Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  Fifty bob to Mum, set aside for fares and Saturday night out and the three bob you could save from the tea money was profitable especially if you played two or three times a week for the reserves and youth team. Otherwise it was sweeping terraces, cleaning out the stands, set out clean kit, clear away dirty kit, clean first team boots, knock on door, clean toilets, paint the back of the stand and even help prepare the pitch, schlepping heavy roller. I was relieved to be sent back to polish taps on baths and showers. Even on Fridays all I could do was to stagger home after 6pm because I had to be up early for the Saturday match. There was no time to answer back or get into much mischief.

  On his seventeenth birthday in April 1958, Moore signed a professional contract at £12 a week but, four years later at the tender age of twenty-one, he was involved in a standoff with West Ham who had, post-abolition, offered all their players £28 a week. All of them signed in the docile manner that clubs expected of their employees; all, that is, except Moore. Apart from gossip and rumour nobody really knew what any other player was earning so the principle of ‘divide and rule’ remained the easiest way for clubs to retain absolute power. Moore decided he was worth £30 a week and refused to be cajoled or bullied. He had justifiable confidence in his own ability and thought that £30 was what he was worth and he wouldn’t sign a contract for anything less.

  Moore held out for six weeks and in the end he got his way. The club, unwilling to break what would now be regarded as a salary structure, saved face by raising the wage level of the whole first team squad to £30 a week. Moore always retained a strong belief in his own talent and was determined to stand up for what he thought was right, or at least what was right for him. The other players now looked at Moore with a new respect. Perhaps unwittingly he had taken a significant first step on the trail that would lead to the captaincy of club and country. Equally unwittingly, he had demonstrated that the socialist principles of his father were not necessarily for him as he would presumably have been quite happy to have taken the £30 for himself even if the others remained at £28. He was fighting the battle of individual enterprise and was setting off on the ideological expedition from traditional working-class Labour to aspiring middle-class Tory. It was a journey made by many footballers in the 1960s and 1970s as Hunter Davies demonstrated when he wrote The Glory Game, which offered an insight into the dynamics of the Tottenham Hotspur dressing room in 1971.

  Moore’s assumption of the captaincy in April 1962 seemed almost taken for granted. When Ron Greenwood took over as manager of West Ham from Ted Fenton in April 1961, he promised to build a new team around the twenty-year-old Bobby Moore. Nobody does that unless he is quite sure that the player is outstanding and that he will be able to gain the respect of his team-mates, particularly those more senior to him. Moore later commented on the captaincy:

  In boys’ teams the captain is generally the outstanding player simply because boys are impressed purely by ability and very little by knowledge. But in professional terms the captain – if he means anything at all – must be a natural leader, the kind of individual whose play and conduct sets an example to the others. If he is slack and cynical and doesn’t seem to care much about training then the rest of the team will take the hint. I try to be the other kind.

  Moore was never a shouter, never a fist-pumper in the manner of future England captains like Robson, Adams, Pearce, Butcher and Terry: he did not fit the traditional image of the battling central-defender-as-captain. When England and West Ham were winning this was an attitude that provoked nothing but admiration, but when results started to turn against the team Moore’s generally perceived air of insouciance irritated fans. Results started to go wrong at West Ham at the end of the 1960s and the Upton Park faithful were quick to criticise Moore’s reluctance to yell at his failing team-mates. They wanted a more visibly vocal presence which Moore was unable to provide because it simply wasn’t in his nature to do so.

  We find it hard to think of Moore as anything other than the captain of any side he played for but, of course, Armfield was captaining the England football team as late as June 1966. In many ways Ramsey and Armfield were a better-suited pair than Ramsey and Moore. Armfield was abstemious where Moore decidedly was not. Armfield had a quiet and dignified Christian faith which would have appealed far more to Ramsey than Moore’s cynicism and irrepressible urge to rebel against authority. To that extent Armfield was a grown-up and Moore a teenager. Moore would have no hesitation in leaving his hotel room, sliding down a drainpipe and setting off in the evening in search of a bar. Ramsey, who knew all about Moore’s nocturnal proclivities, quietly seethed at such behaviour. Armfield would never have embarrassed him in this manner. In terms of character then, there is no doubt which of the two players the England manager respected more. But Ramsey had dedicated himself to ensuring that England won the World Cup in 1966, and every decision he took was with that end in mind.

  That is why the public myth endures, and why we find it hard to think of Ramsey and Moore as anything but a loving couple, two men who respected each other and found in each other the perfect manifestation of what Moore looked for in a manager and what Ramsey wanted in a captain. Ramsey was happy to proclaim his confidence in his young captain:

  He was my captain and my right-hand man. Bobby was the heartbeat of the England team, the king of the castle, my representative on the field. He made things work on the pitch. I had the deepest trust in him as a man, as a captain, as a confidant… I could easily overlook his indiscretions, his thirst for the good life, because he was the supreme professional, the best I ever worked with.

  The reality is that the relationship was much more uneasy than Ramsey’s laudatory words suggest. In fact, Moore had nearly lost the England captaincy within a year of his leading his country for the first time in May 1963. At the end of the 1963–4 season, ten days after Moore had held aloft the FA Cup after a dramatic 3–2 win over Preston North End, he was part of the England squad that was due to fly out to Lisbon for a match against Portugal. The England party stayed at White’s hotel near the FA headquarters in Lancaster Gate. On the Wednesday night before the match on the Sunday, after training at the Bank of England ground in Roehampton, a party of seven players left White’s to stroll along Bayswater Road – Moore, Charlton, Wilson, Banks, Eastham, Byrne and Greaves. Moore, Greaves and Byrne were part of the heavy-drinking brigade, but the presence of Charlton suggests that this was no wild night out. Nevertheless, all of them ended up in the Beachcomber, a club that was a favourite haunt of Jimmy Greaves.

  The seven players had a few drinks in the West End but when they got back to their rooms they found their passports on their beds – a clear sign that Ramsey knew who had left the hotel and why they had done so. Management invariably held the travel documents of players when they were travelling abroad. The implication was clear – these seven might not be travelling to Lisbon after all. Ramsey was clever. He allowed them on to the plane and watched as the seven miscreants took part in training, all of them knowing that some kind of retribution was inevitable. The thunderclap didn’t erupt until after the final training session on the Saturday. Ramsey dismissed all the players with the words, ‘You can all go and get changed – except for the seven players who I think would all like to stay and see me.’ Ramsey then let rip in a burst of concentrated fury, but he still played all seven on the following day: ‘Budgie’ Byrne scored a hat-trick and Bobby Charlton the other goal in a 4–3 victory. Moore was not spared the lash of Ramsey’s tongue because of his privileged position as captain. Moore’s taste for alcohol and his refusal to be the mouthpiece of his managers does not correspond very accurately with the traditional image of the captain as the embodiment of the conformity expected by the manager.

  The reality was that Moore suffered badly from insomnia and, as far as he was concerned, it was better for him to go out in the evening, unwind by drinking, and then get his eight hours of sleep from 1.30 a.m. to 9.30 a.m. These were not hours that would generally find
favour with his managers but it was the best solution for Moore who would otherwise have been up all night. Moore’s other argument was that he could hold his drink. He might be the last one out of the bar and the last one into bed, but he would also be the first one into training the following morning to sweat it off – and the last to leave the training field. George Best and Jimmy Greaves were both badly affected by alcohol. Bobby Moore was not.

  The social backgrounds of Moore and Ramsey were not dissimilar. Both were born in east London and in their behaviour on the field, cool, calm and thoughtful, short of pace but clever anticipators of the ball, they had much in common. Off the field, however, the two men were chalk and cheese. Ramsey loathed publicity of any sort and felt uncomfortable when not in the company of football men or his wife, Vicki, on whom he greatly relied. By contrast, Moore enjoyed the limelight and, as his career soared upwards, he and his wife Tina revelled in the trappings of wealth and fame.

  Their marriage was much more typical of footballers’ marriages than Billy Wright’s had been or Beckham’s was to be. They had met, as so many couples did in the 1950s, on the dance floor of the Ilford Palais when Tina was fifteen and Bobby was sixteen and were married five years later in the summer of 1962 after Bobby’s return from the World Cup in Chile. It wasn’t quite the childhood sweetheart romance beloved of saccharine gossip columns. Tina found Bobby very resistible at first and was only persuaded to give the polite young man from Barking another chance after intervention on his behalf from her mother. Bobby’s mother, Doss, inevitably saw Tina as a threat. ‘My Bobby’s a good boy,’ she was reported as warning the young woman. ‘You’d better not be getting him into any trouble.’ It was an odd thing to say since that phrase was used constantly at the time but only in reference to the possibility of the boy getting the girl into trouble. It echoes the relationship between Alan Bates and Thora Hird in A Kind of Loving mentioned previously but from the reverse perspective, as if June Ritchie were throwing up over the back of the sofa in Alan Bates’s home. The wedding went ahead as planned at the Valentine pub in Gants Hill with Bobby in his dark blue mohair suit looking as handsome as the bride looked radiant. After a honeymoon in Majorca, the happy couple set up home together in a three-bedroom semi-detached house in Gants Hill which cost £3,650, but they moved up the housing and social ladder as soon as they could afford to do so – to the mock-Tudor splendour of Manor Road in Chigwell.

  They could afford to do so because Bobby’s career was progressing so well. The FA Cup win in 1964 was followed a year later by a 2–0 victory over Munich 1860 in the final of the European Cup Winners’ Cup which was played, fortuitously, at Wembley. After the FA Cup had been won each man in the West Ham team received a £25 bonus from the club but £175 from the commercial pool, suggesting that outside endorsements might provide a greater part of a player’s wages than the salary he received for playing football. For many years, however, the biggest perk attached to reaching the FA Cup final was the twenty complimentary tickets each player received. They were obviously intended as gifts for the players’ close friends and relatives, to allow them to attend the match of the season, but inevitably some of them ended up on the black market affording players, who were still not particularly well paid despite the abolition of the maximum wage, a very welcome financial bonus. The West Ham winger Johnny Sissons was reputed to have made £600 which he used to buy a Morris 1100. Football celebrity was starting to have a commercial value.

  As the FA Cup-winning skipper, captain of England, blond and good-looking, Moore was constantly in demand for commercial photographs and endorsements. He was an obvious client for Bagenal Harvey, the man who had virtually invented the role of the sports agent in England when he got a lift from Denis Compton, on the back seat of whose car lay a bag with unopened letters spilling out of the top. Harvey told Compton, whose distaste for correspondence, administration and organisation was legendary, that he would open them and sort them out, suspecting that there would be commercial offers in at least one of them. According to legend, in one of them there was the offer from Brylcreem which turned England’s most exciting batsman into ‘The Brylcreem Boy’.

  Moore’s encounter with the Bagenal Harvey agency turned out to be of brief duration during which the agent secured only one contract, ironically from Brylcreem for a poster worth £450. Instead Moore turned to Jack Turner, West Ham United’s property manager, a well-known figure around the club, a man who was impeccably honest and trustworthy, who wore grey suits and polished shoes, a man whom young footballers, untutored in the ways of the world away from the football field, could trust to acquire a mortgage or complete a tax return. He was a man of sound advice and calm reassurance who did the best he could for a grateful Bobby. A weekly column in Tit-Bits, a mass-market magazine with undemanding content aimed mostly at men, paid Bobby £80 a week for twenty-six weeks. Moore chatted for half an hour each week with his ghost writer Roy Peskett who received £15 of the fee, leaving Bobby with a clear profit of £65 at a time when his weekly wage from playing football was £35. At the start of the 1964–5 season his wages went up to £60 a week, far in excess of what most of his team-mates were earning but, compared to what Mark McCormack was doing for his clients, it was small potatoes.

  The real money, of course, was to be made on the back of the 1966 World Cup. Moore entered the tournament in the middle of yet another contractual dispute with his club. As a result, technically speaking Moore was out of contract on 30 June 1966, and therefore legally unqualified under FIFA rules to play any kind of football – either league or international. A frustrated Ramsey, who could well have done without this aggravation, consulted the FA and told Greenwood to come out to Hendon Hall Hotel where the England squad was staying. Allegedly, Ramsey told Greenwood that he could have his captain for just one minute and sent them both into a dark-panelled room. Moore, exchanging barely a word with or a glance at the man who had said he would build his team around him, signed a one-month contract with West Ham United that was sufficient to permit him to perform on the stage of the 1966 World Cup and to enjoy his greatest moment.

  The England team had been slowly progressing since the disastrous start to the Ramsey regime. A prestigious 2–1 victory at Wembley over the Rest of the World in an exhibition match to mark the centenary of the Football Association in October 1963 meant less than a more important win in Madrid on a bitterly cold night in December 1965 against a Spanish team who were the current holders of the European Nations Cup. The 2–0 scoreline did scant justice to the manner of the England victory. What made it all the more significant was that it was achieved with the help of Ramsey’s new 4-3-3 formation. The press had been scandalised by Ramsey’s decision to abandon conventional wingers and instead use a front three of Joe Baker, Roger Hunt and Alan Ball, who had made his debut as a nineteen-year-old six months earlier, backed up by a midfield of Charlton, Nobby Stiles and George Eastham. Nine of the players who were to feature in the World Cup final the following year played in that game; only Hurst and Peters were missing. It was the first time that the English press, which had been largely sceptical of Ramsey up to this point, expressed support for his belief that England could win the World Cup in 1966.

  The fact that the World Cup was to be played in England had apparently taken the then prime minister unawares. Harold Wilson had been seven years old when his local team, Huddersfield Town, clinched the first of the three consecutive First Division titles that they would win under the leadership of their innovative manager, Herbert Chapman. It was perhaps not surprising that one of Wilson’s party pieces in later years was to rattle off the names of the team that won those three championships in the 1923–4, 1924–5 and 1925–6 seasons. What is more surprising is that when Denis Howell – the football league referee who became a Birmingham Labour MP in 1955 and Britain’s first minister of sport in October 1964 – reminded the new prime minister that England was the venue for the 1966 World Cup, Wilson indicated that it was the first he had heard of it
. In the event England hosted the World Cup four months after Wilson was returned to office in March 1966 with an overall majority which had increased from an almost unworkable four seats – after the 1964 election – to a resounding ninety-six. Wilson could now welcome the approach of World Cup Willie with a lighter heart.

  It is possible to argue that there is a synergy between Wilson, Ramsey and Moore even if, as seems likely, the latter two never voted for the former. One of Wilson’s primary tasks was to change the image of Britain from that of a country run by men who spent too much time on the grouse moors to one of a country that was prepared to incorporate the full extent of recent technological changes. At the Labour party conference in Scarborough in 1963, Wilson, in his first conference speech as leader, warned his audience that if the country was to prosper, a ‘new Britain’ would need to be forged in the ‘white heat’ of this ‘scientific revolution’. It became one of his more memorable soundbites even if it did echo the passionate appeal for modernisation which had been made by Hugh Gaitskell at the 1959 conference in the same location.

  Prime Minister Harold Wilson chats with Bobby Moore at the Annual Sports Writers Association Dinner, 9 December 1965 (Topfoto).

  In their own ways, Ramsey and Moore were doing something similar. Ramsey’s constant battles with the FA reflected the wider ongoing war in many areas of British social and economic life between the amateur and the professional. Cricket was the most visible sporting stage on which this battle was fought and the abolition of the amateur cricketer followed by the adoption of the highly commercialised one-day knock-out competition sponsored by Gillette suggested that even in the corridors of the MCC there was a recognition of the need to move with the times. Ramsey had persuaded the FA to abolish its much-despised selection committee so that the manager had complete control over the playing side of the England team. His assiduous attention to the detail of where the team was to stay and train when playing matches abroad was matched by his determination not to allow a repetition of the gastronomic catastrophe of 1950. When England set out for Mexico to defend their World Cup in 1970 they would take with them endless supplies of tinned goods like baked beans with which the minds and stomachs of the players would be comfortable.