My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes

by Gary Imlach

  There’s no way of knowing how great the pace of change might have been then, or how different the game might look now, but the great reshaping of football by television that took place in the 1990s could have begun three decades earlier; in fact did begin, only to be suffocated in the boardrooms of the old First Division.

  If the Football League hadn’t had other pressing matters to deal with, perhaps the live-television experiment could have been revived. But by November 1960, the PFA had called in the Ministry of Labour to try to get a response from the League to their proposals over pay and contracts. For the next three months the men who ran the game would be distracted by the threat of a players’ strike. The union had a package of demands, but the key elements were the ones the clubs were most adamant they wouldn’t concede: the abolition of the maximum wage and the end of retain-and-transfer.

  For the clubs, the television issue had been clear-cut – they were in a position simply to say no to it. Many of them believed they still had a similar prerogative over the wishes of their players. Decades of turning them down flat had cemented in the minds of chairmen their right to continue doing the same, even as it became increasingly clear that the PFA, under its new chairman, Jimmy Hill, was cultivating an air of militancy among footballers more widespread than had ever been managed by his predecessors. Despite Newcastle caving in and transferring George Eastham to Arsenal in late November, the union persuaded him to continue his legal action against the club in order to challenge the retain-and-transfer system in court. And all around the country dressing-room doors were being closed on players-only meetings to gauge the appetite for industrial action.

  At Luton, P.G. Mitchell refused to accept the vote in favour of a strike and demanded that it be restaged in front of him. ‘They had all the players into the boardroom,’ Brendan McNally told me, ‘and he says, “I want a show of hands of the players who are not going to accept a maximum wage” – and all the hands went up except three. He was trying to put the squeeze on us, see who’d put their hand up and then they’d have their eye on you.’

  Ken Hawkes’s was one of the hands that went up in defiance of his chairman. ‘He said, “I hope you know what you’re doing, you’re going to be out of a job.” And Allan Brown, the union rep – Al was a pretty forthright guy – he says, “Are you trying to frighten me, Mr Mitchell?” He says, “No, but it just won’t happen, you’re fighting a lost cause,” and he did everything to convince us that it was silly.’

  After the votes at club level a series of mass meetings was called. At the first, in London, southern players came out overwhelmingly in favour of a strike. In Coventry, the City chairman, Derrick Robins, tried to stop the Midlands vote going the same way: ‘I gather the impression that the majority of players at yesterday’s meeting didn’t want to strike but were swayed by one man. It may suit that one man to have a strike but the vast majority of footballers know that a strike is not in the best interests of themselves or their clubs.’

  The one man Robins was referring to was Jimmy Hill, whose ability to unify players in pursuit of a goal must have impressed the Coventry chairman as much as it alarmed him. Within a year he’d be offering Hill the manager’s job at Highfield Road. In Birmingham, as in London and Manchester, the vote was for industrial action.

  In the meantime, the antique machinery of the game continued to wheeze and rattle. In the week before Christmas 1960 Stan Matthews was reprimanded for playing in a charity match. He’d appeared with his son, a tennis player, in a fundraising Tennis Stars v Showbiz XI game. This was in breach of Football Association Rule 18a banning players ‘under the jurisdiction of the FA playing with or against unaffiliated clubs’. An FA official reported that Matthews had given a written undertaking not to do it again.

  The threatened strike is popularly remembered as being about the abolition of the maximum wage, partly because it’s an easier headline, partly because in the end that was the only objective it achieved that wasn’t fudged afterwards by the Football League. But the maximum wage was actually conceded comfortably in advance of the planned strike date.

  Backed into a corner by the first week of January 1961, League negotiators had finally agreed with the PFA not only to remove the maximum, but also to bring in a new system of arbitration to safeguard a player’s rights at the end of his contract period with a club. Chairmen were due to vote on the deal on 9 January. But the concession on contracts generated so much hostility from the clubs in advance of the meeting that it was never put to a vote. The negotiated changes were simply deleted. Instead, a vote was passed in favour of a unilaterally altered deal which covered only the lifting of the maximum wage. The retain-and-transfer system was clearly more important to clubs than keeping a ceiling on earnings. And the chairmen calculated that they could buy the players off with one in order to keep the other.

  It didn’t work. A new series of mass meetings was called starting on Wednesday 11 January, spread over three days so that the union leadership could address each one. Fresh mandates for strike action were issued region by region. My father was one of only two Coventry players who accompanied their PFA delegate, Ron Hewitt, to the Midlands meeting in Birmingham. Not that I really felt the need for proof of which way his vote had been cast: I may not have known him as well as I should have, but I knew him this well.

  Birmingham City’s delegate, Brian Farmer, spoke outside the hall afterwards: ‘We were prepared to accept these proposals until we realised that the transfer clause was still in its original form. This must prove to the public that we are fighting for principle – not money.’ At their meeting the next day the northern players let in the press to prove that they weren’t being mesmerised by Jimmy Hill.

  With the strike set for Saturday 21 January, the League tried to squeeze one last game’s worth of revenue out of the players. Telegrams were sent to every club in the country telling them that the entire fixture list was being brought forward to Friday night, or Friday afternoon for clubs without floodlights. Any players who refused to appear would be considered in breach of contract. The PFA discussed counteracting the move by bringing forward the start of the strike. The pools companies hedged their bets and printed two coupons, one featuring the usual slate of English and Scottish League games, the other Scottish games only – split into half-time and full-time scores.

  It was a stand-off. No more talks were scheduled, the only exchanges were in the press: the League promised that games would go on as normal using replacement players; the TUC called on its members to boycott blackleg matches; the PFA talked about staging its own league on Hackney Marshes or in Ireland; there was muttering about players in club houses being evicted.

  Even when the Ministry of Labour brokered last-ditch talks on the Wednesday before the strike was due to start, Joe Richards gave no grounds for optimism: ‘I will be at the meeting if my presence means avoiding a strike but I am not going to waste my time. I am not budging on the transfer system, which must remain as long as there is a league competition in this country.’

  By Thursday the 19th, he had agreed to a whole raft of changes. No transfers could take place during the term of a contract except by mutual consent of player and club. And if the two couldn’t agree on a new contract at the end of a season there was a detailed and transparent series of steps to protect the player’s earnings and his rights. It wasn’t the contractual free-for-all of club chairmen’s nightmares, but it was the end of the feudal system under which the players had laboured for so long.

  The strike was off, the weekend’s fixtures were back on and the papers all reported the result the same way: LEAGUE END SOCCER SLAVERY . . . HILL’S HOUR OF TRIUMPH . . . HE LEADS PLAYERS TO VICTORY AND FREEDOM.

  But that’s not the way history remembers it, and the reason is simple: the clubs reneged on the agreement. Just like the Football League’s live-television deal with ITV, this one lasted as long as it took for the chairmen to meet and vote it down. At the decisive talks, presided over by the Minister of
Labour, John Hare, the League contingent had insisted that they had a mandate to negotiate the necessary changes. Afterwards, an extraordinary general meeting was called for April, and the clubs they represented refused to ratify the key element in the package. Joe Richards talked as though 19 January had never happened: ‘Come what may we intend to keep the retain-and-transfer system.’

  Speaking in the House of Commons, John Hare was as unequivocal in his support for the union as a Conservative Cabinet minister could be. The players were right and the League had been informed of the government’s view. MPs from both sides of the chamber put down a motion calling for the original agreement to be ratified. The League and the PFA peddled their conflicting versions in the press. There was a pre-Clintonian debate about the meaning of the phrase ‘deal with the matter’ in the wording of the pact.

  By this time it was almost the end of the season. There wasn’t much leverage in a summer strike. Anyway, the original momentum for one was now bogged down in a messy argument over interpretation. The retain-and-transfer system lurched on like Rasputin under a hail of claims and counterclaims.

  It would be another two years before Justice Wilberforce got in what looked like a clean shot to the head. In his 1963 judgment on the long-delayed George Eastham case he called it ‘an unreasonable restraint of trade . . . Indeed to anyone not hardened to the acceptance of the practice it would seem inhuman and incongruous to the spirit of a national sport.’ Even then the League found room for manoeuvre in the subordinate clauses of a 16,000-word judgment, and the system, although vastly improved, wouldn’t finally die until the Bosman ruling three decades later.

  Incredibly, the clubs also tried to stymie the part of the package they had ratified – the abolition of the maximum wage. Shortly after the deal that had averted strike action, club chairmen met at the Café Royal in London, where they tried to agree a new unofficial maximum among themselves and behind the back of the League. Their plans were sabotaged by one of their own: Tommy Trinder, the comedian and chairman of Fulham. Trinder, who presumably had an appreciation of the market value of entertainers, had told the press he’d happily pay the England captain Johnny Haynes £100 a week, if only he could. Now he could and – happily or not – he did.

  But Haynes was the exception not the rule, even at his own club. My father’s Scotland teammate Graham Leggat was in the line of players waiting behind Haynes to be called into Trinder’s office: he came out with a £5-a-week increase. At Coventry, and at most clubs around the League, the wage increases were more Leggat than Haynes. My mother never saw her husband’s pay packet, but she doesn’t remember much of a change in her housekeeping money.

  Still, this was the fork in the road for the players and the people who watched them. Footballers were finally going to be paid what they were worth, which inevitably would be more than the ordinary working fans on the terraces. It was the beginning of the end of the local neighbourhood football star, the man who lived and socialised in the community where he played.

  Not immediately, though, and not for my father. Coventry finished the 1960–61 season strongly, with a run of results that might have earned them promotion if only they hadn’t started it from just above the relegation zone. While his teammates dispersed for the summer, my father was down at the ground five days a week. He’d signed on as a joiner with a company that had a contract with the club to do refurbishment work, and spent the off-season building a new directors’ entrance at Highfield Road.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A Telephone Conversation

  with Jimmy Hill

  TEN MONTHS AFTER HE’D stood in a packed hall in Birmingham listening to Jimmy Hill as a union leader and fellow player, my father sat in the dressing room at Highfield Road and heard his first team talk as a manager.

  In November 1961 Coventry sacked Billy Frith and his three coaches after they went out of the FA Cup to the part-timers of King’s Lynn. That was the trigger, but Frith was obviously due the bullet anyway, because the chairman already had Jimmy Hill lined up as his successor and named him the same day. Hill’s first public statement on taking over was a slightly shaky declaration that, as a union man, he was very unhappy about the four sackings.

  A week into the job, he lifted Coventry’s ten-year-old ban on players talking to the press. The next day, the League Secretary Alan Hardaker was talking to the press himself, publicly drawing Hill’s attention to Rule 76, which made permission contingent on the understanding that the player would not bring his club or the League into disrepute. He followed it up with a letter to the Coventry directors, reminding them of their responsibilities and asking them whether they supported their new manager’s decision.

  It doesn’t seem to have started a feeding frenzy at the dressing-room door. The first post-match player quote in the Evening Telegraph wasn’t until four months after Hill’s announcement. It’s this bombshell – attributed to my father but in words sounding very like the reporter’s – on how he took advantage of a defensive mistake to make the second of Coventry’s goals in a 3–2 defeat at Bristol City: ‘Briggs tried to trap the ball before sending it back to his goalkeeper but he did not control it properly and I took it before he recovered.’ Alan Hardaker could sleep easy.

  My father was playing well and had been pretty much since he signed, so it was a surprise when he was suddenly dropped in April 1962, towards the end of Hill’s first season in charge. The manager went out of his way to emphasise that he wasn’t simply being rested: ‘You don’t rest a man in the reserves.’ It sounded like some kind of bust-up, especially from Hill’s pointed remark, but it seems to have lasted no more than a game.

  The following week my father was back in the first team – and for a few glorious seconds, back at Wembley. With Crystal Palace standing in for Luton and the quagmire of Highfield Road momentarily smooth and green, he beat his man, looked up and cut a perfect ball back for the incoming Roy Dwight to score with a first-time shot. Dwight had never properly recovered from his broken leg in the Cup Final, and he’d been out of the League for a year. Jimmy Hill remembered him from their early years together at Fulham, and had signed him from Gravesend & Northfleet where he’d been playing part-time.

  The reunion lasted only half a season though. I skipped the last few match reports in the Evening Telegraph, looking for the story I knew was coming.

  CITY TRANSFER STEWART IMLACH – BUY LAVERICK

  Saturday 30 June 1962

  . . .they bought Bobby Laverick, a 24-year-old left-winger from Brighton, and transferred outside-left Stewart Imlach to Crystal Palace. Jimmy Hill described both fees as ‘reasonable’ and added: ‘but we came out on the right side’.

  The transfer of Imlach comes as a surprise for he was one of City’s leading forwards last season playing in all but one of their games and scoring 7 goals.

  At last, a living manager. Jimmy Hill was the seventh of my father’s career, and the first who was still around to tell me why he got rid of him. Just as importantly, he was forthright enough not to dress his reasons up for the sake of tact. Still, I didn’t dive straight in when I telephoned him. We covered his union days, his anger at the Football League for reneging on the 1961 deal, his reasons for going into management, and the various innovations he’d tried at Coventry. All interesting stuff, forcefully reminisced.

  Then: ‘So, Jimmy, as a player you’d have known my father before you got to Coventry, you’d have come up against him with Fulham . . .’

  ‘Oh yes, I was well aware of him. Outside-left is a position that the game is still short of players you can rely on – they’re always in short supply, more these days it seems than in the past which is surprising – but I’d had Bobby Laverick who I’d bought for £2,600 from Everton [Brighton, actually, Jim – but I wasn’t going to interrupt his flow of memory now we were onto the subject matter that mattered]. He played one game and I said, “Thank you very much, Bobby, you can go and find yourself another club,” and I had to look round suddenly to find
people to fill that hole as it were . . . and Stewart was . . . a left-footed player . . . and just as the game . . .’

  No sooner is he onto the subject of my father than he’s off again, generalising about why the game has become short of left-sided players, being Jimmy Hill. And he seems to have my dad’s departure and Laverick’s arrival the wrong way round. After a respectful pause I tried steering him back.

  ‘Now you sold my father and bought Bobby Laverick on the same day.’

  ‘Yeeeah . . .’ It’s the first syllable he’s uttered with anything less than full Hillian conviction, long and drawn-out, buying himself time to cast around in his memory. ‘Yeah . . . when you say I sold him . . . I can’t remember selling him. Had he not gone when I arrived? We were short of a left-sided player which is why I signed Bobby Laverick, and I didn’t get rid of anybody.’

  Bloody hell, he’s forgotten him. I’m well-used to the unreliability of memory by now: the erroneous certainties, the unpredictable gaps, the random fog of Alzheimer’s. I’ve become acutely aware of how poor my own memory is for events much closer in time to me than most of the ones I’m asking others to dredge up. But this is something new: a man with what seems like a reasonably robust memory except for a hole in it the exact shape of my father.

  ‘Yeah, at the end of the 1961–62 season you sold my dad to Palace and bought Bobby Laverick on the same day.’