Tim Quelch - An End of Innocence: The Watershed Season of 1959/60

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2021

Pitch Publishing

A2 Yeoman Gate

Yeoman Way

Durrington

BN13 3QZ

www.pitchpublishing.co.uk

Tim Quelch, 2021

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Print ISBN 9781785317583
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In memory of David Hughes and Michael Jennings

THIS BOOK is dedicated to two late friends who suffered with an incurable lung disease. All my royalties will be donated to the British Lung Foundation, a particularly worthy cause in these critical times. Thank you to everyone who has helped me in writing this book.

Many former players and managers have assisted, including Ray Pointer, John Collins, Bob Seith, Jimmy Robson, Lawrie McMenemy, Jimmy McIlroy, Keith Tucker, John Angus, Ken Ballard, Brian Pilkington, Alan Ballard, Trevor Meredith, Adam Blacklaw, Martin Dobson, Geoff Nulty, Arthur Bellamy and authors, Ivan Ponting, John Doherty, Dave Thomas, Mark Metcalf and Jonathon Wilson. Thanks also to all at Pitch Paul, Jane, Gareth, Dean, Duncan and Graham. Your help has been invaluable. Thanks to website owners Tony Scholes of Up the Clarets, the Mighty Whites and Chris Fort of York City South supporters website www.yorkcitysouth.co.uk, plus national and local press and a wide range of books, journals and video footage. All sources are listed in the reference section at the end of this book. Where possible I have sought copyright clearance but, in a few instances, it has not been possible to identify ownership because of the age of the material or image. Please accept my apology if I have inadvertently breached copyright. If anyone wishes to pursue this further, please refer this to my publishers in the first instance.

This is Pitch Publishing, A2 Yeoman Gate, Yeoman Way, Worthing, Sussex BN13 3QZ.

IN HIS autobiography Greavsie, Jimmy Greaves suggested that the 1959/60 season brought footballs age of innocence to an end, with open, attacking football giving way to defensiveness, aided and abetted by specialist coaches and tacticians. In An End of Innocence, the author looks at English football in the 50s and 60s: the management styles; tactics; coaching and training methods; with a wide range of illustrative games reflecting upon how open or insular we were. Some of the questions considered in this book are:

How did England change as a country in the 40s, 50s and 60s?

Did any of these changes affect English football?

Was the 50s a time of innocence for English football or a time of naivety, insularity, myopia, prejudice, and complacency, hastening the decline of the national team?

Was English football slow to learn its World Cup and Hungarian lessons?

Was coaching, training and tactical awareness good enough in the 50s?

How and why did English football shift its emphasis from attack to defence?

How did 60s coaching and tactics turn England into World Cup winners?

How did British clubs conquer Europe? Did Euroscepticism ever impede them?

How did the minnows beat the biggest and best English clubs in the 50s and 60s?

Did English professional football change forever and for the better in the 60s?

Did some liberated soccer slaves become well-paid celebrities during the 60s?

Did this change have any impact upon rising hooliganism?

How did the English youth movements of the 50s and 60s generally affect football?

Did 60s football become too rough? Was this worse than in the 50s?

How did 60s economic decline affect the health of once famous English clubs?

Was television a force for good or bad for English football clubs?

Who were the main movers and shakers in 50s and 60s English football and why?

Was the 1959/60 English football season the watershed Jimmy Greaves claimed?

How healthy did the English game appear to be at the end of the 60s?

Tim Quelch
May 2020

GREAT BRITAIN concluded its part in the Second World War battered, barren and bankrupt. After suffering six years of trauma and hardship its working people were eager for something brighter and fairer, with greater protections against want and disease, better standards of living and improved educational prospects. It was this deep-seated sense of entitlement, aroused by the bleak deprivation of the hungry 30s, which brought about the Labour landslide of 1945.

On the back of the excited VE Day celebrations, the British public flocked once again to our sad, neglected seaside resorts and turned up in their thousands to watch five vibrant Victory Tests of 1945 in which a creaking England cricket side took on a scratch Australian Services XI. Brilliant England batsman Wally Hammond recalled the occasion with uncharacteristic euphoria, There was a feeling of peace and happiness in the air that was very delightful to me. It seemed as though after years in the shadows England was marching into the sunshine again.

Our cinemas, dance halls, race tracks, athletics stadia, boxing arenas and football and cricket grounds became packed, too, as the grim war years were cast aside with almost febrile glee. Writer and former diplomat Bruce Lockhart exclaimed in 1945, Never have I seen a nation change so quickly from a war mentality to a peace mentality. The war [in the Far East] has disappeared from the news. Sport and the election now fill the front pages.

But the carefree mood did not last long. The country was 3bn in debt. Capital and overseas investments had taken huge hits. The nations infrastructure was in tatters. Bombed-out housing had to be replaced. With servicemen returning to their estranged families and the first wave of baby boomers voicing their needs, an enormous and urgent housing shortage had to be addressed.

As an emergency response, 30,000 prefabricated dwellings were erected from kits financed by United States subsidies under the Lease-Lend programme. When that programme ceased in 1945, Britain had to cadge another 4bn loan to meet its financial Dunkirk, as John Maynard Keynes aptly put it. This was not charity. With the Cold War pressing ever closer, the Americans needed Britain to maintain its position as head of the Commonwealth to help stem the spread of international communism.

In a statement resonant of Britain today, Labour minister Herbert Morrison declared, We are in danger of paying more than we can afford for defences that are nevertheless inadequate, or even illusory. Yet it was in this anti-communist capacity that Britain obtained additional American funding, via the Marshall Plan, to pay for its Welfare State reforms. This loan was not repaid until 2006.