can do thi father’s job. You come and ask thi dad to come and play against Brother Matthews in front of 35,000 people on a Saturday afternoon.’ We all laughed and everyone started cheering. In my opinion that changed the meeting. Players went into that meeting not sure they should go on strike. By the time the meeting had finished we all were united behind the strike.

  The PFA gave the Football League one month’s notice of strike action. At Belle Vue in Manchester, northern players passed the resolution by 254 to 6. The final countrywide vote was 694 to 18. Ted Hill, then chairman of the TUC, declared his support for the PFA. In January, he asked all members of every trade union not to attend ‘blackleg matches’. There was still considerable pressure against a strike from the football pools companies, so the PFA tried to arrange alternative matches for people to bet on. The players had been frightened by the prospect of alienating their supporters by depriving them of their Saturday-afternoon entertainment. In the end, they need not have worried.

  Jimmy Hill, President of the Professional Footballers’ Association, talks to members of the press at St Pancras Town Hall, London, 10 January 1961.

  The strike that was due to start on Saturday 21 January 1961 was called off on the Wednesday before when the Football League offered to abolish the maximum wage and make concessions on retain and transfer. The latter principle still held until the revolutionary judgment in the Eastham case which the PFA brought when the Football League started to backslide on the agreement made with the PFA at the Ministry of Labour. George Eastham was a skilful inside-forward who had asked his club, Newcastle United, for a transfer in 1959. When Newcastle used the retain-and-transfer system to prevent him from leaving, the player refused to play for the club and took Newcastle to the High Court for restraint of trade and unpaid wages. Eastham’s situation became a test case for all players in contractual dispute with their clubs. The player noted:

  Our contract could bind us to a club for life. Most people called it the ‘slavery contract’. We had virtually no rights at all. It was often the case that the guy on the terrace not only earned more than us – though there’s nothing wrong with that – he had more freedom of movement than us. People in business or teaching were able to hand in their notice and move on. We weren’t. That was wrong.

  The decision in the case was announced on 4 July 1963 by Mr Justice Wilberforce:

  The system is an employers’ system, set up in an industry where the employers have succeeded in establishing a united monolithic front all over the world, and where it is clear that for the purpose of negotiation the employers are vastly more strongly organised than the employees. No doubt the employers all over the world consider this system to be a good system, but this does not prevent the court from considering whether it goes further than is reasonably necessary to protect their legitimate interest.

  The judge’s ruling that the retain-and-transfer system was unreasonable led to reforms in the transfer market, with players who were looking to re-sign for their clubs receiving fairer terms, and a transfer tribunal being set up to resolve disputes between players and clubs. In 1963, football was finally starting to move with the times.

  The life of Jimmy Hill seemed to symbolise those times and, had he been captain of England, he would have made a persuasive case for inclusion as one of the five significant captains of the post-war era. He was born in 1928 in a two-up, two-down terrace house in Balham in south London, to parents who struggled to make ends meet and were obliged to take in lodgers and other paying guests. Hill’s father was frequently unemployed but found occasional work, first as a milk delivery man ladling out milk from a churn door to door, then in a bakery in Blackheath for £4 a week. His day started before dawn and Hill rarely saw his father before 7 p.m. on those days when he was working. Hill passed the Eleven Plus and went to Henry Thornton School in Clapham. In 1949, after national service with the Royal Army Service Corps at Cirencester, which he spent, like many national servicemen who were talented sportsmen, mostly playing football and cricket, he joined Brentford, for whom he made eighty-three appearances. Three years later he moved to Fulham where he would spend the remainder of his playing career.

  His entrepreneurial talents revealed themselves early on, although they were undoubtedly encouraged by financial insecurity. Ossie Noble, an accomplished drummer and local mime artist, with whom Hill regularly played golf, shared his own fears about future penury and informed Hill that he had started the Immaculate Chimney Sweeping Company, having invested in a vacuum machine that boasted that it could suck the soot from the chimney without depositing it on the sitting-room floor. Noble invited Hill to join this revolutionary start-up and use his persuasive and articulate powers to attract new customers. The charge to the householder was seven shillings and sixpence (37.5 pence) of which Hill kept one shilling (5 pence). So well did he perform his duties that the Immaculate Chimney Sweeping Company soon had more orders than it could fulfil and Hill was invited to join as a full active partner by donning the overalls and doing the sweeping himself. However, Hill could only devote his time to the business during the summer months and since he suffered from hay fever at that time he was soon rendered ineffective by constant sneezing and withdrew. Nevertheless the Immaculate Chimney Sweeping Company affair demonstrated the lengths to which professional footballers had to go in the 1950s to supplement the family budget.

  So there we were – the Immaculate Chimney Sweeping duo wanting to play golf much, much more than sweep chimneys but imprisoned by the constant rumblings of insecurity arising from the fear that one day our art would no longer feed the family – the nagging insecurity of professional sport.

  Hill’s story continued to thread its way through the narrative of English football for another thirty years.

  Johnny Haynes, Jimmy Hill’s team-mate at Fulham, led England into the 1962 World Cup, but the settled team which had looked so impressive in 1960 and 1961 was badly affected by injuries. Not for the first – or last – time the England football team failed to do justice to their talents at the end of a gruelling domestic season. The dependable and accomplished right-back Jimmy Armfield remembers the sad decline of that England team only too well:

  The expectancy of the England team was greater in 1960 than it is today. Then we really did think we were going to win every match. We lost Bobby Smith who did his ankle before we left for the 1962 World Cup and he was a key player. We had an excellent team, the best I ever played in for England. It was a very attacking team. The balance of the team was good. Jimmy Greaves was like Messi, his close control was so good and he had quick feet. But eventually we lost Bobby Smith and Peter Swan and Johnny Haynes. Gerry Hitchens came in for Bobby Smith, and then they brought Bobby Moore in and he reminded me of when I first played against Brazil, but he did better than I did and I told Walter he’s going to be OK. His temperament and his positional play were excellent.

  Bobby Moore had been making a reputation for himself for a few months before his first selection for England. On Friday 4 May 1962, Moore gave an outstanding display in a Young England v. England game played at Highbury. The match, which was one of the very few games of the era to be televised, took place the evening before the 1962 FA Cup final between Tottenham Hotspur and Burnley. Ron Greenwood, Moore’s manager at West Ham, had been telling his friend Walter Winterbottom of Moore’s blossoming for a few months. Shortly after the Cup final, which Spurs won 3–1, the party for the World Cup in Chile was announced and Moore was in it.

  The eighteen-year-old Bobby Moore of West
Ham United, September 1959 (William Vanderson / Getty Images).

  The England party that went to Chile for the World Cup was based at the end of a single-track railway line in Coya, a remote mining community run by the Braden Copper Company. It reminded Armfield of a barracks in his National Service days. Most of the squad had done their National Service and were not disconcerted by the basic nature of their accommodation: ‘The country had been through hard times. There was a lot of austerity and players today simply wouldn’t put up with what we had to go through. National Service had prepared us for anything.’

  England lost 2–1 to Hungary in their opening group game, then beat Argentina surprisingly but convincingly 3–1 in the second match, before grinding out a scoreless draw against Bulgaria in the knowledge that the result would be good enough to assure them of a quarter-final place. Unfortunately, it was to be against the World Cup holders, Brazil, but Armfield believes that the England team was unlucky on the day to lose 3–1.

  If we’d taken our chances against Brazil in the quarter-final we could have won it. We lost to that Garrincha free-kick. We’d been in a mining camp 8,000 feet up in the Andes for three weeks. That’s where we played our games but then we didn’t have the time to readjust to playing in the quarter-final. I was round about my best then.