War Hammers II E-Book

Brian Belton

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 445

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

War Hammers II, the sequel to the fascinating story of the club during the First World War, looks at the achievements and developments of the Upton Park heroes throughout the Second World War. West Ham United was forced to adapt in the dark days of the 1940s, building the outlook and approach that would eventually give rise to the club's most successful period, and establishing a culture of style and support that is still present today. Exploring the power, politics and intrigue of wartime football, a detailed account is given of the Irons' 1940 War Cup victory and of those who played for the club between 1939 and 1945. Author Brian Belton includes huge global events and many local incidents within the context of the club's history, to create a book that is sure to fascinate and entertain football fans and historians alike.

Leseprobe

From a proud grandson

To George Morris

(My maternal grandfather)

Warrior, Firefighter and Socialist

Fire falling from the air,

Bombs blasting everywhere,

So it’s to the engines boys to kill the flames,

Only the fire-girls will remember our names,

East London’s burning, the docks afire,

Pump the River to douse the pyre,

To save the City so the child may live,

The warrior fireman his life will give.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Roy and Paul Goulden for their time, memories and good humour.

Terry Brown for his kindness and generosity, particularly in passing on the ‘Charles Korr tapes’ that have proved to be a mine of information not only with regard to this book, but also for the historian/supporter. All images are taken from my own collection. In a few instances the ownership of copyright is unknown. If we have unknowingly used an image without permission then please contact me through the publishers.

CONTENTS

Title

Quote

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Terry Brown

Introduction

O

NE

                    The Last Peacetime Season

T

WO

                    The Hammers go to War

T

HREE

                 The War Cup

F

OUR

                   Paynter

F

IVE

                    The Cup of War

S

IX

                      The Corbetts

S

EVEN

                  Fenton

E

IGHT

                  ‘Can Anyone Give Him a Lift to Leicester?’

N

INE

                    Football and War

T

EN

                     Onward!

E

LEVEN

               Social Solidarity and Political Football

T

WELVE

              Tackling the Terriers

T

HIRTEEN

            All in the Game

F

OURTEEN

           Instant Replay

F

IFTEEN

              War Within a War

S

IXTEEN

              Some Kind of Harmony

S

EVENTEEN

          Runners-Up

E

IGHTEEN

            Birmingham Beaten

N

INETEEN

            Golden Len Goulden

T

WENTY

               Mutiny at Upton Park

T

WENTY

-

ONE

        Bridge of Sighs

T

WENTY

-

TWO

       Blackburn

T

WENTY

-

THREE

    The Legend that is Dick Walker

T

WENTY

-

FOUR

      Crompton

T

WENTY

-

FIVE

       The Football League War Cup Final

T

WENTY

-

SIX

         Transition

References

About the Author

Copyright

FOREWORD

I am delighted to write a foreword to Brian’s history of the club during the Second World War. I have to admit to being evacuated to Lanark, in Scotland and later Burnley, so I cannot say I sat the war out in East London, although I do have memories of red skies and tube stations. The latter are interesting because the people of East London marched to The Savoy in the Strand to protest against the failure of the authorities to allow people to take shelter in the underground tube stations during bombing raids (The Savoy had safe underground rooms that were used by many influential people). The stations were opened immediately, which without doubt saved many lives, notwithstanding the awful tragedy at Bethnal Green tube station in 1943 when 113 adults (mainly women) and 60 children were killed when people fell on the stairs leading to the entrance of the station.

Churchill was reported as saying that if the people of East London gave up then the rest of the country would quickly follow. As we all know, they never did, and the club’s role in maintaining spirits was recognised at the time and subsequently when we were allowed to repair our bomb-damaged ground and install makeshift floodlights with poles from the London Docks at a time when everyone else was subject to strict rationing.

I like to think that many of the brave soldiers from East London and their families at home, who went through so much lived, long enough to watch a home-grown boy become the best defender in the world and the team bring home the European Cup-Winners’ Cup some twenty years later when West Ham United, ironically, beat a team from Munich.

Brian’s book is long overdue and I am so pleased to see the club recognised in this way.

Terry Brown

Honorary Life President

West Ham United Football Club

INTRODUCTION

Then came the war and, with it, the end of my career or so I felt. Surely there couldn’t be room for a professional footballer in a world gone crazy? I, of course, being a young, fit man of approaching twenty would go into the services. Meanwhile, in the leisure time I had left I wound up my personal affairs, cursed Hitler and all his rats and occasionally sat down to think of what had been and what might have been.

Tommy Lawton, Football is my Business

Writing about West Ham United has become something of a habit, perhaps an obsession, even an addiction, for me over the last (almost) three decades, but to set the club, and its historical footballing context, within the wider environment of the Second World War has been a developing challenge that stretches back to my boyhood days; now close to half a century.

The book that has resulted has been a consistent labour of love, and also the source of frustration and exasperation at times. But for me, as a historian, sociologist and West Ham supporter, the latter have been compensated for by a series of magic moments. These have made up my education in what West Ham United is. My lessons have taken the shape of seminal encounters with club legends and Hammers stalwarts from the wartime era like Ernie Gregory and Eddie Chapman. My most recent delight and honour has been in contacting Paul and Roy Goulden, the sons of the West Ham player my father most admired, the immortal Len Goulden.

This multi-dimensional learning curve has provided me with a plethora of narrative, a mine of information, but more importantly ongoing understanding and insight that has shaped my personal direction and view of the world. I attained a professional qualification, a Bachelor of Science and then a Master’s Degree before achieving my doctorate. Not bad for a bad boy from Plaistow, who left Burke Secondary Modern School as a 16-year-old with a few CSEs (including a grade 2 in ‘woodwork’ – a qualification, I am proud to say, I have never put to any use whatsoever). However, my consistent and, I think, most profound awareness of the potential for human collaboration and industry has been the result of spending time with the wise, thoughtful, brave, mad, funny, eccentric, depressed, joyful, kind, cranky and generous men who, at one time or another, ‘wore the shirt’ with the Hammers over their hearts. Many welcomed me into their homes and a few even invited me into their families; all gave me something of their lives. I have worked and associated with so-called educated people, sometimes for many years, and have found most of them incapable of the munificence, simple humanity and social intellect shown to me by these players (there are no ‘ex-players’ in the lexicon of the Irons), often their wives, children and, once or twice, grandchildren too. I will always be grateful to these people for this.

My privileged journey, with this noble tribe, is reflected in the pages that follow.

PEOPLE

Having published one book about West Ham in war (see Belton 2014), I wanted this offering to be both the same and different. As with the first War Hammers (which is concerned with the club during the First World War), I have built the story around games, events and player biographies. My experience of football is that it is, at base, about people; it is something ‘made’ by managers, players, fans and, to a less palpable extent, directors. This being the case, people, individual players, the men who made the team, constitute a significant part of this story. In this respect I have focused on those players who played as Hammers in the final of the 1940 League War Cup. Several of these men were part of the Hammers team throughout the war and as such they are representative of the bulk of those who played under the banner of crossed hammers in those dark years. I chose to provide as much of their life-stories as was practicable, because they came to West Ham, and the war, with and by way of, the experience of their lives. They contributed the product of those lives to the club, as well as the wider society that struggled through the war years, partly using football to ease that path. I also believe that their lives after West Ham and the war are important. How these men lived and finally died was influenced by both of these aspects of their experience. More importantly, just to cover their time as stoppers or goal scorers is, I think, to dehumanise them. These men were players, but they were also people, and who they were and what became of them is significant, just because of that. However, their former and later lives are also relevant because they, like me, and perhaps you, will always be ‘West Ham’ – you, me, we, they: that ‘is’ West Ham and in that we are one.

Around 120 men played first-team football for West Ham during the Second World War. I would have liked to include all of them, but that would have taken about three or four times as many pages as I have eventually filled. Some were at Upton Park before, during and after the war; others were purely ‘conflict’ players, ‘guesting’ for the club during the years of hostility. Among them were those who served the club during the war for many dozens – sometimes over a hundred – games; others played just a few times, being football Gypsies for the duration, turning out for several, sometimes many, clubs all over Britain. Such was the nature of the game and the West Ham club during the war. I am sad I have not been able to write about many players who deserve to be included on both personal and sporting merit. These include the likes of Ernie Gregory, Jim Barrett, Jackie Wood and Alf Chalkley. Although I have written about many of these talented players previously, it was hard to exclude them from this book.

I make mention of the wartime international matches that included West Ham players, principally Archie Macaulay and Len Goulden (but also Willie Corbett and Ted Fenton). I considered including the international matches in which the likes of Jock Dodds played (he donned the claret and blue during the 1944/45 season, scoring an impressive 11 goals in 10 games) as well as the many West Ham ‘guest’ players who represented their countries. However, again, this would have more than doubled this aspect of the book, although Jock was involved in most of the games detailed.

The Charles Korr tapes were a great help in supplying dimension and background to my own primary research. These were kindly passed on to me by Terry Brown. They are recordings of interviews carried out during the first and last in-depth organisational, sociological and historical study of the West Ham club (with total access to organisational records and staff ) by Korr, who is now Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri, St Louis. The tapes were the background for Korr’s seminal book West Ham United (1986) and include contributions by or about Reg Pratt, Malcolm Allison, Len Cearns, John Lyall, Charlie Paynter and many others.

I also wanted to include something of the wartime supporter experience. The most accessible people were, of course, my family (the support of West Ham goes back many generations in my extended Cockney clan). My closeness to these people I hope provides something of what many of those who identified themselves with the Hammers went through, but also how living with and being part of West Ham helped them through the massive challenges presented by life in war-torn East London. Overall, I believe this material provides another dimension on football in wartime, demonstrating its relevance and deployment as a psychological and humane resource during a period of worry, fear and tension.

If one writes a book about wartime, one has to include that experience both as background and as foreground. Football could not, between 1939 and 1945, be simply divorced from the historical and social environment, the nature and conduct of hostilities. Given this, I have tried to set the football, the game and its governance, West Ham as a club, its players, management, directors and supporters, in the context of the time. This involves looking at landmark events, but I have also tried to include lesser-known aspects of wartime history, encompassing home defence, in particular around East London, and largely forgotten events, campaigns and characters that I feel deserve attention, if only because of the lack of the same in the past.

WHAT HAPPENED?

While putting together this West Ham United wartime biography, I found that as the story developed it increasingly gave the lie to, or demonstrated the erroneous nature of, an oft-repeated perspective on the Second World War. This interpretation has it that the conflict did little more in terms of the game than end, interrupt or seriously disrupt football careers. While this is certainly true of some, the war also provided a football stage on which many players built and extended their careers. More than a few players would never have got the chance to play for professional teams had the conditions been ‘normal’. Many of those who would have got a game or two in peacetime had protracted wartime careers and consequently a playing CV in the post-war football job market. The war also cemented the club’s relationship with its supporters; they (we?) went through it together, we got each other through.

At the same time, for the first time, a lot of players were turning out for several clubs, all over the country. They had a unique opportunity to experience different management and organisational conditions; most significantly, this movement created a dialogue between players on a scale never before known. This is not to be underestimated with regard to the organisation of players as a workforce after the war. The latter led to the abolition of the minimum wage and ultimately a complete revision of the way football was organised as an industry. In fact it is probable that the war obliged the boardrooms of professional clubs to move more swiftly towards becoming mature business enterprises, which included industrial relations. This transition was to displace the cultural fiefdoms of local builders, brewers and shopkeepers that many football clubs had been.

CHANGE

There is little point in writing history unless there is an argument about the impact of the past on the present and the future. With this in mind I have provided some analysis of how the war years were to shape the future of West Ham and football overall. Part of this refers to organisational considerations by way of a very general overview. But in places I have personalised other considerations of how the years of conflict moulded the attitudes and motivations of the most perennial aspects of West Ham’s human resources. This is mainly focused on the character of support but also the nature of West Ham the board. It includes a reflection on my own experiences as a child who came to the Hammers just a decade after the war, who played on bomb sites, and whose parents, grandparents and teachers were shaped by and in the war. The players who formed my vision of Upton Park and the Hammers, those who played in the first games I was to attend, were products of the post-war organisation of football, itself a creation of the 1939–46 era.

While the First World War played a crucial part in changing West Ham United, altering the class dynamic of the administration of football (following the football class war within the war: see Belton 2014), the Second World War saw the further development of football as a commercial endeavour. The conditions demanded that the final blow be delivered to the practically feudal system, complete with despots and patriarchs, which had dominated the organisation of the game at every level. While there were regional differences in this respect, one only has to compare the position of the managers of the 1940 War Cup Final to intuit this. The war created the room and need to modernise not only the playing of the game (see Belton 2013a, 2013b) but also the running and administration of clubs. As the following pages suggest, at board level, West Ham’s Reg Pratt was perhaps the first to see the need for what was ultimately to be a revolution of sorts. To his credit he probably transformed his own approach and attitudes in the first instance; not an easy task for the best of us.

While Len Cearns (the chairman of West Ham for thirty-one years, starting in 1948) also did much to sustain this position, the club remained on something of a plateau, even going into decline, after the 1960s, until the Terry Brown era. For the first time an actual supporter, someone who had stood on the terraces of Upton Park, took a controlling hand in the club, and it was his administration that brought a final end to the dynastic character of the West Ham hierarchy. Terry was wise and loyal enough to value the history of the club (which is something different from tradition or custom), even doing what he could to set up a club museum. But whatever you think of his methods, the overall management of the club under Brown was made fit for twenty-first-century purpose by way of his influence, skill and care. History will remember Terry as a seminal custodian of the club’s past and future. A trick of economic history and the failure of international finance during the ‘Icelandic period’, together with the legacy of Harry Redknapp (see Belton 2007), prevents a secure understanding of events post-Brown at this juncture in time; we still stand too close to that era to make out the wood for the trees.

The current ownership, Davids Gold and Sullivan, continue the interrupted process Brown started, alongside the tremendously hard-working, massively intelligent and dedicated Karen Brady (really the ‘First Lady’ of the English game). The move to the Olympic Stadium is at the forefront of the ethos they have brought to the club. Again, you or I might not want to ‘move’ emotionally, I’m not sure the Davids do, but the practical and economic case is clear. Yes, my granddad had fond memories of Bidder Street, Canning Town, with its outside toilet and view of the gasworks, but overall, the three-bedroomed semi in Chigwell is really a better place to bring up your kids. His father was among those who watched Thames Ironworks FC at the Memorial Ground, which was a fantastic sporting edifice in its time (see Belton 2003), but then, as now, economics and finance dictated movement. It must have seemed mad to move from that impressive venue to what there was at Upton Park in the first years of the twentieth century. However, life and history are like that; nothing stays the same – in business, sport and our lives, stasis is usually achieved at the cost of existence.

Once more, Gold and Sullivan are ‘fans’ and a million miles away from the men who cultivated a sort of ‘toffness’ as part of an almost Upstairs, Downstairs culture that pertained at West Ham before the war. I have met and like Terry Brown, David Gold and David Sullivan; I found them all affable, down-to-earth men, intelligent, interesting, funny and generous. The idea that I might ever have been given the same time, or shown similar kindness by the potentates of the 1940s and those who succeeded them prior to the 1990s is beyond contemplation. I say that from personal experience. One would have more chance of an audience with the Pope or a pint at the Boleyn with Xi Jinping (both Hammers supporters, of course) than a meet with one of the Cearns family round at their drum.

LIGHT

Where we are today started with the coming of war. In those bleak and fearful times, football brought moments of illumination and much-needed distraction. I think of myself as a sort of rogue Protestant; I have always been something of a ‘spiritual slapper’. When I have felt the need or the curiosity, I have visited temples, mosques or churches of various denominations, usually on recommendation or pulled by repute; to listen to what the priest, vicar or imam has to say about the world. It was in the 1990s that I took myself over to the West London synagogue to take in the wisdom of Rabbi Hugo Grinn. His connection with the Second World War was as a 9-year-old prisoner in a concentration camp with the rest of his family. In one of his sermons I heard him tell the congregation about one experience he had during this time.

Hugo’s father was also a rabbi, and with Hanukkah coming up, he and others thought about the menorah and the concomitant need for candles. But candles, like most other things, were not made available to prisoners, so plans were laid to make them. Each family gave a tiny amount of butter from their meagre rations over a number of weeks for this purpose. The very young children, like Hugo, were given the job of finding material for the wicks. They found that tiny strands of material pulled from the uniforms of the camp guards could be threaded together for this purpose. The quality and strength of the cloth was much more suitable than the rags the inmates had to wear. Each time a child surreptitiously pulled one of these strands from their captors, they took their lives in their hands.

So it was Hanukkah came, and in the cold darkness of one of the camp sheds, the congregation came together to light the candles. But no one knew that butter didn’t burn like wax. As soon as each candle was lit, in a split second it was gone in a small flash of flame. Hugo told how he cried bitterly. However, his father held his shoulders, looked into his glassy, tearful eyes and told him, ‘There was light. That’s all that matters. That there was, even for just a second, light here.’

In total darkness even a glimpse of light signals hope. There is an old Gypsy saying: ‘Hope is the last thing to die.’ In the Second World War, as the Nazis were raining down fire and destruction on the place I still regard as ‘home’, West Ham brought hope; they brought light.

My dad and a couple of mates were at a game at Upton Park when the air-raid siren sounded. Two old blokes told the kids to follow them and they ran to a shelter at the back of a house not too far from the Boleyn Ground. The cramped, dark space, lit by a single candle, was packed with frightened people when the explosions started. A young woman, who was holding a baby close to her body, started to sing:

Thou, Whose Almighty word

Chaos and darkness heard,

And took their flight;

Hear us, we humbly pray;

And, where the gospel’s day

Sheds not its glorious ray,

Let there be light!

The people in the shelter, including my dad and his pals, who remembered the hymn from school, started to join in. Between the explosions he could hear other people giving their voice too, from shelters along the row of back yards of the little terraced houses that nestled round the home of the Hammers:

Spirit of truth, and love,

Life-giving, holy Dove,

Speed forth Thy flight!

Move on the waters’ face

Bearing the lamp of grace,

And in earth’s darkest place

Let there be light!

What follows is a story of that hope; it is a tale of light. A time when the Irons of East London went to war and football protected us with its own promise of the next goal, the next game, next week, when Saturday comes; depicting a future that offered an escape from the now. Escape is different from escapism (which is perhaps what football is today). We need to face or escape danger; perhaps facing it and escaping it come to much the same thing, but football and West Ham helped with that. For kids like my dad, amidst the destruction of his dockland home, war workers on shifts or service people, on roaring, freezing seas or fighting in blistering deserts, the game, the ‘results’, mattered! Hope happened by way of the match still being or to be played – for a moment they were home, for a precious, illuminated second the war was forgotten – ‘There was light.’ That’s all that mattered.

Boundless as ocean’s tide

Rolling in fullest pride,

Through the earth, far and wide,

LET THERE BE LIGHT!

From the hymn ‘God, Whose Almighty Word’by John Marriott (1825)

ONE

THE LAST PEACETIME SEASON

Called up to the Army as Trooper T. Finney 7958274 of the Royal Armoured Corps. I had given up hope of any action in the football sense … But I was wrong. Football was important.

Tom Finney, My Autobiography

The coming of war was something many had hoped might be avoided, but no one was surprised at; the omens had not been good from the mid-1930s with the rise of fascism in Europe. Although on 24 March 1939 Britain had declared that she would oppose any German aggression against Belgium, Holland or Switzerland, and a week later it was determined that the government would stand by France in supporting Poland, the appeasement of German expansionism had become the way of things. This was graphically symbolised by the Nazi salute that the English football team were obliged to provide before their encounter with Germany during May 1938 in the Berliner Olympiastadion.

There was some disturbance in the England camp with regard to the team being expected to give the Hitlergruß (‘Hitler Greeting’), but the pro-appeasement British ambassador to Berlin, Sir Neville Henderson, convinced Stanley Rous, the FA secretary at the time, and the Oxford University representative on the FA Council, Charles Wreford Brown, that should the salute not be given by the England team, it would result in an international incident. Henderson also argued that giving the salute would ‘get the crowd in a good mood’ and that it was the polite thing to do. In retrospect the visitors’ 6–3 victory was hardly a redeeming factor. The players, England’s Lions, had been clearly led by donkeys – nothing new there in terms of British/German relations. (The final England goal, a crashing 30yd drive, which had torn the German net, came from the boot of West Ham’s Len Goulden – Stanley Matthews was to declare that he had never seen a more powerful shot.)

THE IRON ’30S

As the opening games of the 1938/39 season were being played out on 27 August 1938, when despite two strikes from Archie Macaulay, West Ham lost by the odd goal of 5 at Craven Cottage, people were wondering if war might sooner rather than later override such considerations.

A few weeks later, on 17September, Macaulay repeated his performance against Fulham at Upton Park as, with a 2-goal contribution from Ben Fenton, the Hammers achieved a 4–1 trouncing of Coventry City (Lol Coen got the only Sky Blues goal). West Ham appeared to be making something of a comeback from a disastrous opening to the season; three consecutive defeats were followed by a run wherein the Irons lost just 1 match. The 16-goal, 5-match sequence culminated in the 6–1 East London defeat of Tranmere Rovers (Macaulay hit a hat-trick, which was equalled by the combined efforts of Joe Cockroft, Norman Corbett and Stan Foxall).

At the same time, things were beginning to look a bit more hopeful on the international front too as the British Prime Minister, Arthur Neville Chamberlain, was working hard to placate Hitler in Berchtesgaden and Bad Godesberg. More than a few saw this frantic diplomacy as only delaying the inevitable, and perhaps it was something of a desperate tactic to give Britain some time to prepare for war. The latter was to some extent confirmed when the Royal Navy was mobilised on 27 September. The Football League gave notice that the weekend’s fixtures would be completed if war did not break out before the start of October.

The notorious ‘peace in our time’ message brought back from Germany allowed football and Britain some respite, although the commotion and general mood of pessimism made it hard for people not to be conscious that the world was on the brink. The statement looked more than hollow when Hitler’s forces invaded the Czechoslovak Sudetenland on 1 October 1938. In Britain this was the prelude for the ominous distribution of gas masks, the hurried digging of air-raid shelters in public parks, and the erection of anti-aircraft batteries around London.

Before the kick-off of West Ham’s game at the Saltergate Recreation ground and every Football League match on 1 October 1938, there was a service of thanksgiving ‘to express thankfulness for the preservation of peace’. Chesterfield ended the Hammers’ short-lived purple patch with a single-goal win. The Irons managed just nine more League wins until a 6–2 away win over Norwich on 11 March 1939 (Sam Small’s hat-trick was the foundation of the Carrow Road victory).

By Easter 1939 Germany had occupied all of Czechoslovakia. The government announced the introduction of compulsory military service for men aged 20 to 21, limited to a period of six months’ training, although the call-up would eventually take in all fit males between the ages of 18 and 41. This potentially would have a huge, and at that point seemingly disastrous, impact on professional football.

West Ham finished eleventh in the old Second Division, 11 points adrift of Champions Blackburn. Spurs had done the double over the East Londoners but the Hammers, after 3 games, had put Peter McWilliam’s boys out of the Cup (Stan Foxall claiming 4 of the 6 goals put past the Tottenham defence over what was a truculent triptych of tussles). It was a pity Portsmouth killed off any further advance by the Irons. It was the sixth time since 1928 that the Hammers had been eliminated by a club that would make the Wembley final.

The Boleyn Boys had by that time played their seventh successive season in the second tier of English football. There were few high-points during that period; perhaps the semi-final stage of the FA Cup in 1933 (a defeat by Everton) was the apex of footballing prowess during what, in retrospect, looks like a relatively grey era in the history of the Hammers. In that same 1932/33 season the Irons avoided the drop to the Third Division South with a 1-point advantage over Chesterfield. Subsequently, the Irons got to third and fourth spots in 1935 and 1936 respectively. In 1935 a single point would have meant the East Enders leapfrogging Bolton (the Trotters had a better goal average) and taken them up to the top flight with Brentford. A season on, 4 more points would have seen the Cockney club taking Charlton’s place and going up with Manchester United. So, with a less pessimistic second look, the 1930s did have a fair share of drama and interest for those who followed the fortunes of the Upton Park cadre.

But at the dawn of 1939, West Ham were beginning to look like something better than what had gone before. As the side’s young goalkeeper at the time, Ernie Gregory, recalled: ‘We began to feel like a side that could be promoted.’ Ted Fenton (in his book At Home With The Hammers) agreed: ‘In 1939, we really and sincerely thought we were going to do it. We had the balance, the power and the experience necessary. We saw it as our season of fulfilment.’ There had indeed been, for some time, a show of will to succeed at Upton Park. When Everton officials approached the Hammers directors in the late 1930s, asking if the club would be prepared to sell Goulden and Jackie Morton, the board gave a definite refusal. Around the same time, West Ham made the bold and successful bid that brought Archie Macaulay to the Boleyn Ground from Rangers.

UMBERTO THE MAGNANIMOUS

As spring turned to summer in 1939, the FA decided to call a joint meeting with the Football League the moment that war was declared to make plans for the game during hostilities. This was indicative of the prevailing gloomy ethos that had shrouded the last peacetime season. The campaign had been played out in a mood of near-excruciating tension as politicians and diplomats continued their apparently unending dance of negotiation and scheming. But for years one international crisis had followed another as football, along with the rest of British society, endeavoured to establish some sense of stasis and predictability.

Following the penultimate season of the 1930s, one of the great heroes of that Hammers side, Len Goulden, was with the England team for a 3-match tour of Italy, Yugoslavia and Romania. He had staked his claim in the 3–0 victory over the Rest of Europe at Wembley in October 1938, again with the final goal of the game.

Before and during the initial match of the tour, the San Siro Stadium in Milan was drenched in torrential rain. In the soaking conditions the German referee (Dr Bauwens) gave an Italian goal, which had clearly been hit home by a fist of one of the home players. This was so blatant that Italian Crown Prince Umberto offered to ask the officiating Deutsche to review this decision, but the offer was diplomatically refused by the FA. The match concluded in a 2–2 result following a late England goal.

A few months earlier, in April, Umberto, returning with troops from action in the Spanish Civil War, had flouted Italy’s newly formed racial legislation. Reviewing the Italian wounded as they were disembarking at the docks in Naples, the crown prince extended a special greeting to the 27-year-old Lieutenant Bruno Fernari, a Jew. Umberto posed with the young man for a picture. Bruno had given up an engineering career four years previously to join the Italian Army. He had suffered a leg wound during the Christmas fighting in Spain and was twice decorated for his bravery. He also received a gold medal for horsemanship.

A few Jewish volunteers remained with the Italian forces in Spain. Most of those who returned were to find that they were no longer considered Italians, so were not able to take up the jobs and trades they had left to serve their country. A disproportionately high percentage of Jewish volunteers were decorated; many were wounded in the last three months of the Spanish Civil War.

Following a long train journey, England were beaten 2–1 by Yugoslavia in Belgrade, but subsequently the tourists claimed a 2–0 victory over Rumania in Bucharest (Len Goulden scored England’s second). This was the last peacetime international for England. Over the following seven years, players would receive unofficial recognition only, which of course translated into no recognition at all.

THE END OF THE START

Soon after Len’s and England’s twenty-four-hour trip back to London, the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) Department of the Home Office laid plans for closing all forms of entertainment on the outbreak of war. The arrangements allowed for the possible reopening of such facilities after a week, depending on the intensity of what was thought to be the practical inevitability of aerial bombing and related decisions to be made by the police.

In the summer of 1939, when the West Ham players reported for pre-season training, talk of war was rife. Sir Edward Grey’s words of 1914, ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe’, seemed as relevant at that time as they had been on the eve of the Great War. A type of fearsome gloom, tinged with uncertainty, was pervasive, but there was also a feeling that the normality of life, of which the ticks and tocks of football were a part, with its regularities, every Saturday, kick-off at 3 o’clock, the results, scores, scorers, leagues and reports, was about to be suspended. The ominous, omnipresent insecurity was fuelled by the newspapers, which seemed to speculate endlessly about the game being stopped, or in some unspecified way curtailed, if and when war broke out.

As early as September 1938 the Hammers chairman had pre-empted a Football Association circular of April 1939, which expressed the hope that the game might be an example of patriotism to British youth by professional players signing up for the Territorial Army (known affectionately as ‘The Terries’) or other national service organisations. West Ham’s chairman, Will J. Cearns, in the face of the threat of the club’s players and other staff being called to defend the far reaches of the Empire, counselled that ‘the first-team join the Reserve Police and the second team get into the Territorials’. This gave these employees a fair chance of not being called to service too far from Upton Park, at least over the immediate period, and provided some hope that the Irons could field a decent side in time of war. Leonard ‘Len’ Crittenden Cearns, the 24-year-old son of W.J., also enlisted in the ‘Terriers’. The ‘Crittenden’ aspect of Lenny’s moniker resonated John J. Crittenden, US attorney general, a slavery compromiser and member of the ‘Know Nothing’ Party.

The ‘local service’ tactic had become something of a trend in football for most of the 1938/39 season. Liverpool staff and players had enlisted with the Terries as a club. This included their manager and former Hammers 1923 FA Cup Final skipper, George Kay. Like West Ham, their combatants from that final, Bolton Wanderers, also joined almost as a unit. However, the Manchester United board completely rejected the idea, seeing it as ‘a matter for the individual to decide’.

When war did finally break out, many of the West Ham playing staff joined the forces and not a few served together in a searchlight unit of the Essex Regiment in East Anglia. So for a good part of the war years, that part of the world was defended against the airborne foe and invasion by men who were more at home with a ball than a gun. Typical of the man, Dick Walker left the police after three months, volunteering to have a more direct impact on the enemy. But less than a week before war broke out, Charlie Paynter got Archie Macaulay a job as a toolmaker in essential war work.

The summer brought a call-up of more reservists, and in July the Football League Management Committee decided that there should be no obligation on clubs to pay players while they were training with the armed forces, but given that an arrangement with the military authorities might be made to make players available, they could be paid for the time they were available for playing football. Perhaps inevitably, the game, as a business, was aware that paying players who were not available for selection made no financial sense. Thus they sought to gain latitude on the six-month conscription period, looking to get it shortened to four months during the summer for footballers.

Around the same time the Army Cup rules were amended to allow soldiers to play for professional clubs as long as consent was obtained from commanding officers. However, with the future uncertain, any arrangements were inevitably provisional. This was illustrated at the Boleyn Ground during August 1939; no new players were recruited as the cost was likely to represent money down the drain should they be called to serve King and Country.

Predictably perhaps, Charlie Paynter found that fourteen players were absent for the opening session of pre-season training, many of whom had been ordered to report to Huntingdon to undergo training with the 64th Searchlight Regiment. However, they returned to make the public trials that traditionally heralded the start to the season in support of the Football League’s Jubilee Benevolent Fund. Clubs all over England took part in this project, using it to provide try-outs for potential players (playing alongside established professionals). West Ham and Fulham contested this season’s curtain-raiser, home and away on the same day with both the first team and reserves. The West Ham sides lined up thus on 19 August 1939:

Reserves (at Craven Cottage):

Ernie Gregory

Terry Woodgate

Steve Forde

Dick Dunn

Arthur Banner

George Foreman

Norman Corbett

George Proudlock

Jim Barrett

Dick Bell

Jim Harris

The West Ham second team won 4–2 at the Cottage.

At Upton Park, West Ham faced the Cottagers on what was to be the hottest day of the year.

First team (at Upton Park):

Harry Medhurst

Stan Burton

Charlie Bicknell

Archie Macaulay

Charlie Walker

Cliff Hubbard

Norman Corbett

Len Goulden

Dick Walker

Jackie Wood

Joe Cockroft

The Hammers had met the West Londoners in the same Jubilee encounter of the previous year, wining 4–2 at the Boleyn Ground. More than 10,000 supporters meant a £521 donation would be made to the Football League’s fund. In the roasting temperatures, players and officials slogged through to produce an exciting game, the sides sharing 6 goals (Jackie Wood and Archie Macaulay were on target for the Hammers, who were assisted by an own goal).

On Monday, 21 August the FA waived Rule 33 which stated that ‘no player serving in His Majesty’s Forces could be registered as a professional footballer’. The following Saturday, West Ham opened the 1939/40 season at Home Park – a venue that would be destroyed in the bombing to come. Plymouth Argyle were beaten 3–1. Cliff Hubbard (2) and Jackie Wood were the Hammers’ scorers in front of 18,000 of the Pilgrim persuasion.

The Irons’ Second Division schedule continued a couple of days later with Fulham returning to the Boleyn Ground. Jackie Wood was on the mark again, and with a goal from Ted Fenton, Upton Park saw what was to be the first and last home Football League Second Division victory for the Irons that season, seeing their visitors off 2–1.

EVACUATION AND TALES OF WAR

The blow of the East End having to say goodbye to its children as evacuation kicked in (the process officially started on Friday, 1 September) was unsurprisingly not softened by the Hammers’ result against Fulham.

This was perhaps the final recognition that war was stalking London. West Ham’s children brought home notes from their school giving details of the plans for their evacuation. Parents read the list of the things their kids would need or be allowed to take with them, which included a change of underwear, stout shoes, spare socks and a raincoat. Everything was to be packed in a small case.

As the crocodiles of schoolchildren converged on Barking railway station, a sea of tears was shed. Each child had a cardboard label tied to them by a piece of string, detailing name, address and school. A particular fear at this time was the potential use of gas, and many parents knew about the activities of the Luftwaffe against civilians in the Spanish Civil War, so every child had a box respirator slung across their shoulders. Many of the younger ones, with this and their ‘small case’, sometimes a brown paper bag, or a sad little bundle containing their bits and pieces, looked like tiny Sherpas.

My 5-year-old mother was one of those children. The second youngest of thirteen, she left dockside Poplar not to return for more than five years. She came back, having been billeted in Wales, speaking fluent Welsh. The entire time she was away is a blank to her, apart from a visit from her dad. He brought a children’s china tea-set from her older sister. When she opened it after he left, she found it had been smashed to pieces. Almost half a decade of the most precious years of her childhood life was blotted out. God knows the fear, anxiety and horrors she experienced that caused this to happen. Many children, remote from love and protection, were used as nothing better than mini-slaves, and although there are numerous stories of the kindness of strangers, we will probably never know the level of abuse that many of these isolated children suffered. This is one of the several hidden casualty lists of the Second World War. My mum at 80, like many who had similar experiences, had coped well with the consequences, although who would want their child to have this exile as a seminal part of childhood?

Her father, George Morris, a veteran of the trenches, one of the Middlesex Regiment who played football with the Germans on Christmas Day 1914, joined the Auxiliary Fire Service. Sorrowfully ironic in his case, schools left empty by the evacuation of pupils were allocated to the Auxiliary Fire Service as surrogate stations. Sheds and warehouses had been made available for firefighters in the docks by the Port of London Authority. The majority of the outer London brigades numbered their auxiliary fire stations consecutively after their regular stations. West Ham, for example, having three regular fire stations, commissioned twenty auxiliary stations and numbered them 4 to 23.

George was a pioneer of the ‘Poplarism’ revolt of the early inter-war years; a socialist, he educated himself in conjunction with the Workers’ Educational Association. George had, of course, seen terrors in the Great War, but the dreadfulness he would witness in his own manor over the duration of the London bombing was to stay with him to the grave. He rose to officer level and was decorated for his bravery in the face of the wildly blazing East End that spat rivers of molten fury and created chasms of fire, like a massively expansive dragon. For me he was a tiny St George who, alongside his small regiment of fellow volunteers, pumped the Thames in the defence of their home. The old river, by which so many had made their living, once more became the water of life, deployed to drive the volcanic monster down. When you next look at our river, maybe for a moment give a thought to how it saved London and defied and denied fascism.

George related nothing of his experiences as a firefighter; his time as a literal fighter-of-fire; but each time it was mentioned, the history of carnage, the flames, could be seen in his eyes as they stared into the scorching past. The courage and tenacity of home front, Blitz-time heroes like him has too easily come close to being forgotten.

COMMITMENT TO SUPPORT

As a boy, when lonely or afraid, the warp and weft of football was a recourse and resource for me. In a police cell, or waiting outside the headmaster’s room, in a tent alone in Tassili n’Ajjer, I have loudly, under my breath or in my head, sung ‘Bubbles’ or recited to myself the 1923 cup final team, the 1958 promotion side, the FA Cup winners of 1964; distraction yes, but also making myself part of something stronger, bigger than just me.

Not a few of those kids, those evacuated, disoriented little East Enders, dispersed all over Britain, would have carried out much the same rituals as I have, and felt something similar in their times of foreboding. Having, in their heads, hearts and spirits, something of home in West Ham United would have united them with the feel and memory of family and the place where they had first seen the light of day; when they listened to or read the football results or kicked a ball. Perhaps more than a few spent part of their journey to what must have seemed like the ends of the earth, finding distraction, comfort and maybe a little sense of courage, recalling or talking about the team, the result and, most importantly, tomorrow.

THE COMING STORM

With two wins from two games, most Hammers supporters looked towards the weekend and the Boleyn Ground game against Leicester City with some hopes of the development of a winning streak. However, after the final day of August, at 4.45 a.m. on 1 September 1939, Hitler ordered the German invasion of Poland. On that Friday the Luftwaffe bombed Warsaw, while Nazi tanks breached the Polish border.

Although London was under the threat of potential aerial attack from Nazi bombing, a communiqué from the Home Office declared that circumstances did not merit the cancellation of matches, although throughout the country theatres were darkened, cricket matches were cancelled and at West Ham Stadium in Custom House greyhound racing was abandoned, as it was at tracks all over Britain.

Saturday, 2 September saw West Ham taste defeat (2–0) in East London. The travelling Foxes got home to find Leicester, late on Saturday evening, with the blackout already in force. But despite the obvious difficulties this presented, many people were out in the streets; seemingly folk didn’t want to go home, even in the face of a ferocious thunderstorm. There was a clear sense that something was about to happen.

The next day, 3 September, at 11.15 a.m. the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announced that the British deadline for the withdrawal of German troops from Poland had expired. At a point when the BBC became restricted to two wavelengths, the world heard him over the ‘wireless’ tell how the British ambassador to Berlin, Sir Nevile Meyrick Henderson, had handed a final note to the German government that morning stating that, unless it announced plans to withdraw from Poland by 11 a.m., a state of war would exist between the two countries. The British Prime Minister continued: ‘I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and consequently this country is at war with Germany.’ As he uttered that last word, the air-raid sirens sounded all over the country. Many took this to be the first air raid, but no bombs fell before the sirens sounded the all clear. For some time it was thought that what had happened was a sort of heralding of war, but in fact it had been a false alarm, caused by a French light aircraft entering British airspace unannounced. Nevertheless, it was a poignant moment.

All League football was suspended and for a short period no football was played in Britain, apart from the Services, as players were called-up for ARP or other wartime duties.

The new season was over by its second Saturday, hostilities sending the national game into what was to be a partial hibernation, but West Ham ‘finished’ in a respectable position – notionally their best since 1936, albeit that none of what they had done, or what anyone else had done, counted at all.

Football League Division Two, 1939/40

Played

Won

Drawn

Lost

For

Against

Points

Luton Town

3

2

1

0

7

1

5

Birmingham

3

2

1

0

5

1

5

Coventry City

3

1

2

0

8

6

4

Plymouth Argyle

3

2

0

1

4

3

4

West Ham United

3

2

0

1

5

4

4

Tottenham Hotspur

3

1

2

0

6

5

4

Leicester City

3

2

0

1

6

5

4

Nottingham Forest

3

2

0

1

5

5

4

Newport County

3

1

1

1

5

4

3

Millwall

3

1

1

1

5

4

3

Manchester City

3

1

1

1

6

5

3

West Bromwich Albion

3

1

1

1

8

8

3

Bury

3

1

1

1

4

5

3

Newcastle United

3

1

0

2

8

6

2

Chesterfield

2

1

0

1

2

2

2

Barnsley

3

1

0

2

7

8

2

Southampton

3

1

0

2

5

6

2

Sheffield Wednesday

3

1

0

2

3

5

2

Swansea Town

3

1

0

2

5

11

2

Fulham

3

0

1

2

3

6

1

Burnley

2

0

1

1

1

3

1

Bradford Park Avenue

3

0

1

2

2

7

1

The Consultative Committee of the Football Association, which had met in September the previous year, had agreed to have a meeting (as committees so often do): ‘In the event of war a meeting [will] be convened comprising the officials of the FA and the Management Committee of the Football League for the purpose of deciding the course of action to be taken with regard to the game.’ This had effectively been an expression of resignation to the predictable, even though that same month Chamberlain had flown back from Munich apparently having appeased Adolf Hitler. There were cheers as he held up the piece of paper that he took to assure ‘peace in our time’.

Most of the British population had hoped their Prime Minister’s message would prove to be true, even though preparations for war had been going on for years. For instance, the stipulations of the Air Raids Precautions Act of 1937 had been kicking in for some time. This required local authorities to draw up emergency fire schemes for their area and submit them to the secretary of state. The County Borough of West Ham was an area of 7.5 square miles, but considering the dockside importance of the district, the crowded little borough was a prime target for the worst ravages the Luftwaffe might unleash.

Initially, West Ham Council had refused to carry out its obligations under the Act, until more financial help for the protection of relatively poor districts like West Ham was made available. However, plans were eventually laid for the recruitment of an Auxiliary Fire Service, even though the local authority continued to argue with the government about the level of direct funding for the new service.

The Home Office was not too concerned about sport, so what restrictions were to be put in place in the circumstances was subject mostly to guesswork. After a short period the ban on sports activities outside the evacuation areas was lifted and the FA was advised that friendlies could be played, but only in areas that did not come under evacuation orders (big towns and cities, and centres of military importance).

On 5 September 1939, William Charles ‘Everton Charlie’ Cuff, the Football League president, in the light of the government’s closure of places of entertainment, announced that clubs needed to maintain player contracts. The following day an emergency meeting of the League Management Committee took place at Crewe, which effectively ended League competition. The main means of shaping and restricting football at least for an interim period included the following:

•  The formal advice that clubs should keep players standing by was rescinded – clubs had to pay players up to 6 September.

•  Signing-on bonuses and removal expenses were to be immediately paid up.

•  Refunds for season tickets had to be held up, but had to be consistent.

•  Matches already played in the League would stand as cup-ties – if the regular schedule resumed, the return matches would be played on a like basis.

•  Injured players were to stick by end-of-season procedures when making claims.

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