Sir Alf. Leo McKinstry

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       TWO The Dell

      A local government study of Dagenham in 1938 described the local population thus:

      Many are rough diamonds, but still diamonds. There is a general readiness to help each other when in trouble, a readiness to support various causes (but only after protracted and heated argument), an appreciation of good music, the usual fondness for Picture Palaces and an undue attachment to the Dance hall.

      Eighteen-year-old Alf Ramsey could not easily have been described as a Dagenham ‘rough diamond’. He showed no interest in dancing, was shy with women despite his dark good looks, had few musical tastes and avoided arguments except when they involved football. He had, however, developed an enthusiasm for the movies, one that was to stay with him all his life and would cause much amusement to the players under his management. He saw his first film when he was fourteen, a jungle adventure with Amercian B-movie star Jack Holt in the leading role. Alf soon had acquired a particular fondness for westerns, which so often revolved around the theme of a tight-lipped heroic outsider triumphing over the natives, the bad guys or the corrupt authorities.

      But his first love remained football. During the 1937-38 season, he was playing better than ever at centre-half with Five Elms United, as he recorded himself: ‘Since leaving school I had developed into quite a hefty lad, and in my heart I knew I had improved my football.’ His exploits in the Five Elms defence brought him to the attention of Portsmouth, one of the country’s senior League clubs. He and two other Five Elms players were approached by experienced scout Ned Liddell, who was for a time manager of Brentford, and asked if they might be interested in signing for Portsmouth as amateurs. Before this, claimed Alf, the thought of becoming a League player ‘had never entered my mind. After all, I was too modest to think I was anything much as a footballer. I just played the game for fun and the exercise that went with it.’

      For a young man obsessed with the game, the chance to play at the highest level was a glittering prospect. But he hesitated for a moment. Apart from some natural uncertainty about his ability, Alf was also worried about the financial insecurity of life in League football. After all, hundreds of youths were taken on every year by the 88 League clubs but very few of them made a decent living. Alf already had a secure job in the Co-op store in Oxlow Lane near his home; by 1938 he had graduated from delivery boy to counter hand and bill collector, the latter a role which required a certain amount of toughness. ‘Going out to collect the bills occupied Monday morning as far as I was concerned. There were no embarrassing moments when collecting money. People either paid or they didn’t, but in the main they paid.’

      But when Alf met Ned Liddell again, he was assured that there would be no problem about keeping his Co-op job if he signed as an amateur. Moreover, Alf’s family were not opposed to the idea. ‘Well, son, it’s up to you,’ said his mother. So Alf, now relishing the thought of joining a top club, filled in the forms and sent them off to Fratton Park, Portsmouth’s ground. He waited eagerly for a reply. None came: not a letter, a card, a telegram, a word from Ned Liddell. The weeks passed in silence until Alf gave up hope. ‘No one, it seemed, was interested in young Ramsey of Dagenham,’ he wrote later.

      Portsmouth’s gross discourtesy was a seminal experience for Alf. It left him with a profound distrust of the men running football, the club directors and officials who treated players with such haughty contempt and undermined careers with barely a thought. He came to share the view of Harry Storer, the hard-nosed Derby County manager who once questioned the right of a certain director to be an FA selector. Having been told that this director had been watching the game for 50 years, Storer replied: ‘We’ve got a corner flag at the Baseball Ground. It’s been there for 50 years and still knows nothing about the game.’ As Stanley Matthews, who suffered from the administrators’ arrogance as much as anyone, ruefully commented: ‘Players were treated as second-class citizens. Football was a skill of the working class but those who ran our game were anything but.’ Portsmouth’s rudeness ensured that Alf, when he became a manager, never acted in such a cavalier manner; his concern for the well-being of professionals was one of the reasons he always inspired such loyalty.

      Ignored by Portsmouth, Alf carried on working at the Oxlow Lane Co-op for the next two years, playing football in the winter, cricket in the summer. Nigel Clarke recalls:

      I happened to mention to him one day that my son loved cricket. The next time we met at Liverpool Street station he turned up with a bat. It was a 1938 Gunn and Moore triple-spring, marked with the initials of his club, The General Co-operative Sports and Social Club. Alf said to me, ‘Make sure he uses it well. This one made plenty of runs for me.’

      He also occasionally went with his brothers to League matches at Upton Park; the first ever match he saw was West Ham against Arsenal, during which he was particularly impressed with the Gunners’ deep-lying centre-forward and play-maker Alex James, ‘a chunky little fellow in long shorts’.

      As with millions of other Britons, the quiet routine of Alf’s provincial life was shattered with the arrival of the Second World War. In June 1940, ten months after the outbreak of hostilities, Alf was called up for service in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry and was despatched to a training unit in Truro. It is a reflection of the narrowness of Alf’s upbringing that he looked on his first journey to Cornwall with excitement rather than trepidation. Taking ‘so famous a train as the Cornish Riviera was in itself a memorable experience for me. As a matter of interest, until I travelled to Cornwall, the longest journey I had undertaken was a trip to Brighton by train,’ he wrote. The thrill continued when he arrived in Truro and was billeted in a top-class hotel, which had been commandeered by the army. ‘This proved another memorable moment for me. It was the first time I had ever been into a hotel! Even with us sleeping twelve to a room on straw mattresses could not end for me the awe of living in a swagger hotel.’

      Throughout his life Alf frequently appeared to be a naïve, other-worldly character, oblivious to political considerations, and that was certainly true of his delight at his surroundings in Cornwall. At the very time Britain was engaged in a life-and-death struggle for its survival as a nation, Alf was writing to his parents about the joy of ‘living in a luxury hotel’. Yet that set the tone for Alf’s war. He was luckier than most soldiers, spending all his years of active service up to VE Day on home soil. Never did he have to endure any of the brutal theatres of conflict like North Africa, Italy or Normandy. Attached to the 6th battalion of his regiment, his duties were in home defence, ‘guarding facilities, manning road blocks, and preparing against German paratroop drops,’ says Roy Prince, the archivist of the Duke of Cornwall’s Regimental Association. In retrospect, it was not dangerous work, though it was demanding, as Alf recalled: ‘The physical training we were so frequently given added inches to my height, broadened my chest and in general I became a fitter young fellow than when I reported for duty as a grocery apprentice from Dagenham.’

      Unlike so many whose lives were ruined by the genocidal conflict of the Second World War, Alf found military service almost wholly beneficial. It brought him out of his shell, and helped demonstrate his innate qualities of leadership. In 1952 he wrote:

      I have since reflected that to join the Army was one of the greatest things which ever happened to me. From my, to some extent, sheltered life, I was pitchforked into the company of many older and more experienced men. I learnt, in a few weeks, more about life in general than I had picked up in years at home. The Army, in short, proved a wonderful education.

      The aura of authority that Alf always possessed – which had seen him become captain of his school’s team at the age of just nine – led to his promotion to the rank of Quarter-Master Sergeant in an anti-aircraft unit. Nigel Clarke has this memory of talking СКАЧАТЬ