the colliery would be to win the ‘Pools’. The Pools, or ‘coupon’ as they were also known, was the dream ticket out of a life of working drudgery.
I was three years old when war was declared, and nine when it ended. It would be an exaggeration to say the tranquillity of life was shattered; war in all its horror didn’t descend on Laughton Green, but it is equally true to say that life was never the same again. There were no dog fights in blue skies strewn with the spaghetti of vapour trails. No trains departing from Station Road with carriages full of husbands and sons waving to the tear-stained faces of loved ones. No wailing air-raid sirens. No need for us to take to the Anderson shelter every night. No houses or factories ablaze.
But if our village didn’t warrant the destructive attention of the Luftwaffe, Sheffield, the city built on steel manufacture, was an entirely different matter. On several occasions I can recall my family and me joining neighbours in a back garden to witness the city suffer a horrendous pounding four miles away. The sloe-coloured sky hummed to the drone of bombers from which there seemed no respite. Ack-ack guns thumped away in the dark distance. The sky flashed and flared. The sound of thunder beset Sheffield most nights. I remember one particular night when I was around seven years old, the thunderous sound was accompanied by a thin red line in the sky above Sheffield. Within half an hour it had billowed into a crimson aura that lit up the surrounding countryside for miles. Sheffield, the city where my football heroes dwelled, was ablaze. Only then did the ghostly droning sound in the darkness of the sky depart.
As a miner, Dad was considered essential to the war effort, which meant he could not be called up. The raw materials needed to help fight the war included leather. Even after the war, it remained scarce, so leather footballs were non-existent around Laughton Common. Even if the ‘sell everything’ shop on Station Road had stocked leather footballs, I doubt if the hard-pressed budgets of most parents could have run to buying one.
The father of one of my pals worked in the local butcher’s. The bladder of a pig is not too dissimilar to the rubber bladder that was inserted inside the leather ‘casey’ or caseball. From as early as I can remember, until I was around ten or eleven years of age, we boys played football on the local rec with a pig’s bladder.
Pigs’ bladders are surprisingly durable. Given that we mostly wore hobnailed boots, those pigs’ bladders came in for some hammer, but they could last a couple of games. That was some going as our football matches on the rec lasted for anything up to three hours between teams of up to fifteen players. A boy who wanted to join the game would have to wait for another boy to accompany him. The pair would then decide who was ‘chalk’ and who was ‘cheese’. As the game continued, the pair would then present themselves before the rival captains, one of whom would choose ‘chalk or cheese’. There were variations such as ‘beef or pudding’, ‘jam or tart’, all with foody connotations, like the ball we played with. I have since learned that many lads of my generation played football through the war years with a pig’s bladder. If you hit the bladder really hard, sometimes it would burst on impact, hence the term, ‘he really bladdered it’, when a player hits a really hard shot at goal.
When the pig’s bladder did eventually give up the ghost, you simply went to the local butcher’s to ask for another. Someone then blew it up and tied the bladder’s ‘tube’ into a knot, like a balloon. No one ever had any fear of catching a disease from it – we never considered such a thing possible. And, gruesome and unhygienic as it might sound to put a raw pig bladder in your mouth, I can’t recall a lad ever being taken ill from having done so.
Many of the lads who played football on the local rec were older than me. As a seven-year-old it is difficult when most of the boys are three or four years older because the physical difference is so pronounced. So I could feel I was fully participating in these games, I always opted to go in goal. There was always plenty for both goalkeepers to do in kick-about matches but, as time went by, I became conscious of the fact that I really enjoyed being a goalkeeper. What’s more, I began to display something of a talent for it.
I had a go at every sport at school and seemed to do okay at most. I represented my school and the district at football, cricket, badminton, basketball, table-tennis, swimming and athletics. I was, however, very keen on gymnastics and in time I became a good gymnast, good enough to represent the city and South Yorkshire. Gymnastics helped me achieve things other small lads could not, such as greater agility, flexibility, the ability to stretch, reach and dive to longer distances – all essential to good goalkeeping.
The recreation pitch we played on would not have been out of place in the foothills of the Himalayas. Any team playing up the slope was in need of Sherpas and oxygen masks to stand any chance of making progress. The pitch had been laid on what had once been a Victorian rubbish tip and, as the pounding of hobnailed boots took their toll on the topsoil, the rubbish tip beneath began to give up its treasures. Many a game was halted while one of my pals unearthed something peculiar. The most striking find was a cast-iron Victorian bicycle dug up from the sea of mud in the bottom goalmouth.
It was during the post-war years, in what has been termed ‘football’s golden age’ when Football League attendances hit a record high, that I first began to collect items of football memorabilia. The first item I treasured was a scrapbook made from sheets of brown paper filled with newspaper photographs and cuttings of my heroes, which I diligently affixed to the pages with a glue I made from mixing flour and water.
I realise as I look at them now, that most of my childhood heroes in those scrapbooks were goalkeepers. Ted Burgin of Sheffield United was an acrobatic goalkeeper with a thick mop of black hair who had written to United for a trial when with non-League Alford Town (Lincolnshire). The amazing thing about Ted was his height; he was only 5 foot 7 inches. You simply will not see a professional goalkeeper of that height in today’s game, where clubs are looking to develop goalkeepers of 6 foot 2 and more. Sam Bartram, a keeper who served Charlton Athletic for twenty-five years, was considered a giant of a man at the time at 5 foot 11. Frank Swift (Manchester City), the first goalkeeper to captain England, was a larger-than-life character and a fabulous goalkeeper. He had fingers like bananas and many a supporter of a certain age is willing to testify to having seen Frank’s ‘party piece’: catching and holding a thunderous shot with one hand.
When I was thirteen to fourteen years of age, my book of goalkeeper heroes expanded to include Jimmy Cowan (Morton and Sunderland). Jimmy had an outstanding game against England at Wembley in 1949 when his heroics helped the Scots to a famous 3–1 victory. I listened to the match on the radio and can well remember Raymond Glendenning’s rich and plummy commentary peppered with superlatives in praise of Cowan’s performance.
Bert Trautmann, the former German paratrooper and POW who stayed on in England after the war to carve a great career for himself with Manchester City, was another hero of mine. As was the dependable Ronnie Simpson of Newcastle United who, much later, at the age of 39, kept goal when Celtic became the first British club to win the European Cup in 1967.
Looking back, the press cuttings I collected tell of a game that is alien to the football of today. It wasn’t better or worse, just so very different. They also reveal that during the war, when football was regionalised, the game was also mighty different to that of the immediate post-war period. The Football League North Division of 1944, for example, comprised an eye-watering 54 clubs, albeit each club played only eighteen matches. Huddersfield Town were crowned champions and, as one glances down a league table that seems to go on forever, there, to the eternal delight of Liverpool fans, I am sure, is Manchester United, in the bottom half, two places behind Crewe Alexandra and Rochdale.
As a small boy I went to Laughton Council School, then to Dinnington Secondary Modern. Unbelievably now, the class I was in at Laughton Council School comprised forty-seven children, and what’s more our teacher had no assistance. It’s a wonder any of us learned anything at all – by the time she had taken the register it was nearly playtime! I was never an outstanding scholar, more fair
