Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  These battles were being fought as football in Great Britain was going through a period of decline. At the height of its post-war popularity in 1948–9 Football League matches had attracted more than forty-one million spectators. By the 1964–5 season that number had declined to just twenty-eight million. Cricket had suffered similarly. The traditional Saturday, when men had gone to the football and thence to the pub or had spent all day at the cricket, was fast disappearing. Increased leisure time, increased disposable income and an increase in the affordable and practical range of leisure activities hastened what seemed to be a long-term decline in attendances. Men who needed only a sixpenny fare on a bus to go to the nearest Football League or county cricket ground now had a car and the chance to take the family out on a Saturday afternoon. The desire for home improvements and the resulting growth of DIY stores provided alternative weekend entertainment.

  It wasn’t just sport that felt the impact of these socio-economic changes. The cinema, which had paralleled the major sports in its post-war boom, also suffered badly from a steep decline in audiences throughout the 1950s. High streets and local neighbourhoods which had boasted a Regal, a Plaza, a Gaumont, an Odeon and a Rialto saw these former pleasure palaces looking shabbier and shabbier until they were finally closed and turned into bingo halls or blocks of flats. Women who had formed the bulk of the audiences for matinée showings started to return to work and no longer spent their afternoons like Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter returning their books to Boots Lending Library and sitting in the circle to watch the matinee of a Hollywood film. In the late 1950s, Hollywood began to lose its touch as the big studios failed effectively to counter the growing threat of television. Many of the men who had made Hollywood great – Harry Warner, Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn, the founder of Columbia Studios – died and in the following decade their studios were swallowed up by multi-national corporations like Gulf & Western, which took over Paramount, Transamerica Corporation, which swallowed United Artists, or Kirk Kerkorian, the Armenian who developed much of Las Vegas and who seized control of MGM. Twentieth Century Fox had nearly gone out of existence after the fiasco of its production of Cleopatra (1963), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, which had been budgeted at $2 million but which eventually cost the studio $44 million.

  From football to DIY, from cricket to a day out in the country in the family car, from cinema to television, the shift from the collective activity of the late 1940s and early 1950s to the individual activity of the late 1950s and 1960s was ubiquitous and growing. Use of public transport declined as car ownership increased. In 1963, the physicist and engineer Dr Richard Beeching, a former technical director of the chemicals giant ICI, and chairman of British Railways since 1961, produced a report entitled The Reshaping of British Railways which called for the closure of 5,000 miles of track and a third of Britain’s 7,000 railway stations. Seventy thousand jobs were to be lost in order to create a saving of £18 million a year. A bitter rearguard action by the unions proved to be of little avail as, before Beeching returned to ICI, he had indeed drastically reshaped Britain’s railways.

  The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953), one of the last of the Ealing comedies, had dramatised an almost identical situation ten years before the Beeching report was published. It told of the efforts of a group of villagers to keep open a country branch railway line after British Railways had decided to close it down. Full of lovingly photographed rural scenes and quaint eccentric characters, it was written, like Passport to Pimlico, by T. E. B. Clarke and it culminated – inevitably – in the triumph of the amateur enthusiasts and lovable villagers over the unlovable, humourless professional bureaucrats. Ironically, Clarke and Beeching were neighbours in East Grinstead and it was rumoured that the latter had contributed some technical details to an earlier Ealing comedy, The Man in the White Suit (1951). The Titfield Thunderbolt was almost the swansong of Ealing Studios, which a few years later were taken over by the BBC for use by its film department.

  The celebration of the amateur over the professional made for a pleasantly nostalgic diversion in a comedy film and it struck a chord with the sort of audiences who were starting to abandon the cinema as a primary form of recreation in favour of television. It ran, however, contrary to the direction in which British society, and even British cinema, was slowly moving. The Rank Organisation had maintained a firm grasp on the British film industry through its ownership of the Odeon chain of cinemas and Pinewood Studios, but, by the mid-1960s the sort of films that the public had demonstrated it wanted to see were neither the Second World War adventures which had proved so popular in the previous decade nor the sort of films that were populated by girls from the Rank charm school like Susan Beaumont in Innocent Sinners (1958) or Belinda Lee in Nor the Moon by Night (1958). Outside that uniquely British phenomenon the Carry On films, the national cinema was moved forward in the 1960s by independent companies like Woodfall Films, which produced such classics as Look Back in Anger (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Tom Jones (1963) which won the Academy Award for Best Film, returning a profit of $39 million on a budget of $350,000.

  The film series which carried the image of the new Britain around the world, however, was the James Bond franchise. Sadly, global audiences were less delighted by Carry On Constable and Carry On… Up the Khyber than by Dr. No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963) and Goldfinger (1964). The box office grosses of the Bond series grew exponentially from $59.5 million for Dr. No to $141.2 million for Thunderball (1965). Bond himself offered a seductive blend of patriotic traditionalism and swinging modernity. The early Woodfall films might have appealed to British audiences who recognised the truth of their gritty, frequently northern, settings, but they held little appeal abroad outside of arthouse cinemas. Bond was different. Bond was cool. Bond might have been British but he reflected the Britain of Harold Wilson rather than the Britain of Harold Macmillan, the Britain of the white heat of technology not the Britain of the grouse moor. If there were ever a passage of dialogue that illustrated this transformation it is the exchange in Goldfinger between Bond and Q as the latter demonstrates the iconic Aston Martin DB5.

  Q: You see the gear lever here? Now, if you take the top off, you will find a little red button. Whatever you do, don’t touch it.

  Bond: Yeah? Why not?

  Q: Because you’ll release this section of the roof and engage and then fire the passenger ejector seat.

  Bond: Ejector seat? You’re joking!

  Q: I never joke about my work, 007.

  At the same time Bond found a way of making the traditional Britain an object of contemporary attraction. The Union Jack, most memorably seen in the astonishing parachute jump that opens The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), was reclaimed from the flag that stood for nineteenth-century imperial conquest and instead symbolised a Swinging Britain which the rest of the world found seductive even if it was essentially a simple but commercially potent mixture of style and camp. Bond was part of the outpouring of fashion, photography and, above all, music which led to a new British cultural invasion. James Bond wasn’t played by an Old Etonian, as he probably would have been had the series started fifty years later, but by a former milkman from Edinburgh. The CIA and the White House doffed their caps to this new British professional who regularly saved the world from the evil intentions of SMERSH and SPECTRE. James Bond wasn’t the amateur spy of popular myth whom the novelist John Buchan would have recognised. James Bond was a professional agent of the security services.

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  The amateurish nature of the FA was demonstrated even before the World Cup tournament began when they managed to lose the Jules Rimet trophy. On 20 March it was on display at a Stanley Gibbons stamp exhibition at the Central Hall in Westminster; on 21 March it wasn’t. For seven days the newspapers covered the story relentlessly with endless speculation. On the eighth day it was found by a dog called Pickles, under a garden hedge in Nor
wood, south London. Pickles briefly became very famous and in dog terms very rich, being awarded a medal by the Canine Defence League and a year’s supply of dog food. Nobody ever discovered who had stolen it or how and why it had turned up under a hedge in a south London garden. If the FA had had a PR agency it might have been seen as a masterpiece of brilliantly organised publicity. The FA didn’t have a PR agency and the stolen trophy seemed more symbolic of British incompetence and bumbling than British entrepreneurial flair.

  Fortunately for all concerned the trophy was on display at Wembley as the World Cup reached its climax. The story of the 1966 World Cup is too well known to bear much repetition. The first England game was a damp squib, a goalless draw against Uruguay in front of a crowd that was 13,000 short of capacity and which booed the negative South Americans off the field. If the crowd at the game was smaller than might have been anticipated the numbers watching on television were considerably greater. More than thirty-two million people watched the match on fifteen million television sets. The pattern of football in the future was being set, and television was to play an increasingly large part in it. Condensed as it was into just nineteen days, the tournament was given blanket coverage but the Portugal v. Bulgaria match attracted only 25,000 to Old Trafford and even a game as attractive as Portugal v. Hungary drew only 29,000 to the same stadium. Television would provide the missing millions.

  England’s second game, a 2–0 win over Mexico, sparked into life only after a nervous first forty minutes when Bobby Charlton opened the scoring with a spectacular Roy of the Rovers goal from twenty-five yards out. It lifted the entire country, never mind the players and the Wembley crowd. The third game was an even duller 2–0 victory over France, most notable for a tackle by Nobby Stiles on the skilful Jacques Simon which would undoubtedly have earned him a red card in today’s climate but produced not a booking from the referee but a demand from the FA to Ramsey that he omit Stiles voluntarily from the next match. Ramsey threatened his own resignation if the FA continued to insist. The FA backed off, Ramsey stayed and Stiles played. It was an early demonstration of the importance Ramsey placed on loyalty and of his contempt for the FA. Walter Winterbottom would never have dared to adopt such a truculent stance. Ramsey’s steadfast and publicly proclaimed faith in Stiles confirmed the bond that had been growing between the manager and his squad. It was to be a vital ingredient of success in the next match.

  It was the narrow, fortuitous victory by a single goal over Argentina that changed the dynamic of England’s tournament. The English public had not been apathetic but it hadn’t been particularly optimistic about England’s chances of winning the tournament. The press felt similarly. During the course of the quarter-final against Argentina the national mood changed. Jimmy Greaves, one of the greatest natural goalscorers in the history of English football, an automatic selection since he had made his international debut seven years earlier, was badly injured while playing against France and was replaced for the match against Argentina by Geoff Hurst. It was a selection that had been on Ramsey’s mind for a while. Greaves had not scored in any of the first three games; Hurst was prepared to run himself into the ground for the good of the team. It was to be a significant substitution for both men.

  Argentina were one of the favourites to win the cup and one of the few teams England genuinely feared. In the ‘Little World Cup’ tournament of 1964, played to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Brazilian Football Confederation, the England party had watched from the stands as the Argentinians destroyed Brazil 3–0 in a frightening display of the brutal and the skilful. The outstanding player by far was the tall, imposing midfield pivot Antonio Rattín. After England lost 1–0 to Argentina in the next match in the competition Ramsey told his players that he thought that Brazil would not win the World Cup in 1966 for the third time in a row. Argentina, however, were another matter. They had already demonstrated their streak of cynical ruthlessness in a scoreless draw against West Germany in which Rafael Albrecht had been sent off for openly kicking the German central defender Wolfgang Weber in the stomach. Their uncompromising aggression would be a challenge in itself but when their technique – which was superior to that of most of the England players – was also taken into account, Argentina posed a significant threat to the host nation’s desperate desire to advance further in the competition.

  From the kick-off, Argentina let England know they would be in for a remorselessly physical encounter. The pompous, fussy German referee Rudolf Kreitlein took so many names in the first twenty minutes that Kenneth Wolstenholme wryly observed that if he wanted to know the names of so many of the players he should have bought a programme. Had Argentina chosen to contest a match of footballing skills they might very well have won, but they tried the patience of Herr Kreitlein too sorely. Their tactics involved cynical fouls and blatant dives which only confirmed in the mind of the patriotic crowd that the Latins had brought with them their usual bag of tricks which mostly included thuggery and cheating. The English crowd jeered but Rattín seemed an immovable object at the heart of the Argentinian team until he tried it on with the referee once too often and was sent off. Rattín claimed he had only been asking the referee for an interpreter, which might have been useful since he spoke no German and Kreitlein no Spanish. Kreitlein simply pointed to the touchline.

  Rattín’s outraged team-mates surrounded the official but after nearly eight minutes of histrionic pleading, the decision stood. It took Rattín a long time to leave the pitch and even longer to make his way round the perimeter towards the tunnel. His slow exit evoked catcalls from the crowd particularly when he wiped his hands on the corner flag bearing England’s colours. They responded by hurling beer cans at him, many of them unopened, an expensive symbol of their contempt. It was, as Hugh McIlvanney observed, less of a football match and more of an international incident. After Rattín’s departure the Argentinians started throwing themselves to the floor after every English tackle. The English players were no helpless victims. Even Bobby Charlton had his name taken for the first and only time in his career as he attempted to come to the aid of his elder brother after he had been assaulted in a manner that would have caused the perpetrator to be bound over to keep the peace in a court of law. When a game of football sporadically broke out, Argentina’s remaining ten men defied England to break them down.

  As long as the game remained scoreless a breakaway goal by the visitors remained a strong possibility. Finally, twelve minutes from time, a curling cross from the left wing by Martin Peters was met at the near post by his West Ham colleague Geoff Hurst, who twisted his head to send the ball beyond the Argentinian goalkeeper and into the far corner of the net, a staple West Ham training ground routine that had brought many goals for their club side. The celebrations at the final whistle were halted as Ramsey, in a highly uncharacteristic public display of emotion, raced on to the field and prevented George Cohen from exchanging shirts with the Argentinian forward Alberto González. The German referee had to be escorted from the field by the Metropolitan Police.

  Argentina’s captain Antonio Rattín is sent off during an acrimonious World Cup quarter-final against England, 23 July 1966 (Bentley Archive / Popperfoto / Getty Images).

  After the match the Argentinians urinated in the corridor outside their dressing room and threatened to break down the door to the England dressing room. An incensed Jack Charlton bellowed to let them in because they would get what was coming to them but he was the only Leeds United player on the team and his bellicosity was not echoed by his team-mates. In his interview with Kenneth Wolstenholme for BBC Television half an hour later, Ramsey was still fuming with rage: he told the world that his side would not be able to produce their best football until they ‘met the right kind of opposition and that is a team that comes out to play football and not act like animals’. It was to be a fateful choice of words. In Mexico in 1970 England were to pay dearly for the events of that day.

  Although in Britain people felt that the 1–0 result w
as a triumph for honest British pluck over Latin American deceit, in most parts of the world it seemed like an imperial stitch-up. Over forty years later, the seventy-year-old Rattín still spoke emotionally of how the referee was so biased that Argentina had no chance of winning. Had England not scored, Rattín claimed, the European referee would have given them a dubious penalty. He was banned for four international matches and his team was fined £85. The British Ambassador in Buenos Aires had to be given a special police guard. Everyone knew that it had been ‘fixed’ that England could play all their games at Wembley because technically the winner of the quarter-final at Wembley was due to play the semi-final at Goodison Park. At the last minute, however, FIFA announced that the England v. Portugal semi-final would be played at Wembley, allegedly because of its bigger capacity. Wasn’t the Englishman Sir Stanley Rous, who had been secretary of the FA, now the president of FIFA? England would not have that sort of protection four years later.

  Meanwhile, the country had belatedly caught World Cup fever and the Tuesday-night semi-final brought a further spike in the temperature. Portugal, who had kicked Pelé and Brazil out of the tournament in the group stages and who had found themselves 3–0 down to North Korea in the quarter-final before the European Footballer of the Year Eusébio rescued them, presented their most attractive aspect in the match at Wembley. Two goals by Bobby Charlton gave England a lead they would not relinquish despite a consolation penalty converted by Eusébio three minutes from time. To the surprise of many Englishmen who had not given the host nation a chance, the national football team had reached the World Cup final. The Union Jack fluttered from every flagpole in the country. It was to be another twenty-five years before the cross of St George would be seen flying from the nation’s white vans. For all the understandable reservations of the Scots, Welsh and the Northern Irish, Great Britain and England were interchangeable in the minds of many and certainly in the eyes of most foreigners.