Sir Alf. Leo McKinstry

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СКАЧАТЬ three pounds and looked more like a jockey than a centre-half. In that trial, the opposing centre forward stood five feet, ten and half inches and tipped the scale at 10 stone. After that game I gave up all hopes of playing for London. That centre-forward hit me with everything but the crossbar, scored three goals and in general gave me an uncomfortable time.

      Compounding this failure, a rare outburst of youthful impetuosity led to a sending-off for questioning a decision of the referee during a match for Becontree Heath School. The Dagenham Schools FA ordered him to apologize in writing to both the referee and themselves. He did so promptly, but it was not to be his last clash with the authorities.

      For all such problems, Alf had shown enormous potential. ‘He was easily the best for his age in the area,’ says Phil Cairns. ‘He was brilliant, absolutely focused on his game. He was taking on seniors when he was still a junior. Everyone in Dagenham who was interested in football knew of Alf because he was virtually an institution as a schoolboy. He was famous as a kid because of his football.’ Jean Bixby’s late husband Tom played with Alf at Becontree Heath: ‘Alf was a very good footballer as a boy. Tom said that he had great control and confidence. He always wanted the ball. He would say to Tom, “Put it over here.”’

      Yet Alf’s schoolboy reputation did not lead to any approaches from a League club. He therefore never contemplated trying to become a professional footballer when he left Becontree Heath School in 1934. ‘I was very keen on football but one really didn’t it give much thought. There was no television then, and football was just fun to do,’ he told the Dagenham Post in 1971. Instead, he had to go out and earn a living in Dagenham to help support his family; this was, after all, the depth of the Great Depression in Britain, which spawned mass unemployment, social dislocation and political extremism. Alf first applied for a job at the Ford factory, where wages were much higher than elsewhere. But with dole queues at record levels, competition for work there was intense and he was rejected. Following a family conference about his future, he then decided to enter the retail trade, beginning at the bottom as a delivery boy for the Five Elms Co-operative store in Dagenham. The occupation of a grocer might not be a glamorous one, but at least it was relatively secure. People always needed food, and the phenomenal growth in the population of Dagenham in the 1930s provided a lucrative market for local businesses. In addition, there was a high demand for grocery deliveries in the area, because public transport was poor.

      Alf immediately demonstrated his conscientious, frugal nature by giving the great majority of his earnings to the family household. ‘Every day I’d cycle my way around the Dagenham district taking to customers their various needs. My wages were twelve shillings a week. Of this sum, I handed over ten shillings to my mother, put a shilling in the box as savings and kept a shilling for pocket-money,’ he wrote. After several years carrying out these errands, Alf graduated to serving behind the counter at the Co-op shop in Oxlow Lane, only a short distance from his home in Halbutt Street.

      He later claimed to be happy in his job, but what he missed was football. For two whole years, he could not play the game at all, since he had to work throughout Saturday and there was no organized soccer in Dagenham on Thursdays, when he had his only free afternoon. But then, in 1936, a kindly shopkeeper by the unfortunate name of Edward Grimme intervened. Grimme had noticed that a large number of talented Dagenham schoolboy footballers were being lost to the game because of their jobs. So he decided to set up a youth team called Five Elms United. Because of his excellent local reputation, Alf was soon asked to join. He had no hesitation in doing so, despite the weekly sixpence subscription, which left him hardly any pocket money. But he did not care. He was once more involved with the game he loved.

      Grimme’s Five Elms United held their meetings on Wednesday evenings and played on Sunday mornings in a field at the back of the Merry Fiddlers pub. Playing on the Sabbath was officially banned by the FA in the 1930s. Strictly speaking, after breaking this rule, Alf Ramsey should have been obliged to apply for reinstatement with the Association, once he became a League player, by paying a fee of seven shillings six pence. ‘I was most certainly conscious that Sunday football was illegal then but it presented me with the only opportunity to play competitive football. Technically, I suppose, never having paid the reinstatement fee, I should never have been allowed to play for England or Spurs or Southampton,’ Alf wrote later. So, in effect, the World Cup was won by an ineligible manager.

      Playing again at centre-half, Alf showed that none of his ability had disappeared, despite his two-year absence from the game. In fact, he was physically all the more capable because of his growth in height and his regular exercise on the Co-op bicycle. Tommy Sloan, now one of the trustees of the Dagenham Football club, saw Alf play regularly before the war on the Merry Fiddlers ground: ‘It was quite a good pitch there. All the lads played in the usual kit of the time, big shin guards and steel toe caps in their boots. Alf was a very impressive player. He used to tackle strongly, but fairly. He had a very powerful kick, especially at free kicks. He was subdued, never threw his weight about and was a model for any other youngster.’ Alf himself felt he benefited from the demanding nature of those teenage games with Five Elms, ‘I have often looked back upon those matches. Most of them were against older and better teams but we all learnt a good deal from opposing older and more experienced players. They were among the most valuable lessons of my life.’

      It is interesting that many of the traits that later defined Alf Ramsey, including his relentless focus on football, his taciturnity and his attempt at social polish, were apparent in his teenage years. For all the poverty of his upbringing in Parrish Cottages, he had nothing like the usual working-class boister-ousness of his contemporaries. George Baker, who grew up near Halbutt Street and later became head of the borough’s recreation department, told me: ‘I was born within two years of Alf and I knew him and his brothers. As a lad, he was not like the locals. He somehow seemed a bit intellectual, a bit distant. He spoke a little bit better than the rest of us. He was pleasant, but he was different.’ Beattie Robbins came to know him in the thirties, because one of her relatives worked with him in the Co-op: ‘I remember him as well spoken, just as he was in later life. He was very nice, but seemed quite shy. I knew him best when he was about 17. He was polite, dignified, a very reserved person. We once went on a coach trip to Clacton with the Five Elms team and he sat quietly on the bus at the front. He did not play around much like some of the others. His life seemed to be just football.’

      As he grew older, Alf appeared only too keen to distance himself from his Dagenham roots. The journalist Max Marquis wrote sarcastically in his 1970 biography of Ramsey, ‘There are no indications that Alf is overburdened with nostalgia for his birthplace…in fact the impression is inescapable that he would like to forget all connections with it.’ His Dagenham contemporary Jean Bixby, who worked with Alf’s brother Cyril at Ford, argues: ‘The trouble with Alf Ramsey was that he tried to make himself something that he wasn’t. He went on to mix in different circles and he tried to change himself to fit in with those circles. Yes, even as a child he was slightly different, but he was still ordinary Dagenham. Then he went away and changed. He was not one of the boys anymore. He became conservative, not like the others who all stuck together. He was one apart from them.’

      At the heart of this unease, it has often been claimed, was a feeling of embarrassment not just over the poverty of his upbringing, but, more importantly, over the ethnic identity of his family. For Sir Alf Ramsey, knight of the realm and great English patriot, was long said to come from a family of gypsies. This supposed Romany background was reflected in the family’s fondness for the dog track, in the obscure way his father earned his living and in Alf’s own swarthy, dark features. ‘I was always told that he was a gypsy. And when you looked at him, he did look a bit Middle Eastern,’ says his former Tottenham Hotspur colleague Eddie Baily. Alf’s childhood nickname in Dagenham, ‘Darkie Ramsey’, was reportedly another indicator of his gypsy blood. ‘Everyone round here referred to him as “Darkie” and it was to be years later that I found out his name was actually Alf,’ recalled Councillor Fred Tibble. Even today, in multi-racial Britain, there is less tolerance towards gypsies than towards most other ethnic minority groups. And the problems of prejudice would have loomed СКАЧАТЬ