subjects were PE, of course, English (I love to read), music and history. Though something of a scamp, I was never a source of trouble at school.
I had a really happy childhood. My dad harboured the hope that I might one day become a concert pianist and paid for me to go to piano lessons. My piano teacher was a genteel old lady who did her best with me, but the lure of football was too great in the end. Although I never played truant from school, piano lessons increasingly got in the way of games of football on the rec. I would set out for my piano teacher’s house with good intentions only to then bump into a few mates who would say, ‘Fancy a game?’ Without exception, any inclination I had to play Schubert’s ‘The Trout’ would play second fiddle to me trying to be be Bert Trautmann.
I suppose there was more than an element of Dad wanting me to live out his dream of being a top-class concert pianist. To this day I still feel a tinge of sadness that I couldn’t do that, but I hope my long career in football in some way compensated him for me not being able to be the Victor Borge of Sheffield.
When I was around thirteen the family moved some three miles to Sawnmoor Avenue in Thurcroft. It was to be a house move that would have a fantastic and life-long effect on me for, when we moved into our new house, I caught sight of a young girl who lived opposite. Even at the tender age of thirteen, I realised there and then that I had seen the girl of my dreams.
Being a gregarious lad, I made friends quickly in my new neighbourhood. I started to go about with a group of young lads and girls, and to my excitement and delight one of the young girls was my neighbour from across the road who, I quickly learned, was called Brenda. Our group, surprisingly unisex considering we were all around thirteen years of age, liked to meet up on a Saturday night and go dancing at the village welfare hall in Thurcroft. When it came to dancing I made a beeline for Brenda and couldn’t believe my good fortune when it became apparent she appeared to like me as much as I liked her.
In the ensuing weeks we spent as much time as we could in one another’s company. What today people may refer to as ‘chemistry’ was perfect between us. I had never had a girlfriend to speak of, nor had Brenda had a boyfriend of any note; we were incredibly naive but I was aware that every moment I spent in her company was magical and special for me.
In time we graduated from the dances at the local village hall and broadened our horizons by travelling the four or so miles to the local swimming baths in Rotherham where, on a Saturday night, the swimming pool was covered with boards to form a dance floor. The attraction of the dances at Rotherham Baths was the music provided by a proper dance band, The Clifton Group, as opposed to a quintet at the village hall. The Saturday dance at the swimming baths was a great attraction for the young people of Rotherham, the place was invariably packed, full of atmosphere and the optimism and anticipation that one can only find at the edge of a dance floor. The type of dancing we did was ballroom dancing, the foxtrot, dashing white sergeant and, later in the night, when things got wild, we jitterbugged. From a lad’s point of view, the great advantage to ballroom dancing was it enabled you to hold the girl you were dancing with. Much modern dancing involves couples not touching at all; not so in those days. For many a lad, when a girl consented to dance and he placed his arm around her waist it was a great thrill, albeit, in many cases, this proved to be the extent of their sex life until he married her.
Brenda was widely considered to be one of the most fashionable girls who attended the dance. In the post-war years there was little to be had in the way of fashion as far as young working-class people were concerned, but when it came to clothes and her appearance, Brenda possessed the all-important attribute of imagination. I recall her once wearing a fulsome skirt in what was known as a ‘tulip cut’ with a netted skirt underneath. With her hair in a bubble cut courtesy of a Twink perm, I remember feeling very special with her on my arm as we walked about the dance hall and she attracted admiring looks from other lads, some even in their late teens. Like the majority of other lads, I dressed in a short-sleeved V-neck sweater of the Fair Isle variety, shirt, tie and baggy trousers purchased off the peg from the Co-op. I longed to own a suit, as did every lad, but family budgets didn’t go to suits for sons. Though I felt I never dressed as stylishly as Brenda, she didn’t seem to mind. She liked me for who I was, which, pardon the pun, suited me fine.
In addition to playing in goal for my school, the District team, Sheffield Boys and Hallamshire County, I also played on a Saturday afternoon for my local youth club before, at the age of fourteen, gaining my first taste of ‘open-age’ football when I signed for the Dinnington Colliery Welfare team.
The Colliery Welfare team played in a league consisting of other colliery welfare clubs and works teams in the South Yorkshire area. In addition to miners, the various local leagues comprised teams for steel-workers, smelters, cutlers, engineers, railway workers, tram and bus drivers, firemen, policemen, painters and decorators, even milkmen. There was, however, not one team from any of the professions. Football was considered the property of the working classes and the notion was that it should be played by them because they were the only people with the talent to play it.
I remember being very excited at the prospect of playing at enclosed grounds whose pitches boasted goals with nets and were bordered by a wooden railing, rather than on a park pitch situated among up to half-a-dozen other pitches. The colliery welfare teams contained the usual characters one will find in any football team at that level of the game. The cultured inside-forward, who wore his hair a little longer than everyone else and played with the air of a grammar school boy among elementary school pupils. The bull-in-a-china-shop centre-forward who was expected to run through a brick shit-house and expected to be roundly abused if he shirked it. The wingers: on one wing a tall, skinny flyer who was all bone and elbow whilst, on the other flank, as if to balance things out, a small and squat winger with bandy legs who, although lacking the pace of his counterpart, was full of trickery. The full-back who never spoke, went about his business in silent efficiency and showed such a lack of emotion you were left to wonder what, if any, enjoyment he got from football at all. The hard-man wing-half, with shin-pads like castle doors who never buttoned his shirt even on the coldest of days, his chest hair protruding from his shirt like stuffing from a burst sofa. The towering centre-half with a granite chin and a forehead hammered flat through contact with a thousand muddy footballs, whose muscular legs would protrude from his cotton shorts like bags of Portland cement. The niggler wing-half who, from the kick-off kept up an incessant verbal harassment of the referee – ‘Bloody hell, Ref, get a grip. Hey, Ref, hand-ball, you missed that. Ref, you’re having a bad one. Hey, Ref, handball. Bloody hell, Ref, he was late. Hey, Ref, he’s all over me. ’king hell, Ref, I never touched him. Hey, Ref, your linesman missed that. Come on, Ref, he’s having the shirt off me back. Bloody hell, Ref, you can’t give that. Hey, Ref, offside, a mile off! Thank you!’
Even at the age of fourteen I never felt overawed at the prospect of playing against men in their twenties and thirties. I think this had much to do with the fact since early childhood I had always played against boys who were older than me. I relished the challenge of pitting myself against what were very decent amateur players, some of whom enjoyed legendary status in local Sheffield football. It was a standard of football far removed from school and youth club football; it was far and away quicker, more physical, more aggressive. Players would swear loudly as they chased the ball across a Lowry landscape and, joy of joys, thumbnail reports of these matches would appear in the Sheffield Star. As a boy of fourteen, the first time I saw my name in print in the Sheffield Star I must have read the match report a hundred times, before cutting it from the sports page and carefully gluing it into a virginal exercise book, on the cover of which I had somewhat optimistically written,
‘Match Reports’.
On leaving school in 1951 at the age of fifteen, I got a job in the local Co-op store as a butcher’s assistant with a view to one day learning the trade. I was very half-hearted about the prospect of being a butcher, though I never dared tell Dad; I took the job because I finished work at noon on a Saturday, which meant I was then free to play football in the afternoon.
