Brian Glanville was a little Gooner
by Myles Palmer
FEATURES
THE ARSENAL AGM - FULL WRITE UP
FIVE REASONS: ARSENAL COULD WIN IN BARCELONA
CARLTON AND ITV UPSET US AGAIN
JEKYLL AND HYDE PLAY THE NOU CAMP
Brian Glanville Football Memories - Virgin (£16.99)
Brian was a Gooner when he was a lad. He first saw Arsenal in 1942 when his father, a Dublin Jew and a dentist, took him to White Hart Lane, where Arsenal were playing Brighton. Denis Compton on the left wing, George Marks in goal, and an amateur, Bernard Joy, at centre half.
The match programme, a single sheet costing a penny, contained instructions on what to do in the event of an air raid. In these days of mega-wages and player power it astonishing to consider the following story.
Alex James, the tiny Scottish genius, clashed with manager Herbert Chapman over pay, so Chapman sent him on a sea cruise. And it was not on an ocean liner. It was a cargo ship! "Tom Whittaker accompanied him to the docks, where the ship turned out to be a tramp steamer.
"I'm not going on that!" insisted James."Boss's orders," said Whittaker, and James duly embarked." An amazing incident, but I wanted to know more.
How long was James away? Where did the tramp steamer go? Did James ever forgive Chapman for such autocratic treatment?
Arsenal became Glanville's obsession during his lonely days at boarding school.There was, of course, no Sky Sports, no Ceefax, no Clubcall.
In the four-page daily newspapers of the time, a miniscule portion of the back page would be devoted to football. How eagerly, compulsively, one scoured those spaces for news of the Gunners!
No transfer tales then;transfers were put on ice till the end of the war.
What is the book like overall? Well, it is very Brian Glanville. More so than his other football books. It takes a while to get into Brian's circuitous writing style, which is like his talking style, full of energetic, detailed self-interruptions, subordinate clause after subordinate clause.
I've read Brian's articles since I was at school, and have known him for 15 years or more. We often come home from Arsenal or Spurs together, and he told me about his forthcoming memoirs last year.
He said that he was critical of the prevailing "interview culture", a sentiment with which I am in complete accord.
Football needs more perceptive comment, not more banalities from by dim millionaires and self-justifying soundbites by media-sharp managers.
I know how Brian thinks and talks, but, even so, I found the first 10 pages very annoying, and the next 10 pages quite annoying. After that I got used to his idiosyncracies and enjoyed them because I was beginning to realise that there has never been a football book like this, and there can never be another like this.(I quickly resigned myself to the idea that I would be baffled by certain anecdotes.)
Towards the end of the book he describes making a TV documentary, One Pair Of Eyes, in which he meets his old hero, Eddie Hapgood, and nailing a lie told about him by Arsenal's Bob Wall, who was the Secretary before Ken Friar.
In his book Arsenal From The Heart, Wall alleged that two players, Hapgood and Jack Crayston, had demanded benefit payments from Arsenal, who refused, as the club was then in financial difficulties. The players were then supposed to have appealed, unsuccessfully, to the Football League. Brian doubted this story, as benefits were optional.
Visiting the elderly, ailing Hapgood at his home in Weymouth, he saw the original correspondence."The file contained a devastating exchange of letters.
Hapgood had just lost his job at Bath City and was on his beam-ends. He wrote to Arsenal asking for help, and pointed out that he had not had the benefit due to him. The response was a letter offering him £30. This to the left back who had helped the club win five Championships and two FA Cups, and who had captained them superbly."
Brian lived in Italy in the early Fifties and is illuminating on the cultural differences. His friend Tony was a teacher at the British Instutute:"The tales he told showed the abyss between Italian and English expectations.
Girls he had caught cheating in exams for instance, whom he had thrown out of class with a cry of 'Signorina!'. Their fathers would then come pleading for them : 'I hid British prisoners in the war.'
"The abyss was huge. I already knew by then that, much through I loved to live in Florence, I could never stay in Italy, as I had believed..... Italy supplied so much of what England lacked : colour, light, beauty, spontaneity. And it lacked so much of what one was accustomed to, of what one took for granted and relied on.
"Here, the house was so often built on sand, and on connections."
Is Brian is pulling punches a bit here? Is he saying that his English sense of fair play was deeply offended by a corrupt Latin culture? He discusses Real Madrid of the Fifties, the legendary side which featured the fabulous Ferenc Puskas but was utterly dominated by the magisterial Alfredo di Stefano.
The word was that, in the last match of his first season in Spain, Puskas could have scored the goal that would have made him top scorer, but diplomatically passed the ball to Di Stefano, who thus led the scorers, in his stead.
On pages 134-5 he described how he meets John Moynihan, son of two distinguished painters, who is an expert at Subbuteo, the table football game.
They soon formed a Sunday team, playing at first in Hyde Park with a side which included Keith Critchlow, a painter who later became an adviser to Prince Charles, and Karl Miller, a Scot who was literary editor of The Spectator.
The team of actors, journalists, students and artists became known as Chelsea Casuals. Glanville cannily began to recruit talented northern boys from the Royal College of Art, and also from the London School of Economics. (An LSE and Chelsea Casuals defender not mentioned in the book is Pat Kiernan, who did a postgrad year in 1966-67 at Manchester University, where I was sports editor of the fortnightly student newspaper.The footballers were among my closest friends, and Pat, a craggy,brave centre half, was the wittiest, often quoted in On The Blind Side, a column I compiled.)
In 1958 rugby was the main sport covered by The Sunday Times, but Glanville managed to cover the World Cup for them as a freelance. He got £20 an article and no expenses.The national staff men got £7 a day expenses.
England trained at the old Gothenburg stadium. Amazingly, a friend of Stanley Rous, a wealthy businessman called Chalwyn, who had a military moustache, trained with them. Four years later, in Chile, Chalwyn even joined in England's training games!
In those happy, innocent days before World Cups became a chaotic, overcrowded circus in which television ruled, it was possible to attend training sessions as one wished.
Out at Hindas where the Brazilians had their training camp, one could watch their joyous training, the players yelling at each other like a male voice chorus gone berserk.
England only took 20 players to Sweden rather than the permitted 22. They could have also taken Nat Lofthouse and Stanley Matthews, but they didn't. There was no doctor with the team. And you thought the FA was clueless today!
One of the many virtues of Football Memories is that Glanville conveys a sense of how richly complicated life can be, and how much of that depends on human nature, which is itself complicated. Consider, for instance, this thumbnail sketch of Sir Stanley Rous, who quit as FA Chairman in 1962 to take over as President of FIFA. "For all his faults, his snobbery, his social climbing, his autocratic ways, his indifference to the troops on the ground, Rous was still a force for good not only in English but in international football."
In the early Sixties England, Scotland and the Irelands had a greater number of exceptionally skilful players than we have now. Some, like Joe Baker, Jimmy Greaves and Denis Law (my all-time favourite player), signed for Italian clubs.
At one point Jim Manning of The Daily Mail had a battle with Bob Findlay of The Daily Express over whether Jimmy Greaves should or should not leave Chelsea for AC Milan.
Manning wanted Greaves to stay, Findlay wanted him to go. After England had beaten Italy 3-2 in Rome in May 1961, the English party, myself included, flew to Vienna for the next match. Greaves gave a mid-air press conference, to say that he was staying with Chelsea.
Stanley Rous, dozing in his seat like an old turtle in the sun, looked up and muttered, "I dont see how he thinks he can."
And indeed, he couldn't.
Glanville is a wise old bird who has been right, and prescient, about many important issues over the years. His judgments, from 1958 to 1998, can rarely be faulted.
"Most managers, at any level, have a finite usefulness, and Ramsey was no exception. By 1972, he was not the same man. It became quite clear when England played West Germany in the first leg quarter-final of the Nations Cup, or European Championship, in that year.
To my amazement, he had picked a team without a single tackler in midfield. In consequence, the big-booted, long-haired Gunter Netzer ran riot, and England lost, 3-1."
He suggests that Glenn Hoddle was jealous of Michael Owen in France 1998.
Since I always felt Hoddle was still working out the traumas and disappointments of his own playing career, and was far too young to manage England, I was interested to read Glanville's verdict: "The eighteen-year-old Liverpool striker was clearly the Gascoigne of his generation in terms of sheer, outstanding talent, with marvellous pace, the ability to know when to use it, superb opportunism and - so unlike Gascoigne - a balanced, preciously mature, disposition...... Hoddle's behaviour with Owen was so illogical, so patently self-destructive, that you wondered what lay behind it. Could a green eye somehow have been flashing?"
They say nostalgia ain't what it used to be, but this book will bring great pleasure to a generation of middle-aged football fans, as well as being vividly informative to younger readers.
Yes, its chronologically infuriating, he repeats compliments as indefatigably as a Jewish mother, the last 50 pages seem a bit rushed and sloppy, but its still a unique and wonderful memoir where you will meet Lennie Bruce, Cassius Clay, Joe Heller and Bill Naughton, the former Bolton lorry driver who wrote Alfie.
Naughton organised games in Hyde Park, persuading passers-by to join in, especially postmen, who parked their Royal Mail vans on the path.
Life was more interesting in the Fifties and Sixties, I think, because people had personalities then. Now they just have careers.
I often used to wonder why Brian organised a Sunday team for 30 years, but eventually figured it out. Brian adores the theatre and is a luvvie, a frustrated actor. He needs an audience. He can't switch off.
One August day, after the Charity Shield, we came out of Wembley Stadium together. On the terrace, in early evening sunshine, we stopped to chat to Chelsea chairman Ken Bates and Bobby Campbell.
As we walked on to the tube station I told Brian I was about to fly off for a three-week family holiday in the Algarve. He admitted that he is a workaholic who cannot handle holidays because, after two or three days,"the black dog of depression sits on my shoulder."
I said that I forget about London quite easily. Indeed, if I was to spend a fourth week away, I would become someone else, and forget to come back.
"You're just a neurotic Jew, Brian," I said. "Your'e exactly right," he replied. "Im a neurotic Dublin Jew."
One thing about Brian which you won't realise from reading this book is his politeness. He is a gent who will always introduce you to people. He once introduced me to an elegant, grey-haired Italian in the Banqueting Hall at Wembley: Myles Palmer...Enzo Bearzot. Which was nice. He didn't let me talk to Bearzot,who was Italy's manager in 1982, but I did not mind. Although, come to think of it, Bearzot might have been fascinating, since he played for Torino with Denis Law.
I love Brian, and respect him. He's achieved a lot beyond the newspaper world with his novels and radio stories.
He might actually have been better suited to writing about cricket, which has more eccentric characters
At 67, Brian Glanville should be used in a different way by The Sunday Times, which he has now rejoined.
Such a knowledgeable veteran should be sending down considered judgements on the big issues. And putting the boot into the bad guys of the game, as Pat Collins does so wittily in The Mail On Sunday.
March 13th 1999