The Goalkeeper’s History of Britain

Other young keepers who struck a popular chord followed. In 1932, Manchester City signed Frank Swift, aged seventeen. Goalkeeper for the third team, he was on ten shillings a week, so thought it financially wise to retain his job as coke-keeper at Blackpool gasworks. When City reached the 1933 Cup Final, he and a mate with a motor-cycle drove down to watch. Big for the time at 6 feet 2 inches and 13 stone 7 pounds, Swift squeezed into the sidecar. They left in the middle of the night in order to make the trip and, in the rain, managed to go off the road only once. Manchester City were more easily brushed aside, 3–0 by Everton. Swift soon found himself promoted in City’s pecking order of keepers and, on £1 a week, able to give up the gasworks. He made his debut for the first team on Christmas Day. When he was knocked out early on by the opposition centre-forward, his trainer brought him round by mistakingly spilling half a bottle of smelling salts down his throat. But in the months after, it was injury to the regular first-team keeper that left Swift in line for selection, as City won their way through to the Cup Final again in 1934. As the time approached to face this year’s opponents, Portsmouth, the prospect left him on top of the world one moment, he said, the next in fits of despondency. He told himself he was far too young to be playing at Wembley. With a ‘terrible, sinking feeling’, he saw the team sheet go up, with his name at the top of it.

He aimed to go to bed early the night before the game but shared a room with his team captain, Sam Cowan, who sat bathing a poisoned big toe in a bowl of hot water. Cowan kept him talking till 3 a.m. Swift reckoned later this was to make him sleep late and have less time for pre-match nerves. They got the better of him in the Wembley dressing room. The sight of a jittery senior player having to have his laces tied, he said, turned him green. The trainer hauled Swift off to the washroom, gave him a slap round the face and a tot of whisky. He made it through the parade on to the pitch and presentation to George V. Just after the game started, Matt Busby, Manchester City’s right-half, turned, shouted and passed back to him, to give him an early feel of the ball and calm him down.

Portsmouth scored after half an hour, for which Swift blamed himself. There’d been a brief shower of rain, which normally would have prompted him to put his gloves on. But he’d peered up the other end to see Portsmouth’s keeper had left his in the back of the net. Not trusting his own judgement, Swift did, too, and paid for it when a shot across him from the right slithered through his fingers as he dived. In the dressing room at half-time, the Manchester City centre-forward, Fred Tilson, told Swift to stop looking so miserable about it. Tilson added he’d score twice in the second half, which he did. The second came with only four minutes to go. Suddenly Swift, aged nineteen, realised he might be on the point of winning a Cup Final.

The photographers sitting at the side of his goal began to count down the minutes and seconds for him. Seeing how tense he was, they may have been trying to be helpful. Equally, men of Fleet Street, they might have had their minds on the story. Swift started to lose control of his with about one minute remaining. With fifty seconds left he was thinking of his mother and if the Cup would take much cleaning. At forty seconds he worried whether the king would talk to him. At thirty seconds, Matt Busby smashed the ball into the crowd to waste time and a photographer shouted, ‘It’s your Cup, son’. As the whistle went he stooped to get his cap and gloves from the net, took a couple of steps out of it and ‘everything went black’.

Swift was the favourite of millions of young fans thereafter. Among them was my dad, listening to the game on the wireless. He was to leave school at the end of that term, a month before his fourteenth birthday. For Swift at nineteen to be in a cup-winning team was enough in itself to make him a Kids’ Own hero. His faint in the Wembley goalmouth only heightened this. Though he was a virtual Superboy of the day, he showed himself vulnerable to pressure like anyone else, a big kid after all. Laid out on the turf, he was brought round by cold water poured on his face and dabbed by the trainer’s sponge. He was helped to his feet and limped across the pitch and up the steps to the Royal Box to get his medal from George V. The king spoke to him through what Swift described as a ‘dizzy mist’ and, at greater length than was customary, asked how he was, told him he played well and wished him good luck. The king sent a message the following week, via the Lord Lieutenant of the County of Lancashire, inquiring after Swift’s health.

Throughout his career, Swift showed himself to be not only a large person, but also a large personality. He’d turn and wave to the crowd, acknowledge their shouts, even chat if the ball was at the other end. He applied an occasional flourish to his leaps or dives for the crowd’s benefit. These were ‘flash’, though within limits. A dive when you could keep your feet, or a punch when a catch was feasible, was not the thing. Swift’s principle, however, was that as long as it was safe, where was the harm in the bit of extra for effect?

Among British keepers, Swift pioneered the skills of throwing the ball, something he’d picked up from watching water polo. Crowds tended to feel short-changed by a keeper doing anything but clearing the ball out of his penalty area with a hefty boot. But Swift had enormous strength and huge hands – the length of the average person’s foot – with which he could pick up or catch a ball single-handed. He’d hurl it over half the length of the pitch, and guide it far more accurately than could be accomplished with a hopeful punt. An extrovert character, it was one of the ways he imposed himself on the game. Swift was generally good at making himself known, not least to referees whose decisions he felt unable to go along with. Against the football hierarchy, he also became a vociferous campaigner for players’ wages and conditions.

After his Cup medal, Swift’s club career reached another peak when Manchester City won the league in 1937. Runners-up were Charlton Athletic, whose goalkeeper, Sam Bartram, had a similar personality and style. Not quite of Swift’s physical dimensions, he was a tall and broad, red-haired character, who indulged in the flamboyant when opportunity arose. Much thanks to him, Charlton had climbed in successive seasons from the Third Division South, through the Second, to challenge for the First Division title itself. Swift and Bartram were identified as future rivals for a place in the England team and at one stage Bartram appeared the most likely contender. The season after Charlton ran Manchester City closely for the championship, he played for the Possibles against the Probables in an England trial.

Swift and Bartram had been born within weeks of each other a little before the start of the First World War. From, respectively, the industrial north-west and north-east, they grew up in regions feeling the worst of the post-war recession. The country’s mood was also steeped in memories of one awful conflict and the strengthening conviction that a worse one was on the way. The Great War had had the wonders of the trenches and ‘going over the top’; everyone knew the next war would bid goodbye to all that with mass aerial bombardment of the cities. Swift and Bartram were products of the widely-held view among ordinary people that there was little sane reaction but to laugh, make the best of it and pretend the worst was not going to happen. If ever the laughter had to be prompted a little, there were always characters around like Swift and Bartram to help its orchestration. Vaudeville keepers in their way, they played in response to popular demand.

In any of their off-duty pictures I later saw – team photos, head-and-shoulders portraits, or shots of them being introduced to one dignitary or another before a big game – they were always at least smiling. In accounts of their matches that I read or was told about, their presence dominated. Each was likely to rush from the keeper’s 6-yard box, to the edge or beyond the penalty area to clear the ball, forsaking their hands and heading it if necessary. This was a way of doing things much more familiar to keepers on the continent. It brought the keeper out of his remote condition and into closer touch with his team. Both Swift and Bartram were students of the style of Harry Hibbs – now nearing the end of his career – and sought advice from him on how it was all meant to be done. But notes taken, they moved far beyond the role of humble ‘custodian’.

Two weeks after my dad’s nineteenth birthday the war was declared, an occasion as stressful at that age as playing in the Cup Final. After listening to Chamberlain’s announcement, he went out in the back garden where his dad grew the vegetables and, as the phrase has it, broke down. His father followed and tried to help: ‘That’s OK, son, there’s nothing to worry about,’ he might have offered. ‘I passed through the Menin Gate and the various battles of Ypres. Nasty explosion at the Somme, of course, and this open hip wound still plays up. But I survived – when most of the Beds and Herts were wiped out, they made me sergeant major for a day till reinforcements arrived.’ But, in that moment, my Bedfordshire grandfather opted to stay quiet.

For two years my father’s bricklaying had him on such essential works as building the Tempsford aerodrome. A Stuka came for a few minutes one afternoon and strafed the hundred or so of them working up the sheer face of the cooling towers at Barford. The bombing of London had prompted my mum’s move to the country and they got married after he was called up into the Royal Signals. In Greenock he and several thousand others were put on ships which sailed west almost as far as Iceland. They weren’t told where they were going, up to the point the boats turned to plunge south. Through the Bay of Biscay the weather was so rough the convoy’s members were rarely in sight of each other. Maybe the conditions were a problem for the German U-boats as well. The next convoy out a fortnight or so later lost a third of its number. My dad’s ‘never saw a seagull’. Straight, more or less, from Sandy, Bedfordshire, he arrived at the Saharan fringes of North Africa, landing with the army in Algiers in 1942.

Across Algeria and Tunisia, the task of pushing back Rommel and his Afrika Korps allowed little opportunity for football or any other game but was carried out in a spirit not seen elsewhere in the war. The British troops viewed Rommel as a ‘good bloke’, a German but a fair one. This marked him as a man apart from the madness of his Nazi teammates. It didn’t mean whatever wit and cunning the ‘Desert Fox’ had could match ours. Near the Tunisian coastal town of La Goulette, shortly before my dad sailed from Cap Bon for Italy, he watched thousands of captured Germans march into their prison camp. This they did in immaculate order, seemingly perfectly according to character. Then they fell into weird nights behind the wire, when their mood alternated between crazed merriment and near riot.

The British army’s attitude to the enemy appeared to be as much a worry to the top brass, even after the Germans had been defeated in Africa and the Sicily landings completed. Maybe the official view was that the soldiers’ achievements might go to their heads. My dad’s company was called together in the almond grove where they were camped near Syracuse and, in line with a War Office directive, bawled out for their apparent misconceptions about Rommel. Not that they took a great deal of notice; there had to be some lone symbol of decency even in the worst of worlds.

All in all, my father said, he was lucky. His brother Reg was sent to Burma. At Kohima the British were besieged for weeks, separated by the width of the High Commissioner’s tennis court from the Japanese screaming at them on the other side. My uncle had injured mates pleading with him to shoot them and put them out of their misery. He was lying wounded in a makeshift hospital himself when the Japanese stormed it at one door and caught up with him after he’d got out the other. Injured by a bayonet thrust, he feigned death in the long grass.

In comparison, the Royal Signals was a doddle. My father had to master Morse Code and spent much of the day tapping it out. He’d applied for the Royal Engineers, thinking it wanted people from the building industry. In relief, when that came to nothing, his dad explained he’d have been constructing Bailey bridges across rivers and repairing phone lines in no man’s land, under what the army liked to refer to as ‘hot fire’.

But events had a way of springing themselves upon you, pulling you suddenly in. You had to beware of the unguarded moment. The German attack on Bari harbour in December 1943 came when we had got ‘too cocky’ and confident of victory. Everyone saw the single German spotter plane circling very high and watched the anti-aircraft fire chase it away. They thought no more about it till at night the aerial assault came in. The harbour was floodlit; the twenty-boat convoy, recently arrived was being unloaded. Two ammunition carriers went up and took fourteen other ships with them. One explosion, like the crack of a large whip, threw my dad 15 feet across his room, door and windows with him; this was 6 miles away along the coast in Santo Spirito. A chance hit,’ wrote Churchill, ‘30,000 tons of cargo lost.’ He didn’t mention the thousand killed among the Italian dockyard workers, merchant seamen and Allied military personnel. In the yard next morning victims, dead and alive, had turned yellow. The medics had no idea for days what they were dealing with, till word went around that General Eisenhower had ordered a consignment of mustard gas. Not that we’d have used it without cause, mind you. We just had it in case the Germans used it first.

During a plague of typhus in Caserta, north of Naples, my dad’s unit was billeted in the abandoned royal palace, with its water cascades and hanging gardens, while for several weeks the Allied advance was held up by the battles for the monastery at Montecassino. Driving through the streets in a truck, he saw an old man fall over and die. Some soldiers who ventured out on the town in their free time suffered the same fate. Sometimes there was nothing to be done, except withdraw, observe and wonder what it was that made such things go on in the world. A degree of separation, if there was a choice, afforded a perspective that was lost on the unthinking crowd. On Piazzale Loretto in Milan, he saw the bodies of Mussolini and his mistress hanging from their heels and urinated on by an angry mob. Weeks before, the same crowd might have been cheering them.

After the war, soldiers rarely volunteered their recollections. They only came out over the years. Experiences had either been too awful, mundane or similar to those of many others to merit earlier mention. Besides, the cities at home had had the bombs. Even Sandy High Street was machine-gunned by a German fighter, my nan having to launch herself into a shop doorway with baby and pram. Anyone who went on about moments they had endured abroad in face of the enemy, or how many of them they’d injured or killed, would have been a suspect personality. Few, too, were asked. Until prompted, my dad said little more than he had seen the eruption of Vesuvius, from Caserta, filling the sky with black smoke for three weeks in March 1944. As in the time of Pompeii, the prior impression had been that it was extinct. Further north in Siena he began to learn Italian by walking out from the city’s fort and reciting door numbers. He came home speaking the language well, one among very few of the quarter of a million Allied soldiers in Italy to do so.

Talking about the football, rather than the war, was easier. Games were played between stages of the Allied advance up the Italian leg. My father played in goal for 15th Army Group HQ and was nicknamed ‘Flash’, though only, he insisted, after his white blond hair. You changed in barracks or tents and, if playing away, went by army truck. Match locations ranged from the landing strip in Syracuse, to Rome’s Dei Marmi stadium, encircled by statues of emperors and gods. In the Comunale stadium in Florence, England were to draw 1–1 some seven years later and maintain their unbeaten record against Italy. In Bologna, my dad occupied the goal where David Platt volleyed the last-minute winner past Preud’homme of Belgium in the 1990 World Cup. His reports of the games he played in suggest he’d have probably saved it.

As for the spectacular moments, the most memorable was reserved for when the army had moved far north to the Yugoslav border to fend off Tito’s claim to Trieste. It was made in the small stadium in Monfalcone, on a baked-earth goalmouth full of large stones. A brisk advance by the opposition down the right-wing forced him to cover his front post. But the ball swung over to the fast-advancing centre-forward, who volleyed it hard towards the far corner. A Liverpudlian, naturally vocal, the centre-forward was shouting for a goal from the moment he hit it. My dad made it across the full 8 yards of his goal, diving to push the ball away with his right hand. The save was unique in anyone’s recollection, though others may have emulated it since.

Immediate thoughts of self-congratulation were tempered by the impact of the goalmouth surface on his knees. As my dad pulled himself up in pain, his opponent – driven by a fit of frustrated expectation and Adriatic sun – rushed in, yelling and hammering him with his fists around the shoulders and head. This incident was ‘comical’, which left me with the impression goalkeepers were not averse to gaining pleasure from the annoyance of others. But they also performed an important public service. Contrary to a common prejudice that it was keepers who, by virtue of their role and isolation, were insane, they showed that it was out there, in the wider, collective world, where madness was to be found.

At the start of the war, Frank Swift had signed up as a special constable in Manchester. He was put to directing city traffic, an ill-advised move, since his presence was more likely to attract a crowd than clear it. One congested day on Market Street, with his efforts achieving nothing, he waved a cheery ‘bugger this’ and went home. Like many top footballers, he became a trainer to younger soldiers who were about to be shipped abroad. My dad was trained by Roy Goodall, the Huddersfield Town and England half-back, and passed out as a PT instructor. This qualified him for a comfortable home assignment in one military gym or another but before one arose he was en route for Africa. Again, he said, he was fortunate. Many of the younger trainers who were at first kept back from service abroad, found themselves later pitched on to the beaches at Normandy.

Football at home ticked over, with teams raised from whoever was on hand on any given Saturday. Sam Bartram played in two successive wartime Cup Finals, one for Charlton, the other as a guest for Millwall. As the war moved towards conclusion, opportunity arose to put on exhibition matches for the troops abroad. Victory in Europe was on the point of being declared as my dad’s unit progressed to Florence, when it was announced Frank Swift was due in town. He was to play for a team led by Joe Mercer, the Everton half-back, against that of Wolves captain, Stan Cullis. It was to be an occasion for great celebration, till on the morning of the game, my dad and fellow signalmen were told to pack their kit and advance up country to Bologna. VE Day was an anti-climax. Each soldier was issued two bottles of beer, which he and his mates poured over their heads: ‘Bloody stupid, really.’

Full international games were under way at home more than a year later. It was obvious to many that the choice for the England keeper lay between Swift and Bartram. In conversation their names were mentioned in the same breath. Yet, in an era when the average forty-year-old didn’t have a tooth to talk of, at thirty-two they weren’t young. The England selectors had dallied with the idea of jumping a goalkeeping generation. Ted Ditchbum of Tottenham Hotspur, ten years younger, was the object of their attention. He had played well in big wartime games against Scotland and Wales, which suggested he was in for a promising international career. Unfortunately for Ditchbum, the Royal Air Force thought so as well. When he was posted to the Far East for two years, the selectors’ hand was forced. By default as much as instinct, they tossed the keeper’s yellow jersey, undersized for the part, into the huge grasp of Frank Swift.

He played commandingly in the first seventeen internationals after the war. For two, he was selected as England’s first goal-keeping captain. What he described as his own greatest day was when he led the team against Italy in May 1948. Originally England were to play Czechoslovakia but after February’s communist coup in Prague, the fixture was rearranged. The team went by air from Northolt, a dozen journalists in tow, among them former players like Charles Buchan, ex-Scotland and Arsenal and then of the News Chronicle. The mode of transport, however, was sufficiently novel for the Daily Herald’s man to opt to go by boat and train. The weather deteriorated over Switzerland, where the captain felt it necessary to stop and change planes. Swift described the rest of the journey over the Alps in a twin-engined Dakota as a ‘bit of a snorter’ and said he wasn’t the only passenger relieved to get off again.

The match was on Juventus’s ground in Turin. World Cup holders from before the war and in front of their own 85,000 crowd, the Italians were expected to win. While England had given themselves three days to prepare, the home team had been undergoing three weeks’ intensive training. Continentals clearly took this kind of thing very seriously. Furthermore, where England’s training in Stresa was open to view, recorded Swift, Italy’s was ‘at a mountain hideout’. In the England dressing room, there was no concealing the pre-match tension: ‘We knew what we were up against and changed quietly.’ Come the moment, Swift was unable to find the words for a captain’s speech of encouragement. Instead, each member of the team filed past and shook his hand.

Outside all was turmoil: loudspeaker announcements, with adverts and exhortations to the crowd, aeroplanes promoting everything from newspapers to cordials, and others swooping low over the pitch with cameramen on board shooting the scene. Hordes more photographers joined Swift in the middle for the toss. ‘Some standing on ladders, which they toted across the field, some lying on their stomachs,’ he said, ‘all of them arguing and gesticulating.’

England’s response to the apparent anarchy was to score almost immediately. Stan Mortensen raced to the byline and beat the Italian keeper Valerio Bacigalupo from what seemed an impossible angle. This was to the ‘astonishment and chagrin’ of the crowd, said Swift, which prompted their team to storm back. ‘For twenty minutes they threw everything at us with bewildering inter-passing and brilliant speed.’ Shots, overhead kicks, headers, the lot ‘flew at me from all directions’. Probably the most startling was from the Italian centre-forward, Gabetto. Eight yards out, he didn’t turn or take aim but back-headed the ball. A British keeper couldn’t have anticipated that kind of thing and the surprise and speed of it beat Swift. The ball hit his crossbar and bounced down just in front of the line, near enough to have the crowd screaming at the referee to give a goal. When play switched to the other end, Swift invited one of the photographers crowding behind the net to step around into the goalmouth so he could show him where the ball had landed. The fellow accepted the offer and quickly took a photo of the spot. His colleagues would have followed, said Swift, if the Italians hadn’t been straight back on the attack.

The England captain stopped everything he had to, though handed the compliments to his team. His defence was ‘rock-like’, not least Jack Howe of Derby County in his first international, ‘and incidentally the first man to play for England wearing contact lenses over his eyes’. By contrast he was sniffy about the Italian defenders, who sometimes ‘indulged in acrobatic antics while clearing the ball’. England’s forwards left the Italians dumbfounded with their simplicity of approach, namely the way they cracked the ball into the net with first-time volleys and after quick one-pass movements. But most of the honours won from England’s near incredible 4–0 victory went to Swift. It was acknowledged as his finest game in the finest England performance ever. Hitherto there was no question that Britain had the finest keepers in the world. In Turin Swift proved to be the finest yet seen.