Star who missed England’s finest hour to get married
It was 50 years ago today but might as well have been 500 so utterly different were the...
AS England’s finest footballers were getting ready to make history 50 years ago today, there was one player missing.
Everton and England defender Brian Labone had already set a date for his wedding to sweetheart, Pat, when the squad for the tournament was announced.
And, in a move unlikely to be repeated by today’s players, he chose to miss the tournament, and possibly the biggest game of his career, to honour his promise.
Yesterday Pat Labone, 73, told the Mail that she wished they had postponed their big day so he could have taken part.
‘Brian was one of those people who, when he had made a decision, he stood by it,’ said Mrs Labone, who was married to him for almost 40 years before his death in 2006.
‘he told me he never regretted what he did, not even once. But, if I’m honest, there must have been times when it got to him, whenever the success of the ’66 team came up.
‘he wouldn’t be human if it didn’t. I am sorry that Brian missed his chance.
‘Of course, everything is different in hindsight, but I wish we had postponed the wedding so that he could have been there.
‘Over the years, when I’ve seen events and celebrations marking the victory I’ve always felt a little sad. If I could turn back the clock, I would. Brian would have been there and I would have been so proud.’
The couple met in 1961 and married on June 23, 1966, in New Brighton, Merseyside. They honeymooned in Torremolinos, Spain, but were home in time for the final which they watched on TV.
Among the photographs taken after England’s solitary World Cup victory, 50 years ago today, one wonderfully evocative, black-and-white shot perfectly captures the heady mood of the nation on that glorious, long ago weekend. Taken in London’s Royal garden Hotel, where the team stayed after defeating West germany 4-2 in a thrilling final, it shows their wives (and one fiancee) excitedly clamouring to read the first editions of the next day’s newspapers.
At first glance, they appear to be sitting at the breakfast table on the morning after the match. In fact, it is still Saturday and the papers have just arrived, hot off the presses from Fleet Street, at the end of an evening that had seen the women treated quite disgracefully by the Football Association.
Downstairs, their husbands were being feted at a glittering banquet attended by Prime minister Harold Wilson and other dignitaries. Yet chauvinistic FA bigwigs had decreed the reception was above the lowly station of footballers’ wives, and banished them to dine separately in the chophouse upstairs.
So there they sat, ‘dressed in our finery’, as Patricia Hunt, the wife of England forward Roger puts it quaintly, nibbling their supper at a table gaudily decorated with paper flags of the World Cup countries.
To add insult to injury, someone even thought it would be amusing for Pickles, the dog who had famously found the Jules Rimet trophy dumped in a garden after it was stolen earlier that summer, to eat with them.
To Kay Stiles, then 24, who had left her six week-old son with her family in Dublin and flown to London to watch her husband, nobby, dance joyously and toothlessly around Wembley stadium when the final whistle sounded, it was an ill-fitting end to the ‘best day of our lives’.
‘They allowed some women to the banquet, but not us,’ she told me this week. ‘We had to sit by ourselves with some man from the FA. I still have no idea who he was. If just one of us had been brave enough to say “this isn’t right”, we’d all have backed her up. But times were different then. no one wanted to be pushy.’
The final insult came when token gifts were handed out. ‘They gave us each a little box containing a pair of scissors — or it might have been two pairs,’ mrs Stiles told me incredulously. ‘What was all that about?’
What indeed? Perhaps the FA forgot to buy any mementoes and someone dashed out to Boots on Kensington High Street at the last minute to purchase the disgracefully sexist objects.
Whatever the truth, it was almost midnight, when the FA fat-cats were reclining with their cigars and brandy, before England’s team manager, Alf Ramsey, let the players leave the reception and join their spouses.
‘There was a touch of Cinderella about it all,’ smiles Tina moore, the first wife of England’s captain Bobby, who wore a dazzling, yellow silk chiffon dress topped with a tourmaline mink stole. ‘We were all dressed up, but we had to wait for hours before we could go to the ball.’
Imagine the furore that would ensue if — don’t laugh — today’s hopeless England team were to win anything important and their pam- pered partners were so shamefully shunted out of the spotlight.
Yet as that marvellous photograph shows, the Wives of ’66 were a very different breed. With their beehive hairdos and mini-skirts, they were, as mrs moore says, ‘girls of their time’.
But in the nation’s finest sporting hour they exuded a refreshingly innocent sense of pride and place. ‘We weren’t called WAGS in those days — we were just ordinary wives,’ reflects mrs Hunt, still glamorous in her mid70s, and long divorced.
‘Footballers today have got everything. They’ve got mansions with swimming pools, money, fancy cars. We didn’t have all that.
‘Roger was on £12 a week when he joined Liverpool! But by the time he was chosen for the World Cup he was on a decent wage. We’d moved from a semi to what we saw as our dream home, where we had our two children, and we had a Triumph 2000.’
The Friday before the final was mrs Hunt’s 26th birthday, and her best present came when Roger phoned with the news that Ramsey had ‘given him the nod’. It meant he would play alongside geoff Hurst, at the expense of star forward, Jimmy greaves, who had been injured and had failed to regain his place.
If truth be told, however, for the World Cup wives it had been a long, lonely summer. Ramsey was a disciplinarian who believed football and females did not mix, and he shut his players away for six weeks in a nofrills training camp in Hertfordshire.
Without a murmur of complaint, the women ironed their husbands’ shirts, helped them pack and waved
‘We weren’t allowed into the victory banquet’ The FA gave the wives a pair of scissors each
them off with stoical pride, as if they were soldiers going away to war.
Then they carried on with their humdrum lives in the suburbs: cooking, washing, going to the corner shop and pushing prams. on the eve of the final, Kathy Peters, wife of goal- scorer martin, even moved home — directing removal men with their baby daughter in her arms.
Conjugal visits to the camp were banned — Ramsey was convinced they would kill his team’s passion for the game, although he permitted players to contact their wives by letter and the occasional phone call.
Small wonder, then, that at least one player could barely contain his ardour by the time the final was over. Returning to the Royal garden Hotel, John Connelly — who was not picked for the match — dashed up to the bedroom, where his wife Sandra was getting ready for the evening.
Previously, he had given her £50 to buy herself an outfit, and she was wearing an elegant cream skirt and gold top from Harrods.
‘He said something like, “ooh! Have we got time?” and I said, “no, we haven’t because I’ve spent all this time on my hair, I’ve got all my makeup on, and everything,” ’ mrs Connelly recalled, with a chuckle, this week.
‘I said “John, it’s half an hour until the reception. We’ve only got a few hours to wait, and then it’s all over with.” ’ Reluctantly, Connelly acceded to her wishes — something it’s hard to imagine happening with the current England team and their lingerie model girlfriends and groupies.
Then again, the fact that all but one of the England team who played in the final were married (Alan Ball, then 20, was engaged) compared with just three of the team that were humiliated by Iceland last month, tells us how much times have changed.
For the match on July 30, 1966, the wives had to travel to Wembley under their own steam. The northern con- tingent drove south the day before, and Pat Wilson, wife of left-back Ray, gave Bobby Charlton’s wife, norma, a lift in her Ford Zephyr. on the motorway, the exhaust broke.
‘I was panic-stricken ,—– the car was making hideous noises — but I made it in the end,’ says mrs Wilson, whose husband left football to become an undertaker.
That evening, the pair went with Kay Stiles and other wives, including Ursula Banks (who cheered on her goalkeeper husband, gordon, even though she is german), to watch The Black & White minstrel Show.
mrs Stiles recalls the wives of the West germany team were also at the Victoria Palace Theatre, but the groups ignored one another. The next afternoon, they were given the best seats at Wembley, not far from the Queen. The only absentee was Jack Charlton’s wife, Pat, who was pregnant and stayed in the north East.
Bobby moore’s wife recalls how she calmed her nerves as kick- off approached by looking for famous faces. Among those she spotted close by were Terence Stamp, the screen heart-throb of the day, and his model girlfriend, Jean Shrimpton.
The former shorthand-typist from working- class gants Hill, in East London, was ‘star-struck’.
Surely everyone knows how the dramatic match unfolded. A see-saw game ended two-all with the germans grabbing an equaliser seconds before the final whistle — whereupon Alan Ball’s fiancée, Lesley, fainted.
‘As the ball went in, everybody stood up and the air just went from my head,’ she said later. Thankfully, she came round to see England score twice in extra time, and that evening looked stunning in a backless striped dress.
Irene greaves was disappointed her husband had been dropped, but gamely turned up to support the team. ‘of course, I had mixed feelings,’ she told me at her Essex home, where Jimmy is recovering from a stroke. ‘But I was cheering when the goals were scored.’
Before being shooed upstairs at the Royal garden Hotel, the wives were briefly permitted to join their husbands on the balcony, below which a euphoric, chanting crowd had created scenes likened to ‘VE Day, new Year’s Eve, and general election night rolled into one’.
Patricia Hunt recalls how Prime minister Harold Wilson, wearing a
World Cup tie and milking the occasion for all its worth, put his arm round her and asked: ‘Which young man are you attached to, young lady?’ When she told him, he replied: ‘Well you must be very proud.’
She and Roger were too exhausted to go out on the town, so, after a night-cap, they turned in. Martin and Kathy Peters also retired to their room with his winners’ medal and were overcome by the enormity of the achievement. Jimmy and Irene Greaves slipped away quietly to Majorca that same evening. But for the others the night was young and the West End beckoned.
Bobby Moore led a group to the Playboy Club, where scantily clad Playboy Bunnies fawned over the players. But his wife Tina didn’t mind, particularly when Bobby took to the stage and serenaded her with a slushy Stevie Wonder song.
Meanwhile, hat-trick hero Geoff Hurst and wife Judith were with the Stileses and the Balls at Danny La Rue’s club, where a World Cup cake was produced in their honour. ‘It was a really fantastic night,’ says Kay Stiles, who had by then forgotten the FA’s shabby treatment of the wives.
Then, it was all over. On Sunday, after appearing with their smartly suited husbands on a TV programme hosted by Eamonn Andrews, the wives returned home.
Mostly, they disappeared back into obscurity. For many years afterwards, they never came together again. But then, about 15 years ago, a reunion was suggested. It proved so successful they have met annually for dinner ever since, staying over- night so the men can play golf while the women go on another outing.
Inevitably, however, time has taken its toll on the glory boys of ’66 and their wives. With several in poor health, they decided their gathering earlier this year would be their last.
We cannot close without mention of one other unsung heroine behind this stirring story. She is Sir Alf’s widow, Victoria, who was his rock during the World Cup campaign (though she remained gracefully in the background), as she was when the FA sacked and shamefully shunned him, eight years later.
Since making a brief, dignified statement after her husband’s death, in 1999, she has never spoken publicly, but this week, when I called at her modest home in Ipswich, we had a brief but convivial conversation. Lady Ramsey is now 93, and walks with a frame. However, she is still impeccably turned out and her mind is sharp. Attended by her carer, she remembered watching the final with Tanaya, her daughter by her first marriage, who now lives in the U.S.
Unlike the players’ wives, she was invited to the banquet that evening, and she was delighted when I showed her photographs of her sitting demurely with Sir Alf, wearing an elegant dress, frilly hat and pearls. ‘It was a wonderful day — the best day of our lives,’ she said.
Yet Lady Ramsey looked aghast when I asked whether she and Sir Alf had celebrated afterwards with the players and their wives. ‘Oh no!’ she said, with an expression suggesting that wasn’t the form in those days. As soon as was decently possible, they escaped the hoopla and returned home to East Anglia, to celebrate quietly with friends.
Afterwards she stayed resolutely out of the public eye, refusing requests for interviews and public appearances — the antithesis of the glamorous partners of today’s moneybags managers, such as Nancy Dell’Olio who was the highprofile girlfriend of ex- England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson.
Materially, the World Cup victory didn’t change her life a jot, either, for Sir Alf never earned more than £7,000 a year, which would amount to about £76,000 today —– a fortnight’s wages for England’s new bossmanager, Sam Allardyce.
When he died, in 1999, she was forced to sell some of his mementoes to make ends meet. Did she sometimes envy the luxury lifestyle of her modern-day counterparts?
‘No, I wasn’t special. It was my husband who was special,’ she says. ‘I spent my life with Alf and I’m just glad about that. Anyway, I’ve got my memories — very happy ones — and that’s enough.’
From a woman who belongs to an age when football wives were true ladies (even if they were treated as second-class citizens) it was just the sort of response you’d expect.
Additional reporting: Nigel Bunyan.