‘Sir Alf’s FA pension was a pathetic £25 a week. This was no way to treat a national hero.’
salary enjoyed by the new England manager Don Revie. Moreover, Sir Alf’s FA pension came to a pathetic £25 a week. This was no way to treat a national hero. Out of work, he had no financial security.
“The wealth of the game passed me by. I would like to have retired in comfort and have no worries about money, but that has not been the case,” he once complained with justifiable bitterness.
The grim predicament of his twilight existence was compounded by the development of Alzheimer’s which entailed heavy care bills before he died in 1999. His beloved wife Lady Victoria avoided having to sell their modest family home in Ipswich only by auctioning off his England memorabilia.
The struggle of his final years carried an echo of his tough upbringing. Exactly 100 years ago, Alf Ramsey was born on January 22, 1920, in Dagenham, then a semi-rural outpost of London.
His childhood home was a primitive cottage, little more than a wooden hut, devoid of hot running water or even electricity.The family’s tin bath hung on an outside wall. The outside toilet stood at the rear of the garden.
Alf’s father made a precarious living from various manual activities. As well as driving a council dustcart, he was a hay dealer who reared pigs. Some locals sneered he was nothing more than a “ragand-bone man”.
It was also whispered that his family came from a gypsy background, but Sir Alf was always angrily dismissive of this claim.
Whatever the truth,
Sir Alf undoubtedly felt a sense of awkwardness about his origins. From his 20s, his habitual reserve deepened, while he reinvented himself as an archetypal suburban English gentleman,
FAMILY MAN: With wife Victoria, and England caps that had to be sold complete with immaculate suits and a clipped, cultured accent.
It is probably a myth that Alf had elocution lessons, but his slightly artificial annunciation, which he said was learnt from army officers and BBC broadcasts during the war, certainly reflected a desire to downplay his roots. But it was football that
WORLD CUP WINNERS: Alf with his unmatched England team of 1966
offered the surest path out of Dagenham. He had developed a passion for the game in his youth, fuelled by his precocious skill.
“It was the only thing that ever interested him,” childhood friend Phil Cairns told me. “He was very withdrawn, almost surly, but he became animated on the football field.”
At the outbreak of war in 1939, Alf was working as an assistant for the Dagenham Co-Op, when he was recruited into the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry to man defences in theWest Country.
Military service not only matured him, but also opened new horizons on the football front. The talent he displayed in Army teams brought him to the attention of Southampton Football Club, for whom he signed at the end of the war. It was the start of a hugely successful career as a professional, first with Southampton, then Tottenham Hotspur, whom he helped to win the First Division title in 1951.
His greatest asset was his uncanny ability to read the game. It helped him win 32 England caps and the captaincy of his country three times. His sense of fulfilment was strengthened by his happy marriage in 1951 to Rita Norris (she later changed her name to Victoria), an attractive divorcee who shared his quiet, private nature.
She had one child, Tanya, from her previous marriage.Alf proved a devoted husband and stepfather despite his obsession with football.
His profound understanding of the game made it inevitable that he would go into management on his retirement as a player in 1955.
With shrewd tactics and fine judgment, he soon performed a miracle at Ipswich, taking the unfashionable Suffolk club from Third Division South to the First Division championship.
JUST as in the World Cup victory, Alf was unfailingly modest at the moment of Ipswich’s glory in 1962.
“He did not want any praise. He gave all the credit to the players,” recalled winger Jimmy Leadbetter. His astonishing record at Ipswich brought him promotion to the England job. His one condition was total control over his squad and its selection, something the FA’s officialdom resented. But the bosses had no alternative, and once more Alf worked his alchemy. In 1963, he provoked widespread derision when he declared that “England will win the World Cup in 1966”. There was further hostility when, in 1965, he introduced a revolutionary new formation without traditional wingers. But he proved critics wrong by building an unbeatable unit. One of the England team doctors of 1966, Neil Phillips, gave me this insight: “He was an incredible man. His talks were unbelievable. He was brilliant at communicating what he needed. I’ve worked with leading consultants and surgeons, but have never, ever worked with someone like Alf. He could go through in exact detail any incident that occurred in a match.” After 1966, Alf – who was knighted in 1967 – was unable to sustain England’s dominance. His side lost in the 1970 quarter-final to West Germany, before the qualification failure in 1974.
But his legacy is a tremendous one, both in his unrivalled record and his love of the sport.
At his funeral in Ipswich in 1999, England’s World Cup-winning right back George Cohen rightly called him “not only a great manager but a great Englishman”.
At the end, he was let down by the very authorities who should have cherished him.