Football Nation: Sixty Years of the Beautiful Game

PART ONE

Introduction to Part One

In this first part we take up English football’s story at the end of the Second World War. By 1945 the professional game had been chaotic for six years. Some club grounds had been bombed or requisitioned, several clubs had been disbanded for a year or more and many players were absent with good reason. Wartime matches were almost all friendlies played on a regional basis – even international matches were unofficial – and there was no relegation or promotion. Players were often servicemen from other clubs who happened to be stationed nearby, and they received thirty shillings (£1.50) a match.

Then, in 1945–6, came a transitional season. Matches were arranged as League North and League South. More dramatically, the national FA Cup competition was restored to the calendar in January 1946. It was arranged on a two-legged basis to ensure that every professional club had at least one home FA Cup match.

In Football’s War and Peace Thomas Taw paints an intricate picture of the 1946–7 season. The lives of football people were dislocated and difficult as they tried to cope with a damaged infrastructure. Football equipment was substandard and travel facilities poor. The professional players’ union was in dispute with the authorities, and properties were so scarce that a club could attract a top-class player by offering a vacant house. That start-up post-war season was played through a very harsh winter and, with the frequent postponements and a ban on midweek matches, the League programme was not completed until 14 June 1947.

In the late 1940s football offered hope for the general populace, a chance to restore community and belonging. Towns and cities had to rebuild and one way to do so was symbolically, through support for local football teams. Fans flocked to grounds in huge numbers, whether it be in Barrow or Banstead, Winsford or Wolverhampton. But renewed vitality brought new problems: players risked injury during matches and when travelling to fixtures; and spectators faced danger from overcrowding and crushing. Fans did their best to take care of one another in the late 1940s, but sometimes the circumstances were impossibly difficult. Stadiums were often dilapidated and the management of crowds was crude.

Spectating reached a peak in the late 1940s and then slowly declined through the 1950s and beyond. Football helped people find stability, normality and familiarity after the war, and many fans remained loyal. This was an era of relative equality within the game. Seven different clubs won the Football League Championship in the first ten years after the war. Amateur teams (or so-called amateur teams) could compete with top-class professional opposition in FA Cup ties, and works teams regularly appeared in the first round of the FA Cup. Amateur players could be selected for the England national team, top amateur matches could attract 100,000 spectators and The Times devoted over a third of its football coverage to the amateur game.

The British home internationals – involving England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales – were more important than the fledgling World Cup (ignored by England until 1950). It was a time of expanding supporters’ clubs, continuing national service and shoulder-charging goalkeepers. Overseas trips were only for the top professional clubs and organised Sunday football was an illegal activity pursued by heathens and renegades. The biggest media development during this period was the launch of hospital radio commentaries. This was the last era before television emerged as a powerful force at professional football grounds.

While the children of the day may recall the era happily, most adults of the time found it austere, drab and grey. The gloom was lifted when floodlights arrived at professional football grounds in the fifties and captured everyone’s imagination and wit.

‘Come on, lads,’ one fan shouted. ‘Pylon the pressure.’

1

Don’t Mention the War

At the start of 1946 wartime experiences dominated the collective memory of football people. Men in their twenties gathered in football-club dressing-rooms in preparation for the sport’s quasi-battles, and their silent twelfth man was the Second World War. The psychological trauma would remain in the communal psyche through the next generation.

Take the sad case of the Daniel family. Bobby Daniel was a fantastic schoolboy footballer who captained Wales Schoolboys and signed for Arsenal at fourteen. As a teenager he played for a Welsh XI against Western Command and scored twice in a 4–1 wartime win. But 21-year-old Flight Sergeant Bobby Daniel, an air-gunner, was killed on a mission to Prague on Christmas Eve of 1943. His bereaved father told Bobby’s fifteen-year-old brother Ray, ‘You have to try to take over from Bobby.’ Ray Daniel was signed by Arsenal, and he went on to play for Wales, thinking that he had to be twice as good as others in case he was getting the chance to make up for brother Bobby.

Take also the fortunate example of Dennis Herod, Stoke City’s regular goalkeeper in the early 1940s. Herod joined the Royal Tank Regiment in Sicily and fought through Italy before the unit was recalled to England. He was back in action the day after the Normandy landings in the summer of 1944, half expecting to be a front-line victim. Instead he escaped a blazing tank with only a fractured jawbone. Herod’s war was over on medical grounds and he considered himself exceptionally lucky to be alive and back playing for Stoke City.

Or take the odd case of Henry Walters, who got his chance in the Wolverhampton Wanderers first team at sixteen because most full-time professionals had enlisted. Walters was exempt from the forces because he was serving a carpentry apprenticeship at a Yorkshire colliery. Instead he was sent to London to help repair bomb damage. On Saturday mornings he carried his boots and shin-pads in a Gladstone bag while he worked on derelict buildings. On Saturday afternoons he played as a guest for Clapton Orient. Walters saw Orient as the Cinderella club of London – he called them Clapton Ornaments – because the whole area, with its many factories, had suffered severe bombing. ‘The washing facilities weren’t too good,’ he told people after the war. ‘But there was usually a puddle somewhere.’

Sad, fortunate and odd.

In 1946 millions of sad, fortunate and odd stories were waiting to be told.

Private George Shaw spent too much of the Second World War in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. In the mountainous jungle he worked hard and perspired pints. As Japanese officers exerted their authority, waiting to beat the slackers and the sickly, Allied soldiers built sections of the Bangkok–Burma railway. A third of these prisoners died of torture, overwork, starvation or beriberi.

In tropical heat George Shaw and his mates swung cudgels and picks while trying to dodge the fall-out from dynamite explosions that sent debris flying at their bodies. The Japanese wore uniforms and heavy boots, but the prisoners were naked except for scraps of clothing that hid their private parts. Shaw was barefoot. With his long hair and unkempt beard he felt like a savage.

As he swung his pick, sweat dropping off his chin, Shaw spoke briefly to his nearest mate.

‘Bill,’ he said. ‘If I’m ever lucky enough to get out of this mess, apart from seeing my family, there’s one other thing I’d like to see.’

‘What’s that, George?’ said Bill in his broad Birmingham accent.

‘I’d like to see Derby County win the Cup. At Wembley.’

‘I doubt it very much, George. I doubt if Derby are good enough for that.’

‘But that’s what I’d like to see before I die,’ Shaw insisted.

He knew he had little chance of fulfilling his fantasy. Derby County had never won the FA Cup and he didn’t think he’d get out of the jungle alive. But football offers scope for hope.

Quiz question: Which club won the FA Cup and retained the trophy for seven years?

Answer: Portsmouth, who surprisingly beat Wolves 4–1 in the 1939 FA Cup Final and safely stored the FA Cup until shortly before the 1946 Final. Portsmouth manager Jack Tinn probably knew more about the trophy than anyone. He knew, for instance, that it held eleven pints. He also knew that it was insured for £200, because he had dealt with the paperwork during the war years.

Tinn first put the trophy into a local bank for extra security, but the bank was hit in the blitz. The next morning, when they heard the news, anxious Portsmouth FC officials assumed the trophy had been destroyed in the blast, but Tinn had been one step ahead. Expecting an air raid, he had taken the silverware home that night and nursed it under the stairs. Thereafter the FA Cup trophy spent most of the war in the cells of Havant police station. It was finally released from police custody in February 1946.

Stanley Gliksten once said that to take over a football club you had to be a multimillionaire, a football lover and a bloody fool. He reckoned that there were some multimillionaires, a lot of people who loved football and plenty of bloody fools. But very few people had all three attributes.

In the early 1930s Stanley Gliksten and his brother Albert were chairman and vice-chairman respectively of one of the world’s biggest timber merchants. Based in London, they were on Clapton Orient’s advisory committee, and they knew the importance of football to their workforce. The Glikstens’ employees worked five and a half days a week, left the timber yard Saturday lunchtime, grabbed a sandwich and then went to watch a Football League match, usually at Clapton Orient or West Ham United.

In 1932 the Glikstens were approached by David Clark, the sole remaining director of Charlton Athletic FC. The brothers accepted the challenge of reviving Charlton. They negotiated with the club’s creditors, raised £25,000 for new players, appointed Jimmy Seed as manager and steered the club from Football League Division Three (South) to second place in Division One. In 1937 the Glikstens personally took over Charlton Athletic’s liabilities, paid off debenture holders and met all previous losses. The bill came to £68,000.

It was tough at Charlton Athletic’s ground, the Valley, during the early part of the war. The venue frequently came under enemy fire, so attendances dropped to a few hundred diehards and spectators were often forced to take cover during air raids. Matches were sometimes suspended for more than an hour and some were abandoned when delays forced players back to work. Charlton Athletic closed down for the second half of the 1940–1 season. Four bombs fell on the terraces and two on the pitch. The Glikstens were losing money and in danger of losing fans in bombing raids.

Later in the war, however, Charlton recruited some good players. They reached two League South Cup Finals at Wembley and drew 1–1 with Aston Villa in the 1944 national final. When the 1945–6 season began Football League clubs were forced by the government to keep jobs open for their pre-war players, even if those players were now thirty-eight and wounded. And there were other problems. Four of the six houses in Blackheath owned by Charlton Athletic and lived in by players had been requisitioned during the war.

So when Albert Brown returned to his job as a Charlton Athletic footballer he found that he had lost his pre-war home. Thirty-year-old ‘Sailor’ Brown had definitely not acquired his nickname from his service in the Royal Air Force. It came from the shape of his legs, bowed like those of a man experienced at coping with the ocean swell. On the football field those legs gave Sailor the balance he needed to swerve one way or the other and leave defenders guessing. He was good enough to play for England – in six wartime internationals – but had nowhere to live. So much for ‘homes fit for heroes’. Sailor Brown asked for a transfer. He wanted to go where the houses were.

One of football’s much-loved characters of this era was Sam Bartram, the Charlton Athletic goalkeeper. Bartram, a Burt Lancaster type from the North-East and a former coalminer, spent the war as a physical training instructor in the RAF. By 1946, though, he was back in his role as a professional entertainer. A brave goalkeeper who put his head among a flurry of flying boots, he was once asked to test protective headgear by a crash-helmet manufacturer. In safe situations Bartram might run out of his penalty area and head the ball or else dribble some distance upfield. He would even dive forward under the ball and kick it over his head with his heels. In one match in February 1946 he elected to take a penalty-kick. He ran up, hoofed the ball over the bar and faced an undignified sprint back to his goal. But Bartram also saved the team in an FA Cup game at Wolves. That win helped Charlton Athletic to qualify for the last sixteen of the 1946 FA Cup competition.

Leon Leuty was born just outside Shrewsbury in 1920, but his family moved to Derby when he was a very small boy. His folks assumed there was a French and Cornish extraction to the Leuty family. Leon was, after all, a French name and a Captain Leuty was buried in Falmouth in the sixteenth century.

In Derby, Leon Leuty’s engineer father worked at Rolls-Royce, and young Leon was raised respecting the company that dominated the town’s industry. A whole generation of Derby people grew up believing that the best car in the world was a Rolls-Royce and the worst was the fictional Rolls-Canardly (‘It rolls down hills but canardly get up them’).

Leon Leuty played football for Derby Boys for an unprecedented three seasons, the last two as captain. A chubby-faced schoolboy, smaller than most around him, he had dark hair, parted on the left, and a friendly disposition. In 1935 he played two trials for the England schoolboys’ team, but the right-half place went to Whitchurch of Essex. Leuty was England’s reserve.

That same year he left school at fourteen and, after trying a few jobs, started a toolmaking apprenticeship in Rolls-Royce’s engineering shop. Leuty promised his mother that he would serve his apprenticeship and not do anything silly – like trying to become a professional footballer. He played amateur football for Derby Corinthians and signed amateur forms for Derby County in the 1938–9 season. Shortly before war broke out he was playing for Derby County’s third team at Leicester when he damaged his right knee. When he came round from the eventual cartilage operation he realised that his mother was probably right. Football was a precarious life.

After recovering Leuty played football for Rolls-Royce. He was coming up to twenty now, taller, leaner, without the puppy fat of his schoolboy days. He couldn’t play for Derby County in the early 1940s as the club didn’t really exist – the military had taken over the Baseball Ground at the start of the war – but Notts County manager Frank Womack invited him for a trial. After another cartilage injury Leuty decided that his football career was over. He would be a toolmaker at Rolls-Royce, sustaining the war effort with essential work. He put away his football boots.

But Frank Womack kept in touch.

‘If you ever want to give it a try, you’re welcome at Notts,’ the manager told Leuty.

Weeks went by.

‘I need your help to keep the team going,’ said Womack the next time they met. ‘It’s not easy getting a team together.’

One day Leuty looked out his old football boots. He found them, handled them, put them on and walked around his family home in them. Then he contacted Frank Womack and tried football again.

Wartime football was all about guest players and uncertainty. Some fans went to matches with their boots in case there was an announcement (‘Are there any footballers in the crowd?’). Notts County fans watched a combination of Frank Womack’s local lads and international players such as Ron Burgess (Spurs) and Tommy Lawton (Everton), who were stationed nearby. They were also lucky to see Leuty develop into one of the best centre halves in the country.

In 1942 Leuty worked nights at Rolls-Royce so as to be free on Saturday afternoons. He often arrived at the Notts County ground exhausted, then soon recovered. He gave the game everything he had; that was his style. Then, one Saturday in January 1943, when Notts County were playing some distance away and travelling was far from easy, Leuty said he was unavailable for his regular team. News of this raced around Derby. Jack Nicholas, a reserve policeman who was in charge of the regrouping Derby County players, needed a centre half that same day, so he set off for the Leutys’ home in Allenton. Leuty had worked Friday night at Rolls-Royce, clocked off around 8am, eaten breakfast and was catching up on some sleep.

Nicholas woke him and asked, ‘Do you fancy a game?’

Leuty set off to play for Derby County.

The club had been resurrected from a rock-bottom position of 1941 when it had no ground, no team, no fixtures, no manager and virtually no directors. Not only had the ground been taken over and hit by a bomb, but manager George Jobey and four directors had been suspended sine die. A joint Football League and Football Association commission had examined Derby County’s pre-war accounts and found evidence of wages for fictitious groundsmen and expenses for journeys never made. Illegal bonuses and under-counter payments had been given to players.

In the latter part of the war Derby’s industries provided a number of so-called reserved occupations for promising young footballers. They made hand grenades at Qualcast, concrete railway sleepers at LNER, munitions at EW Bliss and Grundy’s and, of course, aircraft engines at Rolls-Royce. Two older international footballers, Sammy Crooks and Dally Duncan, were still in town, working at Coles Cranes and Derby Carriage & Wagon Works respectively. Once a man had worked in the war industries he couldn’t be recruited into the forces in case he was captured and forced to divulge national secrets.

It was relatively easy to attract guest players to Derby County as the town was centrally located in England and had good rail links. The team regularly included internationals of the calibre of Peter Doherty (Manchester City) and Raich Carter (Sunderland). By the end of the unofficial 1944–5 league season, however, every regular Derby County player was either in his early twenties or his thirties. Many professional players in their late twenties were in another country.

Leuty switched permanently to Derby County in August 1943 when the Rolls-Royce night shift finally took its toll on him. He signed professional forms at twenty-three and in the next three seasons played 130 matches, more than any other Derby County player. By now he had changed physically. He was nearly six feet tall, slim, supple and striking. Off the field he could have been mistaken for an actor. His dark, crinkly hair, high forehead and dark eyebrows made an asset out of his large, pointed nose. And his friendliness was magnetic. He was growing in confidence daily – as a tradesman, as a footballer and as a man who was very attractive to women and yet decidedly one of the lads. When he smiled the world seemed a nice place again. When he laughed it was infectious. And he smiled and laughed a lot, especially when the war ended and the FA Cup competition was reintroduced. Derby County’s team of players aged under twenty-six and over thirty-one now had the chance to fulfil the FA Cup Final dreams of Derby folk, including George Shaw, the ex-prisoner of war.

2

‘Surely They’d Fainted’

Bert Gregory was raised in the 1920s, when children played street football with a ball of twine, a pig’s bladder, a tin can, a tennis ball or an old ale bag stuffed with paper. They played morning, noon and night. Bert Gregory ate, drank and slept football. There was little else to do.

He and his mates needed to avoid the local policeman, who would either clobber them, if he caught them playing in the street, or say, ‘I know your father.’ If the lads refused to stop playing, or gave the policeman some cheek, there would be real trouble. Bert Gregory and his pals were arrested when they were teenagers. They were taken to court and fined five shillings (25p) for playing football in the King’s Highway.

Gregory’s first organised football came when he played in the Bolton Sunday School League. He paid a sixpence (2½p) weekly subscription to his club and made sure he satisfied the requirement of attending Sunday School at least twice a month. In fact he went every Sunday. His mother insisted.

In 1923 Gregory skipped school to watch a Wednesday afternoon FA Cup replay between Bolton Wanderers and Huddersfield Town. That was like asking to be caned. Gregory grew accustomed to crowds of 60,000 at Bolton’s Burnden Park ground, and was part of a 69,912 attendance at a 1933 FA Cup match against Manchester City. Later he was employed by Bolton Wanderers, doing odd jobs for the club, and he kept his counsel about anything he learned. The senior staff trusted him. He understood the ways of professional football. He got to know Burnden Park very well, but nothing prepared him for the events of Saturday 9 March 1946.

On this fateful Saturday large crowds of spectators made their way to Burnden Park, half a mile south of the town centre. Bolton was returning to normal. Meat and cheese were arriving from New Zealand, Hermann Goering was having to defend himself at the Nuremberg Trials and local cinemas were showing I Know Where I’m Going and Confidential Agent. Maybe the beer barrow would be back at Burnden Park for a half-time drink. A place in the FA Cup semi-finals would be worth celebrating after this destructive war, and Wanderers were 2–0 up after the first leg at Stoke City (in a season when all FA Cup ties were played over two legs).

The Railway End embankment, at the northern end of the Bolton ground, supported the LMS line that ran from Yorkshire to Bolton. The embankment was muddy, mucky and messy. There were no seats. The spectators stood on dirt with a few old stone flags for steps. Burnden Park officials reckoned that the Railway End could hold 28,435 people. That worked out at 1 square feet per person. Secretary-manager Walter Rowley planned for a crowd of 50,000, having estimated 5,000 extra spectators for each of the two main stars – Ray Westwood (Bolton Wanderers) and Stanley Matthews (Stoke City).

The first spectators arrived at the ground at 8 am and turnstiles were open from 12.30. Thousands continued to arrive, the streets outside becoming choked. By 2.15 the conditions outside the turnstiles were very uncomfortable. People were packed in tight queues and some were pressed against the stadium walls. A few fell on the floor. One man gripped his eighteen pence (7½p) entrance money and said he would happily pay the ticket price just to get out of the crush. By the time he reached the turnstile he could no longer open his hand to drop the money. An old man fainted and was held upright by the crowd.

‘Mind th’owd chap,’ someone shouted.

The crowd was generally in good humour, even though the turnstiles seemed a long way off and the crush was severe.

‘I’d be awreet if when I moved mi feet came wi’mi,’ said one man.

‘I wish I’d ne’er ’ad that prater pie.’

‘I wish t’directors were i’this lot.’

Police Constable Lowe was one of 103 officers on duty at Burnden Park. He could see a bottleneck building up in front of him, so he went to find the head gateman. PC Lowe wanted the Railway End turnstiles closed. But the head gateman had duties all over the ground and couldn’t be found.

Around 2.40, PC McDougal set off to find the head gateman. He met him near the Main Stand.

‘The Bolton End could do with being closed,’ said PC McDougal.

The head gateman went round the turnstiles and told the checkers to stop checking. Some had already done so. Spectators inside had been shouting that there was a problem.

By this time the turnstiles had clocked 28,137 people on to the Railway End but that figure wasn’t known until later. The head gateman did not have access to the numbers and had to rely solely on how packed the crowd looked. The official attendance was 65,419, but who knows how many were really there? It was later estimated that between 85,000 and 90,000 people had arrived in Bolton wanting to watch the match.

Seeing the turnstiles closed, many fans gate-crashed the match via the adjacent railway line. They tore up the railway fence and climbed on to the Bolton–Bury line. They walked along the track to the signal-box and then dropped down to the embankment, overwhelming the seven railway policemen. Maybe 3,000 or 4,000 supporters got up on to the railway line that way. Some had a view of the pitch from behind the railway fence. Most gave up and went home.

Other fans simply climbed over the turnstiles. About 1,000 went over the entrance to the Boys & Forces enclosure without paying their ninepences (4p). A group of twenty sailors hoisted one another on to shoulders and scaled the turnstiles.

Inside the Railway End, Norman Crook decided to leave because he was worried about his twelve-year-old boy, who was feeling ill as a result of the crush. Ten minutes before kick-off Crook picked a gate lock near the Boys & Forces entrance to get out. He and his son left, but those still locked out now saw their chance.

‘Come on, Charlie, we’re in here,’ one man shouted. About 300 spectators came through the gate before policemen forced it closed.

The incomers from the Boys & Forces entrance put more weight on the north-west corner of the Railway End, where the physical pressure was now intense.

‘Stop shoving, there’s children in front,’ someone shouted.

A young girl was passed down over the heads of spectators.

‘Go to the corner of Weston Street,’ shouted the child’s mother, who was trapped in the crowd.

Audrey Nicholls’s father had started taking her to matches when she was five years old. That felt like a real adventure because the two of them drank coffee at the match whereas they never had coffee at home. As a teenager Audrey went regularly to football with a school pal. On the day of the Stoke City match she was standing in the Railway End.

She was a third of the way up the terrace. The view was good but she was very uncomfortable and scared. There were too many people. There was pressure from the side and pressure from the back. She felt she needed to get out. There was no point in going back towards the exit gate because that was the source of the squeeze. She wanted to get to the track, where the police were allowing smaller kids to climb the wall and sit on the cinders.

When the teams came out and the game started, the children sitting on the cinder track found it difficult to see because the track was two feet below the raised pitch. On the Railway End terrace, people craned their necks to see and pressed on shoulders in front to hold their position. Some people had their backs to the pitch, their faces to the sun, unable to turn round. Others had their arms forced into the air and were unable to get them down. There was no space to swing a rattle.

‘Let us out.’

‘Get us out.’

The swaying and the jostling grew worse. The pressure from gate-crashers caused a surge from the north-west corner of the embankment. People tumbled forward. Two twelve-foot-wide crush barriers near the corner flag gave way under the strain. People in the bottleneck near the front tumbled on to the floor three or four deep. Men and women were screaming. Clothes were torn from people’s backs.

Seeing people in real distress, the police now broke down the wooden paling fence between the enclosure and the running track.

‘Get them out any road,’ the call came.

The teams had been playing for only a few minutes. The afternoon sun, after a heavy night’s frost, had made the pitch black and heavy.

Long before kick-off Joe Harrison had been knocked to the floor of the enclosure. For what seemed like thirty minutes he was a human carpet, trampled from all sides. He kept his head down and managed to get one hand free to loosen his tie and collar. A policeman eventually got him out and he survived. Others were not so fortunate.

Bert Gregory sat with his wife in the Main Stand. They were three rows from the front. His wife grew agitated.

‘It’s only a crowd,’ Gregory told her. ‘They’ll sort it out. There’s room over there.’

He could see that the spectators were unevenly distributed in the Railway End. He assumed they would spread naturally, as crowds usually do.

‘Some of them people are injured,’ his wife said.

‘Don’t worry, it’ll be all right. They’re feeling a bit distressed, but they’ll be all right.’

Officials brought out a body and laid it on the grass verge at the back of one of the goals.

‘That woman’s dead,’ Gregory’s wife said.

‘How do you know that from here?’

‘I can tell – woman’s instinct.’

Someone covered the motionless woman’s face.

‘What are you getting excited about?’ asked Gregory. ‘She’ll be all right.’

‘No. She’s dead.’

Audrey Nicholls was helped out of the crush by some men nearby. They lifted her up and passed her over the top of the spectators. She felt the hands of a score of other people as she went overhead towards the police and first-aiders on the track. It was not a dignified exit, but Audrey was glad to be out of the crowd. She stepped over the low fence at the front of the terrace and stood at the side of the pitch. That was when she saw the dead bodies laid out on the track. Their faces were a terrible colour that she had never seen before. Killed at a football match. Incredible. Football was supposed to be enjoyment and a source of pleasure, a release from the horrors of war.

Audrey’s first reaction was to stare at the corpses. Her second was to leave the ground and go home.

Twelve minutes into the game, with the crowd already encroaching on to the pitch, Inspector Topping walked across and asked the referee to take the players off for a ten-minute break so that the pitch could be cleared. The referee informed the two captains, Harry Hubbick (Bolton) and Neil Franklin (Stoke).

When the players departed, the pitch quickly filled with people escaping the crush on the terrace. Dead bodies were laid out near the corner flag. Most people in the crowd thought these prone spectators were fainting cases. Bert Gregory grew more apprehensive. Maybe his wife was right. Maybe some were dead. How was it that she could tell better than him?

As they carried one body past the Main Stand, the stretcher-bearers accidentally tipped the stretcher and the lifeless body rolled on to the track. Gregory watched, disbelievingly.

One policeman wanted to open the Railway Enclosure gates from the inside but he couldn’t find a key-holder. To relieve the pressure, between 1,000 and 1,400 people were shepherded out of the Railway End and into a vacant stand that had been hitherto closed and guarded because it had been occupied by the Ministry of Food during the war. About 2,000 to 2,500 spectators were brought down to the track. They spread across the touchline. A new touchline was marked with sawdust. The pitch was narrowed.

The dressing-rooms were normally a sanctuary for players and officials, but the St John Ambulance team now commandeered every vacant inch of space along the corridors under the stand. Twenty-four medical staff had reported for duty. There were two doctors, six nurses and sixteen St John volunteers. This had been increased since the previous match, when staff had been caught short by the number of flu sufferers in the crowd.

Now the casualties were brought in every few seconds. Broken limbs. Split heads. Damaged ribs. Stomach and chest bruises. Cut shins. They were carried in on makeshift stretchers. The dead were placed on wooden benches and carried to the joiner’s shop, which became a mortuary. The stack of wooden benches disappeared alarmingly quickly.

‘They’ve only fainted.’

‘Let’s get on with the game.’

The Bolton Chief Constable overheard comments around the ground and realised that very few people understood the extent of the tragedy. If the match were abandoned now, a rush for the exits might produce more casualties. Also, it was better to keep the spectators inside the ground so that the injured could be ferried to hospital through quiet streets.

The Chief Constable spoke with the referee, who went into the dressing-rooms and said, ‘We’d better finish this match.’

After a break of twenty-six minutes the game resumed, but all the pleasure had gone out of the event. A generation of people accustomed to danger – air raids and battles – had been caught out by a strange kind of friendly fire. The dead included experienced soldiers who had survived hostile action only to be killed at a football ground. Fred Battersby had been at the evacuation of Dunkirk before serving four years in the Middle East with the Royal Artillery. His brother James Battersby, another victim, had seen five and a half years’ army service.

Audrey Nicholls arrived home while the match was still taking place. Her parents were surprised to see her.

‘There’s been some trouble,’ she told them. ‘There were bodies lying on the pitch.’

‘Surely they’d fainted.’

‘No, no, they’re dead.’

She had damaged her shoes, so her mother took her into town to buy a new pair. When she came back her father confirmed what she had said about the deaths. Audrey felt she had had a lucky escape, thanks to the men who had passed her over their heads. A fourteen-year-old schoolboy had died in the disaster.

On a Burnden Park pitch churned up by spectators and police horses, Bolton Wanderers drew 0–0 with Stoke City and progressed to the semi-finals. When Bert Gregory reached home that evening, his next-door neighbour came round.

‘Hey, what about this to-do at Bolton?’ the neighbour said.

‘Aye, there’s been a big crowd and there’s been some injuries.’

‘Injuries? There’s a lot dead. It’s in the paper.’

The final edition of the Bolton Evening News reported at least seventeen people killed and many more injured.

Thirty-three people died in the Bolton disaster. Around 500 were injured. A Home Office inquiry, chaired by Ronw Moelwyn Hughes KC, concluded that the pre-match crowd estimate of 50,000 was reasonable.

‘The disaster was unique,’ the report concluded. ‘There was no collapse of a structure: it was the first example in the history of football following of serious casualties inflicted by a crowd upon itself.’

The major problem was the overall planning. There was no scientific assessment of the ground’s capacity – merely the ground’s previous record attendance – and no way of telling when the capacity was reached. No one was able to find keys that would have opened exit doors and relieved pressure on the crowd. Not all the turnstiles were operable. And there was no way of immediately closing turnstiles when the crowd became too large. The club officials were not readily available on the day and they left a lot to the police.

The psychology of the massed football-ground terrace was complex. People did not stand scientifically. They wanted their regular place near their mates. They wanted to be in front of a barrier. They wanted a position to suit their height and weight. No one wanted to stand where a pillar was blocking the goal or behind a six-foot-six bruiser in a trilby.

Passageways through a crowd opened and closed. The route from A to B was not the same for everyone. A full terrace had dense patches and sparsely populated areas. The dense patches could easily feel dangerous. All it needed was some extra pressure, an unpredictable sway, an exciting moment near the corner flag, a man pressing on his neighbour as he steadied himself to pee down a rolled-up newspaper, a few people heading to the refreshment bar or the exits. As spectators left the stadium at the end of the match, the meeting of two throngs could cause a crush.

The mystery of the Bolton disaster was that football crowds in this era were not more volatile. They were orderly and well-behaved. The disaster happened because of poor organisation and the lack of provision for the possibility of nearly 90,000 turning up. If people arrive, expectant and excited, for a crucial FA Cup tie after seven years of football famine, they will do what they can to get inside the ground, and this leaves football-club directors with a dilemma. How do we keep it safe and yet get as many people inside as possible? The problem was aggravated by football-club officials not having had to deal with these issues for seven years. For most of the Second World War stadium safety meant protection from air raids.

The lessons were there to be learned. Important matches should be all-ticket. Ground capacities should be set at safe levels. Terracing should be examined. Crush barriers should be studied for their siting, strength and type. Entrances to the ground should be safe and sensibly placed. There should be safe ways for spectators to leave the ground during play. There should be a loudspeaker system, a central control room, radio communication between police and accessible aggregate figures for each section of the ground.

The Home Office report recommended that a licensing authority (e.g. the local authority) should be appointed to issue football-ground licences and carry out periodic checks. All football grounds were at risk. They had too much timber and earth, and too little steel and concrete.

On the Monday after the disaster Walter Rowley sent for Bert Gregory, who was working at the ground.

‘Find a rope, Bert, will you?’ Rowley said. ‘See the police. They’ll tell you where to go.’

The police told Gregory to rope off a part of the terrace where the deaths had occurred. He found the debris of a disaster. Belts. Raincoats. Hats. Scarves. Flat caps. Shoes.

In the years that followed, Bert Gregory didn’t like talking about the Bolton disaster; it meant recalling those terrible scenes of dead bodies and scattered clothing. But he knew he had to speak about it. It was a reminder of what could happen if you didn’t take precautions.

3

Abide With Me

‘You couldn’t get a ticket for love nor money,’ Derbyshire folk said about the 1946 FA Cup Final, and Charlton Athletic manager Jimmy Seed reckoned he could have sold 500,000 tickets. In fact Charlton Athletic and Derby County were allocated only 12,000 tickets each, even though the match was attended by 98,215 spectators. There were no supporters’ clubs to aid the distribution of tickets and no voucher systems to favour regular fans. And who were the regular supporters anyway? Some had followed the clubs through the 1930s but had not watched many recent matches because they had been elsewhere in the world.

The Cup Final came at a time when the whole country was readjusting, and the Home Office investigation of the Burnden Park disaster hung over club secretaries. The staff at Derby County dispatched tickets to the public as best they could. The men at the centre of the distribution network were secretary Jack Catterall and his assistant Cyril Annable. They were very different characters.

In one publicity piece Jack Catterall was described as football’s youngest administrator at the age of thirty-four. He claimed to have played cricket for Leicestershire and amateur football for the Corinthians and Manchester United. He was a flamboyant dresser with a range of colourful blazers, and he seemed to know everyone. Unfortunately his football-club administrative experience was very limited and his approach proved costly. Catterall was later suspended sine die for withholding players’ income tax and paying excessive bonuses.

In contrast Cyril Annable, Derby County assistant secretary in 1946, was a quiet man who went about his job efficiently and effectively. He didn’t seek out people but was not unfriendly when approached. At times he seemed out of place at the Baseball Ground, surrounded as he was by bantering footballers who were full of camaraderie, but he was not unusual in the world of administrators. Anyone who has dealt with hangers-on and unworthy ticket-chasers would not find Annable’s liking for privacy strange. Before the 1946 Cup Final he started to receive carpets, legs of ham and other black-market products beyond the ken of rationed English folk. There were even stories of journalists giving away match tickets for a joint of meat (‘forgive us our press passes’). Annable politely returned all his offerings and launched himself on a twenty-year career with his integrity intact.

At Charlton Athletic ticket applicants had their names and addresses noted and successful ones were asked to bring their identity cards when collecting tickets (‘to help in the defeat of ticket racketeers’). At Derby County the ticket shortage caused a rift between players and directors. The players’ wives were offered uncovered five-shilling (25p) seats, while the directors’ wives were given either thirty-shilling (£1.50) or £2 seats under cover. The players weren’t pleased when they heard. On the Thursday before the Final the experienced players approached the directors and demanded better tickets for their wives. The directors refused. The players issued an ultimatum.

‘No tickets, no match,’ said Raich Carter, a senior Derby County player and previously captain of the 1937 FA Cup-winning Sunderland team.

The directors relented. The players’ wives were upgraded to covered seats.

The place of women had changed during the war and many Derby wives had been earning well in the local factories. Now the women were pushed back into the homes and the men reclaimed their masculine roles. Daily Mirror journalist Tom Phillips wrote some strong words on the subject: ‘For organised sport, so glorified for its part in character building, makes our women suffer in health, temper and pocket. It drives the hardy from the home, turns nice, charming, sweet brides into nagging hags, and the pleasant but weak-willed into snivelling drudges.’

Peter Blake was evacuated from Dartford during the Second World War. His local football club had strong associations with Charlton Athletic. Young Dartford players went from the nursery to Charlton; old players returned to the Dartford graveyard.

In his early teens Peter Blake followed all London sports. He supported the West Ham speedway team and watched ice-hockey and professional wrestling. He joined a few hundred fans at Dartford’s ground and sometimes took a special charabanc to a Dartford away match. A haircut was exciting because his barber had been a Dartford footballer. The young boy stared at the press cuttings around the walls.

The height of excitement, though, came when he mingled with thousands at Charlton Athletic. Blake had returned to London at the perfect time. Charlton were winning matches and qualifying for the FA Cup Final. On match days he caught the trolley bus from Dartford to Woolwich, and stopped in a café for a roll and a cup of tea. He then walked two miles to the Valley, past stalls selling rosettes and rattles, and arrived with an hour or more to spare. He joined the crowds on the terraces – the stands were for rich people – and was often passed down to the front over the top of the cloth caps. There was a damp smell in the air and the tension simmered. Blake assumed that every working-class kid had