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The roots of Sir Alf’s antagonism towards the media and the FA lay in his deep sense of social insecurity. He was a strange mixture of tremendous self-confidence within the narrow world of football, and tortured, tongue-tied diffidence outside it. He had been a classy footballer himself in the immediate post-war era, one of the most intelligent full-backs England has ever produced, and was never afraid to set out his opinions in the dressing-rooms of Southampton and Spurs, his two League clubs. Performing his role as England or Ipswich manager, he was the master of his domain. No one could match him for his understanding of the technicalities of football, where he allied a brilliant judgement of talent to a shrewd tactical awareness and a photographic memory of any passage of play. ‘Without doubt, he was the greatest manager I ever knew, a fantastic guy,’ says Ray Crawford of Ipswich and England. ‘He had a natural authority about him. You never argued with him. He was always brilliant in his talks because he read the game so well. He would come into the dressing-room at half-time and explain what we should be doing, and most of the time it came off. He was inspirational that way.’ Peter Shilton, England’s most capped player, is just as fulsome: ‘From the moment I met Sir Alf I knew he was someone special. He was that sort of person. He was a man who inspired total respect. Any decision he made, you knew he made it for the right reason. He had real strength of character. I have been with other managers who were not as strong in the big, big games. But Alf could rise above the pressure and dismiss irrelevancies.’
Yet Sir Alf never felt comfortable when taken out of the reassuring environment of running his teams. All his ease and self-assurance evaporated when he was not dealing with professional players and trusted football correspondents. He could cope with a World Cup Final but not with a cocktail reception. ‘Dinners, speeches,’ he used to say of the FA committee men, ‘that’s their job.’ Amongst the Oxbridge degrees of the sporting, political or diplomatic establishments, he felt all too aware of his humble origins and lack of education. Born into a poor, rural Essex family, he left school at fourteen and took his first job as a delivery boy for the Dagenham Co-op. To cope with this insecurity, Sir Alf devised a number of strategies. One was to erect a social barrier against the world, avoiding all forms of intimacy. That is why he could so often appear aloof, even downright rude. From his earliest days as a professional, he was reluctant to open up to anyone. This distance might have been invaluable in retaining his authority as a manager, but it also prohibited the formation of close friendships.
Pat Godbold, his secretary throughout his spell as Ipswich manager from 1955 to 1963, says: ‘I was twenty when Alf came here. My first impression was that he was a shy man. I think that right up to his death he was a very shy man. You could not get to know him. He was a good man to work for, but I can honestly say that I never got to know him.’ Sir Alf guarded the privacy of his domestic life with the same determination that he put into management. The mock-Tudor house on a leafy Ipswich road he shared with Lady Victoria – or Vic, as he always called her – was his sanctuary, not a social venue. Anne Elsworthy, the wife of one of the Championship-winning Ipswich players of 1962, recalls Sir Alf and Lady Ramsey as a ‘a very private couple. After he retired, I would occasionally see them in Marks and Spencer’s in Ipswich, but all they would say would be ‘Good morning’. They were not the sort to stand around chatting in a supermarket. When Alf went to play golf, he would just go, complete his round. He would not hang around the bar.’
Another strategy was to reinvent himself as the archetypal suburban English gentleman. The impoverished Dagenham lad, who could not even afford to go to the cinema until he was fourteen, was gradually transformed in adulthood into someone who could have easily been mistaken for a stockbroker or a bank-manager. The pinstripe, made of the finest mohair, was a suit of armour to protect from his detractors. When he went to Buckingham Palace to collect his knighthood in 1967, he went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that he was dressed in the exactly the correct attire. But by far the most obvious change was in his voice, allegedly the result of elocution lessons, as he dropped his Essex accent in favour of a form of pronunciation memorably described by the journalist Brian Glanville as ‘sergeant-major posh’. Like Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, Sir Alf occasionally betrayed his origins when he slipped into the vernacular of his childhood, as on the embarrassing occasion in a restaurant car travelling to Ipswich when, in the presence of the club’s directors, he told a waitress during dinner, ‘No thank you, I don’t want no peas.’
Tony Garnett, the Suffolk-based journalist who covered Ipswich’s great years under Sir Alf, told me: ‘He did drop some real clangers when he was trying to talk proper, as they say. One of the best was when Ipswich went abroad after they had won the championship and Alf began to talk about going through ‘Customs and Exercise.’ Nobody dared to correct him. He could not do his ‘H’s properly, nor his ‘ings’ at the end of a word.’ With his attempts at precision, his lengthy pauses, his twisted syntax and his frequent repetition of the same phrase – ‘most certainly’ and ‘in as much as’ were two particular favourites – it seemed at times that he was almost trying to master a foreign tongue.
The Blackpool and England goalkeeper in the 1960s, Tony Waiters, who led Canada to the 1986 World Cup finals and has wide experience of working in America, says: ‘It was always worth listening to Alf. But occasionally he would fall down on his pronunciation or would drop an “H” every so often. As a coach myself, I am aware that if you say the wrong thing, it could come back to haunt you. And sometimes Alf would give an indication that this was not his natural way of speaking. He was very deliberate in what he said. I work with a lot of people who are coaching in their second language. Generally speaking they slow down because they are thinking ahead and almost rehearsing in their own mind what they are going to say. With Alf, it was always good stuff but maybe he had to do a bit of mental gymnastics as he prepared to speak.’
For all his anxiety about his accent and his appearance, Sir Alf could never have been described as a snob. Just the opposite was true. He loathed pretension and social climbing, one of the reasons why he so disliked the fatuities of the FA’s councillors. David Barber, who has worked at the FA since 1970, beginning as a teenage clerk, recalls Alf’s lack of self-importance: ‘Right from the moment I first took a job there, I was not in the slightest bit overawed by him. Though he was the most famous man in football at the time, he was down to earth. He was very nice, treated me like a colleague, not an office boy. He was uncomfortable with the press and FA Council members and in public could be a shy man, but with people like me, whom he worked with on a daily basis, he could not have been more friendly.’
Utterly lacking in personal vanity, Alf deliberately avoided the social whirl of London and was unmoved by fashionable restaurants and hotels. His knighthood did not change him in the slightest, while he always retained a fondness for the activities of his Dagenham youth, such as a visit to the greyhound track accompanied by a pint of bitter and some jellied eels. As reflected by his penurious retirement, he refused to exploit his position for personal gain, unlike most of his successors; in fact, it was partly his repugnance at commercialism that led to his downfall.
Alf’s favourite self-preservation strategy, though, was to ignore the world outside and retreat into football, the one subject he really understood. Since his childhood, he had been utterly obsessed with the game. He was kicking a ball before he was learning his alphabet. It was the great abiding passion of his life. When he was truly engaged with the sport, his introversion would disappear, the barriers would fall. Apart from his wife, nothing else had the same importance to him. As his captain at Ipswich, Andy Nelson, remembers: ‘He was a very private, quiet man, very unhappy to have any conversation that was unrelated to football. When we went on the train, we used to have a little card school. Roy Bailey, our goalkeeper, was a big figure in that. Alf would come into our compartment and start talking about football. And then Roy would say, “Anyone seen that new film at the pictures?” You would literally be rid of Alf in two minutes. He’d be off, gone.’ Hugh McIlvanney told me that he could see the change in Alf’s personality as soon as he shifted the ground onto football. ‘Alf liked a drink and he could get quite bitter when he was arguing about football. That front of restraint, which was his normal face for the public, was pretty superficial; he quite liked to go to war. All the insecurity he so obviously had socially did not apply for a moment to football. He was utterly convinced of his case – and with good reason. He was a great manager in any sense.’
It is impossible to deny that, in his obsession with football, Sir Alf was a one-dimensional figure. He had a child-like affection for movies, especially westerns and thrillers, enjoyed pottering about his Ipswich garden and was genuinely devoted to Vickie. But he was uneasy with any discussions about politics, current affairs or art beyond privately mouthing the conventional platitudes of suburban conservatism. An unabashed philistine, he turned down an offer to take the England team to a gala evening with the Bolshoi Ballet during a trip to Moscow in 1973; instead, he arranged a showing of an Alf Garnett film at the British Embassy. He had an ingrained xenophobic streak, and had little time for any foreigners, in whose number he included the Scots. In fact, his dislike of the ‘strange little men’ north of the border was so ingrained that one Christmas, when he was given a pair of Paisley pyjamas as a present, he soon changed them at the shop for a pair of blue and white striped ones.
Nigel Clarke, the experienced journalist who worked more closely with Sir Alf than anyone else in Fleet Street and wrote his column for the Daily Mirror in the 1980s, provides this memory: ‘Alf was certainly conservative with a small ‘c’. But he was not a worldly man and we never really talked about current affairs or wider political issues. He was just happy talking about football. I think that was partly because he knew the subject so well. He could talk about football until the cows came home. He never wanted to discuss governments or religion or anything like that. His life revolved around football. He had little conversation about anything else. His face would lighten up when you mentioned something about the game. We would be sitting in the compartment of a train, going to cover a match for the paper, and Alf would be dozing. Then I might refer to some player and his eyes would open, he would sit up instantly, and say, ‘Oh really, yes, I know him. I saw him play recently.’ He just loved football, loved anyone who shared his passion for it.’
When it came to football itself, Sir Alf Ramsey was anything but a one-dimensional figure. Beneath his placid exterior, the flame of his devotion to the game burned with a fierce intensity. It was a strength of commitment that made him one of the most contradictory and controversial managers of all time. He was a tough, demanding character, who could be strangely sensitive to criticism, a reserved English gentleman who was loathed by the establishment, an unashamed traditionalist who turned out to be a tactical revolutionary, a stern disciplinarian who was not above telling his players to ‘get rat-arsed’. His ruthlessness divided the football world; his stubbornness left him the target of abuse and condemnation. But it was his zeal that put England at the top of the world.
ONE Dagenbam
The Right Honourable Stanley Baldwin, the avuncular leader of the Conservative Party in the inter-war years, was not usually a man given to overstatement. But in 1934 he was so impressed by the new municipal housing development at Becontree in Dagenham that he was moved to write in an official report:
If the Becontree estate were situated in the United States, articles and newsreels would have been circulated containing references to the speed at which a new town of 120,000 people had been built. If it had happened in Vienna, the Labour and left Liberal press would have boosted it as an example of what municipal socialism could accomplish. If it had been built in Russia, Soviet propaganda would have emphasized the planning aspect. A Pudovkin film might have been made of it – a close up of the morning seen on cabbages in the market gardens; the building of the railway lines to carry bricks and wood, the spread of the houses and roads with the thousands of busy workers, gradually engulfing the fields and hedges and trees. But Becontree was planned and built in England where the most revolutionary social changes can take place and people in general do not realize they have occurred.
The Becontree estate was certainly dramatic in conception and scale. It was first planned in 1920, when the London County Council saw that a radical expansion in the number of homes would be needed to the east of the city, in order both to provide accommodation for the men returning from the Great War and to alleviate the terrible slum conditions of the East End. This was to be Britain’s first new town, a place providing ‘homes fit for heroes’. The scheme to convert 3000 acres of land into a vast urban community was, as the LCC’s architect boasted, ‘unparalleled in the history of housing’. The establishment of the Ford motor works in Dagenham in 1929 was a further spur to the urbanization of the area. By 1933, with the building programme reaching its peak, the LCC proclaimed that, ‘Becontree is the largest municipal housing estate in the world.’
Right in the midst of this gargantuan sprawl, untouched by bulldozer or bricklayer, there stood a set of rustic wooden cottages. These low, single-storey dwellings had been built in 1851, when Dagenham was entirely countryside. For all their quaintness, they were extremely primitive, devoid of any electricity or hot running water. And it was in one of them, Number Six Parrish Cottages, Halbutt Street, that Alfred Ernest Ramsey was born on 22 January 1920, the very year that saw the first proposals for the Becontree Estate. The row of Parrish Cottages remained throughout the development of the estate, an architectural and social anachronism holding out against the tide of modernity. They did not even have electricity installed until the 1950s and they were not finally pulled down until the early 1970s. In one sense, the cottage of his birth is a metaphor for the life of Alf Ramsey: the arch traditionalist, modest in spirit and conservative in outlook, who refused to be swept along by the social revolution which engulfed Britain during his career.
For much of his early life, Ramsey was not completely honest about his date of birth. In his ghost-written autobiography, published in 1952, he stated baldly that he was born ‘in 1922’, without giving any details of the month or the day. Now the reason for this was not personal vanity but sporting professionalism. When Ramsey was trying to force his way into League football at the end of the Second World War, a difference of two years could make a big difference to the prospects of a young hopeful, since a club would be more likely to take on someone aged 23 than 25. In such a competitive world, Ramsey felt he had to use any ruse which might work to his advantage. His dishonesty was harmless, and it passed largely unnoticed until after he received his knighthood in 1967. Having been asked to check his entry for Debrett’s Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage and Companionage, Sir Alf decided not to mislead that most elevated of reference works. As Arthur Hopcraft put it in the Observer, ‘Alf Ramsey the dignified, the aspirer after presence, could not, I am convinced, give false information to the book of the Peerage.’ But by then the issue of his age had ceased to matter; in any case, because of the stiffness of his character, he had always seemed much older than his stated years.
Parrish Cottages may have become outdated with the arrival of the Becontree Estate, but when Alf Ramsey was an infant they were typical of rural Dagenham, where farming was still the main source of subsistence. ‘Dagenham was like a little hamlet. It was much more countrified until they built the big estate. There was a helluva lot of open space here in the twenties,’ says one of Alf’s contemporaries Charles Emery. ‘Most people think of Dagenham as an industrial area. But until I was six there was nothing but little country lanes. I saw Dagenham grow and grow,’ Alf wrote in 1970. A reflection of that environment could be seen at the Robin Hood pub in the north-west of the borough, where customers drank by the light of paraffin or oil lamps, and the landlord had to double as a ploughman. As one account from 1920 ran: ‘A customer would enter the bar and finding it empty, would shout across the fields for the landlord. After a time he would arrive, and wiping his hands free from the soil, would draw a pint of beer, have a talk about the weather, and then depart again to the fields.’
A striking picture of life in Dagenham in the early twenties was left by Fred Tibble, who died in 2003 after serving as a borough councillor for 35 years. He grew up with Alf, often playing football and cricket with him, and remembered him as ‘a very quiet boy who really loved sport’. The late Councillor Tibble had other memories:
We were very much Essex, we were country people. Many people came to the village selling things. There was a muffin man, who would come to the area once a week, ringing a bell with a tray of muffins on his head. The voluntary fire brigade was based in Station Road in the early 1920s, and when the maroon sounded, men would have to leave their jobs and homes to man the appliances. It could be difficult in the daytime, as they would have to try to get the horse which was being used for the milk round. At the weekends and summer evenings, the police used a wheel-barrow to take drunks from the pub to the police station. The drunks would be strapped into the barrow. We always found that amusing. Sometimes we would climb up the slaughterhouse wall to take a look at cattle being pole-axed. We often hoped to get hold of a pig’s bladder, which we could stuff with paper and play football with.
It was a country life that young Alf relished, especially because it provided such scope for football. He wrote in Talking Football:
Along with my three brothers, I lived for the open air from the moment I could toddle. The meadow at the back of our cottage was our playground. For hours every day, with my brothers, I learnt how to kick, head and control a ball, starting first of all with a tennis ball and it is true to say that we found all our pleasure this way. We were happy in the country, the town and cinemas offering no attractions to us.
But it was also a deprived existence, one that left him permanently defensive about his background. ‘We were not exactly wealthy,’ he admitted euphemistically. His later fastidious concern for his appearance stemmed from the fact that his family was poorer than most in the district, so he was not always dressed as smartly as he would have liked. If anyone commented on this difference, he retreated further into his shell, ‘We grew up together in Halbutt Street. Alf was very introverted, not very forthcoming. I sometimes went to his house, a very old cottage, little more than a wooden hut. His family were just ordinary people. He was not especially well-turned out as a child. That only came later, when he bettered himself,’ says his contemporary Phil Cairns.
Alf’s father, Herbert Ramsey, made a precarious living from various manual activities. He owned an agricultural small-holding, while on Saturdays he drove a horse-drawn dustcart for the local council. He also grew vegetables and reared a few pigs in the garden at the front of Parrish Cottages. He has sometimes been described as ‘a hay and straw dealer’, though it is interesting that when Alf married in 1951, he referred to his father’s occupation as a ‘general labourer’. Others, less generously, have said he was little more than a ‘rag-and-bone man’. Alf’s mother, Florence, was from a well-known Dagenham family called the Bixbys.
Pauline Gosling, who was a neighbour of the Ramseys in Parrish Cottages, recalls:
The cottages had outside toilets and no hot water. If you wanted a bath, you had to heat up the water in a copper pan and then fill a tin tub by the fire. Friday was usually bath night. There was no electricity, so you had to use oil lamps. If you wanted to go out to the toilet at night, you had to take one of those. Alf’s mother was a lovely lady. She and my mother were very close. They were a quiet family, very private, like Alf. They had worked the land for years around Dagenham. My own great-grandfather used to work on the land with Alf’s great grand-dad.
Gladys Skinner, another former neighbour, says:
There was an outside loo in a little shed in their back garden. You could see their tin bath hanging up on the wall outside. They were never a family to tell other people their business. Alf’s mother was a dear old thing. When they were installing electricity round here, she wouldn’t have it, said it frightened her. Alf’s father was also a very nice man. He sometimes kept pigs and we would go round have a look at the little piglets in the garden.
Alf always maintained that his was a close family. ‘My mother is in many ways very like me. Like me she doesn’t show much emotion. She didn’t, for instance, seem very excited when I received my knighthood. But she is very human and I like to think I was like her in that respect,’ he wrote in a 1970 Daily Mirror article about his life. He also felt that, despite the lack of money, his parents had taught him how to conduct himself properly. ‘He told me that he was brought up very strictly and that is why he was such a stickler for punctuality and courtesy. He said that it was part of his upbringing to be courteous and polite to people,’ says Nigel Clarke.
Alf was one of five children. He had two older brothers, Len and Albert, a younger brother Cyril, and a sister, Joyce, though he was the only one to go on to achieve public distinction. Cyril worked for Ford; Len, nicknamed ‘Ginger’, became a butcher; and Joyce married and moved to Chelmsford. Albert, known in Dagenham as ‘Bruno’, was the least inspiring of the siblings, utterly lacking in Alf’s ambition or focus. A heavy drinker, he earned his keep from gambling and keeping greyhounds. Alf himself was always interested in the dog track, liked a bet and was a shrewd gambler. But he never allowed it to dominate his life in the way that Albert did. ‘Bruno was a big chap. I can picture him now, with a trilby turned up at the front. He had a great friend called Charlie Waggles and the two of them never went out to work. At the time I thought that was terrible. They just gambled on the dogs,’ says Jean Bixby, who grew up in Dagenham at this time. In later life, Bruno’s disreputable life would cause Alf some embarrassment.
From the age of five, Alf attended Becontree Heath School. Now demolished, Becontree Heath had a roll of about 200, covering the ages of four to fourteen. Alf was neither especially diligent about his lessons nor popular with his fellow pupils. ‘I was never particularly clever at school. I seem to have spent more time pumping at footballs and carrying goalposts,’ Alf once said. ‘He was a year above me but I remember him all right. Know why? ’Cos he looked like a kid you wouldn’t get to like in a hurry,’ said one of them in a Sun profile of Sir Alf in 1971. For all his introspection, Alf was not a cowardly child, as he proved in the boxing ring at school. ‘I weighed only about five stones, but I was a tough little fighter. I won a few fights,’ he later recalled. But when he was ten years old, he was pulverized in a school tournament by a much larger opponent. ‘He was about a foot bigger than I was and I was as wide as I was tall. I was punched all over the ring.’ That put a halt to his school boxing career, though for the rest of his life he retained a visible scar above his mouth, a legacy of that bout. Alf was also good at athletics, representing the school in the high jump, long jump, and the one hundred and two hundred yards. And he was a solid cricketer, with a sound, classical batting technique.
But, as in adulthood, football was what really motivated Alf Ramsey. ‘He did not have much knowledge of the world. The only thing that ever seemed to interest him was football,’ says Phil Cairns. ‘He was very withdrawn, almost surly, but he became animated on the football field.’ From his earliest years, Alf demonstrated a natural ability for the game, his talent enhanced not only by games in the fields behind Parrish Cottages, but also by the long walk to and from school with his brothers. To break the monotony of the journey, which took altogether about four hours a day, the boys brought a small ball with them to kick about on the country lane. On one occasion, Alf accidentally kicked the ball into a ditch, which had filled with about three feet of water after heavy rainfall. He was instructed by his brothers to fish it out. So, having removed his shoes and socks, he waded in, soon found himself out of his depth, and was soaked to the skin. On his return home, he developed a severe cold and was confined to bed for a week. He wrote later: ‘That heavy cold taught me a lesson. I am certain that those daily kick-abouts with my brothers played a much more important part than I then appreciated in helping me secure accuracy in the pass and any ball control I now possess.’
Alf’s ability was soon obvious to his schoolmasters. One of his teachers, Alfred Snow, recalled in the Essex and East London Recorder in 1971: ‘I was teaching at Becontree Heath Primary and I taught Alf Ramsey for two years. I remember him particularly well because he was so good on the football field. It didn’t really surprise me to see him get where he has.’ At the age of just seven, Alf was placed in the Becontree Heath junior side, in the position of inside-left. His brother Len was the team’s inside-right. Alf’s promotion to represent his school meant that, for the first time, he had to have proper boots. His mother went out and bought him a pair, costing four shillings and eleven pence – with Alf contributing the eleven pence from the meagre savings in his own piggy bank. ‘If those boots had been made of gold and studded with diamonds I could not have felt prouder than when I put them on and strutted around the dining room, only to be pulled up by father. “Go careful on the lino, Alf,” he said, “those studs will mark it,”’ Alf’s ghost-writer recorded in Talking Football.
By the age of just nine, Alf, despite being ‘a little tubby’, to use his own phrase, had proved himself so outstanding that he was made the school’s captain, commanding boys who were several years older than himself. He had also been switched to centre-half, the key position in any side of the pre-sixties era. Under the old W-M formation which was then the iron tradition in British soccer, based around two full-backs, three half-backs, two wingers and three forwards, the centre-half was both the fulcrum of the defence and instigator of attacks. It was a role ideally suited to Alf’s precocious footballing intelligence and the quality of his passing.
His performances brought him higher honours. He was selected to play for Dagenham Schools against a West Ham Youth XI, then for Essex Schoolboys, and then in a trial match for London schools. But in this match, Alf’s diminutive stature told against him. He wrote:
I stood just five feet tall, weighed six stone three pounds and looked more like a jockey than a centre-half. In that trial, the opposing centre forward stood five feet, ten and half inches and tipped the scale at 10 stone. After that game I gave up all hopes of playing for London. That centre-forward hit me with everything but the crossbar, scored three goals and in general gave me an uncomfortable time.
Compounding this failure, a rare outburst of youthful impetuosity led to a sending-off for questioning a decision of the referee during a match for Becontree Heath School. The Dagenham Schools FA ordered him to apologize in writing to both the referee and themselves. He did so promptly, but it was not to be his last clash with the authorities.
For all such problems, Alf had shown enormous potential. ‘He was easily the best for his age in the area,’ says Phil Cairns. ‘He was brilliant, absolutely focused on his game. He was taking on seniors when he was still a junior. Everyone in Dagenham who was interested in football knew of Alf because he was virtually an institution as a schoolboy. He was famous as a kid because of his football.’ Jean Bixby’s late husband Tom played with Alf at Becontree Heath: ‘Alf was a very good footballer as a boy. Tom said that he had great control and confidence. He always wanted the ball. He would say to Tom, “Put it over here.”’
Yet Alf’s schoolboy reputation did not lead to any approaches from a League club. He therefore never contemplated trying to become a professional footballer when he left Becontree Heath School in 1934. ‘I was very keen on football but one really didn’t it give much thought. There was no television then, and football was just fun to do,’ he told the Dagenham Post in 1971. Instead, he had to go out and earn a living in Dagenham to help support his family; this was, after all, the depth of the Great Depression in Britain, which spawned mass unemployment, social dislocation and political extremism. Alf first applied for a job at the Ford factory, where wages were much higher than elsewhere. But with dole queues at record levels, competition for work there was intense and he was rejected. Following a family conference about his future, he then decided to enter the retail trade, beginning at the bottom as a delivery boy for the Five Elms Co-operative store in Dagenham. The occupation of a grocer might not be a glamorous one, but at least it was relatively secure. People always needed food, and the phenomenal growth in the population of Dagenham in the 1930s provided a lucrative market for local businesses. In addition, there was a high demand for grocery deliveries in the area, because public transport was poor.
