The winter of ’63: A pictorial flashback to when the FA Cup was frozen in time
IT’S 1963 AND PITCHES ARE USED AS ICE RINKS WITH BRITAIN IN THE GRIP OF BLIZZARDS
FIFTY years ago tomorrow, heavy snow forced a referee to postpone the third round FA Cup tie between Lincoln City and Coventry City scheduled for the following day.
The match was called off a record 14 times more before eventually being played on March 6. Third Division Coventry, then managed by the one and only Jimmy Hill, won 5-1 en route to a quarter-final defeat by Manchester United.
The notorious Big Freeze of 1963 so strangled the breath out of the FA Cup that the third round took 66 days to complete and only after a total of 261 postponements.
Half of the 32 ties fell victim to the weather 10 times or more.
No climatic intervention before or since has had such a dramatic effect on England’s pre- eminent cup competition.
A tar burner was employed at Stamford Bridge, by which time Tommy Docherty had flown his Chelsea side to Malta in search of a playable surface; flame throwers were tried at Blackpool; they pretty much gave up at Halifax where the club turned their pitch at The Shay into a public ice rink and charged admission.
Clubs needed income to pay the wages of players who, in turn, earned nothing by way of bonuses.
And with no games being played the football pools companies needed to find a way to attract revenue. Their solution was the advent of the Pools Panel which, after three void Saturdays, met first on January 26 and for four weekends thereafter.
The resident panel comprised Ted Drake, Tom Finney and Tommy Lawton, from Scotland George Young and former referee Arthur Ellis under various chairmen including, bizarrely, Group Captain Douglas Bader.
The Big Freeze had been preceded by what turned out to be London’s last Great Smog in December 1962 and, omen or not, a young Michael Fish joining the Met Office the previous month.
The last few days of the year brought 20-foot snowdrifts in the South West and in Wales. The snow was to remain in some areas for more than two months.
January ended up being the coldest month in the 20th century with the sea freezing for a mile out from shore at Herne Bay in Kent. February produced more snow, gale force winds and, consequently, more 20-foot drifts.
All outdoor sport suffered. Rugby union and rugby league cards were wiped out on a weekly basis. There was no horseracing in England between December 23 and March 7 as a staggering 94 National Hunt meetings were cancelled.
But football was the highest profile casualty. Bolton Wanderers did not manage a single competitive match between beating Tottenham 1-0 on December 8 and losing 3-2 at Arsenal on February 16.
Current boss Dougie Freedman would have freaked out.
‘It was crazy,’ Ronnie Farmer, an old wing-half in the 1963 Coventry side, recalled. ‘We just trained and trained and trained. We had a Hungarian fitness man. I remember we had to run up and down a snow- covered coal bing at the nearby colliery. The snow almost blinded us and gave us eyeache.’
But in Hill, Coventry boasted a chinned wonder who was building a reputation for innovation and a willingness to adopt modern techniques. Like the most determined snowplough, he was always going to find a way through the drifts.
‘Jimmy took us back and forward to Ireland where we played Manchester United in Dublin and then Wolves twice, first in Cork and, if I remember correctly, then in Belfast,’ Bob Wesson, the Coventry goalkeeper that year,
told Sportsmail. Hill and Stan Cullis, the Wolves manager, were so pleased with their first jaunt to an Ireland which had escaped the worst of the blizzards — Wanderers won 3-0 on a muddy bog at Flower Lodge, home of Cork Hibs — that they arranged a return match at the since demolished Celtic Park in Belfast.
The star- studded First Division side enjoyed a 6-3 victory.
But it was the game against Manchester United at Glenmalure Park, then the home of Shamrock Rovers, which lingers in the memory of Farmer and took on a significance for later that season. ‘An amazing crowd of 20,000 turned up,’ Farmer explained. ‘I managed a goal and we led 2-1 into the dying minutes. But a certain Bobby Charlton slid one home to earn the Reds a 2-2 draw.’
The thaw eventually arrived but it still required a pneumatic drill to penetrate two feet of ice covering Lincoln’s Sincil Bank pitch before the FA Cup tie against Coventry went ahead at the 16th time of asking.
The away team’s superior match fitness, acquired on the other side of the Irish Sea, proved decisive and influential in the subsequent cup run. But in a schedule that makes a mockery of modern complaints about ‘too much football’, match fitness eventually gave way to exhaustion. Rotation existed only as a geometric expression.
Coventry played five FA Cup ties, including two replays against Portsmouth, and two league games in 19 days with the last on the Monday immediately prior to the quarter- final with Manchester United’s stars. ‘We were absolutely knackered,’ Farmer recalled. ‘Jimmy summoned us to the south coast for a “special training session” and told us not to forget our golf clubs.
‘We were too tired to train so we just played golf and tried to relax.’ Two goals from that man Charlton and a third from Albert Quixall gave United a 3-1 victory, which hit goalkeeper Wesson particularly hard.
‘I sat in the corner of the changing room after the match literally crying into a glass of champagne,’ Wesson said. ‘Our chairman Derrick Robbins put his arm round my shoulders and told me we had got further than anyone thought we could.’
United went on to win the Cup for a third time, beating Leicester City 3-1 with two goals from David Herd and one from Denis Law.
Fifty years on, Coventry travel to Tottenham this weekend in the hope and expectation that it won’t snow this time.