The Goalkeeper’s History of Britain

PETER CHAPMAN

Dedication

For Marie, Alex and Pepito,

my mum and dad,

Maria and Marie I.

Epigraph

‘… a nation of goalkeepers’

Napoleon I, speaking of the British (later misquoted)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

1. A Determined and Heroic Defence

2. More Flash than Harry

3. In Swift’s Succession

4. End of Empire

5. Neck on the Block

6. Into the Fire

7. Booked

8. The Distant Orient

9. Death on the Cross

10. Highways, Cemeteries, Cleansing and Baths

11. The Demise of Old Industrial Britain

12. On to the Pole

13. Long Game

14. Um Goleiro Inglês

15. Nation of Shotstoppers

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

A Determined and Heroic Defence

At the top of the street was a stretch of waste ground, a memorial in bumps and ruts to where the barrage balloon had flown. There hadn’t been another one for miles. Attached by cable to an air force lorry, it was lowered during the day, my mum told me, to be checked for signs of damage and deflation by the two airmen in charge of it. They sent it up again at night, its job to deflect any bombers that had overshot their main targets of the City and the docks. It had played its part in what all reports said had been a determined and heroic defence.

Ten years after the end of the conflict, signs of it were all around. Numbers 8 and 10, which stood next to each other on the canal side of the street opposite us, were a half shell of their original selves. From a padlocked gate in the railings, steps ran down into a basement area virtually covered with rubble to the pavement level. The weed-and tree-strewn interiors were home to a colony of cats, large enough in size and number to scare off the packs of stray dogs that wandered the street and surrounding area. The cats were fed by Mrs Clements, the elderly lady who lived on the top floor of our house. Three times a day she would rattle down four flights of stairs and across the road with tins of sour-smelling liver and fish relayed to her on their bikes by the competing catsmeat men of Frome Street and Camden Passage. In anticipation of her first delivery of the day, the cats would yowl through the pre-dawn hours.

A few doors down from us, all that remained of number 25 was a gap in the terrace. The 8 foot drop into what had been its basement was barred only by a few lengths of scaffold board and pole. The blind man on his way back home from work had no problem tapping his way past, but you wondered about the various male members of the Bray family who lived further down. On Saturday nights, they reeled and stumbled on their way home from post-licensing hours sessions in the York public house at the top of Duncan Street near the Angel. They shouted abuse at their wives, who attempted to remain a discreet distance in front of them.

Our street ran down from Colebrooke Row, which curved the quarter mile between City Road and Islington Green. Some Colebrooke Row houses had no railings around them, only stubs of iron a couple of inches long. My mum said they had been removed as soon as the war began, to be made into guns and ammunition. Both corners of Colebrooke Row and the street at our back, Gerrard Road, were wartime bombsites, used for bonfires on Guy Fawkes’ night. The stretch of waste ground where the barrage balloon had flown was right opposite the bombsites but never used for the occasion. This was possibly out of respect for the priest and nuns of St John’s, the red-brick Catholic church behind it, though no one openly made the religious connection. Irish and Italian families in the area threw rubbish and bits of unwanted furniture on the bonfires like everyone else.

Otherwise the Gerrard Road bombsites had no great use. They were certainly too rough for football or any other ball game. Encouraged by a fall of snow and reports that ice hockey was the fastest game in the world, I tried to emulate the Harringay Racers with two bits of wood knocked together by my grandad into a flat-bottomed stick. After two minutes trying to assert control over a few stones, I fell over and took a piece out of my right calf on some glass. I filled it with Germolene, a treatment my dad had applied after he had been bitten in the stomach one night by a large centipede when he was with the army in Sicily. A pink skin had formed over the hole in my leg by the morning. Harringay Racers disappeared no less miraculously soon after.

Playing with a ball in the street was largely confined to the walls of the houses at the very top. Both were used as factories and, for some reason long preceding the war, their windows had been bricked up. One belonged to Lowe’s the printers. My mum, who had been trained as a bookbinder, worked there on and off for some years. Mr Lowe had the shape of the Michelin man and the public demeanour of the Laughing Policeman. In slimmer yet grimmer times he had been a soldier with the Czechoslovakian army. After the Germans had taken over his country in 1938, his unit underwent a stage-by-stage retreat to England. He, his wife and two young daughters lived on the floor above his factory. They were Jewish. Other than sensing that no one else in the street was, I had little idea what this meant.

Mr Lowe spoke several foreign languages, including ‘Czechoslovakian’ and Hungarian, all of which strangely failed him when it came to swearing at his clients. Despite the fact they were often his fellow central Europeans, he did this very loudly in English. One of his better customers sold holidays under the name and advertising banner of ‘See Spain’, an exotic destination unknown to anyone in the area. Few who sought his services to print their brochures and baggage labels paid unless he went physically to shake the money out of them. He had to go through this process on most Fridays to get enough money in the bank to pay the staff’s wages.

He also swore at his staff but my mum and two or three other women who worked there – none of whom would have classified themselves as liberal on the subject of industrially colourful language – seemed only mildly offended. Should he cast doubt on their parentage or liken them to parts of the anatomy rarely mentioned at the time, he could be a ‘horrible man’. But to a degree he was excused the scorn which would be poured on locals who acted like this (the Saturday-night Brays, for example). It was assumed he could not have grasped the seriousness of what he was saying. It was the same if the people working for him were in his factory-come-house toilet at a time he wanted to use it. Mr Lowe would not retreat tactfully, as if relieving himself was the last thing on his mind, but wait outside and rattle on the door handle, shouting ‘How lonk vill you be in dere?’ He did not quite understand how we did things, which was to say, how they should be properly done.

This was entirely to the advantage of local kids when it came to playing up against his wall. He raised no objection. By contrast, the wall on the opposite corner we usually avoided. It belonged to a small engineering factory, populated by men in blue overalls who wore collars and ties beneath them as a symbol of the nation’s industrial standing. The foreman, in his white overall, was vigilant about the noise of ball on brickwork and would come out to complain that his workers’ concentration on their clanking machinery was being impaired. One day he caught me down the factory’s basement area after I’d climbed the railings to retrieve a ball. He threatened to call the police. I had no doubt he would or, for such a crime, that Scotland Yard would turn up in force.

We lived with my grandparents. My grandad was from the Exmouth Market, near Saffron Hill and the Italian area, where his mother had leased a shop and sold roast meals. The vicar at the Holy Redeemer church opposite – High Anglican, with nuns, mass and sense of mission among the toiling poor – challenged her on why she opened on Sundays. ‘Because it’s my best day, vicar,’ she said, ‘like yours’, which chased him off She had the same effect on my great-grandfather when he drank or gambled, and he’d flee for weeks at a time to a sister in Bedfordshire.

My nan was born just off Theobald’s Road in Holborn, a street or so back from the house where Disraeli lived. She spent much of her early life living in the City and Finsbury, near Smithfield Market and the Barbican, then later further north off the Goswell Road. Her grandmother was Italian, from a family she said sold ice cream – what they didn’t sell in the day was kept under the bed at night. My nan’s family was poor, not least because her father, a music printer, went blind when she was little, working by candlelight in the basement of the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand. When my grandparents married they moved across the Finsbury border into Islington, an advance of about a mile from their backgrounds.

My grandad earned most of his living in the years between the wars as a freelance bill poster, the mythical ‘Bill Stickers’. He worked alone, cycling miles with pastebrush, bucket and bills to beyond Hammersmith in one direction and the Burdett and East India Dock Roads in the other. A policeman once commandeered a milkman’s horse and cart to chase and arrest him in the Fulham Palace Road. The crowd outside a labour exchange shouted and converged on the policeman, who had to let him go. As big a threat was a rival cousin, whose gang would rip his work down. On one occasion they cornered him in a Finsbury mews and beat him up. Much of his bill posting work was for the Sporting Life. He also delivered papers and worked in Bouverie Street at the News of the World on Saturday nights, when the pay around Fleet Street’s machine rooms was particularly good.

In the absence of pension plans, each time he saved up enough he would buy a house as a hedge against old age. The average Islington price in the 1920s and ’30s was £200–350. He had three in our street, all on our side. Each was £50 dearer than houses bordering the Regent’s Canal opposite because of the problem they had with rats clambering up from the towpath. He had four others in Carnegie Street, one road over from where the canal came out after its mile-long journey through the tunnel that ran from Colebrooke Row to Bamsbury. My grandma’s oldest sister, Ada, who had played at the Collins music hall on Islington Green with Chaplin before he went to America (‘not a nice man’; he never spoke to her or the others in the chorus line), had lived in one of them. So had her son Teddy, who was a little older than my mum and a favourite cousin. All my grandad’s Carnegie Street houses, however, were destroyed one night in the bombing.

The London Blitz had started on a warm Saturday afternoon early in September 1940 when my mum and her sister were visiting Aunt Ada and cousin Teddy. He had a good job as a shop-fitter, which exempted him from military call-up since his skills were put to making rear-gunner placements on bombers. When the sirens sounded they didn’t want to be caught away from home, so Teddy walked them down through Chapel Market and along the small street round the back of the Agricultural Hall – a large building where farmers used to exhibit their prize animals and which had the look of King’s Cross railway station about it. At Upper Street by the Angel high pavement they stopped to watch the early moments of the raid. Planes were fighting to the south, away above the area of Moorgate and east over the docks. At the time it was a bit of a show. But the German planes were dropping incendiaries and, when it got darker, the sky over the City and river was alight. Then the real bombers came back.

In one of his broadcasts, Churchill – or the man who did his voice when he was away in the USA visiting Roosevelt-announced this as everyone’s ‘finest hour’. The family spent the initial month of raids in the basement, upright piano against the window. Stuck amid the machinery of the News of the World print room on the first night, my grandad wouldn’t believe how bad it was until he’d experienced it himself on the second.

From shortly after the first siren at about seven in the evening, to not much before 7 a.m. when the all-clear sounded, the house shook. Bombs landing nearby were both terrifying and of some comfort. Once one had exploded close at hand, the next in the string dropped by that plane would, reliably, be away and beyond. Much worse was the device at some point in the middle distance. The bomb straight after it could be the one to fall on you. The British guns continually fired back. (My mum said the sound was like that, two years later, of the Allied guns opening up at Alamein.) Maybe briefly you’d doze off. When you found yourself still alive after the planes had gone, it was impossible to imagine that, on looking outside, you’d find anyone or anything else had survived.

In the mornings my mother, who was seventeen, and her sister, my aunt Olive, who was younger by a year, walked to work down the City Road, picking their way through a chaos of rubble and firemen’s hoses. The City Road maternity hospital was among the bombed buildings one morning, its beds blown halfway out the windows. The teenagers worked at Waterlow’s in Old Street, which printed foreign banknotes. After a day spent staring at the face of Chiang Kai-shek, they walked home, had their tea, put on a pair of slacks and prepared for another night.

My grandad spent weeks looking for a location to get them out to, then was reminded of his distant aunt whom his father used to run away to from Exmouth Market. The family, including my mum’s one-year-old brother Keith, and other members like Great-aunt Ada, moved to about 50 miles away in Sandy, in Bedfordshire, where they found a place over a shop in the High Street.

Grandad stayed behind. Not wishing to join the crowd down the Angel tube, he offered to build a shelter in the backyard. Mrs Clements said she and her middle-aged children, Stanley and Lily, who lived with her on the top floor, would refuse to use it. So he converted the cupboard under the basement stairs. For a while the four of them shared this, crouched on two narrow benches. Stanley, who wore a detachable starched collar and was clerk to a firm of window cleaners in Camden Passage, sat with a suitcase on his knees packed for a hasty exit. He bemoaned my grandad’s lack of similar preparation, and fretted he could hear the rattles of the air-raid patrol men signalling a gas alarm. Grandad soon opted for the relative peace and comfort of sleeping out the raids in the ground-floor parlour.

Number 25 succumbed quietly one night to an inextinguishable incendiary. When numbers 8 and 10 opposite went up, the blast blew the front parlour window over the room, but grandad was out working in Fleet Street. A bomb just along from the backyard took six houses out of the terrace in Gerrard Road. Two bombs which landed on the corners of Gerrard Road set off fears of a gas explosion and everyone was evacuated to Owen’s boys’ school, 300 yards away. Mrs Clements, Stanley and Lily left in such a rush they forgot to take their suitcase and any money and grandad had to buy them a cup of tea.

A few raids later a bomb dropped down a ventilation shaft into the basement of the girls’ school on the other side of the Owen’s playground. Many of the several hundred people sheltered there were killed either by the blast or by drowning when the water mains burst. Coming out of the Angel tube next morning on her monthly visit to make sure grandad was still intact, my nan said the scene was ‘like a pit disaster’. Not that she knew it, but her youngest sister and one of my grandad’s sisters, Mary, were still to be pulled out. Both walked away from it alive, Great-aunt Mary with a stick thereafter. Off-duty soldiers were taking advantage of the mayhem to throw their pass books into the smoke and debris to fake their own deaths.

Grandad’s oldest sister, Polly, lived in Finsbury by the Ironmonger Row baths, an area not easy to survive in at the best of times. If you didn’t know the precise address of the person you were visiting, it wouldn’t have done any good inquiring of the locals – they’d assume you were the police or a debt-collector. On her own initiative Polly had gone down to the Northern line platforms at Old Street every night since a week before the war began. The tube was not officially being used for the purpose at the time, the government being reluctant to allow people underground during the raids lest they give the impression of a nation cowering in fear. Polly went down throughout the first twelve months of the ‘phoney war’ and, when the bombing started, was so petrified she almost had to be carried down. St Luke’s church, the few feet across Ironmonger Row from her house, had been destroyed as she resurfaced after one raid. She died towards the end of the Blitz for no obvious reason. Her heart had been none too good, and my grandad said he was sure she’d been frightened to death.

Our street’s great escape came when a 1,000-pound bomb struck the chimney stack on Siddy Bates’s house at number 40. Had it hit and gone through the slates of the roof, much around the house would have gone with it. The sudden and looming presence of the barrage balloon might have jogged the bomb aimer’s elbow the fraction required. I imagined the outcome. The bomb bounced off the stack – solid brickwork – and sailed into the air again. In a high arc, a tantalising parabola, the bomb flew towards the end of the 60-foot garden. But where would it land? Maybe an old, mythical goalkeeper stood down there, calmly watching as it dropped – flat cap, roll-neck jersey, positioned on his line, jumping at the last moment (actually giving little more than a nonchalant skip) to make sure the threat passed over. With his upstretched hand he’d have set the crossbar swaying up and down a couple of times, just to reassure all concerned he’d had it covered. Immediately beyond the garden and towpath the bomb fell into the canal, where it exploded beneath the brown and accommodating sludge. Next morning my grandma was on one of her visits. As she walked from the Angel tube, she said, the mud was splattered across the roadways, pavements and housefronts for streets around.

Her father died when the raids seemed to have come to an end. In his eighties, blind and in a wheelchair, he’d been either unwilling or unable to leave London and had sat out the bombing in his own private darkness in his house in one of the small Finsbury streets off Goswell Road. The family returned from Sandy for the funeral, Great-aunt Ada going to join her son Teddy, who had stayed on in Carnegie Street. Everyone assumed the bombing was more or less over, but the evening before the funeral saw one of the worst raids yet. Ada left quickly to go to the shelter at the end of the street but it was nearly full and there was nothing to sit on. Teddy ran back and was killed in a direct hit on the house.

From the Caledonian Road an air-raid patrol man saw him on the doorstep, coming out of the house carrying what he said looked like a chair. My mum and her sister were not allowed to see him. They later worked it out from what little they were told that he had been decapitated. His body was not in too much of a state, however, to deter whoever removed his wallet. It was assumed to have been one of the ARP men, ‘good people as a rule’ but in that area often market boys and bookies’ runners. Great-aunt Ada was left to come to terms with the loss of her father and son within a few days of each other. She came back to Sandy two weeks later and the family met her at the station, none of them with any idea what to say. All she said was, ‘We just have to start all over again.’

My mum and dad met soon after the family arrived in Sandy and were married fifteen months later. He had to be back at an army camp in the north of England the next day and was promptly sent to Africa and Italy for four years. She worked in the Naafi by the market square in Biggleswade, making 3,200 pounds of slab cake a day for the navy, army and air force. My dad said the army never saw any of it. After the war he moved back to Islington with her. War brides usually followed their husbands, but she had not exactly warmed to the country. Locals had sometimes wondered what Londoners were making all the fuss about and, worse, referred to the family as ‘evacuees’. As my nan, in a rare state of vexation, was keen to point out, they had not left London like hundreds of thousands had as part of some state-dependent evacuation programme: ‘We got ourselves out.’ My father was also easily persuaded that demand for a bricklayer would be nowhere as high as in London.

I was born in the first week of the National Health Service in July 1948, in a stately home near Welwyn Garden City. The story had it that Lord Brocket, its former owner and a Member of Parliament in the 1930s, had been led astray by Sir Oswald Mosley, Britain’s moustachioed champion of fascism, after which the state required an act of noble penance. No mention of this was made on the plaque later put on the lobby wall: ‘By the kindness of Lord Brocket’, it said, he gave over his Hertfordshire home to expectant women who, but for the destruction of the maternity hospital in City Road, would have been accommodated nearer home. I was born in the room above the front door, once the chamber of Lord Palmerston before he sent in one British gunboat too many and became fatally entwined with a maid on Brocket Hall’s billiard table. Lady Caroline Lamb, an earlier resident, served herself up naked from a large silver tureen on the birthday of her husband and prime minister, Lord Melbourne. While Melbourne was away on higher affairs of Georgian state, Byron probably passed through for a few grabbed moments of warmth and verse. My mother said it was a cold and sparse place. After the customary ten days of confining us there, and in the absence of ambulances or other transport, we took a taxi back to London.

At the upper end of the street, two adjoining houses lay between ours and the corner. They had been so shaken about by the bombs that two thick wooden props were placed diagonally from ground to the second floor to keep them up. Eventually the landlord accepted that the price of Islington property was never likely to rise and sold the freehold to the council, which promptly pulled the houses down. One of the families moved out to Ealing, where they had a garden. The demolition of the houses left ours at the top of the terrace. From here there was a sense of looking down and surveying the scene. The street sloped away gradually and became stranger the further it went. Our neighbours, up to about ten doors away, we knew reasonably well but even then people ‘kept themselves to themselves’. Two hundred yards away Danbury Street divided the street in two and was rarely crossed. Before the war the lower half had been called Hanover Street, until the London County Council decreed the name should be confined to a byway in the more prestigious West End. The road was united, to local disapproval. Our upper part of the street was different and believed to be better than the lower half. There was little in common between us, so no point in pretending we had the same identity.

I had to cross Danbury Street to reach Hanover school. Opposite was the Island Queen pub, where barrels were delivered through the trap door in the pavement from a large cart pulled by dray hones. Its front doors were thrown open at all times of the day. It looked a black hole of a place, with only vague shapes visible as you glanced in. It wouldn’t have done to look too long, since it was patronised by the very people from whom we kept ourselves to ourselves. Behind the school, around the banks of the canal, were the grey-bricked buildings of the British Drug Houses, the BDH. Viewed from our upper part of the street, they piled over the houses in the lower half like the bridge of a delapidated oil tanker. Chemicals in large green bottles bundled in straw and wire containers went into its entrance in Wharf Road. A smell akin to but several times more powerful than that produced when the gas board dug up the road rose out of it and over the school.