Sir Alf

But as with a huge number of wartime marriages, the union between Arthur and Rita broke down and in 1947 they separated. Under the more strict law of the period, Rita could not officially gain a divorce until a period of at least three years had elapsed. And even after her divorce, she would not be able to re-marry for another year. So she and Alf, even though they were deeply in love, were trapped. Pat Millward recalls:

Alf told me privately he was waiting, waiting all the time for her to get her divorce. He was a little nervous that people in Southampton might throw it at him that he was involved with a married woman. But I never heard anyone say anything about it. Mind you, Alf was always very secretive about her. He never talked much about the relationship. The first moment I think I was aware of it was that time when my department store was giving out the wallets and handbags to the Southampton players. Alf was very uptight about getting the right handbag for her, so I chose it for him.

Rita’s divorce finally game through on 30 November 1950, the official grounds given that Arthur Norris had ‘deserted the Petitioner without cause for a period of at least three years immediately preceding the presentation of the petition’. Little more than a year later, on 10 December 1951, Alf Ramsey, aged 31 years – he always gave his true birth date where officialdom was concerned – was married at the Register Office in Southampton, before going on to a brief honeymoon in Bournemouth. The wedding was sandwiched between an away fixture at Blackpool and a home game against Middlesbrough. In line with the reclusive nature of the affair, Alf kept quiet about his marriage and it therefore came as a surprise at Spurs. ‘Secret wedding honeymoon ended today for Alf Ramsey, Spurs right back and first choice for England and his bride who was formerly Rita Welch of Southampton,’ announced the Daily Mirror on 12 December 1951. ‘He kept the wedding so secret that even Spurs’ manager Arthur Rowe did not know of the ceremony at the Southampton Register Office. On the train returning from Blackpool Ramsey asked for “two or three days off” to be married.’

It would be wrong to exaggerate the impropriety of the circumstances surrounding Alf’s marriage. Divorce, though still far less common than it is today, was becoming increasingly prevalent, partly because of the high rate of failure in wartime marriages. In 1920, when Alf and Rita were both born, there were just 3,090 divorces in England. By 1939, the figure had risen to 8,254. By 1950, however, the divorce rate had soared to 30,870 a year. So it is hardly as if Alf and Rita were causing a public scandal. Though the true nature of Alf’s marriage has never before been revealed, there have occasionally been wild rumours in the football world about his relationship with Rita. It was whispered breathlessly, for example, that she was ‘the daughter of an admiral’. Others said that Alf had ‘stolen his bride from his best mate’. Neither is remotely true. Rita was, like Alf, born in the working class and had merely contracted an unfortunate first marriage. ‘There was no sense of Alf stealing her,’ says Pat Millward. ‘When they met, she was already waiting for a divorce.’ Nevertheless, Rita Norris’ past undoubtedly heightened Alf’s sense of wariness about discussing his private life. It was another uncomfortable subject that he would prefer to avoid, like his father’s job or his alleged elocution lessons or his supposed gypsy background. After his marriage, the barriers were put up even higher, as Margaret Fuljames, his secretary at the FA for many years, recalls:

He hated any intrusion into his private life. Like the Daily Mail would ring almost every year on his birthday, looking for a diary piece, a light little comment from him or his wife, and Alf would never have anything to do with that. He felt it was nothing to do with who he was or his job as England manager.

For all its inauspicious beginnings, Ramsey’s marriage proved a successful one. Rita changed her name to Victoria, though Alf always knew her as Vic, and she was happy to concentrate on building their home and supporting Alf. In typically practical terms, Alf once set out the proper role of a player’s spouse:

A footballer’s wife needs to run the home completely so that he has no worries; give him the sort of food he likes and should have; and to work only for his good and the good of his career. She must know that she will rarely see him at weekends – and the better player he is, the less she will see of him. A footballer could be ruined by a wife who let him have all the household responsibilities, fed him the wrong diet and gave him no peace of mind. My wife has been splendid. I have been very lucky.

In her turn, Vickie returned the compliment. ‘I was privileged to have met and married Alfred and I enjoyed a very wonderfully happy life with a kind and generous man,’ she wrote to me.

Alf proved a loyal, honourable husband, giving her not the slightest moment’s suspicion that he might stray. Unlike a lot of successful sportsmen, who revel in the flash of a knowing smile or a whiff of perfume, Alf was too innocent to be at ease with sophisticated femininity. ‘I don’t know much about women and the only women I know are footballers’ wives,’ he said, at a time when the phrase ‘footballers’ wives’ had yet to become the embodiment of predatory lust. His love for Vickie was certainly genuine. ‘He’s the nicest man in the world. Never quarrels or loses his temper. He even listens to my views on football,’ Vickie told the Daily Mail in 1962. They never had any children of their own, but Alf proved a good step-father to Vickie’s daughter Tanaya, who went on to marry an American and settle in the USA.

Pat Millward says: ‘They were a very close couple. Alf was devoted to her.’ Despite his comments about a wife’s duties, Alf was not the stereotyped husband of his generation, treating all housework as the preserve of women. Ken Jones has this recollection of the domesticated Alf:

In 1974 I was doing some magazine pieces with him and Brian James, the Daily Mail’s football writer. So I picked him up at Liverpool Street and took him over to my house. We did some work in the morning, and then sat down to lunch cooked by my wife. All went well and we had a few drinks – Alf liked a drink. Then after lunch, I said, ‘Right, back to work.’

To which Alf immediately said, ‘Hold on, what about the washing up?’

‘The washing up?’ I said in astonishment.

‘Yes, the washing up.’ And he went off into the kitchen to help with my wife. There he was, with his elbows in the sink. From that day on, he was always a hero to my wife.

John Booth, who became a close friend of Alf after his retirement, says: ‘Everything always had to be spotless with Alf. He liked everything clean and tidy. He once came into my kitchen and started cleaning the sink and kettle.’

Whatever his virtues of fidelity and domesticity, it could not be claimed that Alf was the most romantic of men. Even Victoria, in one of her rare comments to the press, expressed her desire for her husband to show more emotion. ‘I wish he would let his hair down occasionally and throw his cap over the moon. It would do him a power of good. There is nothing spectacular ever in his reactions,’ she said in 1965. Early in his marriage, his relentless tunnel vision about football could be hurtful. On one occasion, when she was waiting outside the Spurs dressing-room after a game, he came out, completely ignored her because he was so wrapped up in his own thoughts, and proceeded to walk down the corridor until he was reminded that he had forgotten his wife. Ron Reynolds, the Spurs deputy goalkeeper of the early fifties, recalled meeting Alf and Vickie at a social event:

We had a meal and afterwards there was a dance. Alf came over to me and said, ‘I want you to meet somebody.’ He took me along and introduced me to Vickie. Within a matter of thirty seconds, he said, ‘You won’t mind having a dance with her, will you?’ Alf didn’t want to dance, he wanted to talk about football to the people there and so he lumbered me! She was very nice, but I was just a country lad, twenty-two years old, a bit out of my depth. I was practically speechless:

His innate lack of demonstrativeness stretched into his marriage. He famously explained that if he and his wife ever had a row, he liked to ‘shake hands and make up’. Nigel Clarke says that he ‘never, ever saw he and Vickie touch each other, embrace or be tactile. They would shake hands when they saw each other. I always had the feeling that Alf was not very worldly wise in sexual matters.’ And though he was a loving step-father, he could not always get excited about his daughter’s youthful activities. Tony Garnett, who covered all of Alf’s Ipswich career, told me of this incident:

Alf was a shrewd man but he was very limited in anything bar football. I remember I ran into Tanya on the train at Liverpool Street. She had just been to the ballet. She was keen on that, like her mother. And I said to her, ‘You know your dad is just two compartments ahead.’

‘Oh, I don’t want to go and sit with him. He won’t be interested in what I have been doing.’

For all his carefully cultivated refinement, Alf could occasionally be crudely masculine. Roy McFarland, the Derby and England defender, remembers an incident in December 1971, when England were on tour in Greece. There was the usual banquet after the game, which the players imagined would be followed by the usual boring speeches. Instead, a ravishing, scantily clad belly-dancer appeared before them. McFarland recalls:

All the lads started coming back from the bar for a closer look. Once she had finished her act, some of us went out to get some fresh air, and then we got on the bus. Alf came out of the reception, sat down in his usual seat, then turned to us and said: ‘Lads, what about that belly dancer! Fucking great pair she had, didn’t she?’ It was so unexpected. We could not stop laughing. He said things like that, which made him all the more endearing. It was a warm feeling to be part of that humour.

George Cohen, the Fulham full-back who knew and understood Alf better than any of the 1966 winners, gave this thoughtful analysis of their marriage:

Alf was, no doubt, a product of his times and when they had passed few men would ever have had more difficulty in adapting to a new style – and new values. His marriage to Vickie was a perfect reflection of this. He worshipped her but he also expected everything of her. She served him, as so many women did their husbands in those days and in return he adored her. If ever anyone walked in a man’s goals in the process. Stoke were crushed 6–1, Portsmouth 5–1 and, most remarkably of all, Newcastle United 7–0, witnessed by a crowd of over 70,000 at White Hart Lane. The Daily Telegraph gave a graphic description of how Tottenham operated:

The Spurs principle is to hold the ball a minimum amount of time, keep it on the ground and put it into an open space where a colleague will be a second or two later. The result is their attacks are carried on right through the side with each man taking the ball in his stride at top pace, for all the world like a wave gathering momentum as it races to the far distant shore. It is all worked out in triangles and squares and when the mechanism of it clicks at speed, as it did Saturday, with every pass placed to the last refined inch on a drenched surface, there is simply no defence against it.

Ron Burgess described it as ‘the finest exhibition of football I have ever seen.’ Eddie Baily, who scored a hat-trick in that Newcastle game, later recalled: ‘Our style commanded a lot of respect from others because of its freshness, because of the way it was played and the men who played it. You felt that you were helping to lift the tone of the game and so you got that respect from the crowds as well.’ By December 1950, Spurs were at the top of the First Division table and held on to the lead through January and February, though Manchester United were close behind. Then in March they tore away again with another burst of fine victories, including a 5–0 destruction of West Bromwich Albion.

Throughout these months, Alf was playing the best football of his life. His captain Ron Burgess wrote that Alf was ‘in grand form that season. He not only scored four goals himself, but his perfectly placed free-kicks led to a number of goals.’ He went on to describe Alf as ‘a brilliant defender under any condition and circumstance’ who was ‘a player for the big occasion’. The quality of Alf’s vision was central to the success of push-and-run in the First Division. Such was his authority on the field that he became known to his colleagues as ‘The General’. He was the master of strategy, the lynchpin of a side that built its attacks from the back, the scheming practitioner who put Rowe’s plans into action. George Robb, who joined Spurs in 1951, told author Dave Bowler:

Tottenham became a great side through push-and-run, which was tailor-made for Alf. There was no long ball from him, and he was one of the crucial members of the side, along with the likes of Burgess. Alf played a tremendous part in setting the pass pattern, which wasn’t typical of the British game. It was a revolutionary side, very well-knit.

Robb recalled The General’s influence off the field as well:

In team talks Alf certainly played an important part – he was full of deep thinking about the game but very quietly spoken. He was appreciated by the rest of us as being a cut above, tactically calm and unruffled. You’d go in the dressing-room for training and you’d have Eddie Baily, a tremendous clown, making a terrific row and Alf would just sit there, taking it all in, occasionally coming in with a shrewd observation, a cooling statement; he was ice-cool, just as his game was. Alf was looked upon as classy, constructive, so he set a new pattern.

Spurs were still top of the table by mid-April 1951 and when they met Sheffield Wednesday on Saturday the 28th they needed only two points to clinch the title. The match kicked off at 3.15 pm, as was traditional in this period, and for most of the first half, Spurs were unable to break down the Wednesday defence. Then, as the clock was about to reach 4 pm, Eddie Baily went past three defenders, then fed Len Duquemin, who hit a rasping shot into the net. ‘I have heard the Hampden Park roar and the Ninian Park roar, and they were mere whispers to the roar that greeted that goal, and that pulsating din of excitement did not diminish from then until the end of the game,’ wrote Spurs captain Ron Burgess. Despite many frantic goalmouth moments at both ends in the second half, the score-line remained the same at the final whistle. Spurs were the champions, the first time they had won the title in their long history. ‘The crowd went crazy, and I don’t think many of the players were too sane at that particular moment,’ said Burgess.

There was one more game left in the season, and Tottenham celebrated in style, beating Liverpool 3–1. After the game, Burgess was presented with the League trophy by Arthur Drewry, the President of the Football League, who said of the champions, ‘I not only congratulate them on having won it but also on the manner in which they did so.’ A couple of days later, all the Spurs players and staff were invited to a ‘Grand Celebration Dance’ at the Royal on the Tottenham Court Road. Supporters had to pay 10 shillings 6 pence for a ticket to the event, where they were promised four hours of Ivor Kirchin and his Ballroom Orchestra.

It was a happy end to Alf’s second season in Spurs colours. But on other fronts, the prospects were darker.

FOUR Belo Horizonte (#ulink_2e69f0c0-a4be-57d3-882d-f502d4d05240)

Within months of transferring from Southampton to Spurs in the summer of 1949, Alf had justified the move by regaining his place in the England team after he had lost it to his Saints full-back rival Bill Ellerington. Languishing in the Saints reserves, his cause would have been hopeless. But his superb form for Tottenham soon attracted the England selectors, and he was picked for the match against Italy at White Hart Lane. England managed to win 2–0, but the result was harsh on the Italians, who had dominated much of the game and had only been prevented from scoring through a memorable display of goalkeeping by Bert Williams. Alf himself had a difficult match, not just in coping with the Italian winger Carapellese, but also in working with right-half Billy Wright. The Daily Sketch commented: ‘Wright could not be satisfied with his performance. There were times in the game when he went too far upfield, leaving Alf Ramsey exposed to the thrusting counter-attacks of the quick and clever Italian forwards.’ But, as always, Alf was learning, and the key lesson he took from the game was the importance of positional play. ‘That November afternoon I realized more than ever before that it is sometimes more important to watch the man rather than the ball, to watch where the man you are marking runs when he has parted with the ball,’ he wrote.

Alf had performed creditably enough, however, and soon became a fixture in the England team, winning 31 caps in succession. One of his fellow players in that Italian game was the revered Preston winger Sir Tom Finney, who was immediately impressed by Alf:

I felt he was a really outstanding full-back, with a good idea of how the game should be played. He was very good at using the ball; unlike some others, he never seemed just to punt it up the field and hope that it got to one of his own side. He always felt that the game should be played on the floor. But he was not particularly fast, and I don’t think he liked playing against people who were clever on the ball and quick.

Like most of the Tottenham players, Sir Tom never found it easy to mix with Alf;

To be honest, he was a bit of a loner. He was not easy-going. He did not suffer fools gladly. He was a theorist who had his own ideas on how the game should be played, but he kept those ideas to himself. He had a very quiet personality, never swore much. I always got on all right with him but I never found that he was a fella who wanted to talk a lot. I would not say that he had many great friends in the England set-up. Unlike some less experienced players who have just broken through into the international team, Alf never felt the need to link up with anyone.

According to Sir Tom, though Alf was generally ‘very serious’ he could display an odd, dry sense of humour. On one occasion, when Spurs had drawn with Preston at Deepdale in the FA Cup, Sir Tom popped his head round the corner of the Spurs dressing-room to say hello to Alf, who was, after all, an England colleague. In his account in his autobiography, Finney wrote:

Alf, who was standing close to the door, seemed quite animated.

‘Not much point you lot coming all the way to London for the reply,’ he barked. ‘There will be nothing for you at Spurs.’

I was taken aback, not so much by what had been said but more by who had said it. I looked Alf in the eyes for a moment but it was impossible to tell whether he was being aggressive, jocular or simply mischievous. He was dead right though – four days later we lost by a single goal at White Hart Lane.

It was always an absurdity that Sir Tom Finney, one of the finest footballers in history, should have to run a business as a plumber in Preston because his earnings from the game throughout the forties and fifties were so meagre. When he and Alf played against Italy in 1949, the maximum wage stood at just £12 a week, while England players received a match fee of just £30, plus £ 1-a-day expenses if the team were playing abroad. It was a semi-feudal system, one where players were tied to their clubs even against their will, since the clubs held their registration and no move was possible without the directors’ permission.

Yet this oppressive relationship was only a reflection of the deeper malaise in football at the time. England was the nation that gave football to the world in the 19th century, but it had failed to progress much since then. Complacently living in the past, the game’s administrators and journalists still told themselves that English football was the finest in the world. The evidence for this global supremacy, it was claimed, lay in the fact that England had never been beaten by a foreign side at home. It was not strictly true even in 1949, when the Republic of Ireland won 2–0 at Goodison Park, but, despite all the years of bitter enmity across the Irish Sea and Ireland having competed in two World Cups as a sovereign state, Eire was transformed into a home nation for the purposes of maintaining the undefeated record. Alf’s trip with Southampton to Brazil in 1948 had shown him the rapid developments that were happening elsewhere in the world, especially in terms of tactics and equipment. But England clung to the reassuring, outdated certainties of W–M formations and ankle-wrapping boots. Training was hopelessly unsuited to a modern, fast-moving game. Indeed, many coaches still clung to the grotesque notion that professionals should be deprived of the ball during the week, so that they would be more hungry for it on Saturday. In place of perfecting their ball skills, they had to carry out endless laps of the track. ‘The dislike of the ball was pretty universal in training. I thought it was crazy,’ says Sir Tom Finney. The physical treatment of players was equally primitive. It was usually carried out by a former club stalwart who knew nothing of dealing with injuries.

The paralysis within English football was perhaps most graphically highlighted in the antique way the FA and the Football League were run. Both were managed more like a somnolent Oxford college than a professional sports body. The Football Association, which was composed largely of representatives from the counties and old universities, had a certain contempt for men who earned their living from the game. Snobbery, poor record keeping and amateurism were rife throughout the organization. When Stanley Rous first became secretary in 1934, there were complaints about his inappropriate dress for matches. ‘I would remind you,’ said one old councillor, ‘that your predecessor would go to matches in a top hat and frock coat.’ This kind of nonsense was still carrying on after the war, with FA members more worried about protocol than performance. The Football League was just as bad. The Yorkshireman Alan Hardaker, who was later to be compared to a cross between Caligula and Jimmy Cagney because of his autocratic methods, arrived at the League’s headquarters in Preston in 1951, as deputy to the secretary Frederick Howarth. Hardaker was shocked at what he found. Housed in an old vicarage, the League kept no proper records and stored files in the attics. Like some Victorian colonialist, Howarth relied on telegrams rather than the telephone. His loathing for the press equalled that for modern technology. ‘Howarth was against change of any sort, particularly if it meant more work for him,’ wrote Hardaker. As a result, ‘The League was like a machine that had been lying in a corner for three quarters of a century.’

The antiquated approach extended to the selection of the national team. What should have been the job of the England manager was instead in the hands of a group of opinionated, often elderly, figures who had absolutely no experience of international football. The eight FA selectors were inordinately proud of their role and enjoyed their trips abroad, but they disastrously lacked judgement or any long-term vision. Riddled with prejudices, often displaying blatant bias towards players from their own clubs, they showed no consistency, no understanding of the needs of modern football. ‘There was always this chopping and changing. Someone would have a tremendous game for England and then be dropped, for no reason,’ says Sir Tom Finney. At their meetings, the selectors would go through each position in turn, seeking nominations and then holding a vote to decide the choice if there were a dispute. On occasions, they could be breathtakingly ignorant. In his first games for England, Bobby Moore was frequently mistaken by one selector for the Wolves midfielder Ron Flowers, purely because they both had blond hair. Similarly, John Connelly, the Burnley winger, recalled talking to a selector during the 1962 World Cup in Chile: ‘All the time it was Alan this, Alan that. He thought I was our reserve goalkeeper, Alan Hodgkinson.’

The man trying to grapple with this system was Walter Winterbottom, who had been appointed England manager and FA Director of Coaching in 1946. The very fact that these two enormous jobs were combined in one individual only demonstrates the indifference that the FA showed towards the management of the national team. In the face of his burden, Winterbottom fought hard to bring some rationality to the chaos. Before the war, he had been an undistinguished player with Manchester United before a back injury ended his career. Having paid his way through Carnegie College of Physical Education, he served as a PT instructor in the Air Ministry during the war, rising to the rank of wing-commander. His military credentials, earnest, academic manner and plummy voice appealed to the socially conscious chiefs of the FA. But Winterbottom was no cypher. As passionate and obsessive about football as Alf Ramsey, he had analysed the game in depth and, through his position as Director of Coaching, he aimed to start a technical revolution in English football by raising skills and tactical awareness. Many of the future generations of top managers were inspired by Winterbottom’s coaching. ‘Walter was a leader, a messiah, he set everyone’s eyes alight,’ said Ron Greenwood. Sir Bobby Robson was moved to call him ‘a prophet. He was my motivator in terms of my staying in football.’ Alf himself wrote of one of Winterbottom’s team talks during his first England tour in 1948: ‘His tactical knowledge of Continental teams, and his outlook on the Italian methods and temperament left a lasting impression on me.’

But, as well as the vicissitudes of the selection process, Winterbottom was faced with two other major problems. The first was the reluctance of some major stars to accept any degree of instruction, especially from someone who had never played international football. With a narrowness typical of the period, certain players believed that fitness and ability were all that mattered, with coaching regarded as alien and demeaning. In an interview with the BBC, the centre-forward Tommy Lawton recalled an early pre-match session with Winterbottom:

He said to us, ‘The first thing we’ll do, chaps, is that we’ll meet in half an hour. I’ve arranged a blackboard and we will discuss tactics.’