Sir Alf

Alf made it hard for some of us to like him because of the shame he seemed to feel about his background. We all understand there can be pressures in those areas but the voice was nothing short of ludicrous. There were some words he could not pronounce and the grammar kept going for a walk. That could be a problem for any human being but, for Alf, it almost became a caricature.

In his gauche attempts to sound authoritative, particularly in front of the cameras or the microphone, Alf would become stilted and awkward, littering statements with platitudes and empty qualifying sub-clauses. One extreme example of this occurred when he was being interviewed on BBC Radio in the early sixties:

‘Are you parents still alive, Mr Ramsey?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Where do they live?’

‘In Dagenham, I believe.’

In his 1970 biography, when Ramsey was still England manager, Max Marquis gave a vivid description of Alf’s style. Describing his language as ‘obscure and tautological’, Marquis said that Ramsey

is unable to communicate with any precision what he means because he will never use a single-syllable word when an inappropriate two-syllable word will do and he dots his phrases with some strange, meaningless interjections…His tangled prose, allied with his capacity for self-persuasion, has made for some of his quite baffling pronouncements. In public he lets words go reluctantly through a tightly controlled mouth: his eyes move uneasily.

Because Ramsey never felt in command of his language, he could vary wildly between triteness and controversy. He could be absurdly unemotional, as when Ipswich won the League title in 1962, perhaps the most astonishing and romantic feat in the history of English club football.

‘How do you feel, Mr Ramsey?’ said a breathless BBC reporter, having described him as ‘the architect of this miracle’.

‘I feel fine,’ replied Ramsey, as if he had done nothing more than pour himself a cup of tea.

Yet this was also the man who created a rod for his own back through a series of inflammatory statements, like his notorious description of the 1966 Argentinian team as ‘animals’ or his claim in 1970 that English football had ‘nothing to learn’ from the Brazilians. As Max Marquis put it, ‘Ramsey is like a bad gunner who shoots over or short of the target.’

A serious-minded youth, always striving for some kind of respectability, Alf did not have as strong a working-class accent as some of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, his speech could not help but be influenced by his surroundings. ‘Dagenham had its own special brogue, and Alf spoke with that,’ says Phil Cairns, ‘It was a sort of bastardized cockney. He certainly had that accent as a child. I did notice how his voice changed when he got on in life. It was so obvious. When he had a long conversation, you would hear that he made faux pas.’ Eddie Baily, who was Alf’s closest friend at Spurs, told me of the difference he saw in Alf once he had gone into management with Ipswich Town:

He was cockney to me but I noticed his voice changed after he left Tottenham. When I saw him after that, his voice was refined. I would say to him, ‘What are you doing? Where did all this come from? You’re speaking very well, my old soldier.’ He would just laugh at that. I could always have a go at him. But I think the position that he took made him want to be a little bit better when he had to do negotiations and all that.

It has always been alleged that this distinct change in Alf Ramsey’s voice was as a result of his taking elocution lessons in the mid-fifties. Indeed, the idea of Alf’s elocution lessons has become more than just part of football folklore: it is now treated as a fact. Both Ramsey’s previous biographers, Max Marquis and Dave Bowler, state without any reservation that he underwent such instruction. The late John Eastwood, who wrote a massively authoritative history of Ipswich football, reported that ‘it was well known that Alf took himself off for the two-hour elocution lessons to a woman at the ballroom dancing school near Barrack Corner in Ipswich’. Another, far less believable, version has been put forward by Rodney Marsh, the charismatic striker of the seventies and later Sky TV presenter, who has claimed that Ramsey took ‘elocution lessons, paid for by the FA, around the time of the World Cup in 1966’. Anyone who knew about either the parsimony of the FA or Alf’s contempt for the Association’s councillors would know that this assertion was nonsense.

Yet the absurdity of Marsh’s statement only exposes the weakness of the conventional wisdom that Alf underwent elocution training. The fact is that ever since his youth, Alf was on a mission to improve himself – and a key element of that was to change his speaking voice, adopting the received pronunciation he heard from BBC broadcasters on the wireless, from officers in the army and from directors at League clubs. There was nothing reprehensible about this. Before the mid-sixties, working-class boys of ambition were encouraged to believe that retaining their accents could be a barrier to progress in their careers. Edward Heath, the son of a Broad-stairs carpenter, adopted the elevated tones of Oxford before embarking on his rise to the top of the Conservative party.

With Alf there was no sudden dramatic switch in his voice from ‘Cor Blimey’ Dagenham to his imitation of the plummy vowels of the establishment; rather it was a gradual process, beginning in his teenage years and climaxing when he became manager of Ipswich. Over a long period his accent, never the strongest, grew milder until it was subsumed within his precise, artificial style of speech. From his earliest years as a professional footballer in the 1940s, Alf was seeking to improve himself in manner and appearance.

Stan Clements, who was training to become a civil engineer when he knew Alf at Southampton and was therefore more socially perceptive than most footballers of the time, says:

I always thought all those stories about his having elocution lessons were a load of old codswallop. His voice had a slight accent but it was controlled. It was not cockney but Essex. I would have said that when he was in the army and became a sergeant – and in those days there was a big difference in class between non-commissioned staff and the officers – he would have got to know the officers and there is no doubt that this influenced his speech.

Other Southampton contemporaries of the 1940s back up Clements. Pat Millward, whose husband Doug played for the Saints and then under Alf at Ipswich, recalls: ‘Alf always spoke very nicely, even at Southampton. He did not use slang much, unlike the others. I’m sure he never had elocution lessons.’ Eric Day, who played up front for the Saints, agrees: ‘He was so taciturn, self-effacing. He always spoke in that very clipped sort of way. He thought his words out before he spoke them.’ Mary Bates, who worked at the Southampton FC office during Alf’s time, makes this interesting point: ‘Even during his time at Southampton, his voice changed, not noticeably at first but certainly there was a difference. If I look back from 1949 to 1945, there was a marked change.’

The same story can be told when he went to Tottenham Hotspur, where again he was no loud-mouth shouting the odds in a broad vernacular. ‘He sounded as if he came from the country. He spoke very slowly with a rural twinge in his accent, a sort of country brogue. It was the same as you would find in people from Norwich, a burr,’ remembers Denis Uphill. Equally revealing is the memory of Ed Speight, who himself was born in Dagenham and joined Tottenham in 1954: ‘He was a gentleman. He always spoke very quietly; rarely did I hear him swear. When he spoke, the top lip did not move. It was all from the lower mouth. Very clipped, staccato stuff.’ Tony Marchi, who was another young player at Spurs in the early fifties, goes so far as to say that, in his memory, ‘Alf had much the same voice when he was at Spurs as when he became England manager. It never really altered.’

The reality was that, by the early fifties, Ramsey was already beginning to demonstrate those concise, somewhat convoluted tones which were to become so much a part of his public character. Through listening to the radio and reading improving texts, he sought to acquire a more refined voice. In 1952, when he was still at Spurs, he had written about his lifestyle in Talking Football:

In the evening I usually have a long read for, like Billy Wright, I have found that serious reading has helped me develop a command of words so essential when you suddenly find yourself called upon to make a speech. People, remember, are inclined to forget that speechmaking may not be your strong point. With this in mind, I always try hard to put up some sort of show when asked to say a few words.

Even the keenest advocate of the Victorian philosophy of self-help could not have put it better. And by the time he reached Ipswich in 1955, his voice only required a more few coats of varnish, not an entire rebuild. It seems likely that the varnish was provided, not by elocution lessons, but by more self-improvement allied to his connection to the most aristocratic boardroom in the country, whose number included a baronet and a nephew of the Tory Prime Minister.

Though some did not believe him, Alf was always adamant that he had not undergone any course in elocution. He stated in that Mirror article of 1970:

I must emphasize that I am not a cockney. I make the point because I have been accused of taking elocution lessons. And told that it is to my credit that I had taken them. The truth is that I have not had elocution lessons. I wish I had. They might have been a help to me. All this business, however, is not important to me. I’ve nothing to be ashamed of. I’m proud of my family, my parents and of all that has happened to me in my life.

As Alf indirectly admitted there, if he had really taken such lessons, it is improbable that he would have found communication so difficult. Nigel Clarke says:

I once pulled his leg about the rumour of his so-called elocution lessons, and he bristled and said, ‘That is absolutely not true.’ He then explained that he used to listen to the BBC radio announcers and modulated his tones to match theirs. I am sure that is true. I mean Alf would not even have known what the word elocution meant.

TWO The Dell

A local government study of Dagenham in 1938 described the local population thus:

Many are rough diamonds, but still diamonds. There is a general readiness to help each other when in trouble, a readiness to support various causes (but only after protracted and heated argument), an appreciation of good music, the usual fondness for Picture Palaces and an undue attachment to the Dance hall.

Eighteen-year-old Alf Ramsey could not easily have been described as a Dagenham ‘rough diamond’. He showed no interest in dancing, was shy with women despite his dark good looks, had few musical tastes and avoided arguments except when they involved football. He had, however, developed an enthusiasm for the movies, one that was to stay with him all his life and would cause much amusement to the players under his management. He saw his first film when he was fourteen, a jungle adventure with Amercian B-movie star Jack Holt in the leading role. Alf soon had acquired a particular fondness for westerns, which so often revolved around the theme of a tight-lipped heroic outsider triumphing over the natives, the bad guys or the corrupt authorities.

But his first love remained football. During the 1937-38 season, he was playing better than ever at centre-half with Five Elms United, as he recorded himself: ‘Since leaving school I had developed into quite a hefty lad, and in my heart I knew I had improved my football.’ His exploits in the Five Elms defence brought him to the attention of Portsmouth, one of the country’s senior League clubs. He and two other Five Elms players were approached by experienced scout Ned Liddell, who was for a time manager of Brentford, and asked if they might be interested in signing for Portsmouth as amateurs. Before this, claimed Alf, the thought of becoming a League player ‘had never entered my mind. After all, I was too modest to think I was anything much as a footballer. I just played the game for fun and the exercise that went with it.’

For a young man obsessed with the game, the chance to play at the highest level was a glittering prospect. But he hesitated for a moment. Apart from some natural uncertainty about his ability, Alf was also worried about the financial insecurity of life in League football. After all, hundreds of youths were taken on every year by the 88 League clubs but very few of them made a decent living. Alf already had a secure job in the Co-op store in Oxlow Lane near his home; by 1938 he had graduated from delivery boy to counter hand and bill collector, the latter a role which required a certain amount of toughness. ‘Going out to collect the bills occupied Monday morning as far as I was concerned. There were no embarrassing moments when collecting money. People either paid or they didn’t, but in the main they paid.’

But when Alf met Ned Liddell again, he was assured that there would be no problem about keeping his Co-op job if he signed as an amateur. Moreover, Alf’s family were not opposed to the idea. ‘Well, son, it’s up to you,’ said his mother. So Alf, now relishing the thought of joining a top club, filled in the forms and sent them off to Fratton Park, Portsmouth’s ground. He waited eagerly for a reply. None came: not a letter, a card, a telegram, a word from Ned Liddell. The weeks passed in silence until Alf gave up hope. ‘No one, it seemed, was interested in young Ramsey of Dagenham,’ he wrote later.

Portsmouth’s gross discourtesy was a seminal experience for Alf. It left him with a profound distrust of the men running football, the club directors and officials who treated players with such haughty contempt and undermined careers with barely a thought. He came to share the view of Harry Storer, the hard-nosed Derby County manager who once questioned the right of a certain director to be an FA selector. Having been told that this director had been watching the game for 50 years, Storer replied: ‘We’ve got a corner flag at the Baseball Ground. It’s been there for 50 years and still knows nothing about the game.’ As Stanley Matthews, who suffered from the administrators’ arrogance as much as anyone, ruefully commented: ‘Players were treated as second-class citizens. Football was a skill of the working class but those who ran our game were anything but.’ Portsmouth’s rudeness ensured that Alf, when he became a manager, never acted in such a cavalier manner; his concern for the well-being of professionals was one of the reasons he always inspired such loyalty.

Ignored by Portsmouth, Alf carried on working at the Oxlow Lane Co-op for the next two years, playing football in the winter, cricket in the summer. Nigel Clarke recalls:

I happened to mention to him one day that my son loved cricket. The next time we met at Liverpool Street station he turned up with a bat. It was a 1938 Gunn and Moore triple-spring, marked with the initials of his club, The General Co-operative Sports and Social Club. Alf said to me, ‘Make sure he uses it well. This one made plenty of runs for me.’

He also occasionally went with his brothers to League matches at Upton Park; the first ever match he saw was West Ham against Arsenal, during which he was particularly impressed with the Gunners’ deep-lying centre-forward and play-maker Alex James, ‘a chunky little fellow in long shorts’.

As with millions of other Britons, the quiet routine of Alf’s provincial life was shattered with the arrival of the Second World War. In June 1940, ten months after the outbreak of hostilities, Alf was called up for service in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry and was despatched to a training unit in Truro. It is a reflection of the narrowness of Alf’s upbringing that he looked on his first journey to Cornwall with excitement rather than trepidation. Taking ‘so famous a train as the Cornish Riviera was in itself a memorable experience for me. As a matter of interest, until I travelled to Cornwall, the longest journey I had undertaken was a trip to Brighton by train,’ he wrote. The thrill continued when he arrived in Truro and was billeted in a top-class hotel, which had been commandeered by the army. ‘This proved another memorable moment for me. It was the first time I had ever been into a hotel! Even with us sleeping twelve to a room on straw mattresses could not end for me the awe of living in a swagger hotel.’

Throughout his life Alf frequently appeared to be a naïve, other-worldly character, oblivious to political considerations, and that was certainly true of his delight at his surroundings in Cornwall. At the very time Britain was engaged in a life-and-death struggle for its survival as a nation, Alf was writing to his parents about the joy of ‘living in a luxury hotel’. Yet that set the tone for Alf’s war. He was luckier than most soldiers, spending all his years of active service up to VE Day on home soil. Never did he have to endure any of the brutal theatres of conflict like North Africa, Italy or Normandy. Attached to the 6th battalion of his regiment, his duties were in home defence, ‘guarding facilities, manning road blocks, and preparing against German paratroop drops,’ says Roy Prince, the archivist of the Duke of Cornwall’s Regimental Association. In retrospect, it was not dangerous work, though it was demanding, as Alf recalled: ‘The physical training we were so frequently given added inches to my height, broadened my chest and in general I became a fitter young fellow than when I reported for duty as a grocery apprentice from Dagenham.’

Unlike so many whose lives were ruined by the genocidal conflict of the Second World War, Alf found military service almost wholly beneficial. It brought him out of his shell, and helped demonstrate his innate qualities of leadership. In 1952 he wrote:

I have since reflected that to join the Army was one of the greatest things which ever happened to me. From my, to some extent, sheltered life, I was pitchforked into the company of many older and more experienced men. I learnt, in a few weeks, more about life in general than I had picked up in years at home. The Army, in short, proved a wonderful education.

The aura of authority that Alf always possessed – which had seen him become captain of his school’s team at the age of just nine – led to his promotion to the rank of Quarter-Master Sergeant in an anti-aircraft unit. Nigel Clarke has this memory of talking to Alf about his army service:

He told me that he absolutely loved it and that his greatest times of all were down on the Helford River in Cornwall. It was in the army, he said to me, that he first really learned about discipline and about being in charge of people, taking command and giving orders. He used to say, ‘I have never been very good at mixing with people but you have to in the army or else you are in trouble.’

The greatest benefit of all was that it enabled Alf to play more football than he had ever done previously – and at a higher class. Within a few months of arriving in Cornwall, he had been transferred to help man the beach defences at St Austell; there he became part of the local battalion team, captaining the side and playing at either centre-half or centre-forward. He was then moved to various other camps along the south coast before reaching Barton Stacey in Hampshire in 1943, where he was fortunate to come under the benign influence of Colonel Fletcher, a football obsessive who had played for the Army. Because of the war, several League professionals were in Alf’s battalion side, including Len Townsend of Brentford and Cyril Hodges of Arsenal. Impressed by such strength, Southampton invited the battalion to visit the Dell for a preseason game on the 21 August 1943. The result was a disaster for Ramsey’s men, as they were thrashed 10-3. ‘The soldiers are a very useful battalion team but they had not the experience to withstand the more forceful play of the Saints,’ reported the Southern Daily Echo. It was Alf’s first experience of playing against top-flight players and he found it something of a shock. ‘At centre-half I was often bewildered by the speed of thought and movement shown by the professionals we opposed.’ Despite the depressing scoreline, Ramsey’s men had shown some promise, for a week later they were invited back to the Dell to play against Southampton Reserves. This time Sergeant Ramsey’s side provided much more effective opposition, winning 4-1.

Ramsey’s performances in these two games had aroused the interest of Southampton. More than a month later he was summoned to Colonel Fletcher’s office. Initially believing that he had committed some military office, Ramsey feared he was about to be reprimanded.

‘Sit down, Sergeant,’ said Colonel Fletcher when Ramsey arrived in his office. Alf was at once relieved, knowing that the Colonel would hardly have been so friendly if he was about to punish him. ‘I have just had a telephone call from Southampton Football Club,’ continued the Colonel. ‘Apparently they are short of a centre-half for their first team tomorrow and would like you to play for them. Well, Sergeant, how do you feel about the idea?’

Ever cautious and modest, Alf then muttered something about his ‘lack of experience’. Colonel Fletcher had little truck with such diffidence. ‘This is a big opportunity, Ramsey,’ he said, looking hard at the raven-haired sergeant. ‘I suppose you have at some time or another considered becoming a professional footballer.’ Alf, ignoring his abortive connection with Portsmouth, claimed untruthfully that he had ‘never given it a thought’. But he assured the Colonel that he was ‘prepared to give it a try’. Without another word, Fletcher was back on the phone to Southampton, reporting that Sergeant Ramsey was available for the match against Luton Town at Kenilworth Road. Alf admitted that, once he left the Colonel’s office, he ‘did a little tap-dance with delight. Even the orderly sitting behind a small desk forgot that I was a sergeant and joined in the laughter’.

Alf was instructed to report at Southampton Central railway station the following morning before the train journey to Bedfordshire. When he turned up that Saturday morning, 9 October 1943, he was met by the elderly, bespectacled secretary-manager of Southampton, Jack Sarjantson, a figure rare in the annals of League history for both the longevity and the range of service to his club. He had been appointed a Southampton director as early as 1914, had become club chairman in 1936, then resigned during the war to act as secretary-manager, before returning to the boardroom to serve as chairman and later vice-president in the 1950s. For all his advanced years, he was also something of a ladies’ man, who, in the words of the Southampton historian David Bull, ‘had a way of flirting with the young wives and girlfriends at the club’s social functions’.

After introducing Alf to the other Southampton players, Sarjantson then asked Alf about his expenses. According to his 1952 autobiography, Alf told his manager that his only claim was for his ‘twopenny halfpenny tram fare from my billet’. In response, Sarjantson ‘dived into pocket’ and pulled out the exact amount. But later, in 1970, Alf gave a much more convincing version, one that reflects the flexible attitude of clubs towards expenses in the days of the maximum wage:

I told Mr Sarjantson that since we were stationed in Southampton I did not have any expenses. He said, ‘Well, if I give you thirty bob is that enough to pay for your taxi fare?’ I said it was more than enough. It was the first time anyone had given me any money for playing.

Alf was equally flexible about his age. In his 1952 book he claimed that when he played against Luton, ‘I had just reached the age of twenty-two’. In fact, he was only three months away from his 24th birthday.

Having sorted out Alf’s expenses so generously, Sarjantson then produced a set of forms for him to sign as an amateur. After his last experience with Portsmouth, this time Alf was only too glad to know that his signature would definitely be followed by a match. ‘As the London-bound train swished through Eastleigh station, I signed for Southampton Football club,’ recorded Alf. On the train up to Luton, he sat beside the Saints inside-forward Ted Bates, later to be manager at the Dell, and who, like Alf, had been a grocery delivery boy in his teens and whose wife Mary was soon to become the first female assistant secretary in League football. ‘Throughout the journey, he told me what I could expect from football: the kind of teams we would be meeting and other little facts which meant a great deal to a new recruit,’ wrote Alf. His first appearance for the Saints was a tight match, one that left him disappointed with his own performance, which he felt was far below the standard of the rest of the side. Ten minutes from the end, Southampton were winning 2-1, when Alf gave away a penalty. ‘I remember tackling someone rather hard,’ he said in 1970. Luton scored from the spot and Alf sensed that ‘several of my colleagues were giving me black looks’. Fortunately Don Roper restored the lead for Southampton soon afterwards, so Alf’s first outing resulted in victory. And he had perhaps been too hard on himself: the view of the Southern Daily Echo was that ‘the defence as a whole functioned satisfactorily’.