The Goalkeeper’s History of Britain

In Swift’s Succession (#ulink_2801832d-a1ea-533d-baff-856650b43433)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.