Most of the players who wore the red shirt with the three lions on that last Saturday in July 1966 have written their own accounts of what transpired during the tournament. One element of Ramsey’s personality that always shines through is his love of westerns and the players were subjected to the manager’s cinematic preferences whether they cared for them or not. Staying as they did for six weeks at the Hendon Hall Hotel, without the comfort of the company of their wives, they spent a lot of evenings and free afternoons at the Hendon Odeon. George Cohen observed that after six weeks without his wife, Daphne, even Jack Charlton was starting to look attractive although every time he makes this good joke he tends to change the name of the player. The entire squad, the manager, his assistant Harold Shepherdson and the trainer Les Cocker would arrive together at the box office; Ramsey would ask for twenty-five tickets in the upper circle and hand over the cash. In fact Ramsey was usually in such a rush that he would set off without the players who were left scrambling for their coats and could be seen running through the streets of Hendon in pursuit of their manager who was determined not to miss a minute of any western featuring his favourite film star, John Wayne. The players got rather bored with Ramsey’s choice of film but any polite requests to sample other genres were invariably rejected. The day after the opening game against Uruguay, Ramsey had arranged a visit to the set of You Only Live Twice, the new James Bond film being shot at Pinewood. They were shown around by Sean Connery whom Ramsey thanked at the end of the visit, pronouncing the Scots actor’s name – quite incredibly – as ‘Seen’. It gave the players the giggles, but it was a puzzling error coming from such a confirmed film fan.
On the morning of the final, a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, the good Catholic boy Nobby Stiles set off from the hotel in search of a Catholic church in Golders Green, aided no doubt by the many Orthodox Jews who lived in the area. It is not clear if he found one or ended up in the Golders Green Beth Hamedrash synagogue but his performance that day suggested a spiritual peace amid the war on the turf. Bobby Charlton and Ray Wilson went shopping that morning and Gordon Banks recalled that he went for a walk with a few of the others down Hendon High Street to stretch his legs and buy a newspaper. The place, he said, was buzzing and a number of people came up to the players to wish them luck. The restraint of people compared with the pandemonium that would occur today is what is noticeable. A fair-sized crowd gathered outside the hotel to cheer them off, but it was only when the coach left the North Circular Road and started to edge its way towards Wembley Stadium that they realised the extent of the World Cup fever they had created.
The game was won, as the Second World War was won, after an initial reverse and a helpful intervention by Soviet Russia. Geoff Hurst’s second goal, the shot which hit the underside of the bar and came down either on or just over the line, was validated by Tofik Bakhramov, the official from Azerbaijan but known thereafter as ‘the Russian linesman’, giving England a 3–2 lead. As a teenager, Bakhramov would have been part of the resistance to the Nazis in the Battle of the Caucasus, fought bitterly for control of the vital resources of oil and gas. Could the linesman’s decision possibly have been influenced, if only subconsciously, by his memory of what he had experienced more than twenty years previously? Providing their own patriotic contribution, the crowd broke into a rousing rendition of ‘Rule, Britannia!’. If fortune favoured England then, it had not done so when the Germans had equalised in the last minute of normal time. Jack Charlton can be seen gesticulating angrily that his foul on Sigi Held, for which he was penalised in a dangerous position just outside the England penalty area, was a fair challenge. Certainly, Moore and Peters appealed immediately when, from the free-kick, the ball appeared to be handled by Schnellinger just before Weber poked it into the net. The Swiss referee was as firm in his decision to award the second German goal as he would be to confirm England’s third.
It is a tribute to Alf Ramsey’s thoroughness and his care for the whole squad that he had thought about what the players who were not selected might be feeling as the match drew to its close. Jimmy Armfield recalls:
When you don’t play it’s not the same but I genuinely wanted them to win. We had to sit in the stands because we weren’t allowed to sit on the bench, FIFA rules, but Alf said to me, because I was the leader of the reserves group, that someone would come to us just before the end of the match and I had to make sure we all came down and sat on the bench behind him. ‘Win lose or draw we’ll all be together at the end.’ And of course as soon as we got there the Germans equalised.
As time ran out, with England clinging on to their 3–2 lead, the composure of Bobby Moore became increasingly visible. As he gained control of the ball in his own penalty area, he ignored the screams of Jack Charlton to boot the ball as far as possible over the touchline and into the stands to gain a precious few seconds and instead played a one-two with Alan Ball, looked up, saw Geoff Hurst in space and played the most glorious and accurate of forty-yard passes. Hurst, shaking off the valiantly pursuing figure of Wolfgang Overath, hit the ball as hard as he could, hoping it would go forty yards past the goal and with a bit of luck by the time the goalkeeper Hans Tilkowski had retrieved it, the final whistle would have blown. Instead, as the three interlopers on the pitch who thought it was all over would have seen, the ball ripped into the roof of the German net. Looking at the extraordinary manner in which Moore had dealt with the danger in his own area, Jack Charlton observed wryly, ‘I remember looking at my captain and thinking, “I will never be able to play this bloody game!”’
As all England supporters rose to their feet to acclaim the certainty of victory and the England bench erupted with delight mixed with relief, Ramsey remained sitting stoically on the bench. ‘Sit down, Harold,’ he said sharply to Shepherdson who was obscuring his view. In his excellent biography of the Yorkshire bowler Bob Appleyard, Stephen Chalke writes about the great Yorkshire side of the 1930s, a team blessed with exceptional talent but one moulded in the harshness of pre-war Yorkshire life. He tells the story of how the young Ellis Robinson once held a spectacular slip catch, diving full stretch, only for Arthur Mitchell alongside him to growl, ‘Gerrup, lad. Thar’t mekin’ an exhibition of thissen.’ It was a suppression of emotion that would have sat well with the England football manager at this supreme moment. The players tried to involve Ramsey in their celebrations on the field but the manager demurred. Ramsey stood and watched anonymously as his players climbed the thirty-nine steps to the Royal Box and Bobby Moore carefully wiped his hands before shaking hands with the Queen.
Ramsey said it was the players’ day but he was being unduly modest. However, if there was one player to whom the day did belong it was the captain. Perhaps because of his sadly early death and because his life after he finished playing was not lived in the media spotlight, the image that everyone retains of Bobby Moore is of that day in July 1966 as he held aloft the trophy that symbolised that England had reclaimed her place at the top of world football. It would be impossible to imagine a more suitable captain for that England. It was not just how he looked; it was also how he played. At all times he exhibited an air of calm authority. When England were struggling and the players looked to their captain for reassurance Moore would show no sign of desperation.
When England had gone behind to an early goal by Helmut Haller following Ray Wilson’s uncharacteristically weak defensive header, Moore went forward looking for the equaliser. After being brought down by Overath, the England captain got up immediately, ignoring the foul, his eyes scanning the German penalty area for Hurst. The free-kick landed on Hurst’s forehead as he sought the space on the edge of the six-yard box at the near post that Moore would always expect him to find, and in a split second England were level. Moore trotted back to the centre circle, pleased but displaying little emotion.
Moore, for all his membership of the Spitfire generation and his upbringing in the world of austerity, was now associated with Carnaby Street and James Bond – the superficiall
y modern images of a Britain that, in reality, still watched The Black and White Minstrel Show and treated foreign food with suspicion. Indeed, it was all about image now. And the image of Bobby Moore seated on the shoulders of his beaming team-mates, holding the Jules Rimet trophy aloft, was the most iconic image of them all. He won the BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 1966, the way the nation conferred its favours without the need to involve Buckingham Palace or 10 Downing Street.
In the streets of London that night, the joyous crowds celebrated as if it were VE Day all over again. The men of the English Football Association congratulated themselves on hosting a perfect tournament in which England had defeated West Germany in the final. They hosted the perfect banquet after the game to which only the wives of the FA officials and no other women, certainly not the players’ long-suffering wives, were invited. The night before the final, the wives who did not live in London were allowed to stay at the FA’s expense at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington where the victory banquet would be held the following night, but the players who had not seen their families for nearly two months remained incarcerated in Hendon until after the match. On this matter the manager and the FA were in perfect agreement. The role of a footballer’s wife, they firmly believed, was to offer constant support to her husband and not make emotional or any time-consuming demands that might interfere with his football. That night the wives were permitted to eat in the hotel’s chop house as their husbands enjoyed the comforts of the plush reception and banquet in the principal dining room, attended, of course, by the wives of the FA officials.
This was not just an example of appallingly sexist behaviour, it was a display of class snobbery; and as such it serves as a depressing reminder that even during England’s transition from the country of Eden and Macmillan to the country of Wilson and Callaghan, old habits died hard. Jimmy Greaves recalled that he and the Manchester United left-half Wilf McGuinness were once flying out to play for the England Under-23 side, accompanied by the usual number of FA officials. The stewardess on the plane served canapés to the latter and asked if she should serve the same to the players. ‘Canapés?’ repeated the FA official in evident surprise and well within the hearing range of Greaves and McGuinness, ‘No, no. It would be like feeding strawberries to donkeys.’ Only Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby could match a line dripping with such class-ridden contempt and he was a fictional character.
The day before the final the players’ wives had been given an envelope containing £50 in cash to spend on something nice to wear that evening. They were naturally delighted and made the reasonable assumption that they would be wearing their new clothes sitting next to their husbands whom they hadn’t seen for two months. It was only when they reached the ground floor that the players found themselves ushered one way and their wives another. The women did not feel mollified by the spending money or by the food laid on in the chop house but they recognised that being the wife of a professional footballer, even one of the most famous and successful footballers in the history of the English game, did not automatically confer on them any rights or privileges. They might resent it, but they knew their place and not only was their place not at the top table, it was not even in the same room. To that extent little had changed since Billy Wright had enjoyed his misty-eyed celebration arranged by the FA in 1952. News of the sexual revolution had not yet reached Lancaster Gate.
There was professionalism in evidence in the television coverage and in the preparation of the team but the commercial exploitation of the event, which was the FA’s prerogative, rather passed it by. The official mascot was World Cup Willie, a cartoon lion wearing a Union Jack. The World Cup song, also entitled ‘World Cup Willie’, was performed by Lonnie Donegan, the skiffle artist whose biggest hit, My Old Man’s a Dustman, had been recorded in the previous decade. It was as if the FA had never heard of the Beatles, which was a distinct possibility. They turned a decent profit – how could they not with a captive audience and a monopoly? – but they simply did not perceive any of the commercial possibilities that stemmed from the global television coverage. The British soldiers in the First World War were memorably described as ‘lions led by donkeys’ (although the phrase has a rather earlier provenance). In 1966 the performance of the FA compared to the meticulous planning in evidence elsewhere made it look like professionals led by amateurs.
Had they bothered to glance at what was happening in Coventry they might have learned something. In partnership with his innovative chairman, Derrick Robins, Jimmy Hill made Coventry City in the mid-1960s the most enterprising club in the Football League, the first to appreciate the power of public relations. A Sky Blue song based on the ‘Eton Boating Song’ was well received by the fans and when the supporters’ coach left at 7.30 a.m. for an FA Cup tie against Lincoln City a catering coach went with them providing tea, coffee and hot dogs. Hill started a number of community activities including a pop and crisps party for children, but the idea of letting off fireworks to celebrate each home goal had to be abandoned on health and safety grounds. In an attempt to replicate match-day fitness peak in a circadian rhythm, he had the players train at 3 p.m. instead of following the traditional morning routine. Coventry also commissioned a ‘Sky Blue Special’ train service to transport fans to away matches; the trains remained full until results declined and the service became uneconomical to run.
Crowds responded positively to Hill’s initiatives. In Division Three Coventry City averaged an attendance of 26,000 compared to the 10,000 they had attracted only two seasons before. After promotion, the club’s first home game in Division Two brought in a crowd of 37,782 for a match against Ipswich. Coventry also started a Sky Blue supporters club where fans could eat a meal, take the wife and family and generally feel part of the club set-up. Hill and Robbins also experimented with closed-circuit TV at Highfield Road when the team was playing away, thereby pulling in an extra 10,000. In the 1966–7 pre-season the team travelled to Europe to play four matches promoting Coventry-manufactured Rover cars in Frankfurt, Vienna, Zurich and Brussels. At the climax of that same season, the crowd that watched the Second Division promotion decider against Coventry’s West Midlands rivals Wolverhampton Wanderers numbered 51,500. Coventry were promoted as Second Division champions and stayed in the top flight for thirty-four consecutive seasons – an astonishing achievement when one looks at the identity of some of the clubs that were relegated from English football’s top tier between 1967 and 2001. Jimmy Hill left Coventry after the club was promoted to Division One, when Michael Peacock offered him the job of Head of Sport at the new London Weekend Television, which was to go on air the following year. His salary would be £10,000 per annum, compared to the £7,500 he had received as a successful football manager. Hill’s move from football to television was a trailblazing one, to be followed in due course by other former professional footballers from Bob Wilson to Saint and Greavsie and then to Gary Lineker. Hill’s imaginative thinking and commercial enterprise stood in marked contrast to the sclerotic attitudes that still prevailed in FA headquarters at Lancaster Gate.
Nevertheless, London was en fête that Saturday night at the end of July 1966. Whatever the fragility of Britain’s economic position (there had been a damaging seamen’s strike just before the World Cup started), the country had succeeded against the odds and emerged triumphant, forcing the rest of the world to admire our skill and fortitude. Even people who had little or no interest in football could not help but be caught up in the tide of emotion that swept the country. It was much the same as what happened when the Olympics came to London in 2012 and suddenly the nation became passionate about cycling and rowing in a way that would have mystified them a week before the opening ceremony.
Politicians now saw the possibility of reflected glory. On the day of the World Cup final, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and George Brown arrived at Wembley before the players emerged and offered their self-serving comments to the television cameras. Wilson, it was later revealed, had to be di
scouraged from appearing on television at half-time and offering his expert opinion on the match. Still, he would probably have made more sense than Phil Neville generally does. Another cabinet minister, Richard Crossman, noted in his diary that there was a big upswing in Wilson’s personal popularity ratings after the World Cup was won and that it might be the precursor of a change in the fortunes of the government as well.
When I told Anne [his wife] over lunch today that the World Cup could be a decisive factor in strengthening sterling she couldn’t believe it. But I am sure it is. Our men showed real guts and the bankers, I suspect, will be influenced by this and the position of the government correspondingly strengthened.
However, the Labour government, despite its best efforts, did not manage to surf the World Cup wave for much longer as industrial strife and the increasing balance of payments deficit continued to exert pressure on a weakening pound. At the time that Crossman wrote his optimistic diary entry, the country was just fifteen months away from Wilson’s devaluation of sterling.
The historian Peter Hennessy understands the relationship between football and the Labour party:
Labour people after the war frequently enjoyed an identification with football. Michael Foot was fanatical about Plymouth Argyle. J. P. W. Mallalieu was Spurs. Harold could recite the 1923–4 championship-winning Huddersfield Town team as his party piece. In 1975 at the Dublin summit as part of the renegotiation of our membership of the EEC as it then was Harold began his speech by saying something like ‘First the most important business’ and then gave the score in the match England were playing that day as if to say, ‘All right, Johnny Foreigner, you might think we are supplicants but we’ve got our priorities right. You might think Britain’s membership of the EEC is of great importance but there are some things that are even more important.’ Jim Callaghan was sitting next to him and looking a little puzzled because I don’t think Jim was a football supporter. Nico Henderson was the British Ambassador in Bonn when Harold returned to power in 1974 and if you read his diaries you can see that he’s horrified by Harold wanting to talk to him about where Billy Bremner should be played in the 1974 World Cup. For Tony Crosland, watching Match of the Day on a Saturday night became something of a fetish as he tried to piss off the bien pensants who were gathered round his dinner table. Harold had been the sort of schoolboy in Yorkshire who would have talked endlessly about the scores the previous Saturday and bored people rigid. He took it seriously and he enjoyed being photographed with Bill Shankly.
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