Sir Alf

A Major Reappraisal of the Life and Times of England’s Greatest Football Manager

This book is dedicated to the memory of Dermot Gogarty, 1958-2005

Another man of dignity, courage and leadership

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

ONE Dagenbam

TWO The Dell

THREE White Hart Lane

FOUR Belo Horizonte

FIVE Villa Park

SIX Portman Road

SEVEN Lancaster Gate

EIGHT Lilleshall

NINE Hendon Hall

TEN Wembley

ELEVEN Florence

TWELVE Leon

THIRTEEN Katowice

FOURTEEN St Mary’s

Bibliography

Index

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

Wembley, 30 July 1966. Amid scenes of jubilation, Geoff Hurst slams the ball into the top left-hand corner of the West German net. After a pulsating match, England are only seconds away from winning the World Cup. But as wave upon wave of ecstatic cheering echoes throughout the Wembley stadium, the England manager remains seated on the bench, showing not a flicker of emotion.

Sir Alf Ramsey’s almost superhuman calmness at the moment of victory has become one of the iconic images of the glorious summer of 1966. For all his outward imperturbability, no one had greater cause to rejoice than him. He was the true architect of England’s triumph, the man who had moulded his players into a world-beating unit. The experts and press had mocked when he had declared, soon after his appointment to the national job, that England would win the World Cup. After 1966, he was never laughed at again. Yet Ramsey was acting entirely in character on that July afternoon at Wembley. In his behaviour, he demonstrated the very qualities that helped to make him such a superb manager: his majestic coolness under pressure; his natural modesty which meant that he always put his players’ achievements before his own; his innate dignity and authority.

Since the World Cup victory, Sir Alf Ramsey has rightly been regarded as the greatest of all British football managers, winning at every level of the game. Through his tactical awareness, motivational powers and judgment of ability, he not only turned England into World Champions, but also, perhaps even more incredibly, he took unfashionable Ipswich Town from the lower reaches of the old Third Division South to the First Division title in the space of just six years. No other manager has been able to equal this record. Sir Alex Ferguson may have won a boardroom-full of trophies at Old Trafford, but he has been almost untested on the highest international stage. Similarly Sir Matt Busby, Brian Clough and Bob Paisley all gained the English championship and the European Cup, but none of them managed any national side, in Clough’s case to his bitter regret, having been turned down for the England job in 1977. Bill Shankly, the legendary boss at Anfield, and Stan Cullis, the iron manager at Molineux, each won three league titles and two FA Cups, but, again, their excellence was confined to the domestic arena. Of international British managers, Jack Charlton may have worked a near miracle with the Republic of Ireland but he could not do the same with any of his clubs, nor could Billy Bingham, who took modest Northern Ireland to successive World Cups in the eighties. Perhaps the man who comes closest to Ramsey was one of his successors at Portman Road, Sir Bobby Robson, who in his long and honourable career won the FA Cup and UEFA Cup with Ipswich Town, the Cup Winners’ Cup with Barcelona and two domestic championships with both PSV Eindhoven and Porto, as well as taking England to the semi-finals of the World Cup in 1990. But the greatest prize eluded him.

For all his extraordinary breadth of achievement, however, Sir Alf Ramsey has always been an elusive figure, an enigma whose life story has remained shrouded in mystery. A private, shy man, he was never at ease with the limelight and throughout his career had an awkward relationship with the media. Even those who worked with him for years, such as his secretary at Ipswich, Pat Godbold, or his longest-serving England player, Bobby Charlton, say that they never got to know him. Partly because of his insecurities about his humble upbringing, he built a protective shield around himself. In contrast to the expansive Sir Bobby Robson, who has written at least four versions of his autobiography, Alf never produced any memoirs, nor did he give many revealing interviews to the press.

There have been three previous books about Sir Alf, of varying quality. In 1970, the journalist Max Marquis wrote a thin, viciously skewed account, Anatomy of a Manager, which was based on recycling negative press stories about Sir Alf. It was hysterical in its vituperation, limited in its scope. Another book, England: The Alf Ramsey Years, by Graham McColl, published in 1988, dwelt entirely on his record as manager of the national team, though it did have the seal of Ramsey’s approval. A more comprehensive biography, Winning Isn’t Everything, was written in 1998 by Dave Bowler, who has also produced a superb life of Alf’s nemesis at Tottenham Hotspur, Danny Blanchflower. Bowler’s portrait was balanced and used much original testimony, and was particularly good on Alf’s tactical innovations. Yet it still left many aspects of Sir Alf’s life and career uncovered.

By dint of extensive research and interviews, I have sought to provide a fuller, more rounded portrait of this remarkable figure. I have been able to unearth new information about his upbringing, his marriage, his early social life, particularly when he was a player at Spurs, his relationship with his England team and the circumstances surrounding his sacking. During my research, I was intrigued to learn of the real reasons why England were knocked out of the World Cup in Mexico in 1970, when Sir Alf displayed a rare but disastrous neglect of certain logistical arrangements.

I have aimed to write more than just a conventional biography. By placing Ramsey in his historical context, I have also sought to analyse professional football and the fabric of British society over the span of his life. One of the many appealing features of Sir Alf’s story is the way it covered a revolution not only in soccer but also in social attitudes. The labourer’s son from Dagenham witnessed the end of the age of deference, the abolition of the maximum wage, the rise of the superstar player, the demise of amateur administrators, the collapse of rigid class structures, the first majority Labour government, the arrival of the permissive society and the disappearance of Empire. Ramsey himself, as a traditionalist in his personal outlook but a revolutionary on the soccer field, appeared to embody that fluid climate of resistance and change.

In helping me to cover this material, I owe a large debt to many people. A great number of ex-England and Ipswich footballers, who were managed by Alf, agreed to give interviews for this book, so I would like to record my thanks to: Jimmy Armfield, Alan Ball, Gordon Banks, Barry Bridges, Sir Trevor Brooking, Allan Clarke, Ray Clemence, George Cohen, John Compton, Ray Crawford, Martin Dobson, Bryan Douglas, John Elsworthy, the late Johnny Haynes, Ron Henry, Norman Hunter, Brian Labone, Jimmy Leadbetter, Francis Lee, Roy McFarland, Ken Malcolm, Gordon Milne, Alan Mullery, Andy Nelson, Maurice Norman, Mike O’Grady, Terry Paine, Alan Peacock, Mike Pejic, Ted Phillips, Fred Pickering, Paul Reaney, Joe Royle, Dave Sadler, Peter Shilton, Nobby Stiles, Ian Storey-Moore, Mike Summerbee, Derek Temple, Peter Thompson, Colin Todd, Tony Waiters and Ray Wilson. I must also express my gratitude to the many Southampton, Spurs and England footballers who gave me the benefit of their views about playing alongside Alf: Eddie Baily, Ted Ballard, Ian Black, Eric Day, the late Ted Ditchburn, Terry Dyson, Stan Clements, Bill Ellerington, Sir Tom Finney, Alf Freeman, Mel Hopkins, Tony Marchi, Arthur Milton, Derek Ufton and Denis Uphill. Ed Speight, a Dagenham-bred youth player at Spurs during Alf’s last days at White Hart Lane, generously showed me some of his correspondence with Alf.

I am, in addition, grateful to those journalists who gave me their views of Alf: Tony Garnett, Brian James, Ken Jones, David Lacey, Hugh McIlvanney, Colin Malam, Jeff Powell, Brian Scovell and Martin Tyler. I am especially indebted to Nigel Clarke, who knew Alf for more than 30 years and cowrote his column for the Daily Mirror in the eighties. Key figures at the FA during Alf’s reign, David Barber, Margaret Fuljames, Wilf McGuinness and Alan Odell, gave me many fascinating insights into Alf’s style of management, while I further benefited from speaking to Hubert Doggart, son of Graham Doggart, who chaired the FA committee that appointed Alf as England manager in 1962. Dr Neil Phillips, the national team doctor in the second half of Alf’s England career, could not have been more helpful with his advice and frank testimony.

Information about Alf’s early days in Dagenham was given by Cliff Anderson, George Baker, Jean Bixby, Phil Cairns, Charles Emery, Father Gerald Gosling, Pauline Gosling, Beattie Robbins, Joyce Rushbrook, Gladys Skinner and Tommy Sloan. Invaluable assistance about other aspects of Sir Alf’s life was provided by Terry Baker, Mary Bates, John Booth, Tommy Docherty, Anne Elsworthy, Peter Little, Margaret Lorenzo, Matthew Lorenzo, Bill Martin, Pat Millward, Tina Moore (widow of Bobby) and Bernard Sharpe.

Several experts were extremely generous in providing me with contact numbers and historical details: David Bull, author of an excellent life of Southampton stalwart Ted Bates; Rob Hadcraft, who wrote a fine study of Ipswich’s Championship-winning season in 1961-62; Kevin Palmer, amongst whose many works is a history of Spurs’ two titles in 1950-51 and 1960-61; and Andy Porter, who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of ex-professionals’ careers. Pat Godbold, still working at Ipswich after more than half a century, not only gave me an interview about her time as secretary to Alf but also helped with Ipswich contacts. Roy Prince, archivist with the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry Association, shed some light on Sir Alf’s army career.

For all their help with other research material, I am grateful to staff at the BBC archives, the ITN archives, the British Newspaper Library, Southampton Central Reference Library, the Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths, the Probate Division, the Press Association, the library of the Daily Mail, Tottenham Hotspur FC, the Barking and Dagenham Record office at Valence House Museum, the Barking and Dagenham Recorder and the Football Association.

Lady Victoria Ramsey, Sir Alf’s widow, felt she could not co-operate with this book, though she did write to me expressing how devoted she was to her late husband.

I would like to thank Tom Whiting and Michael Doggart at HarperCollins for overseeing this project and giving me endless encouragement and support.

Finally, I owe a huge debt to my dear wife Elizabeth, who put up with the many, isolated months I spent in research and writing without complaint. I can never thank her enough for putting me on the path to becoming an author.

Leo McKinstry

Coggeshall, Essex, April 2006

Introduction

15 May 1999. The ancient Suffolk church of St Mary-le-Tower in Ipswich had never previously held such a large or distinguished congregation. Three hundred mourners were crowded tightly on its polished wooden pews, while hundreds more lined the streets outside. England’s greatest living footballer, Sir Bobby Charlton, sat near the front, looking more sombre than ever. Alongside him were colleagues from the World Cup-winning team of 1966, including the bald, bespectacled Nobby Stiles, the flame-haired Alan Ball and Bobby’s own gangly brother Jack, who had left his Northumberland home at first light to attend the event.

They had gathered on a bright afternoon to pay their last respects at the memorial service of Sir Alfred Ernest Ramsey, the former England and Ipswich manager who had died at the end of April after a long illness. The venerable provincial setting was appropriate to the man whose life was being honoured, since modesty was one of the hallmarks of his personality. For all his success as both player and manager, for all his brilliance as a leader, he continually shunned the limelight and was uneasy with public adulation. The august Gothic expanse of Westminster Abbey or the classical grandeur of St Paul’s would not have suited a farewell for this least bombastic of men.

The personal qualities of Sir Alf were referred to throughout the service. Afterwards, outside the church, former players spoke of his loyalty, his essential decency and his strength of character. ‘He was an incredibly special manager. I just loved being with him, because I knew everything was straight down the line,’ said Alan Ball. ‘He was responsible for the greatest moment I had as a footballer and I will never forget or be able to thank him enough for that,’ said Jack Charlton.

In a moving eulogy, George Cohen, another of the 1966 Cup winners, described Ramsey as ‘not only a great football manager but a great Englishman’. Highlighting the way Sir Alf would stick by his players, Cohen gave the example of the occasion when Sir Alf refused to give in to pressure from FA officials to drop Nobby Stiles from the 1966 side after a disastrous challenge on the French player Jacques Simon. Though the tackle, according to Cohen, had been ‘so late Connex South East would have been embarrassed by it,’ Sir Alf supported Stiles to the hilt and even threatened to resign if the FA ordered him to change the team. In a voice cracking with emotion, Cohen continued: ‘Sir Alf established a strong bond with his players who stood before every other consideration. We all loved him very much indeed. What Alf created was a family that is still as strong today in feeling and belief as it was thirty-three years ago when we won the World Cup.’ Cohen then speculated as to how Alf might have reacted to such words of praise. ‘If he is looking down at this particular moment, he is probably thinking, “Yes, George, I think we have had quite enough of that.” Finally, Cohen turned in the direction of Sir Alf’s grieving widow, Lady Victoria. ‘Alf changed our lives, not just because of what we achieved with him but because our lives were richer for having known and played for him. He was an extraordinary man. Thank you for sharing him.’

Though the memorial service had been billed as ‘a celebration’ of Sir Alf’s life, it was inevitable that the day should also be wreathed in sadness at his loss. ‘I could not be more upset if he was family,’ said Sir Bobby Charlton. Big Ted Phillips, one of Ipswich’s strikers during Ramsey’s years at the Suffolk club, told me: ‘At Alf’s memorial service, I could not speak. There were tears rolling down my cheeks. They wanted me to say a few words, but I told them I couldn’t do it. Alf meant so much to me. He was a superb guy. He was unique. Under him at Ipswich, we were like a big family.’

Yet the sense of sorrow went much deeper than merely regret at the passing of one of England’s modern heroes. There was also a mixture of guilt, disappointment and anger that, during his lifetime, Sir Alf had never been accorded the recognition he deserved. He might have been the man who, in the words of Tony Blair, ‘gave this nation the greatest moment in our sporting history,’ but he was hardly treated as such by the football establishment. Throughout his career as England manager, many in the FA regarded him with suspicion or contempt. He was never given a winner’s medal for the 1966 World Cup victory, something that rankled with him right up to the moment of his death. His pay was always pitifully low, far worse than most First Division managers of his time, and when he was sacked in 1974, he was given only a meagre pension.

The last 25 years of his life were spent in a sad, twilight existence. The lack of money was compounded by the refusal of the football authorities to make any use of his unparalleled knowledge of the game. While football enjoyed an embarrassment of riches from the early nineties onwards, Sir Alf was left in uncomfortable exile, isolated and ignored. As late as 1996, the FA denied him any participatory role in the ceremonies to mark the opening of the European Championship in England. ‘I sometimes look back and become bitter about it. I achieved something perhaps no manager will ever do again, yet the wealth of the game passed me by. I would have liked to have retired in comfort, and have no worries about money, but that has not been the case. And I couldn‘t understand why, after I left the FA, nobody there was prepared to let me work for my country,’ he said in 1996.

This neglect of Sir Alf was symbolized by the absence from his memorial service of a host of key figures from the football world, despite the attendance of most of the 1966 side. Invitations were sent to all 92 Football League clubs, but only five of them were represented. Neither the then England manager Kevin Keegan nor any Premiership manager were present, though there were no fixtures that Saturday. Not one current England player showed up. As Gordon Taylor, Chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association, put it afterwards: ‘It is amazing. If we cannot honour our heroes, what is the point of it all – and was there ever a greater hero for our game than Sir Alf? Everyone in the English game who could have been here should have been. It is a matter of simple respect.’

But in truth, outside the confines of his England squad, respect was something that Sir Alf had rarely been shown. The reluctance to honour him was not confined to the FA. Ever since the triumph of 1966, he had been the subject of a stream of criticism for his approach to football. His manner was condemned as aloof and forbidding, his methods as over-cautious and ultra-defensive. He was widely seen as the leader who hated flair and distrusted genius, a dull man in charge of a dull team. ‘Ramsey’s Robots’ were said to have taken all grace and romance out of football. ‘Alf Ramsey pulls the strings and the players dance for him. He has theorized them out of the game. They mustn’t think for themselves. They have been so brainwashed by tactics and talks that individual talent has been thrust into the background,’ claimed Bob Kelly, the President of the Scottish FA. The 1966 triumph was belittled as the fruit of nothing more than perspiration, dubious refereeing and home advantage.

Indeed, many critics went even further, claiming that winning the World Cup had been disastrous for British football in the long-term, because it encouraged a negative style of play. Particularly regrettable, it was said, was his abandonment of wingers in favour of a mundane 4-3-3 formation, which relied more on packing the midfield than in building attacks from the flanks. Sir Alf’s enthusiasm for the aggressive Nobby Stiles was seen as typical of his dour outlook, as was his preference for the hard-working Geoff Hurst over the more creative, less diligent Jimmy Greaves in the final itself against West Germany. In Alf’s England, it seemed, the workhorse was more valued than the thoroughbred. The doyen of Irish football writers, Eamon Dunphy, who played with Manchester United and Millwall, put it thus: ‘Alf came to the conclusion that his players weren’t good enough to compete, in any positive sense, with their betters. His response was a formula which stopped good players.’ Similarly, the imaginative Manchester City coach Malcolm Allison argued that ‘to Alf’s way of thinking, skill meant lazy’.

This chorus of criticism reached full volume in the early seventies, when Sir Alf became more vulnerable because of poor results. He was the Roundhead who kept losing battles. As England were knocked out of the European Championship by West Germany in 1972, Hugh McIlvanney summed up the mood against Alf:

Cautious, joyless football was scarcely bearable even while it was bringing victories. What is happening now we always felt to be inevitable, because anyone who sets out to prove that football is about sweat rather than inspiration, about winning rather than glory, is sure to be found out in the end. Ramsey’s method was, to be fair, justifiable in 1966, when it was important that England should make a powerful show in the World Cup, but since then it has become an embarrassment.

Some of the attacks grew vindictive, with Alf painted as a relic of a vanishing past, clinging on stubbornly to players and systems no longer fit for the modern age. His old-fashioned, stilted voice and demeanour were mocked, his lack of flamboyance ridiculed. In early 1973, soon after England had beaten Scotland 5-0 at Hampden, with Mick Channon performing well up front, the satirical magazine Foul! carried a cruel but rather leaden article entitled ‘Lady Ramsey’s Diary’, parodying the Private Eye series of the time about Downing Street, ‘Mrs Wilson’s Diary’. One extract ran:

He’s terribly worried about this Mr Shannon (sic). ’You see, my dear,’ he told me (it’s amazing how different he sounds after those elocution lessons), ‘we just can’t afford to have individuals playing so well. It undermines the whole team effort. Besides, people will start expecting us to score five goals in every game, and we can’t have that.’

The critics had their way in April 1974, when Sir Alf was sacked as manager after eleven years in the post. The FA’s decision was hardly a surprise, given England’s failure to qualify for the World Cup the previous autumn. But it still fell as a painful blow to Sir Alf, one from which he never really recovered. He once explained that only three things mattered to him – ‘football, my country and my wife’. Football had turned out to be a fickle mistress, and for the remainder of his years he carried a feeling of betrayal. ‘Football has passed me by,’ he said towards the end of his life.

Since his sacking, no other England manager has come near to the pinnacle he climbed. When he departed in 1974, it seemed likely that England might one day reach that peak again. In the subsequent 30 years and more, however, the national side has endured one failure after another, with just two semi-finals in major championships during those three decades. Yet it should also be remembered that before Sir Alf’s arrival as manager in 1963, England’s record was equally dismal, having never gone further than a World Cup quarter-final; indeed in 1950, the national side suffered what is still the greatest upset in the history of global soccer, losing 1-0 to the unknown amateurs of the USA. Set in the context of England’s sorry history, therefore, the extent of Sir Alf’s achievement becomes all the more remarkable, putting into perspective much of the carping about his management.

He might not have inspired electrifying football, but for most of his reign he achieved results that would have been the envy of every manager since. Nobby Stiles told me: ‘I cannot say enough in favour of Alf Ramsey. His insights were unbelievable. I would have died for him.’ It is a telling fact that the 1970 World Cup in Mexico is the only occasion when England have ever gone into a major tournament as one of the favourites to win it – in 1966, England, still living with the burdens of their past record, were regarded as outsiders. The status that England had earned by 1970 in itself is a tribute to the supreme effectiveness of Ramsey’s leadership. Moreover, his success in 1962 in bringing the League Championship to Ipswich Town, an unheralded Third Division club before he took over, is one of the most astonishing feats in the annals of British football management, unlikely ever to be surpassed.