The Goalkeeper’s History of Britain

The score was 4–1 by half-time. In the second half England dug into their reserves of resilience and scored twice. So did Hungary. A combination of their easing up – a lack of ‘superior stamina’, possibly – and a first-rate performance by Merrick, kept the score to 6–3.

At five o’clock, a little over an hour after the end of the game, my dad walked the couple of minutes to Gloucester Road tube from the Natural History Museum, where building works were going on around a new air-conditioning system to fan the dinosaur bones and drawers of dead beetles. The papers were on the streets, the placards and men at the newsstands screaming the match outcome. He had to walk up and down the pavement by Baileys Hotel with the Evening News for a while to take it all in. ‘We thought foreign teams were nothing,’ he said. ‘The big games, the ones you were frightened about, were with the Scots.’ He’d had the chance to see the match but hadn’t taken up the offer for the sake of a lost afternoon at work. He was glad he had. He didn’t want to face the journey home: ‘If I felt like this, I wondered how bad it was for those who were in the stadium?’

As for all internationals, his youngest brother, Bim, was there. In his early twenties he had no worries about missing a half-day’s pay and no regrets that he had. It was an incredible occasion, breathtaking – actually, the very opposite of that. It made you realise how long you’d been holding your breath and didn’t have to any more. You’d felt it coming for so long, that the waiting was the problem. The tension was off. The hordes had finally stormed down from the hills. ‘To those who had seen the shadows of recent years creeping closer and closer, there was perhaps no real surprise,’ said Green of The Times. England must ‘awake to a new future’.

For the Wembley crowd the true shock had been Hidegkuti’s goal in the opening minute. It was one of four in the afternoon hit with such power as to make the dusky continental ‘weak in front of goal’ ghost look more pallid than old Harry Johnston. The second following within a few minutes of Hidegkuti’s initial strike made the spectators realise this was to be no flash in the pan. By the third, they were fully disposed to savour what was served before them.

That goal came after a sharply hit diagonal pass from the wing found Puskas on the gallop a few yards out from the right edge of Merrick’s area. Severely left-footed, Puskas easily controlled the ball but, skidding to a halt, found himself with his back half turned towards the goal. He may have appeared off-balance to those near him. He rocked back on his right foot, as if he might even fall and let the ball go beyond reach in front of him. Billy Wright, driven to new heights of dynamism at having been caught out by Puskas’s move into a dangerous position, ran and threw himself at the ball in a sliding tackle. He aimed to sweep it out of play for a corner kick and on the damp turf his momentum carried him into the crouched row of photographers across the touchline. The problem was he didn’t have the ball with him.

Puskas was the ‘tubby brains’ of the Hungarian attack. In addition to his plastered-down, centre-parted hair, he was short and of square frame. In technically polite terms he had a low centre of gravity. He hadn’t been unbalanced at all, and placed the studs of his left boot on the ball to drag it back swiftly out of Wright’s path. In a continuation of the same movement, he pirouetted on his right foot, drew his leg back and hit an unstoppable shot. Merrick, knees buckling, hardly had time to lift his hand.

Billy Wright witnessed this as he detached himself from the sprawl of grey-coated cameramen and dislodged trilby hats. Stanley Matthews was off in the fog on the right-wing but four decades later could still clearly see Puskas’s goal in his mind’s eye. The Hungarian report observed how the crowd ‘applauded for a very long time’. What they’d seen had been so simple that anyone in British football would have been proud to have done it. The footwork was perfectly no-nonsense, and effective enough to dump the England captain on his backside. It was rounded off with an example of shooting to equal anything England’s own forwards could have provided. It was brilliant, might even have been very British, yet was a million miles beyond us.

Puskas’s ‘drag-back’ captured the imagination sufficiently to be given the name. In scarcely a second, it fused elements of the game – deftness and directness, skill and shooting power, the scurrilous tactical stuff of foreigners and the straightforward decency of home – thought unfusable. It was a moment of football creation and for England the moment of much wider defeat. We had to acknowledge we were beaten. What the crowd witnessed wasn’t some overseas reverse, explained by the quirky things that went on abroad and distant enough to be forgotten. It had happened here, on our turf and before our own eyes.

Allowing for a few thousand neutrals at the game, a bare minimum of Magyar émigrés and a scattering of communist diplomats, some, say, 95,000 people went back to the workplaces, pubs and working-men’s clubs of an England approaching full employment and spoke about it. According to the old marketing principle that everyone knew 250 people – or, even if the number were pared to a conservative 100 – it meant that somewhere between nearly a quarter and over half of the population of England heard of the moment from someone they knew who had been there. This was in addition to what they discovered through the papers and radio. TV had missed the moment; only the second half was broadcast, because the FA didn’t want people staying away from several afternoon replays between lower division and non-league clubs in the second round of the Cup. But all channels of communication reflected on this matter of wide national concern. Scots, Welsh and Irish joined in, in appreciation as much as glee.

Puskas’s achievement was of mythical proportions. My dad talked about it with his brother and many other people. When he told me about it, I understood it to have been performed by someone from somewhere called ‘Hungry’. This put it in the same funny-country category as ‘Turkey’ and ‘Grease’, though it turned out to be not some old gag but a stroke of magic. Puskas, I gathered, rolled the ball beneath his foot backwards and forwards several times. This had cast a kind of spell on the England defence, as if they were under the influence of an old Indian snake-charmer like Dr Dadachanji. They had swayed back and forth with it, till Puskas’s final dispatch of the ball snapped them out of their trance. I practised rolling an old tennis ball under my foot in the backyard and tried it on the other kids in the infants’ playground. Far from mesmerised, they shouted at me to get on with it. It occurred to me this might not be my skill; also, that foreigners could do very impressive things.

The Hungary defeat was not Merrick’s fault. He’d had to be necessarily spectacular to stop any number of Hungarian attacks. My encyclopaedia showed one, the England keeper springing left with rolled sleeves and black wool-gloved hand to push the ball around the post. A strand of dark brilliantined hair out of place confirmed the pressure he was under. Puskas said that if Merrick hadn’t played so well the score would have been 12.

By the time a quarter of that figure had been reached, the outcome was certain. We had been out-performed and the most implacable last line we could muster was unable to stop the foreign tide. As Puskas’s shot flashed by, Merrick’s raised hand clutched only a gloveful of November gloom. Half turning his head to watch the ball on its way into the net, his eyes were unmoved as ever, staring at the end of empire.

Chapter 5

Neck on the Block

We learned at school that the tree which best survived on the streets of London was the plane tree. For several years I assumed there was no other tree around, failing to register the chestnuts on the steep embankment of the canal and evidence from Sunday visits my mum organised to leafier places like Kensington and Hyde Park. The plane tree’s visible trick was to shed its bark regularly to shake off the effects of the London smog. But its secret lay in its name. It was the ‘good old’ plane tree, plain and straightforward as we were, a tree for the common man. It was strong and it survived.

Crossing Danbury Street on my way back home from school, about a week into 1954, it started to rain. The taps in the playground had been frozen, so I leaned my head back and for about twenty seconds drank from the sky. A few days later I was sent home from school early with a head like death. My stomach came out in sympathy. No one quite knew what it was as I was put in bed, but when my dad arrived back in the evening he recognised what was wrong from his time in Italy and Africa. He carried me to my grandad’s car and they took me to the children’s hospital in Hackney Road, which confirmed the problem as dysentery. I was kept in for three weeks and treated as if victim of a tropical disease.

My grandad generally had a ton of coal delivered just before winter started. The coalman, who wore a flat cap, trousers held up by braces and looked like he’d climbed out of the chimney, shot the 20 hundredweight sacks of the stuff down the coalhole in the pavement and into the basement area cellar. It shone in large, tar-laden chunks. After its dust was swept into the gutter, the stain in the paving stones remained for at least a day of rain. A month later the smog came down, from about the third week of November, and hung around on and off into February. You wore it as a badge of honour, a mark of living in the largest city in the world. The newspapers said that thousands of people with bronchitis and other illnesses died from it. When you put a handkerchief over your mouth, by the time you’d walked down the street and back, a wet, black mark had appeared. Many football matches would be abandoned, the ref finally giving up hope of an improvement some good way into the game. Every year there’d be one when, with the teams back in the dressing room, it would be realised a goalkeeper was missing. The trainer or a policeman would be sent out to find him, at the edge of his penalty area, peering into the smog, unaware everyone else had left the field. This happened to Ted Ditchbum, Sam Bartram and any number of them until the smog as an annual event finally disappeared.

Ours was the black ash variety, particles of the stuff floating before your eyes. The Americans came up with a new one. They carried out an H-bomb test on the Pacific island of Bikini. Japanese fishermen heard the explosion and saw the mushroom cloud rise from 80 miles away. An hour and a half later, it started to rain, or rather snow on them, a kind of white-ash smog – probably pieces of Bikini, as well as whatever else comprised such a phenomenon. Fortunately, the Americans were on our side (the Russians only had the A-bomb). My dad said the GIs he’d met abroad were as friendly as anyone you could come across. But despite the fact they spoke English, you couldn’t say they were exactly like us. Johnny Ray began a tour of Britain, smiled a lot and collapsed into tears at the end of his songs – nice, but funny people.

It was just as well that this time the USA were not among the teams in the summer’s World Cup finals. Neither England, nor Scotland (who turned up for the first time) needed the embarrassment. In an act of self-punishment that would have done Bert Williams proud, England chose to go for one of their warm-up games to meet the Hungarians, in the Nep, or People’s stadium in Budapest. A local reflecting on the occasion with British writer John Moynihan said he was amazed when England took the field: ‘We had always thought of them as gods. But they looked so old and jaded, and their kit was laughable. We felt sorry for you.’ That was before the kick-off. His sorrow had surely turned to Johnny Ray-like sobs by the final whistle. Hungary won 7–1.

In the World Cup in Switzerland, Merrick was blamed for three of the four goals Uruguay scored when eliminating England in the quarter-finals. Out of touch with home newspapers during the competition, he was surprised when a reporter asked him on his return whether he had any comment on having ‘let the country down’. He replied it was a ‘poor show’ if people had said that, that only the last Uruguay goal was his fault in a 4–2 defeat and that none of his teammates had blamed him.

Actually, Stanley Matthews – often cast as one of football’s ambassadors – commented that Merrick ‘disappointed’ us ‘when we were playing well and had a chance’. This in itself showed a new feeling towards the tournament. In Brazil four years earlier the players had given the impression they couldn’t have cared less. Suddenly they wanted to win. After the years of suspicion towards a ‘foreign’ trophy, it was at least a tentative advance from the line into territory mapped out by others.

There was obviously something to be learned from the wider world. As well as dispatching England, Uruguay scored seven against Scotland. The British teams’ performance helped start a debate about training methods. Merrick noted that before a match, teams like Hungary and Brazil did stretching exercises in the middle of the field. British teams tended to stand around stiffly, rubbing their hands from the cold and having a few desultory shots at their keeper. It was suggested that back home British clubs might put less emphasis on dogged cross-country runs and encourage the more refined, if slightly prissy, practice of training with a football. Not any old football, naturally. Officialdom remained sceptical about the new white one, rejecting it as contrary to our natural game. The absorbent leather ball was an important test of how men met the sport’s varying challenge. It was designed to be played in the rain. It was just like the sunny continentals to run up the white flag in the event of a downpour.

The selectors, anyway, had enough experimenting on their hands with a new generation of keepers. Ray Wood had come into the Manchester United team; Reg Allen had been part of United’s championship-winning side in 1952 but, as a result of his war experiences, had suffered a nervous breakdown. Wood appeared modest enough to satisfy national requirements: a degree of shyness meant, in his photographs, he tended to incline his head down and look guardedly at the camera. He also had elements of a greasy quiff, an unnecessary bit of styling when compared with the plastered-back fashion of the wartime generation. Did this place him in the ranks of surly youth? He played in two games, did his bit to register two victories, and was promptly left out of the team.

The next overseas visitors to Wembley were the new world champions, West Germany. Hungary had hammered them 8–3 in an early World Cup round in Switzerland but somehow the Germans contrived to keep going through the competition and met the Hungarians again in the final. Puskas was injured, the Germans triumphed. This showed characteristics not associated with them. They were the types who went on to an early offensive – Schlieffen Plans, Blitzkriegs and Operations Barbarossa – then collapsed when things got tough. The World Cup had showed ominous signs of an ability to claw their way back.

The selectors reverted to the tried and trusted. Wolverhampton Wanderers were the reigning league champions and Bert Williams had proved he was back to fitness. He made a reassuring return in England’s 3–1 win. One thing mentioned in the programme notes, and otherwise largely missed, was that the Germans were building for the future. Their players were part-timers, their team experimental. Uwe Seeler, for example, their centre-forward, was apprenticed to a Hamburg firm of furniture removers and now in the van for his country at only eighteen. It made him the youngest player to appear in a full Wembley international.

Chelsea won the league in 1955 and were invited to take part in the newly constituted European Cup for national champions. The London club wanted to enter, the Football Association said no. Unnecessary games on the continent would clog up the fixture list at home. And could teams going abroad for what amounted to little more than an exhibition match on, say, a Wednesday, guarantee they could have their players back fit and well for the proper stuff of life on the Saturday? We should maintain our distance.

In Downing Street, Churchill had had a stroke and decided to retire. He convalesced by bricklaying in his garden. What with the renovation of our house, there were bricks around and so, using sand instead of cement I put up a few temporary walls in our backyard. My dad said they were better than Churchill’s, which were more ‘serpentine’ than straight. Clearly the old boy could have benefited from a seven-year apprenticeship. But building walls seemed a thoroughly good thing to do.

The new prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden, agreed in that there was too much of this modish European integration stuff floating around. Germany and France, enemies for most of the last hundred years, were getting together, combining their coal and steel industries. Britain should block this and anything like it. It would only lead to the kind of imbalance in Europe that in the past we’d had to go in and sort out. Eden had previously been foreign secretary and knew about these overseas places. He said himself, he understood the affairs of the continent inside out. He’d studied Persian at Oxford.

In Persia, no less, we were under attack. British people had been forced to leave our oil refinery at Abadan. Things were worse in Egypt where types like General Nasser had taken over the Suez Canal. ‘Their canal’, they said. Really? Who built it? England’s football season got under way with its first international but showed that roughneck forces were infiltrating our borders, too. England played Wales in Cardiff and lost 2–1. The by now venerable veteran Bert Williams was harshly treated by some of the young Welsh forwards out to show off their muscle. They used shoulder barges, as the law said they could. But wasn’t there a spirit of the law they were offending? In the opposite goal, Jack Kelsey of Arsenal, whose display was key to the Welsh victory, thought so. He agreed a keeper was there to be hit, within reasonable limits. The way Williams had been targeted was unnecessary. That said, he quickly added that the rule book should not be changed. Take away the right to barge keepers and they’d end up like those on the continent – allowed to flap around when they had the ball and, as Kelsey said, ‘do just as they like’.

James Dean died as Rebel Without a Cause came out in London. More worrying to people than Johnny Ray, he didn’t cry but looked sullen, like the Teddy Boys on the streets, with their long Edwardian-style jackets, sideburns down to their necks, drainpipe trousers and thick rubber-soled shoes. A week later the ‘King of the Teds’, who lived around the Walworth Road in south London, was arrested for throwing a firework at a policeman; with intent to do him grievous bodily harm, said the police. Five years, said the judge.

Eden took the boat from Southampton to the USA for talks on the Middle East, where Russia was supporting Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal. Three weeks later he reported back to Parliament that the Americans fully supported the British position. The Russian leader Mr Khrushchev was booed as his train arrived in London at Victoria station. He had come by sea from Russia to Portsmouth and during his stay a Royal Navy frogman, Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb, disappeared in the harbour. The crew on Khrushchev’s boat complained they saw him surface and dive back underwater. No one else saw him again alive. There was nothing these people wouldn’t do. On the wireless I heard the Russians went in for things like ‘brainwashing’ and assumed Crabb’s body was back in Moscow, his brain extracted and being washed right now. Yet it was the Russians who protested. He was a spy, they said, and, incredibly, it was Eden who had to apologise.

Crabb had been awarded the George Medal in 1944 for searching the bottom of British ships for limpet mines. Of the wartime generation, there were pictures of him with lined face and wearing a black roll-neck jersey under his frogman’s suit. The passing of Bert Williams from the England team saw the goalkeepers’ roll-neck all but disappear. It had been creeping down towards and below the Adam’s apple for years. Keepers now appeared less wrapped up against the cold and, in a dangerous world, went bare-necked into the fray.

Manchester City reached the 1955 and 1956 Cup Finals with Bert Trautmann in goal. It had seemed a crazy decision by them to have a German keeper. Badly bombed in the war and with a large Jewish population, Manchester was not likely to feel well disposed towards him. Then, someone had to follow Frank Swift and, as England had found with Ditchburn, anything like a ‘normal’ goalkeeper would have had a tough job. No one would have been able to ‘do it like Frank could’. Manchester City’s first choice had been Alex Thurlow, who was taken ill and died of tuberculosis. Trautmann was drafted in, his one advantage that his nationality lowered the level of the crowd’s expectations. Anything good from a German was bound to be better than the fans had anticipated.

When he was a boy in Bremen in north Germany, Trautmann had joined the Hitler Youth. This was shocking to learn but, when you thought about it, not much different from my joining the 31st North London cubs over the canal bridge in Vincent Terrace. You went for the games, suffered the church parade every fourth Sunday, and tolerated the rigmarole of learning to fold the flag and not to fly it upside down. From our get-togethers, there was little or no grasp of any underlying mission.

Trautmann had been a paratrooper, my dad said, which was ‘very important’. Paratroopers were an elite force on either side, floating above the dirtiness of war. My dad’s brother Cecil was at Arnhem. Under fire and moving from house to house, he and a mate had stopped to shelter in a doorway. He heard a gurgling sound and turned to see the throat of his friend had been cut by shrapnel. I thought paratroopers were small men: my uncle was 5 feet 5 inches and, as a signwriter by trade, often found himself working at the extent of his ladder. Trautmann was tall, at 6 feet 2 inches. Short or long, you knew they were tough.

Trautmann was blown up in retreat from the Russian front, then later buried in rubble and injured in a bombing raid in France. Captured by the Americans when the Allies invaded Europe, he assumed he was going to be shot; armies on the move didn’t always want the bother of prisoners. Instead he was allowed to slip away, picked up almost immediately by the British and shipped to England in 1945. The prospect of seeing Germany again, he said, was only a dream: ‘es war ein Traum’. Yet he stayed on when the war finished. My mum had told me German prisoners had to be kept in captivity because they wanted to escape and get back and fight. Only one ever managed to get free and off the island. The Italians, in contrast, weren’t bothered. Those in Sandy were allowed to roam more or less free. They hadn’t wanted to go to war like the Germans. The fact Trautmann didn’t want to go home, I assumed, meant he must have been different.

He was blond like Bert Williams, though altogether more outgoing. In his photos he invariably smiled. My dad said he was a ‘good bloke’, like Rommel, one among the enemy who gave you hope. The Chief Rabbi of Manchester came out in support of him. As a keeper, he didn’t court acclaim and got down to the job. He was no showman, but he had an important element which was familiar. He engaged the crowd, waved and chatted to them from his goalmouth at the start of the game and even between opposition attacks. It was a direct echo of his predecessor Swift, who before the war had assured the crowd it’d be all right. Now after it, Trautmann seemed to be saying the same. He liked us and people liked him. Just before the 1956 Cup Final he became the first goalkeeper – leave aside the first foreigner, the first German – to be made footballer of the year.

When my dad got back from work on Saturday afternoons he sometimes took me to the cinema. On Cup Final day Moby Dick was on at the Carlton, beyond the Essex Road library by the tube near New North Road. By the time he was ready and we had passed by at my grandparents to say hello, the match was not far away from starting. Birmingham City and its veteran keeper Gil Merrick with his dark moustache were firm favourites. A German smiling cheerily at the future was cast as underdog. Arthur Caiger, the small man in a baggy suit who stood on the high wooden platform wheeled out on the pitch for the communal Wembley singing, was saying: ‘Now, Birmingham City fans don’t have a song of their own, so I’ve chosen one for them.’ He asked everyone to join in with ‘Keep Right on to the End of the Road’. The band in bearskins and red tunics struck up what sounded like the Funeral March. Televised Cup Finals were no substitute for something to go out for; I was happy to leave for the pictures.