How fake accent and knitting secured cup glory
Remembering photographer’s sly tactics that helped him get pitchside view of England’s famous win
AMID UNPRECEDENTED security and in a climate of political hostility, the eyes of the football world will be on Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium on Thursday.
But the discovery in Leeds of a cache of postcards and memorabilia has thrown the spotlight back to a more innocent age – when a sly backhander, a cod German accent and a knitted armband was all it took to to the heart of the action.
John Varley, a photographer who for 30 years was the Daily
Mirror’s prism through which Yorkshire was seen, kept an archive that takes in some of football’s most defining moments from five World Cups, including the victory lap at Wembley in 1966. It also includes once-in-alifetime snapshots of events that made the news in the county.
Mr Varley’s son, Andrew, himself a veteran photographer, unearthed the material after an approach from a football magazine.
They include the landmark picture of Bobby Moore and Pele swapping jerseys after Brazil had beaten England at the Mexico finals in 1970.
“He made his own luck. He became a bit of a master at juggling the security armbands or bibs around,” said his son.
“The system was that each photographer was allowed on the pitch for only half of the game – so for the rest of the time they would have to be on a gantry, looking down on the pitch, which isn’t ideal.
“But by getting my mother to knit armbands and bibs in different colours he found he could remain on the pitch at all times – even if the colours on the forged armbands hardly matched the real ones.”
At his first World Cup in 1966, eight years after he joined the Mirror, he pretended to be German in order to get better access, Andrew Varley said.
“At the final at Wembley, he slipped a few quid to a steward to borrow his armband,” he said.
“He had been in Germany after the war when he did his National Service, so he knew a few phrases of the language. He pretended he’d been to the loo and kept talking German until the steward got fed up and let him on to the pitch.”
A few minutes earlier, he had taken a picture of the footballers Mike Summerbee and George Best next to him in the stand. The shot came back to haunt Best years later when he denied having been at the match.
Mr Varley, who died in 2010, at 76, also left behind boxes of postcards sent home from his travels – which, in 1970, involved getting to Mexico in a rally car.
The Mirror had staged an unprecedented road race from Wembley to Mexico City, covering 16,000 miles across 25 countries, in 24 days. Some 240 professional and amateur drivers in 93 cars made the journey through deserts, across jungles and up 15,000ft mountain tracks. Among the teams was the recently retired footballer Jimmy Greaves and Prince Michael of Kent, then an Army officer.
Mr Varley and his Yorkshire colleague Allan Staniforth joined the rally in the Mirror’s own car. “It broke down about 70 miles from Mexico City,” Andrew Varley said. “But they made it.”
Mr Varley’s exploits were not confined to the football field. He had close access to the Bradford boxer Richard Dunn when in 1976 he was beaten by Muhammad Ali in Munich. He also photographed sculptor Henry Moore in Leeds and The Beatles after they played the Futurist Theatre in Scarborough.
He kept talking German until the steward let him go. Andrew Varley about his father, John.