Sir Alf. Leo McKinstry
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Название: Sir Alf

Автор: Leo McKinstry

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

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isbn: 9780007371174

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ