any other ground in the country, Wembley included. The weather was of the kind that makes people who don’t drink know how a hangover feels. The rain was incessant and, as it fell, moved around a thin grey mist that hung in the atmosphere like an unwanted guest at a party.
The pitch squeezed like a sponge when I pressed my foot down on it and sent little popping bubbles to the surface at either side of my shoes. It was going to be as greasy as a chip pan. Fielding low shots on that type of pitch, ones which shot up off the surface like ricocheting bullets, would be a lottery for a goalkeeper. As we stood with the rain anointing the shoulders of our gabardine macs, the ground was silent, but I knew that in two hours, irrespective of how much rain fell, that would change.
The rain had eased off to a light drizzle when we took to the pitch to polite applause from a 52,000-strong crowd. When Arsenal emerged the crowd roared their approval. To my great disappointment they were doing so again some six minutes into the game. Wearing the number nine for Arsenal that day was another great British centre-forward, Tommy Lawton. Tommy had rocketed on to the English football scene in the 1930s when, on his debut for Burnley four days after his seventeenth birthday, he became the youngest player ever to score a hat-trick in the Football League. Tommy was transferred to Everton and was given the arduous, many would say, impossible, task of replacing Dixie Dean. Tommy was not as prolific a goal-scorer as Dean (but then again, who was?), but he proved potent in the penalty box and his goals helped him win a League Championship medal in 1939. He was the top goal-scorer (337 goals in major matches) in wartime football when he appeared for a variety of clubs and also scored 24 goals in 23 wartime internationals. He signed for Chelsea in 1945 and two years later shocked everyone by signing for Notts County, who were then in the Third Division North. To put this into perspective, it would be the equivalent of Wayne Rooney leaving Manchester United for, well, Notts County.
Tommy left Chelsea because of the maximum wage, which in the late 1940s was £12. Notts County agreed to pay Tommy the maximum wage he was earning at Chelsea but also offered him the carrot of a ‘dolly job’, which was a job a footballer supposedly had outside of football. A dolly was usually arranged with a company owned by a director of the football club, or else a close business associate of his. In the case of Tommy, in addition to him playing for Notts County, he was employed as a consultant to an engineering firm owned by one of the County directors at a wage of £14 a week, which more than doubled his weekly income. Tommy knew as much about engineering as I do quantum physics and I doubt if he ever set foot in the company. It was simply a ruse to get around the maximum wage. Tommy wasn’t alone in this. When Trevor Ford played for Aston Villa after every match he had to go and play the Villa manager or a director at snooker for a wager of £5. Trevor was no John Parrot but he never lost at snooker. Tommy was transferred from County to Brentford where, in addition to his football, he also worked as an advisor to a firm of architects. Seemingly, when that company had drained Tommy of every ounce of Norman Foster that was in him, he moved back to top-flight football with Arsenal.
Tommy Lawton had passed the tipping moment in his career but he was still a formidable opponent. With little over six minutes of the game gone, he rose to head a corner back to Alex Forbes, who dutifully dispatched the ball past me and a knot of my teammates. Just before half-time Tommy ensured he would not be the toast of the evening in the pubs along the Ecclesall Road when he made the ball slither across the sodden pitch and nicely into the path of Doug Lishman, who did a fine impersonation of Alex Forbes some thirty minutes earlier.
In the second half Arsenal added two more without riposte, their third, a stinging drive from Derek Tapscott that I had covered only for the ball to rear up when it momentarily skidded on the surface before its trajectory took it over my left shoulder as I dived to my right. As I had suspected from the start, it was that type of pitch.
Leaving St Pancras station for Sheffield we made for a downcast lot, me particularly so. A director had spoken to someone at Bramall Lane and been told Ted Burgin had played a blinder for the reserves. I had conceded four, although I felt three of the goals were not directly down to me. Either way, I feared my tenure as the United’s number one was far from a racing certainty, and so it was to prove.
I found myself back with the reserves for the following game. Reg Freeman never offered me any explanation, Ted Burgin was reinstated for the next first-team game, at home to Cardiff City, and I doubt if Reg spoke as much as two words to Ted either. United lost 3–1 against Cardiff, but there was to be no immediate recall for me.
I was called upon to play eleven first-team games that season. United enjoyed a much better second half to the season and finished just below halfway in the League; another two points would have given us a top ten finish which, given our bleak beginning to the campaign, was some turnaround. Obviously I would have liked to have been the regular number one, but as 1954–55 drew to a close, I took stock of my situation. I was still only eighteen when the season came to an end. I reminded myself I had been playing non-League football two years ago and now I was facing the likes of Jackie Milburn and Tommy Lawton, albeit on an intermittent basis. Still, I was of the mind I had made excellent progress. Though aware I had one hell of a lot to learn, in my heart of hearts I believed I could play First Division football on a regular basis. There was only one tiny little snag, and that came one bright summer morning in the form of a brown envelope through the letterbox.
Whilst Sheffield United could get by in the First Division without yours truly, my country, seemingly, was not so well set. According to the contents of the brown envelope, Queen and country required my services and who was I to deny them such? The letter informing me of the National Service did say my conscription to the armed services would be dependent on me passing a medical; however, given I was a professional footballer I took this to be a formality. It was.
During the summer of 1955 tragedy befell Reg Freeman who died suddenly of a heart attack. His replacement was the former Everton, Arsenal and England wing-half Joe Mercer who, at the time of his appointment as United manager, was running the family grocery business in Wallasey on Merseyside. When a new manager is appointed every player thinks of it as a new start not only for the manager but also for himself. The player hopes the new manager will see things in his play the old manager didn’t see. He also hopes he will undergo a renaissance under the new manager and produce the type of performances he always knew he was capable of. Perhaps the new manager will introduce a system of play that brings out the best in the player. Initially, a new manager always brings hope. Of course it is never long before the manager sets out his stall and begins to impose his own culture on the club and the players. Usually then, certain players get the message they do not ‘feature in the future plans’. I had every reason to believe I did have a future at Sheffield United but I wasn’t going to feature in any plan of Joe Mercer’s, not for nigh on two years at any rate.
National Service was first introduced to Great Britain in 1916 to bolster the perpetually decreasing ranks on the Western Front – cannon fodder, as well we know. It was scrapped in 1920 and re-introduced in 1939 when we faced the might of Nazi Germany. In 1957, Harold Macmillan announced National Service was to be scrapped and the last conscripts were called up early in 1960.
I was assigned to the Royal Signals Corps for my two-year stint and sent to Catterick Camp in North Yorkshire for my basic training. National Service was a bit like the internet, in as much as it scooped up and displayed the very best and worst. There were some terrific and talented young lads from all walks of life in the army due to National Service, but there were also the toe-rags, rogues, nutcases, villains and gangsters. The army, of course, has no prejudice. We all received the same treatment. You can imagine.
In terms of history and tradition the Royal Signals Corps is a relatively young regiment. As I learned during my first week, the Royal Signals began life in 1920 as the ‘C’ Telegraph troop of the Royal Engineers, whose principal role was to provide visual and telegraph signalling and communications in the battlefield and, in time, to wherever the British army found itself throughout the world.
In my first few weeks with
