However, despite these real innovations, some historians looking back at the decade tend to notice the elements of continuity as much as the more obvious breaks with the past. Dixon of Dock Green achieved bigger audiences than Z Cars and lasted for years beyond George Dixon’s official retirement age. The big film of 1965 was The Sound of Music, the television ratings were dominated by The Black and White Minstrel Show and Sunday Night at the London Palladium. People in 1966 would doubtless have been astonished to have been informed that within twenty years The Black and White Minstrel Show, which featured performers with blacked-up faces, would be regarded as embarrassingly racist. Despite the steady flow of Caribbean immigrants into the UK, and the beginnings of a similar movement of people from the Indian subcontinent, Great Britain in the 1960s remained overwhelmingly a white nation.
The younger generation of television programme makers in the 1960s were dominated by the product of Rab Butler’s grammar schools and a university – if not an Oxbridge – education. The programmes they wanted to make reflected their interests and so comedy now included Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Not Only… But Also as well as The Dick Emery Show. The successful magazine programme Tonight spawned a twenty-six-part documentary series The Great War as well as That Was the Week That Was. At the end of the decade co-production money from Time Life subsidised Kenneth Clark’s personal view of the historical development of ideas and the arts, Civilisation. If these were the shows that historians eagerly seize upon to demonstrate the fact that television was growing up and that the medium could innovate in the 1960s where it had found it difficult to do so in the previous decade, it should not be forgotten that most people who rented their sets from Granada or Radio Rentals or DER wanted to watch Charlie Drake as much as Hancock, Harry Worth rather than Monty Python, Take Your Pick or Double Your Money rather than Hamlet in Elsinore or The Year of the Sex Olympics. Perry Mason, The Dick Van Dyke Show and Batman made a much bigger impact on audiences than An Age of Kings (a fifteen-part adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays produced by the BBC in 1960) or The Spread of the Eagle (a nine-part BBC adaptation of Shakespeare’s three major Roman dramas).
In 1965, the BBC introduced two bi-weekly half-hour soap operas whose subject matter reflected some of the social changes that were taking place in 1960s Britain. Two nights a week viewers could watch The Newcomers, produced by the rising star Verity Lambert who had won her spurs on Dr Who and who was now trailblazing a path as a television executive for future generations of women. The Newcomers centred on a London family who moved to a housing estate in the fictional country town of Angleton. Exterior sequences were filmed in Haverhill in Suffolk, a town which, after a rapid post-war expansion to incorporate families moving out from London, had undergone similar social changes to those depicted in the soap opera itself.
The Newcomers ran in conjunction with a soap opera with a similar format called United!. This series followed the travails of a fictional Second Division team called Brentwich United. The football scenes were filmed at the Victoria Ground in Stoke with the ubiquitous Jimmy Hill, now the manager of Coventry City on their climb from Third Division anonymity to First Division status, acting as a technical adviser. His efforts to achieve authenticity unfortunately ran into heavy criticism from the then management of Wolverhampton Wanderers who complained that the storylines followed too closely their own unavailing struggles to avoid relegation. United! was less successful than The Newcomers, and was cancelled after only two series. The show was generally considered to be too soft to appeal to male viewers, and too male-oriented for the female audience who preferred Compact, a soap opera set in the world of a fashion magazine which had been taken off the air to provide breathing space in the schedule for United! and The Newcomers. The devastated writers of Compact, Peter Ling and Hazel Adair, wrought a terrible revenge on the callous BBC by moving across to ATV Network and creating Crossroads. The cultural hooligans who ran the BBC in the 1960s insisted that the Corporation save money by reusing the original two-inch videotapes on which United! had been recorded, as a consequence of which none of the programme’s 147 episodes are believed to have survived. It is not the act of short-sighted philistinism that wiping the tapes of Not Only… But Also undoubtedly was, but at the very least it denied future historians the chance to check their teenage memories.
Nevertheless, the very fact that cautious BBC programme executives who have always been risk averse and are probably more so today than ever before, had accepted the fact that football was a suitable topic for a BBC1 drama series in peak viewing hours suggests that both football and television were changing. United! appeared at almost the same time as Match of the Day made its transfer from the tiny initial audience on BBC2 to its unquestioned status as a fixed point in BBC1’s Saturday-night schedule. The relationship between football and television was then still in its early, fumble-in-the-back-row-of-the-cinema stage, but it would blossom in spectacular fashion, the shy virgin of the 1960s medium becoming the unhealthy predator of the twenty-first century.
The change from the schoolmasterish Walter Winterbottom, who accepted the fact that he had to play with a team selected by men who knew little about football, to Alf Ramsey, who only took on the job on the understanding that he would have complete control of the selection process, is another indication of the changes that the new decade brought. In a parallel move, the enthusiastic Billy Wright, with his unkempt, schoolboyish shock of blond hair, gave way to the stylishly groomed Bobby Moore, a man who rarely revealed what he really thought to anyone. ‘Ask me to tell you about Bobby Moore, the footballer,’ Ron Greenwood, his West Ham manager, once said, ‘and I will talk for days. Ask me about Bobby Moore the man and I will dry up in a minute.’
Matt Dickinson, Moore’s latest biographer, writes perceptively that Moore was a child of post-war austerity. Children born during the war years and having very little memory of them were heavily influenced by the years of rationing and austerity. George Best, who was born in 1946, just five years later than the future England captain, was a symbol of a different age. Moore’s appearance had something of the Spitfire generation about it: he was always neat, compulsively tidy and socially polite to everyone. He came from an upstanding socialist background where there was no drink, no swearing and significant working-class solidarity. His mother, known as Doss, would wash and iron the laces in Bobby’s boots before every schoolboy football match. His shirts were never folded but placed on hangers and hung in the wardrobe in colour order, from dark to light. Moore, not unlike Ramsey, nursed a constant anxiety that he might be exposed for his lack of social skills. He inherited his hatred of fuss and attention from his mother, while his father, Bob, was no socialiser either and shunned the drinking culture of the pub. It was a regimented upbringing, Dickinson concludes, but not a joyless one. Moore knew that his parents were his firm supporters and he understood why they eventually retreated from the reflected limelight of being the parents of the captain who held aloft the World Cup.
Although he eventually gave way to Bobby Moore before the start of the 1966 World Cup, Jimmy Armfield was the England captain when Alf Ramsey took over. His first match in charge was the second leg of a qualification fixture for the 1964 European Nations Cup against France in Paris at the end of February 1963. Britain, like most of Europe, was enduring its worst winter since 1946–7 and most players hadn’t played a competitive match since the turn of the year. Armfield recalls the night with a shudder:
We should never have played that first game in France. The floodlights were awful. The pitch was covered in snow and ice. We lost 5–2. The last goal they scored I was the only England defender in the penalty area and there were three French forwards with the ball. Springett had slipped and the left-back was still trying to get back. On the bus afterwards Alf sat next to me and said, ‘Do we always play like that?’ He rang me up at home and carefully went through the strengths and weaknesses of every player asking me what I thought. I was captain for a couple of yea
rs, maybe fifteen games, and I lost the captaincy through injury. I ruptured my groin in the last match of the 1963–4 season. Alf was in the stand and I had my suitcase with me. I was going to fly off with him for the mini World Cup they called it but instead I was on my way to hospital. I rang Alf on the Monday morning and said I wasn’t going to make it and that’s how Bobby Moore got the captaincy.
Jimmy Armfield leads out the England team as captain against the Rest of the World, 23 October 1963, with Bobby Moore behind him (A. Jones / Getty Images).
Ramsey’s second match in charge saw an equally humiliating 2–1 defeat by Scotland at Wembley and a mistake by Armfield when he dallied on the ball and was robbed by Jim Baxter on the edge of his own penalty area. Baxter continued unhindered and thumped the ball past debutant Gordon Banks. Ramsey, an Englishman who at core loathed the Scots, felt humiliated by his team’s general display, and he was particularly unimpressed by Armfield’s laxity. Eventually he preferred George Cohen at right-back, which would have limited Armfield’s games as captain, but the Blackpool skipper continued to lead the side in Moore’s absence as late as the warm-up games before the start of the World Cup in 1966. This, however, was probably the result of Alf Ramsey’s reluctance to let Moore think he had a divine right to the captaincy. Despite his legendary, and ultimately fatal, loyalty to his players, Ramsey was always keen to emphasise that he was in complete control of the selection process. No matter how well a player had performed the last time he pulled on an England shirt he was not guaranteed a place in the next squad until Ramsey had informed the FA of its composition.
At the end of the 1962–3 season, Jimmy Armfield was injured and for the first time Bobby Moore was asked to lead out the side for England’s match against Czechoslovakia in Bratislava on 29 May. At just twenty-two he was the youngest captain in England’s history. England won the game convincingly by 4–2, two of their goals coming from Jimmy Greaves. It was the first indication that England might indeed win the World Cup in 1966. After the defeat in Paris in February, Ramsey had also spent some time talking earnestly with Bobby Moore, who was still a relative newcomer to international football. Jimmy Armfield was sharp enough to realise that, despite Moore’s youth, Ramsey had found his natural lieutenant in the West Ham United left-half. Although he was determined to maintain his own presence in the national side for as long as possible, Armfield could not help but recognise that the young man from Barking had an extraordinary maturity for one so young.
Bobby Moore, like Armfield and Jimmy Hill, had also passed the Eleven Plus examination. R. A. Butler’s 1944 Act had laid down three types of school – grammar, secondary modern and technical – but of the last named there were few in operation. One of them, however, was Tom Hood Technical College in Leyton which Moore attended from the age of eleven, working towards his four O levels in woodwork, geography, art and technical drawing. He had been born on 12 April 1941 and raised in Barking, only a symbolic few miles from Alf Ramsey’s Dagenham and David Beckham’s Leytonstone. He was the only one of his friends to pass the Eleven Plus and attend Tom Hood. Moore’s journey to his new school required him to get up at 7 a.m., catch a bus to Barking station, then take the train to Wanstead and the trolleybus to Leyton, followed by a long walk to the school. He hated the journey and the attendant loneliness so he went to his doctor to ask for a certificate for transfer to a school nearer home in Barking on the grounds of travel sickness.
In the end Moore stayed at Tom Hood because he was swept along on a tide of footballing success. He joined West Ham United in 1956 and made his debut for the first team at the age of seventeen in an early-season encounter with Manchester United in September 1958. His rival for the shirt was his mentor, Malcolm Allison, who had finally recovered from a debilitating bout of tuberculosis that had kept him out of the game for over a year. Allison had never played in the First Division and was desperate to do so. He had spotted Moore’s potential as soon as the youngster appeared on the same training pitch. It was Allison who had taught Moore to adopt that distinctive upright gait, who had told him constantly to ask himself the question, ‘If I get the ball now who am I going to give it to?’, which gave Moore that extra second of awareness as an opponent tried to close him down.
Confronted by the dilemma of whom to pick, the West Ham manager, Ted Fenton, consulted Allison’s best friend, the Irish left-back Noel Cantwell, who advised that the manager select the young lad over the desperate veteran. On learning of the decision Allison walked out of Upton Park and effectively finished his playing career. He never played in the First Division, although he would go on to become a famously successful and innovative coach. Moore, meanwhile, played his part in an exciting 3–2 win over a Manchester United side that was still struggling in the post-Munich era. Had Allison remained to watch the game he might well have gained the place he so coveted in the West Ham first team. A few days after the victory over Manchester United, West Ham went to Nottingham where Forest beat them four-nil. Bobby Moore was taken apart by the skilful Forest inside-forward Johnny Quigley but Allison was no longer around to take advantage of Moore’s subsequent demotion to the reserves. Much as Moore admired Allison, he despised the self-destructive streak that so tormented his fellow defender. Moore would endure two difficult seasons playing as a centre-half or a traditional wing-half, but he learned from these early struggles and developed a mental strength. In February 1962 Ron Greenwood asked him to play in the back four alongside Ken Brown, the regular centre-half. It was the catalyst for Moore’s transformation into a player of exceptional class, and his career took off from this point. The invention of the second central defender killed off the old WM formation, in which one centre half marked one centre forward. Liverpool adopted it with Tommy Smith alongside Ron Yeats, and Harry Catterick at Everton did the same when he also gave the number ten shirt to John Hurst but played him at the back alongside Brian Labone. Nobody, however, performed more gracefully and effectively in the role than Bobby Moore.
As Moore rose through the ranks to become captain of his country, his predecessor Billy Wright was taking his first and, as it transpired, his only job as a Football League club manager. After his retirement as a player, Wright had turned down the chance to be groomed as Stan Cullis’s eventual successor at Molineux, as well as offers of management jobs in the Midlands and London. He preferred the atmosphere at Lancaster Gate where the FA continued to show their great admiration of a footballer who knew his place in their world. Wright was duly appointed to manage the England Under-23 and youth sides. In the summer of 1962, Arsenal sacked their manager and former goalkeeper George Swindin for not being as successful as Bill Nicholson was across north London at Tottenham. The job was offered to Billy Wright who, unfortunately for all concerned, accepted.
As a manager Wright took his cue from Walter Winterbottom rather than Stan Cullis. He simply did not have the toughness that a good manager needs: after a bad defeat he would excuse his players rather than criticise them. When he did eventually get round to dropping a well-known player who was badly out of form, the player responded by hammering on the manager’s door, which was firmly bolted against all intruders. Gary Newbon, who knew Wright well when they both worked for ATV Network in Birmingham, relates the story as told to him some years after the event by Wright: ‘He used to put up the team list then run away and hide. There was a big bruising centre-half who also occasionally played centre-forward who would bang on his door which was locked and he would scream, “I know you’re fucking in there!”’
The general consensus was that Billy Wright was simply too nice a man to be a good manager. In 1965–6, the last of his four unsuccessful seasons at Highbury, Arsenal finished fourteenth in the league, having earlier been knocked out of the Cup in the fourth round by lowly Peterborough United. The hostility of the fans and the careless incompetence of the players, who were by no means untalented, literally drove Wright to drink. It was to be many years before he emerged from a debilitating battle with alcohol. The
match which sealed his fate was a 3–0 home defeat to Leeds United, a match played, through inept scheduling, on the same night as Liverpool lost 1–2 to Borussia Dortmund in the final of the European Cup Winners’ Cup, a match shown live on television. At the same time, just 4,554 spectators trickled into Highbury.
For all the fact that he could spot a talented youngster (most of the home-grown players who won the Double for Arsenal in 1971, including Charlie George, had been signed and developed by him), he was mercilessly dismissed by the chairman Denis Hill-Wood. Wright was on holiday when he was accosted on coming out of the sea by a newspaper reporter who wanted Wright’s comment on his dismissal. Prior to this unwelcome confrontation Wright had no idea that he had been sacked, although he could hardly have been unaware of the possibility. Brian Glanville was less than impressed by the behaviour of Arsenal’s Old Etonian chairman towards England’s former captain:
He was betrayed by Denis Hill-Wood. Supporters shouted Wright must go, he responded Wright must stay – and then stabbed him in the back. I wish I had the talent to draw the cartoon of Hill-Wood backing Billy Wright to the hilt and then showing the dagger sticking out of his back.
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