The Goalkeeper’s History of Britain

The new era got off to a shaky start, however, early the following season. As with Williams’s old club Walsall, the uncertainty owed something to geography. In September 1949 the Republic of Ireland came to play an international at Goodison Park, which posed the question ‘Who are they?’ England played Ireland every year but that was the north of the island. This team were more rarely taken on and went under the title ‘Eire’. Few people knew how to pronounce it: was it ‘Air’, or ‘Air-rer’? As it turned out, it rhymed with Eamon de Valera. Even few Irish people used the term, preferring simply ‘the Republic’.

Still it was convenient in a way because it emphasised to us the foreignness of the place. For reasons best known to themselves, they had gone their own way and wanted to be different. In the war, for example, they stayed neutral even though Irish regiments fought with the British army. De Valera refused to give Churchill guarantees, my mum would recall, that German U-boats wouldn’t be allowed to use Cork harbour. You never really knew where you were with them. They weren’t people who stuck to clear-cut lines; the edges were always slightly blurred.

Some of their players had played for both ‘Ireland’ and ‘Eire’. Johnny Carey, their captain, was a case in point. In the Protestant north of the island, football was played on Saturday, Sundays kept sombrely free. In the south they went about things in the chaotic-but-fun, Catholic-continental way of lumping church and football all into the Lord’s day. Some Irish footballers had played for both the island’s national teams in the same weekend.

Not that Eire’s team was cracked up to be much. Most of them played in British league teams but back at home football came a poor third in popularity after Gaelic football and hurling. Their 1949 team was a suitably makeshift outfit. It had three goalkeepers. Tommy Godwin of Shamrock Rovers was to play between the posts on this occasion, but Con Martin upfront had also won international honours in goal, and Carey had played a league match for Manchester United when the regular keeper had cried off late before the game.

The fact that they won the match, therefore, was cause enough for English disillusion. But it went further than seeking reasons and scapegoats for the 2–0 scoreline. If this Ireland was the alien ‘Eire’, then England had lost their proud record of never having succumbed at home to a foreign side. Hadn’t they?

The problem was deftly solved in a Celtic rather than Anglo-Saxon way. The edges were blurred and the lines made less clear-cut. Sure, weren’t we all a bit Irish anyway? In my family there had been Great-great Granny Smith, with her one eye and caravan in Sandy around the turn of the century. But, fundamentally, it was noted that nine of the winning team played in the English or Scottish leagues, including both the goalscorers: Martin of Aston Villa and Peter Farrell of Everton. At Goodison Park Farrell was on his ‘home’ pitch. Keeper Godwin was an exception, but he soon won a transfer to Bournemouth in the Third Division South, and you could hardly get more English than that. No, whatever they were – and forget the signs in landlords’ windows saying ‘No dogs, Blacks or Irish’ – they were not foreign. After a nasty scare, England, it was decided, had kept their home record intact.

Two months later against Italy at White Hart Lane, there were no ambiguities about the opposition’s national status, but many nasty scares. In front of a 70,000 crowd – Ditchbum, ruefully, among them – it was Bert Williams’s finest game. Despite the cold, misty afternoon, the Italians tiptoed through the England defence and pounded his goal. The spectators watched in amazement, the Italian players with their heads in their hands, as Williams saw them off. One shot he diverted with his legs, while diving in the opposite direction. England managed a couple of effective breakaways near the end to win 2–0, but Williams took the credit. Italian newspapers nicknamed him ‘II Gattone’, ‘the cat’ (to be exact, ‘the big cat’, such had been his presence).

The performance placed Williams second only to Swift in the ratings of post-war English, and arguably British, goalkeepers for much of the next two decades. But in a key sense, it was almost immediately forgotten. Although Italy had made England look inept for most of the game, the final score encouraged the thought that we were ready to advance off our lines, at least with a quick dash to take on the newly emerging threats caused by upstarts, the lot of them, who needed to be put in their place.

Before the World Cup arranged for Brazil in 1950, the tournament had been staged twice in the 1930s, then war intervened. British teams had shunned it; as a notion dreamed up by a Frenchman, Jules Rimet, it was a bit of a cheek. Foreigners had created a competition which presumed to anoint the champions of ‘our game’. Sensible analysts knew who the world’s champions were. They were the annual winners of Britain’s home international championship, the toughest international competition in the world.

The World Cup illustrated just how like foreigners it was to go organising fancy events with fancy titles. They always had to show off. When you played them, before kick-off they presented things like elaborately tasselled pennants. Even when Moscow Dynamo came in 1945, they had taken the field with great bouquets of flowers for each of their opponents. The British players looked lost, the crowd laughed. What was the point? All insincere gestures and flashing smiles (well, in this case, maybe not the Russians), foreign teams tried to wheedle their way into your affections, then turned on you and got nasty once the game started. They were people who weren’t what they appeared to be. Play them on their grounds and, like as not, they’d fix not only the match ball, but also the referee.

England went to Brazil in keeping with the new spirit of international cooperation and comradeship. Having fought with, or against, each other we had to live together, rather than, as after the First World War, retiring to our respective corners, in effect to prepare for the next conflict. Something else had also begun to gnaw away at us. There was no need to announce it to everyone, but perhaps we had something to prove. The World Cup was creating an alternative pole of development which others might come to regard (wrong though they would be) as the true yardstick of greatness. We wouldn’t have been wrong to stay away, but would not have wished our actions to be misinterpreted as shirking a challenge.

When England turned up in Rio de Janeiro in June 1950 they were greeted as the ‘kings of football’. The arrival of the inventors of the game was an endorsement of the competition. The England party regarded it less seriously. Most arrived ten days before the competition’s start, allowing little time for the players to acclimatise. Their first game was to be with Chile in the coastal humidity of Rio, the next against the United States in the rarefied mountain air of Belo Horizonte. Four players, leading lights like Stanley Matthews among them, came via a post-season tour of Canada and arrived just three days before the opening match.

Conditions confirmed the party’s suspicions of what living abroad must be like. From a country blessed with the Broadstairs and Blackpool B&B, the players were scathing of their hotel on Rio’s Copacabana beachfront. Egg and bacon breakfasts were obtainable, but served in black oil, not wholesome melted lard. Players survived on bananas, risky in itself. When the first bananas, not seen since the 1930s, arrived in Britain after the war, there had been reports that a young girl of three had overdosed and died eating four of them. Alf Ramsey was the first to go down with a bad stomach, a bilious episode that was to colour Anglo-Latin American relations on and off for the next thirty or forty years. English pressmen on the trip also warned against whom, not just what, you could trust. The players were urged not to give autographs. Some Brazilians had, only to find they’d signed subversive ‘communist’ petitions.

The first game before a thin crowd of 40,000 at the Maracanã stadium (capacity 110,000) saw England players suffer from the surprisingly thick air. They gulped from a cylinder of oxygen at half-time. Surprisingly, in a foreign land, rain then fell to make conditions a little more familiar and a 2–0 win was scratched out of a patchy performance. The manager, Walter Winterbottom, and captain, Billy Wright, thought there should be changes for the second game against the USA, but the decision was in the hands of the one selector on the trip, the Neville Chamberlain look-alike Arthur Drewry. He chose to change nothing. The USA was a small footballing nation about which we knew and cared little. Thus, he waved his sheet of paper with the England line-up before an expectant world. There were to be no changes; a case of peace in our team.

Other factors were also blamed for England’s subsequent performance. The stadium at Belo Horizonte had been built for the World Cup but was a rickety structure. With a capacity of only 20,000, it summed up the players’ feelings that this was not a serious competition. The surface, recently laid, was a scrubby desert of tufts of tall grass, interspersed with bare earth. Any of the 111 pitches just created from the east London rubbish dump at Hackney Marshes-with so many posts and crossbars it had caused a national shortage of white paint – might have been better.

Neither could the USA be regarded as serious combatants. One of their better players was a Scot named McIlveney, who’d played in Wales but, after seven games for Wrexham in the Third Division North, had been given a free transfer and emigrated. Keeper Borghi’s first sporting love was baseball. The centre-forward Joe Gaetjens was from Haiti, a place few had heard of except in lurid discussions about voodoo. Several of the US team took the field in a zombified state. Imagining they would have little to celebrate after the match, they’d stayed up to party through the night before.

Surreal forces, whether brought to bear by Haitian Gaetjens or not, played no minor part. When England’s forwards prepared to shoot, the ball stood up on the long tufts of grass, to be scooped, with uncanny regularity, high over Borghi’s bar. No one was quite certain what magic fashioned the USA’s winning goal. Bert Williams appeared to have a shot from the left covered but Gaetjens somehow got to it with the faintest of headed deflections. People wondered, had he touched it at all?

The British press hit upon the analogy of the defeat at Gallipoli in the First World War to convey how England had been routed in distant parts. When a loss to Spain meant ejection from the tournament, Dunkirk was the obvious parallel. Britain’s first expeditionary force to a World Cup rapidly evacuated hostile territory, the instinct of the England team, officials and the press to get away as quickly as possible, back to the safety of home. They didn’t stay to study the form of those who remained in the competition and missed the eventual final between Brazil and Uruguay. The view was that there was nothing to be learned from places where the conditions for football were never right, nor from the teams which played there. If they weren’t out-and-out cheats (the Football Association toyed for a while with the idea of protesting that the US team had contained ineligible non-Americans), then they were as good as. An official report darkly pointed to how the Brazilians had cancelled all league matches for months before the competition. The Uruguayans had been together for no less than two years. This was typical of such people. They got together in darkened rooms to concoct their plans. If that won them games, well, it showed what a state the world was in. Doubtless in the estimation of Monsieur Rimet, Uruguay’s victory in the final was magnifique, but it wasn’t football.

What did the World Cup mean, anyway? ‘Even if we’d have won it,’ said Stanley Matthews, ‘the public would have said it was “just another cup”.’ What had happened was in a remote part of the globe. Unlikely defeats had happened before in those sorts of places, where climatic and other quirks allowed Johnny Foreigner his occasional day. Losing to the USA at football was as humiliating as Gordon going down to the ‘mad Mahdi’ and his whirling dervishes at Khartoum. That had been in the desert. The pitch at Belo Horizonte was much the same and the Americans had played like a team possessed. But it was also distantly forgettable. It wouldn’t happen at home. England turned back on itself from its failed beachhead in Brazil, bruised and ready to draw its line in the sand.

The assault began almost immediately, in the irregular shape of Marshall Tito’s ‘partizans’, with Yugoslavia’s visit in the late autumn. Yugo-, or Jugoslavia as it was often written, had beaten England 2–1 in Belgrade before the war, one of their players rugby-tackling an England forward in the penalty area to prevent an equaliser. The war had confirmed Tito and his mountain men as a belligerent bunch. The British soldiers called them the ‘Jugs’, which rhymed with ‘mugs’ and sounded funny. But the Jugs were definitely no mugs. When the British forces were based there during the stand-off over Trieste, anyone tempted to go looking for wine and women in the hills behind Gorizia was in serious danger of never coming back. Partizans came down into Trieste, marched off groups of Italians and shot them. A stealthy band paddled across from their Slovenian haven to my dad’s camp around the bay one night and removed and made off with the tyres of seventeen jeeps. Now the Yugoslavs came from the depths of Serbia and Montenegro to the dim hinterland of Hornsey Road to snatch a 2–2 result at Highbury. Thus, Islington, and a site but a mile up Upper Street, and through Highbury Fields from our street, took its place in history: it saw the first draw by a foreign team on English soil.

Just under a year later the venue and the score were the same, only this time the French were the opposition. It was more perplexing. France had regularly played against England since 1923 but usually in Paris when the English selectors felt like a jaunt across the Channel. Taken with the game against Yugoslavia, it suggested a pattern was developing. Foreign teams need no longer be fodder for the cannons of the England forward line. The two drawn games also meant England were only one slip or stroke of ill-luck away from losing their home record. Control of events was ominously slipping out of our hands.

This was clear in the war in Korea, where the Americans and Russians were dictating events. In addition to 40,000 British troops, the Labour government under Clement Attleee sent along twenty-five warships, but they were under American command. Thanks to my dad’s extra year facing the partizans, he was spared the call-up. His younger brother, Bim, was bound for Korea, till at the last moment India was persuaded to join in by sending some medics. My uncle’s ambulance division went to sweat it out in Hong Kong. The Chinese were a range of hills or so away from his base at Sek-kong and assumed to be ready, on an order from Moscow, to sweep down in their millions. Many soldiers had to be treated for depression and some committed suicide. All you could do was wait. The tension, he said, was awful.

I came downstairs and heard a report on the wireless one morning that British troops in Korea had been attacked on somewhere called the Imjin river. This sounded like my dad’s name, Jim, and a funny thing to call a river. They’d fought off the attack, which was to be expected. But what was alarming was that the assault had been carried out, the broadcaster said, by ‘communist gorillas’. My parents were at work, so I asked my grandparents what this meant and picked up the impression that communists got up to all sorts of tricks. Thereafter, gorillas kept cropping up everywhere.

In Malaya they killed someone called the British High Commissioner. In Kenya, they’d been stealing from white people’s houses in Nairobi. Here they’d formed an armed band with the frightening sounding name of ‘Mau Mau’. It was said they got together in the jungle in secret to ‘swear oaths’. This wouldn’t have done round our way. With the exception of people much further down the street, you didn’t go around swearing oaths. Why were they like this? It was said they wanted the white man out of Africa, yet it was we who did things honestly and openly, wasn’t it? The British police and army, for example, were doing their straightforward best to deal with them. The gorillas, on the other hand, in Asia, Africa or wherever, did things in an unreasonable and underhand way. Reports of their activities suggested that now everything was against us, even the animal kingdom.

Soon after the France match, Bert Williams suffered a shoulder injury which threatened to end his career. Given the gravity of the global situation, there could have been few worse times for it.

Chapter 4

End of Empire

For a small village, Great Marfold had a good team and could call on players from a much wider area. The uncle married to my dad’s oldest sister, Laura, played centre-forward. She went to watch when they’d advanced to the late stages of one of the Bedfordshire cups. It was a Saturday afternoon game, quite sunny, at the Victoria Works ground in Bedford. Their keeper, Bill Farrell, was twenty-one and due for a trial at Luton Town the following Monday.

In the style of the day, their opponents had a hard centre-forward, a curly-haired fellow called Red Venner. ‘Dirtiest man ever walked on a football field,’ said my aunt. ‘I heard him shout out during the game, “Get that big bugger!”, pointing at Bill.’ When a cross came over, Farrell took it arms outstretched, body taut. Venner came in, studs raised, and caught him hard in the chest and stomach. ‘Well, you said you’d get him,’ my aunt shouted at him, as they carried the keeper off. My uncle took over in goal.

In the dressing room they gave Farrell a cup of hot sweet tea. When they took him to hospital and he was waiting to be seen, he kept doubling over to ease the pain. The proper sister wasn’t on that evening. Something had perforated in his stomach and he died next afternoon. ‘The day his banns were called,’ said my aunt. ‘And he’d have got in the Luton team easily.’ Venner’s son was apprenticed to my uncle as a toolmaker. He said his father had hung up his boots, would never play again, and didn’t sleep for a month after the incident.

Bert Williams had been injured before. It may have had something to do with the way he played, taut and, like a compressed spring, waiting to bounce. But there were always good stand-ins available. We had the greatest goalkeepers in the world and any one of them could be drafted in to do a perfectly adequate job by our standards. By anyone else’s, it would be superb.

Bernard Streten, Luton’s veteran keeper and favourite of my Bedfordshire uncles, had deputised for Williams once in 1949. He came in, did all that was required in a match in which he had very little to do, and never played for England again. His only international cap was a reward for long-standing service to the cause, bestowed by the selectors in the spirit of ‘they also serve who stand and wait’.

The same sentiment guided them as they brought in Gil Merrick of Birmingham City now late in 1951. Williams wasn’t expected to be gone long. Though two years younger, Merrick was already thirty. He’d been overlooked as a contender in the Swift succession. At that time Birmingham had been promoted from the Second Division to the First, thanks to his conceding only twenty goals in forty matches. But next season his team’s form was so bad that two of their players started arguing on the field on a visit to Highbury, and almost came to blows. Team captain Merrick ran upfield and told them to ‘turn it in’. A selector was in the stands and concluded that a keeper had no business out there getting involved. An army man in the war, Merrick soldiered on as his team was dispatched back to the lower division. Eventually he was deemed worthy of reward and proved a decent stop-gap for Williams.

For the spring-to-autumn months up to Merrick’s selection, Clement Attlee’s Labour government had tried to lift the nation’s spirits with a celebration of its new British way. The Festival of Britain was held down by the Thames on bombed wasteground by Waterloo Bridge. There was a steam train, and big iron wheels standing there for people to look at. My parents said there would be a firework display and some kind of dome. They took me along and told me it was good. The festival made no impression on me, other than the strangeness of its slogan: ‘Tonic for the Nation’.

A tonic was something my grandparents had when they were ill. They’d get it from Dr Dadachanji’s surgery at the end of Colebrooke Row, opposite the gardens, the last house before Goswell Road. His waiting room in the front parlour was cold and dim, with a few wooden chairs, and his surgery was at the back. Dr Dadachanji was small and quiet and, to me, mysterious. He probably was to everybody. I’d gone to see him when my nose bled badly and people didn’t know what to tell me but to put my head back. The blood ran down my throat and came back later in livery globs. Dr Dadachanji sent me to the children’s hospital in Hackney Road, where they plugged my nose with cotton wool soaked in snake venom. Mysteriously, it worked.

Millions were spent on the festival and millions came. It was pronounced a great success. An uplifted people should have gone to the polls in the general election the month after the festival closed and swept Attlee back into power. He was running against Winston Churchill, who had lost in the 1945 election because he was considered yesterday’s man. Many people, however, had picked up the idea that the nation was a bit poorly. A large part of the electorate did certainly vote Labour, even though many of them were in places much too far from London to have gone to the festival. They were in the big industrial constituencies, with enormous Labour majorities, but they only counted for one seat. Many in the lesser populated areas – strangely, a lot of them nearer London, so they may have visited the festival – voted Conservative. Labour got more votes, the Conservatives more constituencies, and Churchill returned to office.

I’d never realised he’d been away. With his solemn presence in the wings – his pronouncements on the ‘noble cause’ of the Korean War, and the like – he’d been awaiting his call, available when the country took stock of the seriousness of the situation. Enough people felt it was not the time for ‘tonics’ but for harder stuff to raise the spirit. A few more finest hours, that’s what was needed. Churchill came back with memories stirred of resolute wartime leadership and the glories of unflappable defence. Gil Merrick made his international debut three weeks later.

The selectors found the man they’d been looking for. They could have invented him. Merrick was from Birmingham City, the club of Harry Hibbs himself. Where Harry had been safe rather than spectacular, and Williams had modified the goalkeeping standard to spectacular but safe, so under Merrick it took a step back into history; he was referred to as ‘never unnecessarily spectacular’.

Merrick was in the image of Birmingham itself, capital of the English Midlands, the industrial heartland. It was just up the road from Coventry. Birmingham people didn’t say much, not that we’d have understood them when they did, but were quietly engaged in the job of rebuilding. They made hammers and drills, anchors and chains, gear boxes and other bits for cars, which was all pretty dull, really, but they ‘got on with it’. Gil Merrick played with the sleeves of his jersey neatly rolled to the elbow.

He was the model of post-war man. With a dark, neatly trimmed moustache, he looked like one of my scoutmasters and anyone’s gym teacher; apart from the rolled sleeves, it was his only hint of affectation. The programme my dad brought back from Wembley when he saw him in the Belgium game the following year said; ‘One of the few goalkeepers in the football league with a moustache.’ In the 1930s my mum used to write away to film stars in Hollywood and they’d send back autographs. To a generation brought up on Clark Gable, moustaches had an element of dash and made men ‘handsome’. Unfortunately, Hitler and, with his periodic returns to the country to save us, Sir Oswald Mosley had intervened and done nothing for them as far as I was concerned. But that wasn’t Gil Merrick’s fault.