4. A Working Class Hero
– and the
Takeover of Football
The 1953 FA Cup Final, between
Bolton Wanderers and Blackpool changed everything.
If you have ever wondered when the seeds were sown for the
ludicrous, self-important, over-inflated all-consuming leviathan of a game
(yes, despite everything you read and hear, it is just a game) we have today,
it was on that first Saturday in May in 1953, the so-called Matthews
Final.
Football on TV started properly
then, and then was pumped up and pumped up, to the extent that in February 2011
several newspapers led – the main story on the front page, most important thing
in the world - with the story of two chaps who do not even play football, but
just talk about it on the telly, being sacked for some injudicious off-air
badinage.
I myself was on four
separate media outlets discussing the sackings, on one occasion beating to air
the BBC’s Middle East specialist, who merely wanted to talk about the possible
fall of two governments in the Arab world.
Very rarely do those of us who fill
the sports pages of newspapers, and airtime on radio and TV, stop to think
football may not be quite as important as we keep making it out to be.
It hit me particularly forcibly one
night in the ‘90s when I was presenting a regional evening radio show in the
North of England.
On busy football
nights I used to take regular reports from the various matches in our region -
as many as 20 sometimes - from Liverpool, Newcastle, Manchester United and so
on, as well as the lower league fixtures at places like Fleetwood and Blyth
Spartans.
The show was an uncomfortable blend
of sport and news which meant booking a studio guest, who on the night in
question was veteran Liberal politician Michael Meadowcroft, recently returned
from a UN-sponsored trip to former Yugoslavia to advise on the organisation of
democratic elections.
I was asking
him about the prospects for the troubled region, and he launched into an
explanation of how instability in that part of Europe could spell disaster for
those of us in the West. “This may be the most important issue in the world
today,” he explained,
“I cannot
stress strongly enough that if this opportunity for peace and democracy is not
taken….,” at which point I said, “I am afraid I am going to have to stop you
there, Michael, there’s been a goal at Worksop.”
I venture to suggest there was a
time when world peace would have been considered more important than football –
in the years immediately after the Second World War, for instance.
Before the Matthews Final, a football
game was just a football game, of huge interest, of course, in the towns the
teams represented but not matters of national moment.
Certainly, our great national
broadcaster made no great fuss of football.
On the contrary.
As we have pointed out, Orr-Ewing and Dimmock’s
pioneering, under-funded, outside broadcast department was predominantly
officer class, bringing the benefits Dimmock told us about, but also meaning
sports favoured by England’s public schools, especially cricket and rugby
union, loomed a little larger at the BBC than they did in working class
England, and especially Scotland.
As Grace Wyndham Goldie confessed,
there was a degree of snobbery at the BBC, fostered no doubt by the patrician
spirit of the first Director General haunting the corridors of Broadcasting House.
According to Dick Booth’s book,
Talking
Of Sport, Seymour Joly de Lotbiniere, who laid down the rules for
the BBC’s sports commentary, owned up to being infected: “I may have
concentrated mostly on the Oxford and Cambridge accents and backgrounds,” admitted
Lobby, “ so that a Howard Marshall may have been preferred to a John
Arlott.
Incidentally, I think a
Wolstenholme was a fair compromise since he sounds neither posh nor common.”
Bolton-born Kenneth Wolstenholme,
of whom much more later, commentated on the 1953 final, and played his part in
securing Matthews - already a local hero - a place in the national
pantheon.
Before the Matthews
Final, it is fair to say that cricketers were bigger stars than footballers.
Names like Len Hutton, Alec Bedser, and
Denis Compton meant more than any from the winter game.
Some idea of how central to the
nation’s conversation cricket used to be can be gleaned from a casual viewing
of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 film
The Lady Vanishes.
It seems perfectly natural
in the movie to have the two comic characters on the train, Charters and
Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne), quiz every English passenger they
come across about the progress of the Test Match.
English people, even travelling through Europe, would have
been expected to know.
If
you were concocting a similar scenario during the 2010 Ashes series in
Australia, C and C would have had to scour the train for someone with a
subscription to Sky TV.
Cricket is
undeniably still popular but, like pornography, if you want it, you have to pay
for it.
Back
in 1950, it was free and everywhere.
Its players were household names.
It was Denis Compton, rather than any footballer – though Compton also
played football, cricket was the source of his renown - who was able to cash in
on his fame, and earn £1,000 a year over a nine-year deal selling himself as
the face of Brylcreem hair products.
Not quite the millions that ex-international footballer Gary Lineker
pockets for hawking potato crisps, but an indication of the cultural primacy of
cricket, before the TV broadcast of the 1953 Cup Final.
The
sport was a surefire topic for comedians of the day, too – especially if the
England team was playing poorly - alongside staples like seaside landladies and
British Rail pork pies.
The
following is from a website collecting jokes of the 1940s:
“
A batsman, scoring
freely against a fast bowler, is handed a note.
He reads it, frowns, and tells the umpire, ‘It’s about my
wife.
She’s seriously ill, and I
need to get to her.
Can you get
the bowler to shorten his run-up?’
”
No
explanation needed.
Cricket was as
central to the English way of life as the weather.
All that began to change after May 2nd,
1953.
Do
not take my word for it.
In a
letter to
The Times
, published on May 6th, 1953, the influential
cricket writer Neville Cardus wondered whether the “drama and heroism” of the
Final was indicative of football replacing cricket as “the game of the
people.”
Here
is his letter in full, because it is entertaining what with the arbitrary
Dickens reference and all, and as an illustration of how one of the leading
sports writers of the era, viewed the sporting landscape:
“Sir,
In
his brilliant report of the Cup Final, your Association Football Correspondent
refers to “the game of the people” meaning Association football.
A few years ago I would have contested
the description “werry fierce.” Nowadays I am not so sure.
While the drama and heroism were going
forward at Wembley on Saturday afternoon I went to Lord’s for the first cricket
there of the season.
Play was not
possible until 3.15.
Then the
players came into the field and in an hour 20-odd runs were scored without a
sign of a daring gesture, without a hint of personal relish.
And
then, after an hour of what I can fairly call a creeping paralysis the players
left the field – for tea.
The
small crowd looked on in silence.
As I departed from the ground I felt pretty certain that I had been
attending a decaying contemporary industry which, but for the artificial
respiration applied from time to time by the Australians, would before long
pass into the hands of the brokers, and gradually disappear, not greatly
lamented, into profound oblivion.
Yours faithfully, Neville Cardus, 112 Bickenhall Mansions, W1.”
A
number of points arise from Cardus’s letter.
Firstly, how genteel society must have been that a
journalist could publish his home address in a newspaper; secondly, what tricks
memory plays on us - I have visited numerous websites reminiscing about the
1953 Final, and most recall it as having been played in warm, spring sunshine,
but if no play was possible at Lord’s until 3.15, surely the weather was not
that clement.
Maybe the warm,
spring sunshine was metaphorical rather than literal, after the dark days of
the war and the privations that followed.
Also, you cannot help admiring Cardus for smuggling in a letter about
cricket under cover of a comment about
The Times’s
football coverage.
In
some ways, Cardus is merely marking the first stages of the interminably slow death
of county cricket, for which artificial respiration arrived in the form of the
one-day game (to be addressed in a later chapter), but you also get the
impression of the writer’s regret at being in the wrong place at the wrong
time.
Cardus clearly felt history
– and “drama and heroism” – was happening elsewhere, and the rest of the nation
was present.
In this, he was spot
on.
Two
academics, Martin Johnes, of the University of Wales, and Gavin Mellor, a
research fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University wrote a long piece about
the match for
Contemporary British History, Volume 20, Number 2
(June 2006)
, in which they report
on its significance: “Like the Coronation,” they write, “it was television that
enabled the 1953 Cup Final to become a genuinely shared and national
event.
“Estimates
at the television audience for the 1953 final were as high as 12 million, but
were more often put at ten million.
This was significantly less than the 20 million estimated to have
watched the Coronation, but it was still a huge audience for the time.
Those who did not have their own sets
crammed into the houses of friends and neighbours.
A cartoon in a Blackpool paper (the
West
Lancashire Evening Gazette
)
showed a man asking his neighbours if he could watch the game at their house:
‘I can’t get near
mine
,’ he is saying, ‘for unexpected visitors.’”
There
was a sense in which the match was part of a year of great national
celebration; Elizabeth ll was crowned, Everest was conquered, Churchill was
back as Prime Minister following consensus policies, and for the first time
since 1933 – pace Cardus – England even won the Ashes.
And the story surrounding the 1953
Final was unbeatable.
The
match was universally believed to be a last shot at a Cup Winners Medal for
Blackpool’s mesmeric 38-year-old right winger Stanley Matthews, nicknamed
Wizard of the Dribble for his ability to shimmy past defenders at speed without
losing control of the ball.
Emerging
from the grime and poverty of the Potteries, one of England’s most deprived
areas, Matthews signed for his local club Stoke City as a 17-year-old in
1932.
In 1947, after years of
being underpaid – in fairness, all footballers were then – and undervalued for
his loyalty, he moved to struggling Blackpool whose fortunes he revived.
He helped them reach the Cup Final,
then the pinnacle of British football, in 1948, where they were defeated 4-2 by
Manchester United.
In 1951, with
Matthews now 36, Blackpool reached the Final again, and were beaten 2-nil by
Newcastle United.
At 38 years old
was this working class hero to be a three-time loser?
Matthews,
though, was not a working class hero in the way that later models like George
Best, Alex Higgins, or John Lennon were – dragging themselves out of the
backwoods and boondocks and using their talents to cock a snook at the
establishment, to tell polite society what it could do with its polite society,
sticking it to the man, as the modern idiom has it (or so my children tell
me).
Britain may not yet have been
ready for that kind of working class hero.
Matthews
was the chap on the shop floor who did not make a fuss but got the job done,
the kind of chap that had won the war for us.
Arthur Hopcraft, in his famous book
The
Football Man
, had Matthews about
right: “He was the opposite of glamorous; a non-drinker, non-smoker, careful
with his money.
He had a habitual
little cough.
He was
representative of his age and his class, brought up among thrift and the
ever-looming threat of dole and debt.
“We
were always afraid for Matthews, the non-athlete; the sadly impassive face,
with its high cheekbones, pale lips and hooded eyes, had a lot of pain in it,
the deep hurt that came from prolonged effort and the certainty of more
blows…For as long as he was one of the world’s fleetest movers he never had
exuberance.”
So
what happened to the working class hero on May 2nd?
More hurt?
Or
redemption?
In truth, for the
first hour the Final had all the hallmarks of a stinker.
Lofthouse scored a soft goal from
distance for Bolton after 75 seconds, the ball bouncing over Blackpool
goalkeeper Farm’s outstretched arm, Mortensen equalized for Blackpool with the
first of his three goals, though it actually took what nowadays would be termed
a wicked deflection (is there any other sort?) and should have been credited
(or debited) as an own goal to Bolton’s Hassall.
A mix-up between Farm and his defender Moir gifted Bolton a
second goal.
Ten minutes into the
second half Bolton appeared to have the game wrapped up when half back Bell,
despite carrying an injury, headed a third.
But it was a match noted more for its calamities than the
beauty of the football.
Indeed,
TV commentator Wolstenholme felt obliged to apologise for the misplaced passes
and the general dullness of the spectacle, ascribing it to the wind, and the
lushness of the Wembley pitch.
(Wolstenholme was obsessed with the Wembley turf.
His default position as a final kicked
off was to give us chapter and verse on the state of the grass – invariably
lush – on whether the players were taking any special stud-related measures to
account for it, and how they were coping with the unusual eventuality of
playing on a grass-covered surface.
Pretty well anything untoward that took place during a match was blamed
by Wolstenholme on the Wembley surface.
I have been watching the BBC coverage of Tottenham Hotspur beating
Burnley in the 1962 Cup Final, in which Burnley struggle during the first half
to put a half-decent move together.
“The Tottenham players seem to have judged the pace of the turf better than
Burnley,” says Wolstenholme.
Maybe
he was just a good, decent chap, who did not want to criticise honest
footballers, but if were around to try it today, chaps like myself at
The
Guardian
and Giles Smith at
The
Times
would be flexing our
sarcasm muscles).
For
the best part of an hour-and-a-quarter it was that kind of final, one during
which your thoughts are encouraged to drift.
But with Bolton 3-1 up, and carrying a number of injuries –
notably Bell, who seemed in real pain, and in no condition to chase Matthews as
he might have been expected to do – Matthews took over.
One
of his many menacing right-wing crosses not dealt with by the tiring and
injury-stricken Bolton defence led to Stan Mortensen scrambling a goal at the
far post, and Mortensen also scored the equalizer in the last minute of normal
time with a powerfully struck free kick.
Injury
time now, and
The Times’s
Geoffrey Green, to whom all of us who write about sport in
the quality press owe a debt of gratitude, describes the climax thus: “With the
last minute already ticking away, the ball again went out to Matthews.
He beat one man on the inside, swerved
past another on the outside, and weaved his incredible passage in towards the
by-line.
As Barrass came across
from the middle to challenge, over came a perfect centre.
Perry, moving into the centre, flashed
it home, and with only seconds left the incredible had happened.
“Blackpool
had won 4-3 at the very last breath.
People were all but crying in their emotion.
The Press box itself was a bedlam as papers and pencils flew
in all directions.
The crowd was
on its feet, cheering hysterically.
And there as a last sight was Matthews being chaired off the field by
his colleagues, shoulder high with his captain, Johnston, each of them with a
hand on the Cup.
Nothing like that
had ever happened before.
I doubt
if it will ever happen again.
That
was the ‘Matthews Final.’”
It
was, despite a fine performance by Blackpool’s Ernie Taylor, playing in the
role of what used to be called a “schemer,” and Mortensen’s generously awarded
hat-trick, the only one scored at a Wembley cup final.
It was cruel but inevitable that when
Mortensen died in 1991, most of the obituaries majored on the “Matthews Final,”
prompting some wag to venture that Mortensen’s burial at St. John’s Parish
Church, Blackpool would probably be known as “the Matthews Funeral.”
If TV
viewers needed to take a deep breath after the drama of the Final, there was
plenty of opportunity.
Coverage
from Wembley finished at 4.50, in time for Children’s Television, and there was
no highlights programme later, re-living the drama.
The big prime time show that Saturday evening was a
Party
Political Broadcast,
from
8.30 to 8.50, entitled
Housing - A Progress Report by Mr Harold
MacMillan
, followed by something
called
Looking At Animals
.
From
this we can see how crucial sport was to television in those early days.
I cannot imagine there were would have
been too many people laying out £66 10s on the new Murphy V210 to look at
animals and Mr Harold MacMillan.
“Sport
was terribly important to the BBC,” Peter Dimmock told me, “It was 60 per cent
of our outside broadcasts, and it delivered good viewing figures, especially if
there was any sort of royal involvement.
We would always get an extra 20 per cent if a Royal were present.
People would switch on just to watch a
member of the Royal Family.”
In
that respect, the 1953 final hit the jackpot.
Queen Elizabeth was there – the first reigning monarch to
attend a Wembley Cup Final - with the Duke of Edinburgh.
That
Times
report that so captivated Neville Cardus waxed
lyrical: “It will live with the countless multitude that viewed it second-hand
upon the magic screen of television…not only because of its highly colourful
and emotional climax…but because here in the presence of the Queen and the Duke
of Edinburgh the game of football, the game of the people, was crowned with all
felicity in this year of Coronation and national rejoicing.”
1953
was undoubtedly a watershed.
Looking at the fixtures for that weekend, I see there was a first
division match, Portsmouth v Middlesbrough kicking off concurrently with the
Cup Final at 3pm.
It was the
last time that would happen.
By
Cup Final day 1954, there were only Third Division matches scheduled, at Norwich,
Ipswich, and Shrewsbury, all starting at 6.30.
By 1956, top billing after the Cup Final was taken by the
Glasgow Charity Cup.
1953 was the year the Cup Final on TV began to become enshrined in the
national calendar.
Incidentally,
a final word on the relative positions of football and cricket in Britain’s
sporting hierarchy; the
Light Programme
, BBC radio’s sports network, did not even carry
the first half of the 1953 Final, picking the match up after half-time, after
coverage of the touring Australian cricket team at Leicestershire and a county
match between Hampshire and Essex.
It was not for much longer that the start of the cricket season would
eclipse the climax of football’s.