The Goalkeeper’s History of Britain

The England selectors may even have agreed at the time. But it didn’t take them long to think again. The following season, little more than six months later, Swift was dropped. He competed for his place with Ted Ditchbum for a couple of games but, soon after, seemed to have been overcome by the affront to his pride. He stood down not only from the England line-up, but from football altogether.

The decision to drop him could have been put down to the passing years but it was not so much Swift’s age, more his style that was cracking on. The selectors were an aged crew themselves, a panel of half a dozen or so club directors or other luminaries from the football establishment. There was a picture of one of them, Arthur Drewry, in my encyclopaedia. He had the brushed-back grey hair, nervous smile and starched collar look of a Neville Chamberlain. He and his colleagues sat in learned committees, their anxiously awaited, often haphazard and mysterious decisions worthy of a puff of smoke when finally revealed. But they did what they believed was for the good of the game and chose those whom they felt were the right type.

Before the war, Swift had never been considered ready for the England team, yet he was the national character for the moment. He had acknowledged that the pressures of life were enough to get anyone down but embodied the spirit of ‘get up and get on with it’. He, as much as any popular figure, symbolised the people ‘smiling through’. Swift waved and laughed to each member of the crowd. To those going off to Africa, Sicily, Normandy, or wherever, this said, ‘It’ll be all right, son’. They didn’t know it would, but it was the best they had. With luck, and the right distance between them and the explosion when it came, they might even survive to get their medals from the king.

For my father and the other soldiers in Florence, Swift was to arrive almost at the very moment of victory. In person, not just in spirit, he was going to be on hand to begin the celebrations with them. Swift’s team won 11–0, so no one would have seen him do much goalkeeping. But you could bet when the ball was up the other end, he’d have been turning to chat with the squaddies behind his goal. My dad said it took him several years to get over the disappointment of missing that game.

Still, Frank’s elevation to the England team meant he was on hand for the party back home. As the returning soldiers ejected Churchill from Downing Street, so they went to be entertained by Swift between the posts. As a keeper able to put on a show, there was no one more perfect for the occasion. Long after Swift retired, my father and anyone who spoke about him continued to do so in terms which raised him to the status of a giant and friendly god, who made you hardly able to believe your luck that he was on your side.

By the time I heard about Swift, revision of the record had been going on for a while. My encyclopaedia made what sounded like noises of approval, yet didn’t throw its compliments around. Swift was ‘massive’ and had ‘exceptional height and reach’, features which represented no great achievement on his part. Harry Hibbs, after all, had not enjoyed such natural advantages. Swift was also ‘likeable’. There had been nothing to say whether Hibbs, Hardy and Scott had been likeable – or even whether to be likeable was a good thing. They were no doubt the soul of decency as people but their virtue as keepers was in their hardly being noticed. With Frank there was little chance of that and here lay the problem. ‘Swift might have been the greatest goalkeeper of all time,’ intoned the encyclopaedia, ‘but for a tendency to showmanship.’

He had been great for the fleeting post-war moment of celebration but deemed inappropriate for the dour times which set in. People were expected to get back to where they’d been. Women from the Naafi or the Land Army – like my mum’s sister, Olive, who’d driven a tractor, worked with the Italian prisoners in Sandy, and even had an Italian boyfriend – were wanted back in the home. Men were required in the jobs that would reconstruct the nation. Men and women were wanted back in stable relationships; Brief Encounter urged them to forget their Little flings. Everyone had to knuckle down to austerity. With a large part of the harvest being sent to Germany, there was bread rationing, something that hadn’t happened throughout the war.

Abroad it was all going haywire. India demanded and gained independence. This was serious, although in the popular mind explained by the usual muddle-mindedness of foreigners – the half-naked fakirs in loin-cloths’ that Churchill referred to. Really threatening was that the Russians had the Bomb. When Moscow Dynamo had come to tour Britain a few months after the war it was amid great public excitement. They met Rangen in Glasgow, with demand to see them so high that tickets priced at three and sixpence were touted for as much as £1 outside the ground; 90,000 people crowded into Ibrox for the 2–2 draw. But the Russians’ tour had transmitted early signals of suspicion. They said there weren’t enough flags, flowers and music to greet them. In London they wouldn’t sleep in the guards’ barracks they were given saying the beds were too hard. (How soft had the feather mattresses been during the siege of Leningrad?) They decamped to the Soviet embassy. Churchill spoke of the Iron Curtain descending from the Baltic to ‘Trieste on the Adriatic’. Churchill made his speech in the USA, among friends; his mother was American. But the USA wasn’t on our side over the empire, not least when Palestine broke up and Israel emerged. They wanted us out, for the ‘freedom’ of others, and to slip in themselves. We were being pushed back again. These weren’t Swiftian times to be bouncing around gleefully off your line.

When Swift was dropped from the England team, his response was, in character, more dramatic than it strictly needed to be. A little more than a year after his greatest international game, he retired. Manchester City could not believe he was giving up and kept him registered for another five years to ensure he didn’t play for another team. But he sought more security than was possible in football. A giant of a keeper, he went off to be a sales rep, for Smallman’s the Manchester confectioners.

He, at least, had relished his international career. His old rival, Sam Bartram, did not win the honour. The general view was that he was kept out of the England team by Swift’s brilliance. Then, when Frank was being lined up for replacement, it was easy to pass over Sam as too old. But short of his one appearance for England Possibles, he had not been in with much of a chance. Near deified by the fortnightly 60,000 or so who turned up to enjoy his performances at the Valley, Bartram never overcame the objections of those who watched in judgement. He was condemned by them as too sensational and for playing to the gallery. His bravery in the way he threw himself at forwards’ feet – normally a commendable feature of a keeper’s game – earned him the criticism of being a ‘danger to football’.

I heard my dad talking with his brother Reg about Bartram by the coal fire in the waiting room on Sandy station. My uncle was seeing us off after one of our monthly weekend visits – dismal night, the late Sunday train, with a probable change at Hitchin or Three Counties. Bartram was good for times like this. My uncle recalled a game against Birmingham City near the end of his career when he had left his goal to take a penalty. He ran non-stop from his own area to hit the ball, which struck the crossbar with such force that he had to chase hilariously back again after it. Sam was a great laugh like that, the shame being the selectors couldn’t see the joke.

In Swift and Bartram the selectors may have noticed something like the unruly ghost of ‘Fatty’ Foulke looming from the grave. Swift they had gone along with as an exception to the desirable rule. To have sanctioned a second showman would have risked established tradition. Protective of the nation’s sterner values, Bartram was where they drew the line. He had to get by with the unofficial title of ‘England’s greatest uncapped keeper’. He played till 1956, by when he was forty-two. At the Valley they named a set of gates after him. Seeking a living, like Swift, out of the English love of humbug and sherbet lemons, he ran a sweet shop and tried football management, without huge success.

I got his autograph on the platform forecourt of St Pancras station on a Saturday morning when he was manager of Luton Town. Had Luton been a big, as opposed to Fourth Division, club, this wouldn’t have been possible. The station would have been alive with big kids who pursued the signatures of the stars and gave any younger kids present a hard time. Bartram was tall, with a big face, wrinkled forehead and wave of sandy hair. He signed my book in front of the cafeteria, as his team grabbed cheese rolls and cups of tea before taking a train somewhere north for their afternoon game. I was aware that here was the man who had been Frank Swift’s chief rival, England’s greatest uncapped keeper. Not so long ago, that had made him one of the finest in the world, and I was surprised more people in the St Pancras steam and grime didn’t give some sign that they recognised him. He was the type who’d have happily called and waved back.

Chapter 3

In Swift’s Succession

The Swift succession played to an unprecedented audience. More than 41 million fans attended the stadiums of the nation in the 1948/9 season. Most of them were prepared to stand on exposed and crumbling terraces for the sake of an afternoon’s entertainment and they established a record that would never be beaten. With so many potentially critical eyes on them, the England selectors replaced Frank Swift by stages. In discreet British fashion, they dropped a hint here and there to prepare the crowd.

Putting Ted Ditchbum of Tottenham Hotspur between the England posts represented a return to reality. He was in Swift’s commanding physical mould at just under 6 feet 2 inches, but his style was different. Ditchburn, fearless and agile, generally did not embellish things. He was solid, consistent and, as such, more within the tradition.

A year and a bit younger than my father, he was of the generation that came to maturity in the war and had to become serious while still very young. There was no time for any of the old inter-war mood of trying to put the bad times behind you – they were on you before you knew it. Ditchburn came from Gillingham near the naval dockyards of the Medway and had volunteered for the Royal Air Force at the start of the war when he was eighteen. Younger keepers gave a new edge to the question of fitness. It was not something you had for the sake of your game or personal pride, but a matter of national necessity. Physical Training became such a high priority that it crossed the frontiers of fanaticism as PT boys were rolled off the wartime production line. Ted Ditchbum was the first of them to occupy the England goal.

Off the field at Spurs he was the players’ representative, at a time when there was talk of a strike for wages higher than the going rate of about £10. The club board threatened to put amateurs in the team. But Ditchbum was not one for ill-discipline or unchannelled aggression. He had a talent for boxing. It went with being a PT boy. If you were expert on ropes and wall bars, likely as not you could handle yourself with your fists. When done properly, it was a fine individualist art – its rules had been laid down by the gentry – which stood you in good stead against the instincts of the mob. It had for my dad when cornered by a bunch of yobs by the Roman arena in Verona. They were yelling the usual stuff about ‘British troops go home’ and edging in. So he put up an orthodox guard, left paw well forward ready to jab the first to make a move, and shouted back in Italian that they should keep coming. Good-in-a-crowd types, they backed off. Ted Ditchbum could have been a boxer, like his father had been, but he chose football and played his first game for Spurs in 1941.

Ditchbum’s military record contained an important element of sacrifice. On the verge of regular international selection, he’d been sent to India in 1944 when the call came for a dozen PTIs – physical training instructors, or so it was thought. He arrived to find the need was for Parachute Training Instructors. Once there he had to stay for two years, thus giving up the opportunity of individual honour and playing for his country for the relatively mundane duties which went with serving it. He returned to find someone else had his place in the team, but didn’t sulk and went out and played well week after week for his club. Ditchbum was made of the right material.

Fog in north Islington meant his international debut against Switzerland at Highbury had to be postponed for a day. A 6–0 victory was duly recorded the following afternoon. My dad’s youngest brother, Bim, who was eighteen and came down from Sandy by train for all the internationals, said all the action was around the Swiss keeper’s goalmouth. While the fans were fired by the moment, Ted Ditchburn had nothing to do.

It was logical to give him another run out in the side, a proper opportunity to show his international worth. For the time being, however, the selectors didn’t feel they had another one available. The function of matches like that against the Swiss was to help plug the gaps between the truly important international games. These were the home championship contests, between ourselves, the British, playing our game. Scotland were the chief opponents, but Wales and Ireland could never be taken for granted. Their players, with few exceptions, played in the English league, the ‘finest in the world’. Foreign international teams were brought over for the delectation of the masses, the fun part of a bread and circuses exercise. With the basics of daily sustenance now in such short supply, their role was all the more significant. Like Christians in the Colosseum, they provided a chance for the lions, without excessive exertion, to keep themselves in trim. No team from abroad had managed so much as a draw against England on home soil.

In the last ten games between England and Scotland either side of the war, each had won four, with two drawn. Swift was chosen, the selectors still not ready to forsake his experience and make his execution too blatant. That was largely taken care of in the match itself by the Scots keeper, Jimmy Cowan, of Greenock Morton. Few people in England had heard of him but, at Wembley and with a performance that was the highlight of his career, Scotland won 3–1. Swift, by comparison, looked jaded. He was at fault with one of the goals and injured a rib when one of the Scots forwards had the temerity to shoulder-charge him. The selectors felt more justified in replacing him.

On the 1949 post-season tour of Scandinavia, they chose Ditchburn for the reasonably stiff task of facing Sweden in Stockholm. Sweden were remembered as gold medallists at the London Olympics the year before. Nevertheless, most of them were still mainly amateurs. From undiscovered centres of footballing excellence like Norr- and Jönköping, Swedish players likely passed the their days as steambath masseurs and cross-country ski instructors. In four previous internationals they had not got within two goals of England.

Captain Billy Wright made the first mistake when, having won the toss, he elected to play into the setting sun. It dipped slowly below the Swedes’ crossbar for much of the first half and into Ditchbum’s eyes at the other end. On the high ball particularly he did not ooze confidence. Worse, as England lost 3–1, he was held to have abused that placed in him by the selectors. He had been invited into their high-risk strategy of toying with the public mood as they displaced Swift. Now they’d been embarrassed. Swift was brought back against Norway, for an easy final international of his career. Ditchbum the selectors sniffly dropped from the reckoning.

They knew they’d find support among the fans. Ditchbum’s popularity on his home ground at White Hart Lane was unconditional but Swift’s enormous national following would have had its fair number of sceptics whoever was replacing him. My dad’s first reaction to mention of the Spurs’ keeper’s name was to scoff. If pressed, he would concede that Ditchbum was a ‘good keeper’, but given my understanding that British keepers were habitually brilliant, it followed that all of them were at least ‘good’. To say so was hardly a compliment.

Spurs were top of the Second Division and the most exciting London team of the season. As well as Ditchbum, they had full-back Alf Ramsey and inside-forward Eddie Baily, both pushing for places in the national side. Ron Burgess was captain of Spurs and Wales and the year before had played left-half for Britain in their 6–1 win against the Rest of Europe. They pulled crowds of more than 50,000 to White Hart Lane fifteen times during the season. The attendance for the visit of Queens Park Rangers was 69,718. Your arms were pinned to your side, my dad said. Lift them to applaud or wave around and you wouldn’t have got them down again.

The game in October was another one-sided contest in which Ditchbum had very little to do. On one occasion when he did – out of character and bored out of his mind – he jumped a little extravagantly at a shot which needed only a simple catch, and spilled the ball. Under no pressure, he retrieved it hobbling in his 6-yard area. He even put on a bit of a smile to the packed terraces. This worked well enough for the Tottenham faithful but my dad was near apoplectic. In his view, the Spurs’ keeper was not only an unworthy pretender to Swift’s national selection, but also a poor imitator of his style. ‘He should have stuck to goalkeeping, not clowning around,’ he said. ‘He could never do it like Frank could.’

Spurs won but their constant attacks managed only a single goal – a lucky bounce off Baily’s shin. QPR’s keeper, Reg Allen, otherwise stopped everything: ‘The finest display of goalkeeping seen by any man,’ said my dad, adding that it finally got him over missing Swift in Florence three years earlier. Allen, a former commando, had spent four years in a harsh German prison camp, which later caused him bouts of heavy depression. He left the field at the end of the ninety minutes, to an enormous ovation from the crowd, with head bowed and an embarrassed, barely detectable smile. Manchester United bought him soon after for £10,000. the first five-figure fee paid for a keeper (inexplicably, centre-forwards were going for three times the price).

One of Allen’s best moments in the match caused the crowd to surge forward for a better view. A steel barrier buckled and spectators fell in front of my father in a heap. If any more had gone down there’d have been injuries and quite possibly a disaster. But thanks to a bit of luck, and several years of army PT, he stayed on his feet. When he got back home, I’d been crying most of the afternoon and my mum had been left holding a three-month-old baby for the sake of a game of football. It was a natural enough moment to leave off watching it for a while.

After England’s defeat in Sweden the selectors went for Bert Williams of Wolverhampton Wanderers. He had played in one wartime international while still on the books of Walsall, a Midlands club of limited ability and such uncertain geography that in the 1930s it bounced between the Third Divisions South and North. Walsall’s greatest moment had distracted focus from Hitler’s ascent to power. In the winter of early 1933, and within the shadow of the laundry chimney at the side of their ground, they’d taken Arsenal to the cleaners, 2–0, in the Cup. The two seasons before the war, as Williams was finding his feet in the team, Walsall had been on more familiar form and at risk of dropping out of the football league altogether.

Walsall’s manager in the late 1940s was none other than Harry Hibbs. If old Harry saw something in Williams, the selectors reckoned they might, too. In his wartime international against France in 1945, he’d made a mistake in the first couple of minutes and the French had scored. But he had retained his nerve, recovered from the setback and played well in the rest of the game. Stan Cullis, returning from his role as a wartime entertainer of the troops to become manager of Wolves, bought him for £3,500 and Williams was elevated to football’s top flight, the English First Division.

Blond-haired and of the same age and frame, Williams looked like my father in his army photo wearing uniform and shorts in Algiers in 1943. At the age of fifteen Williams had been only 5 feet 2 inches tall and built himself up with exercises, which included dangling by his arms from door frames. He grew 8 inches in two years. He was another PT boy, a former instructor at the same RAF camp as Ted Ditchbum. A high-class sprinter, he could speed off his goalline for crosses, or to get down at the feet of onrushing forwards. His saves were often dramatic; he covered huge distances with his dives. These midair gyrotechnics were certain to raise the spirits of a crowd, and have a similar effect on the eyebrows of the selectors. But if he wasn’t their automatic choice, he had an undeniable quality. There was no doubting his seriousness.

Williams was shy and quietly spoken. In no picture I saw of him was he smiling, but since he looked like my dad I imagined he did. From Staffordshire, he lived several miles from the Wolves ground, a distance he would walk each training and match day on his toes and the balls of his feet. His reckoned that to rest back on your heels left you ill-prepared for sudden attack. He had a tortured look and masochistic edge. His training programme comprised a tireless stream of handstands and somersaults into mud. He’d round things off with a full-length dive on concrete.

Williams was the ideal compromise for the England goalkeeper’s job. He had enough of what, from their varying perspectives, the selectors and fans wanted. The sharp shift from Swift to Ditchbum – triumph to reality – had been too much. Williams borrowed from both styles and was perfect for the transitional times. He mixed drama with dour necessity. He was the first keeper I heard my dad describe as ‘spectacular but safe’.

The turn of phrase aptly described the country’s view of itself. It was obvious to anyone with a brain that by standing alone from the fall of France to Pearl Harbor we’d saved the world but, as obviously, that Britain was no longer the dominant player. As the Russians and Americans carved up the world between them, it wasn’t certain how we fitted in. But we could still lead by principled example and were still able to show the world ‘a thing or two’, even give the enemy ‘a bloody nose’. Alert on our feet, we could get out there, sharply off our line if necessary, to save this new world from the dangers it was creating.

Bert Williams played his first full international as the Soviet Union was being persuaded to lift its siege of Berlin. For nearly a year the US air force and the new England keeper’s own RAF had airlifted in water and other basic supplies in defiance of the Soviet blockade of the west of the old German capital. The Soviets had tried to strangle the place. In taking them on, we dared them to shoot us down. They didn’t have the nerve, and we held ours. This was what we were like. We did the spectacular when we had to, to keep the world safe.

At the same time, the Amethyst, a British boat sailing up the Yangtze river in China, was fired upon and besieged for weeks by communist troops. Why it was calmly steaming through a country in midst of revolution was unclear; it was also beside the point, as the Royal Navy made repeated attempts to rescue it. Finally, it just slipped away and, under cover of darkness, got back to safety, brilliantly, as you’d expect and to rapturous cheers at home. The enemy were ‘caught napping’, resting back on their heels. Like Bert Williams, we wouldn’t have been. We were the types prepared to dive on concrete – piece o’ cake these Chinese.

Just a few days after the flop against the Swedes, Williams was drafted into the team for the season’s last international. Three weeks earlier he had played in Wolves’ FA Cup Final success against Leicester City. A nerveless performance in the 3–1 victory over France in Paris secured his place in the England team. It also tidily completed the otherwise messy process of the Swift succession.