The Goalkeeper’s History of Britain

Chapter 3

In Swift’s Succession

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.