Remembering Duncan

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."


The very moving events marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Munich Air Disaster have shone a light into L.P.Harley’s foreign country that is the past in a very interesting way. The world of 1958 and in particular the footballing world of 1958 could not be more different from the footballing world of today.

Take for example the description in the Daily Mail of Manchester United's 2007 pre-Christmas Party.

“United's 19-year-old defender Jonny Evans was questioned today over the alleged rape of a woman at the club's party before being bailed until February 23 pending further inquiries. The players had reportedly paid £100,000 for Monday's party and invited around 100 girls back to the £395-a-night Manchester hotel. The event is said to have been organised by Ferdinand who is reported to have held a whip round to which 25 players gave £4,000 each. Wives and girlfriends were not invited.
…. A total of 35 players, including many multi-million pound stars, began the day with lunch at the Manchester235 casino complex where they were entertained by drag queens and dancers. After three hours, stars such as Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Gary Neville and Owen Hargreaves, accompanied by junior squad members, headed to Coronation Street star Liz Dawn's pub The Old Grapes for more drinking.

Later a group including Rooney and Ferdinand drove to a lapdancing club but left without going inside after seeing photographers outside. For the night they had booked out the 30-suite Great St John Street Hotel - a converted Victorian school featured in top hotel guides - where they continued partying into the early hours. One female guest described the party as "a horrendous cattle market" She said: "I like the United players but they were out of control. They were treating girls like pieces of meat. "We got special invites but if we ever get asked again there's no way we would go again." Another said: "A lot of the players were really letting their hair down. Waitresses were handing out pink champagne to whoever wanted it.
"The players seemed to be drinking beer, vodka and whisky. Lots of drink was flowing and there were a lot of the girls there simply trying to bag a footballer for the night. It was all very sleazy."

As Rod Liddle said in the Times , “Yes, of course, the whole business is vile and repulsive on a scale we should, by rights, feel difficult to comprehend. But these days we comprehend it all too well. The obscene extravagance of the party, the gallons of pink champagne flowing down the gullets of pampered and witless imbeciles, the coarseness, the sheer utilitarian intent behind that noble tradition, the harvesting of the slappers. But it would surely not surprise anyone any more. Almost everything our Premier League footballers do is an affront to decency, the result of fairly stupid young people being afforded unlimited incomes and unlimited adulation.
These players think that they can do anything, without censure. By and large they are right. But our sympathies should not be with the equally witless young women who, in effect, colluded in this moronic festival. It should instead be with the state of our national game and with the fans who subsidise such behavior.”

It is that type of behavior that I think that is part of the reason we look back to 1958 with such fondness, it is not simply with rose tinted glasses, there is certainly a degree of nostalgia but nostalgia for the values of a lost age. Compare that coverage on the United players of today with the coverage from the Guardian of old fans who congregated at Old Trafford to remember the exact moment 50 years earlier when the Munich tragedy occurred.

People like Derek Taylor, a supporter for more than 50 years, who carried flowers and a remembrance card with the words from The Flowers Of Manchester, a poem and song tribute to the victims. Taylor was a newspaper copy boy at the time of the crash. "I took the copy from the teleprinter announcing that the aeroplane had crashed," he said. "I was totally devastated. It was just unbelievable, like losing one of your family.

"When I first met Duncan Edwards, he used to come to Old Trafford on a bike. When they realised their value had gone up, the club told them they had to come on a bus!
"Sir Matt Busby used to turn up in his car, put his arm around my shoulder and ask, 'How's my team playing for me?' He was like a granddad for the fans."

In Germany, hundreds of fans attended a memorial service at the site of the tragedy outside Munich. But if the day was marked by solemnity, it was also leavened by moments of humour, not least at a tribute hosted by the television presenter and United fan Eamonn Holmes. The Babes' goalkeeper, Harry Gregg, who risked his own life to pull three others from the plane wreckage, recalled how he returned to the football field just two weeks after the crash.
"We didn't have counsellors or psychologists - trick cyclists, I call them - in those days, we just got on with it. There was no point in sitting at home moping," he said.

Nobby Stiles, a 15-year-old apprentice with United in 1958, and later a 1966 World Cup winner, assessed the talents of those who died, including Duncan Edwards ("The greatest player I've ever seen") and Eddie Coleman ("My idol").

As ever, though, Sir Bobby Charlton, who went on to fulfil the lost legacy of fallen colleagues by winning the European Cup in 1968, fashioned the perfect epitaph for a glorious team.
"I'll never forget what Sir Matt said to us one day when he pointed across to Trafford Park, which at the time was the largest industrial estate in Europe," he said, his voice cracking with emotion. "He told us: 'The people over there work hard all week long and it is your job to go out on the field and provide them with some entertainment'.
"And that is what we tried to do; we played for the team, for the club and for the country."

Be in no doubt football in the 1930’s, 40’s and into the 1950’s was the theatre of the working class.

J.B.Priestley in the opening chapter of The Good Companions (1929) said :

"To say that these men paid their shillings to watch 22 hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink... for not only had you escaped from the clanking machinery of this lesser life, from work, wages, rent, doles, sick pay, insurance cards, nagging wives, ailing children, bad bosses, idle workmen, but you had escaped with most of your mates and your neighbours, with half the town, and there you were, cheering together, thumping one another on the shoulders, swopping judgments like lords of the earth, having pushed your way through a turnstile into another and altogether more splendid kind of life, hurtling with conflict and yet passionate and beautiful in its art."

Priestly was far from being naive about the role of commercialism in football even before the war in An English Journey, his account of a tour of the country in 1933, he describes a game between Notts County and Notts Forest:

“Nearly everything possible has been done to spoil this game; the heavy financial interests; the absurd transfer and player selling system; the lack of any birth or residential qualification for the players; the betting and coupon competitions; the absurd publicity given to every feature of it by the Press; the monstrous partisanship of the crowds (with their idiotic cries of 'play the game Ref' when any decision against their side is given); but the fact remains that it is not yet spoilt and it has gone out to conquer the world.”

I would contend that in 1958, the game was still, “not yet spoilt”, thanks to post-war austerity football was still cheap and attracted huge crowds desperate for some entertainment. Enter into this era the "Busby babes"!

Matt Busby had arrived at Manchester United in 1946 after a pre-war career as a player with Manchester City and Liverpool. Born in a miner's cottage in North Lanarkshire his father and all his uncles had been killed in the First World War. He was an immediate success with United , FA Cup winners in 1948, football league runners up in 1947, 48, 49 and 51 before winning the title in 1952. It was however his commitment to young players that set him apart. United won the FA Youth Cup, in 1954, 55, 56 and 57. The club bought no players at all for three seasons between the 1953/54 and 1956/57. The youngsters he bought through gained United the league championship in 1956 and 1957.

Of these youngsters the best of the bunch signing for United when he was 16 in 1952 was a lad from Dudley. A lad who had played for Wolverhampton Street School, Dudley Schools, Worcestershire County and Birmingham and District and had made his debut for England School Boys at just 14.

Wolves who the Daily Mail had christened the Champions of the World after they had beaten Honved in December 1954 had missed out on Duncan and on what might have been.

As Robert Philip wrote in the Daily Telegraph,

"As early as 1948, a handwritten letter from United's chief scout in the Midlands, Jack O'Brien, landed on Busby's desk. "Have today seen a 12-year-old schoolboy who merits special watching. His name is Duncan Edwards, of Dudley. Instructions please." O'Brien's recommendation was promptly passed on to coach Bert Whalley with the added instructions: "Please arrange special watch immediately - MB."

With the young man in question turning out for Wolverhampton Street Secondary School, Dudley Schools XI, Worcester County XI and Birmingham & District XI, arranging a 'special watch' represented something of a full-time occupation. At the age of 13, he walked out at Wembley on April 1, 1950, to win his first 'cap' for England Schoolboys against Wales Schoolboys in front of a crowd of 100,000; at 14 he was appointed England Schools captain - a position he would hold for two seasons.

With Wolverhampton Wanderers hovering, on June 2, 1952, United pounced, Whalley banging on the Edwards front door at 31 Elm Road on the threadbare Priory council estate at 2am, brandishing amateur forms. Having put pen to paper, young Duncan, still in his pyjamas, left Whalley and his father, Gladstone, to sort out the details while he climbed the stairs to bed, muttering: "I don't know what all this fuss was about. I've said all along that Manchester United were the only club I wanted to join."

Ten months later Edwards made his first-team debut at left-half aged 16 years and 183 days against Cardiff City at Old Trafford; not that the date April 4, 1953, is writ large in the history of Manchester United, a 4-1 defeat leaving the reigning champions in the no-man's land of mid-table. Busby was fully aware that despite his side's league title success the previous season, the majority of the United players belonged to the over-the-hill gang and Edwards' fellow 'Babes', David Pegg, Dennis Viollet, Bill Foulkes, Mark Jones and Jackie Blanchflower, were also introduced during the closing weeks of the season."

His personality shines through in the comments people make of him, "A permanent fixture in the England Under-23 side from the age of 17, United's teenage sorcerer may have grown in fame with every passing game but he remained engagingly modest throughout his all-too-brief career. "He might have been the Koh-i-Noor diamond among our crown jewels," Murphy explained, "but he was an unspoiled boy to the end, his head the same size it had been from the start. Even when he had won his first England cap but was still eligible for our youth team, he used to love turning out with the rest of the youngsters. He just loved to play anywhere and with anyone." (He had one known vice as a child - as well as representing his school at football, he was also a member of the Morris dancing team.)"

What Morris Dancing in Dudley! He continues,

"According to Busby, ". . . the bigger the occasion the better he liked it", and there were few bigger occasions than England's 1956 international against World Cup holders West Germany in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, where Edwards scored a goal. With 25 minutes gone and the score 0-0, he gained possession on the edge of his own penalty area and set off on a run that left a trail of West Germans in his wake before smashing the ball into the net from 25 yards."

"By the mid-fifties Manchester United had caught the imagination of the country. Duncan Edwards played his first game for the club in 1953, at the age of fifteen years and eight months. Two years later he won his first England cap and Walter Winterbottom, then England manager, referred to him as ‘the spirit of British football’. On £15 a week and living at Mrs Watson’s boarding house at 5 Birch Avenue in Manchester, Edwards was the most prized of the ‘Busby Babes’."

Writes Gordon Burn in his book Best and Edwards. Duncan was no saint after all he did two years national service in the army as 23145376 Lance Corporal Edwards D. He did most of his 2 years at the Ammunition Depot at Nescliff on the Welsh border, serving in the same regiment as Bobby Charlton.

In the Daily Telegraph John Russell, who was 23-year-old civil servant in 1957 and acquaintance of Edwards said, "I knew him faintly. I'd see him riding around on his bike near my home in Sale. I'd meet him in the Ashton on Mersey cricket club. We used to bump into the United lads going to the match, walking down the Warwick Road to the ground, or on a Saturday night in the Plaza or Ritz ballroom in Manchester or the Sale Locarno. We'd chat to them, say 'Good match, Dunc'." Munich was such a tragedy."

James Lawton in the Independent asked the question, was Duncan, "The greatest Footballer that ever lived?"

The tragedy of 1958 meant that, "there will be one regret above all others. It was that we never got to see if it really was true that Duncan Edwards was the greatest player who, despite his epic fight, never got to live. Not in the fullness of his talent. Not in the haunting reach of all his possibilities."

On his debut Duncan was the youngest player to play in the First Division he played, 177 games for United scoring 21 goals, and received 18 England Caps scoring five times. He once scored 6 goals in an England under 23 match playing as a centre forward.

He is one of those lost boys whose story gets stronger in the telling as the values of now and then collide. We cannot believe that modern players with all their money and their boorish behaviour are a patch on the players of old. For all their wealth they do not have the common touch and how can they? Making more in one week than the players then made in a lifetime. Television corrupts everything it comes into contact with and part of the joy of celebrating Duncan's life is that there are so few pictures or so little film of his playing days.

When I visited his Grave twenty five years ago it was subject to vandalism even then and was not easy to find in the Stourbridge Road Cemetery today there is a statue in the Market Place and an exhibition at the Museum to join the glass windows in the St Francis Church in Laurel Road. His family and in particular his mum worked all their lives to tend his memory. His father, Gladstone, actually ended up working at the cemetary and his mum turned their home, on Elm Road , into a shrine to Duncans playing career. Much of the contents can now be seen in Dudley Museum. Sarah Anne Edwards passed away on 15th April 2003, aged 93.

Still it's good to know that a lad born on Woodside and raised on the Priory is still considered by Bobby Charlton as the best he ever played with.

"He was incomparable, I feel terrible trying to explain to people just how good he was, his death was the biggest single tragedy ever to happen to Manchester United and English football. I always felt I could compare well with any player - except Duncan. He was such a talent, I always felt inferior to him. He didn't have a fault with his game".

For more about Duncan in Dudley see: www.duncan-edwards.co.uk

Wednesbury Diaspora Discus Prize Winning Novel

The scene, Alf Day has joined the RAF:

"Pluckrose who was also a sergeant, although it didn't suit him - not that a commission would have suited any better - his face was simply incompatible with Air Council Instructions: it had the wrong atmosphere and superiors took it amiss. Added to which he could never shut up.

'Well I didn't ask to come.' Peering over Alfred's head on the first day, beaming about at the hangar full of blue: men standing as if they could think to do nothing else: others searching as if they were late, as if they had lost something, or had been forgotten: others not alone, begining to be not alone.

'Matter of fact King asked me. I got a written invitation - through intermediaries, tht's just what you'd expect, but it should make a difference, you would think. Of course, I volunteered for this part. And not a soul's been civil to me since - except you.'

He beamed down and Alfred could see no doubt in him no unease, only this sense that he was being entertained. 'Wouldn't have turned up if I'd known. I mean it's hardly been efficiently organised, thus far. More like a total fucking shambles.' And amiability in his voice had made his searing not a personal thing, or angry, more of a musical addition. Truly. I mean, a man could catch his fucking death of cold here, for a start. And i suspect worse.'

Alfred, his words in alump under his tongue, ashamed of themselves, but getting out a decent- sounding, 'Yes.' He was keeping things short, sticking to the phrases he was safe with,the ones hh'd cut away from Staffordshire, that could sound fully RAF.

He still practised in his head.

Yo bin and yo bay. Yo doe and yo day.
You are, or you have been and you aren't, or you haven't been. You do and you don't, or you didn't.

Everything getting longer and longer when you started to say it that way - and harsh too, the h's everywhere to trip you, having to hack out each one.

I bin.
I am. I was.
The way I was. The soft way I was.

His dad had always said, 'Doe talk soft.' But he'd meant don't talk as if you're stupid, he'd meant Alfred was stupid. Now Alfred was talking hard."

What Black Country person on leaving God's country has not felt something similar?

It was a joy to read the Guardian’s G2 section on January 24th. There was a double page spread of an interview by Stuart Jeffries of Alison Louise Kennedy.

Better known as author Al Kennedy she had just won £30,000 from Costa for her novel Day. Well so what I here you say, well the hero of said novel, a former wartime Lancaster rear gunner – the bravest of the brave – returns to Germany to appear as an actor in a film about an escape from a prisoner of war camp like the one he had been held in having been forced to bale out over Germany.

Like a lot of that generation war had given his life a sense of purpose that civvy street failed to provide and in a way it was a journey back to where everything began to go wrong.

Jolly interesting full of all sorts of moral dilemmas about the British character and all that stuff except that the “hero” Alfie Day hail’s from Wednesbury.

Stuart Jefferies takes up the story,

“I tell Kenedy that my parents hailed from Wednesbury, the Black Country town from which Day escapes into the thrill of war, a place whose heavy industries the Luftwaffe tried but couldn’t quite finish off ( the Tories where more thorough) while the RAF was bent on reducing German cities to simulacra of the fires of hell.”

Good start methinks at least the interviewer knows where this wonderful place is!

“Why did she choose the Black Country boy as a hero?” Asks Jeffries.

(Not realising the heroic capacity of all Black Country folk).

“I knew about it because my grandparents were from there”, she says.

So another exiled Wednesbury family two in the same Guardian interview is this a first I wonder?

“Its an industrial area where people did very dangerous jobs and could be killed at any time, and extreme levels of poverty.”

So war may have come as a perverse sort of escape – on the can’t be any worse and you get fed and see the world – She sounds alrighyt this AL Kenedy.

Then she commits the coup de grace!

“She was drawn, too to the strange dialect.”

“There’s an enormous sense of humour in the way Black Country people speak. It’s very playful and very old language.”

What are you waiting for get down the bookshop!!!

A Further review from the OBSERVER :

"YOU CAN CALL ME AL"


In a rare interview, the elusive AL Kennedy unburdens herself on men, the joy of stand-up comedy and the worth of long walks

Geraldine Bedell
Sunday March 25, 2007
The Observer

Alison Louise Kennedy is contemptuous of this whole undertaking. 'Never mind the work, let's review the author,' she has written scathingly about interviewers on her website. 'Someone who sits alone for a hours at a time, typing, must be really fascinating and it beats having to think about anything, doesn't it?'

Her short stories and novels, the latest of which is Day, are often mordantly funny and teeming with startling images. Like her approach to interviews, though, they make no concessions: her writing is linguistically and emotionally demanding. 'It's like anal sex,' she explains when I ask her about her fiercely literary attitude to her work and her correspondingly confrontational presentation of it. 'If that's what I want to do to you and you're not into it, then go away, because that's what will keep happening.'

Before we can get on to anal sex, however, I go to see her at a Glasgow comedy club, where she has a regular gig as a stand-up. I catch my first glimpse of her as she's waiting to go on stage, bopping away with another performer in a corner. Having reread her books and studied her website's acidic reviews of her reviews, I have become so alarmed by her that I'm actually shocked to see her doing something so frivolous.

Her stand-up is startlingly good. She works the audience and makes the most of her cleverness with words, her knack for seeing things freshly. She has a great riff about people scraping moss off each other every morning in Scotland, but the audience seems most to enjoy the material about pubic hair. I learn that her father was from Birmingham and her mother from North Wales, that they went to Australia but then came back to Dundee before she was born and that they split up when she was quite small, which is more information than she ever appears to have divulged in an interview.

'It's a cartoon version of my childhood,' she says when we meet the next day in a tea shop near her home in the West End of Glasgow. She is particularly dismissive of physical descriptions of herself, but she has a strikingly high forehead, which seems to be permanently creased in a frown, and wears jeans, flat shoes and no make-up. One way and another, she appears to suffer very little from the usual female handicap of anxiety to please.

She says she doesn't give away more to interviewers 'because they don't ask interesting questions. Plus I don't particularly want ...' She tails off, but it's enough to make you wonder whether what she does give is another cartoon version. She has said in the past that she wouldn't be doing stand-up 'if my life wasn't completely shagged', and she continues to protest that she performs mainly because 'it's an analgesic'. She sighs, as though this is all too wearisome: 'I lost a friend who made me laugh a lot. He knew a lot about comedy and we used to share comedy and afterwards I had less access to it. I found I wasn't sleeping and I was passing the time by making things up.'

She doesn't want to talk about this friend, she claims, although she does mention him subsequently. She will say that he wasn't a lover. She once wrote obliquely about a male friend who, tormentingly, had sex with someone else in a hotel where she was also staying; whatever the exact nature of the betrayal, it was enough to end the relationship. For a while, she couldn't write fiction, producing instead the brilliant On Bullfighting.

It's tempting to think that AL Kennedy might be playing up her misery, cultivating the bleakness that is often said to characterise her fiction. There is an unflinching, exposed quality to her work: Day is about RAF bombing raids and requires the reader to enter the head of a man who is mentally disintegrating. She is sensitive to absurdity, to the imminence of what she calls 'the pantomime surprise of death'.

She vigorously denies courting unhappiness, claiming to think it's wholly unnecessary to successful fiction. She'd rather have joy, but it's simply not available. 'I have sex about once every five years. I've lived alone since I was 17. I am slightly tired. My life is not comfortable to me. But I am philosophical. It's just the way things have worked out.'

What would make her comfortable? 'Occasional company,' she says. I am starting to find this self-pity slightly comical, so I say: 'I bet you've got a secret husband at home.' Perhaps she has too, because she answers: 'Yeah, I killed him and ate him.' She would like, she says, 'just to have people to talk to who you can actually talk to, which is quite rare'. Despite this, her whole life is an attempt to communicate. She acknowledges that this looks a bit paradoxical. 'Yeah, you spend your time shouting into a well. You don't often get the echo back. I spend a lot of time making stuff for other people. It's a huge relief if someone talks back to you in a way that gets your head running.'

I don't quite know how seriously to take this vision of lonely rooms, bereft of company, especially as, when the interview ends, we discover we have mutual friends and she enthuses about them and jolly party games they've played. But if at some level, AL Kennedy has decided to put her writing first, it has not been (at least from a reader's point of view) a pointless sacrifice. She has been on the Granta list of Best of Young British Novelists twice, but is still, in my opinion, underrated. She does things no one else can do, including write about sex better than anyone. 'Oh,' she says, 'but that's because I'm not really writing about sex at all.'

Day is the story of a Second World War tail gunner and prisoner of war who, in 1949, becomes an extra in a war film and tunnels back through his memories to discover what has become of him. It's not as blackly funny as her last novel, Paradise, about an alcoholic woman, but Kennedy insists this isn't because of the stand-up. 'It's not a very funny thing, the Second World War.' She then complains I've missed the two Max Miller jokes.

The big question is whether the images in AL Kennedy's books spring into her mind fully formed or whether they are the result of months with a thesaurus and endless revision. 'A lot of it's because my books are character-based,' she says evasively. 'If you want to make something appear fresh, you rely on the fact that no person has a voice quite like any other. With Day, I got a new vocabulary, because of the period and the military stuff and the mental state he's in, but, yeah, if you look at the rewrites, there are up to 150 or 175. Some of that will be commas, some of it will be major.'

I wonder if she shows the work to anyone or relies on her own sense of whether 150 revisions are enough. 'My friend who went away is the only person whose opinion I was ever interested in. He had a very interesting mind. There aren't that many people with good ears. My editor has a good ear, but you can only read something for the first time once. You commit yourself to doing something until it's right and then you learn what right feels like, tastes like, sounds like. It helps if you're obsessive-compulsive and you don't have any distractions.'

You can't help wondering if some of her moroseness derives from the ever-present fact of physical pain. (This will go up on her website in the glib psychobabble section.) She suffered an undiagnosed herniated disc between her shoulder blades for six months, by which time she had muscle wastage. She also fell off a horse and has a 'squint shoulder' and once broke her sacrum, which sometimes gives her sciatica. She has a special chair to write in, hard to envisage, in which her knees are above her heart.

The most common criticism of AL Kennedy's writing is that its craftedness can become oppressive. 'I don't think it's that,' she says. 'I think it's being in someone else's mind. That's fair enough: that's what I want to do to you. If you define plot by what's happening externally to the character, it's true there's no plot in my fiction, but I'm interested in the things people carry around that you don't necessarily see. I just want to get to the bits that interest me.'

For all the craft, the revisions, the foraging for the ideal phrase, AL Kennedy manages to be pretty prolific: she is 41, and Day is her fifth novel. There have been four volumes of short stories (she's working on a fifth right now) plus eight or nine drama scripts, a couple of works of non-fiction, regular journalism and, now, the stand-up. 'If you're quite a fast cook, you don't have children, you don't have pets and you've got no one to talk to, what else are you going to do?' she asks. 'I've got vast amounts of time to occupy.'

On the way home, I wish I'd told Alison Louise Kennedy to stop giving that bloke the satisfaction of knowing he's ruined her life. I don't suppose she'd have listened. She told me she wasn't good company and when I objected that this simply wasn't true, she conceded, 'for a limited period, OK. But I get bored very easily. If you were around all week, I'd want to kill you. I wouldn't tell you, even: I'd just go for increasingly long walks. Having achieved the joy of your friendship, I'd find it disappointing, as I find everything I attain.'

AL Kennedy: initial impressions

1965 Born in Dundee.

1986 Graduates in theatre studies and drama from Warwick University.

1991 Publishes first short-story collection, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains

1993 Completes debut novel, Looking for the Possible Dance. Listed among Granta's 20 Best of Young British Novelists.

1996 Booker Prize judge.

1998 Scripts C4 film Stella Does Tricks

2005 Performs stand-up in Glasgow and at the Edinburgh Fringe.

On her use of initials: 'The authors I first loved all had initials - JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, E Nesbit, ee cummings - and I actively didn't want to know who they were or have them get in the way of my enjoying their story and their voice.'
Tancred Newbury

· Day is published by Jonathan Cape on 5 April, £16.99. To order a copy for £15.99 with free UK p&p, go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885

Death of Outstanding Wednesbury Footballer

I thought this obituary of our Norman in the Guardian said it all. A man who won two championship medals and won the FA Cup scoring two goals in the final and won England caps. Who went on to play for Darlo! And ended up as a steward for the Saddlers. Modern players with far lesser talent and all their cash and status could not lace his boots. Those where the days our Norman scored his first goal for the club in a pulsating 4-4 draw with West Bromwich Albion in the FA Charity Shield. Yes Wolves and Albion shared the shield for six months each. The 1954 Champions and FA Cup Winners. Bill Shankly was wrong football is just a game and there are things in life that are more important but Normans life shone trough his football career.

Who would have thought that it would be so long before Wolves won the FA Cup again. Maybe they need more lads from Wednesbury in the team!

"Norman Deeley was a tiny ball of high-octane energy and verve that never lost its bounce during his medal-rich prime with Wolverhampton Wanderers at the end of the 1950s.

An irrepressibly dynamic goal-scoring winger versatile enough to thrive on either flank, he excelled as part of the second thunderously powerful combination moulded by the formidable disciplinarian Stan Cullis, helping to lift two consecutive League titles and the FA Cup, and earning England recognition along the way.

There was never very much of the effervescent Midlander. When he made his entrance onto the international stage at schoolboy level during 1947/48, he stood a mere 4ft 4in and was said to be the smallest ever to play for the team. Indeed, he was to grow only a foot taller, but he compensated amply in skill, determination and bravery for what he lacked in physical stature." Wrote Ivan Ponting in the Independent.




Obituary
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Norman Deeley
Goal scorer in Wolves' FA Cup victory of 1960

Brian Glanville
Wednesday November 28, 2007

Guardian

Norman Deeley, a tiny winger for Wolverhampton Wanderers in their championship winning sides of the 1950s, whose pace, skill and opportunism made light of his size, has died aged 73. At 4ft 4in, he became the smallest ever schoolboy international for England in 1947, and even when full-grown, he was little more than a foot taller.
Born in Wednesbury, West Midlands, he attended Holyhead Road school. Wolverhampton Wanderers was a natural, local club to join and he served them well for 11 years. Perhaps the peak of his achievement was to score twice in the FA Cup final of 1960, though admittedly it was against a Blackburn Rovers team cut down to 10 men when their full-back, Dave Whelan, now owner of Wigan Athletic, was carried off with a broken leg. Already an own goal down, Blackburn still proceeded to play largely the better football, but as they tired, Deeley, operating on the right flank, but always ready to move into the middle, swooped twice.

Altogether, he played 235 First Division matches for Wolves, scoring 75 goals and winning two Championship medals in successive seasons. The first came in 1957-58, when, in 41 appearances, thus missing but a single game, he scored 23 goals. The following season he scored another 17 in 38 appearances.

When things were going wrong for Wolves, he would do his energetic and intelligent best to put them right. As when, in the absence of the team's playmaker, Peter Broadbent, in a game lost 1-0 at Tottenham in September 1961, one wrote: "Deeley did his best to supply the lack of generalship but, well as he played, neatly as he controlled the ball, cleverly as he passed, a winger can do only so much, even when he wanders."

Deeley won two caps for England, on the ill-starred summer tour of South America: a 2-0 defeat in Rio de Janeiro by Brazil, when he was inevitably overshadowed by the explosive brilliance of his Brazilian opposite number at outside right, Julinho; the second in Lima, when Peru humiliated England, beating them 4-1.

In 1961-62 he left Wolves, and helped Leyton Orient to gain promotion to the top division, coming second in Division 2; he scored two goals in 14 games. Later he drifted into non-league, playing in turn for Worcester City, Bromsgrove Rovers and Darlaston, before retiring in 1974. He later worked at a community centre in Walsall and as a steward for Walsall FC. He lived on his at his late mother's home in Wednesbury.

· Norman Victor Deeley, footballer, born November 30 1933; died September 7 2007

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007ituary
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London 3 (St Pancras, Cross-Rail, Heathrow) West Midlands 0.

I have to admit, and all of my environmentalist friends with cringe when I say it but I do like to travel, and that means today a fair bit of flying. Not a huge amount, I travel by train when I can but this year I have flown about six times including two Atlantic crossings. Some years ago after a series of terrible journeys I made a pledge that whenever I went I would avoid going through Heathrow Airport at all costs.

Quite frankly it is a dump. What’s more it is a dump that may have access to all parts of the world from its runways, but on many occasions, which just happen to be the times you want to get there it does not have access to England.

What on earth the Government can be thinking of in trying to shoe-horn another runway between the M3, the M4 and the M25 is beyond me. One can only conclude that the Government have been captured by the Airport operator BAA. Although BAA seems to be in the static rather than the travel business, as they seem more interested in keeping travellers in the Airport as long as possible as captive consumers in their shopping malls, rather than in getting them quickly and safely into the air.

I remember on one trip I was forced to stay overnight at the airport to catch an early morning flight because it was impossible to guarantee that I could make the check in time in the morning rush hour. It still took me over an hour, despite the fact I could see the aeroplane to get from the hotel to the check in desk.

So my question is, even if you mange to demolish Windsor Castle and Hampton Court Palace to get the new runway down, how will the passengers disembark onto the surrounding infrastructure? We have of course been promised cross-rail but how long is that going to take to tunnel east-west under London?

As a railway fan I have greatly enjoyed the programmes on BBC about the redevelopment of St Pancras Station. What a wonderful inspiring building, but you don’t get much these days for £800 million pounds; the most glorious part of the architecture was built for us by our Victoria forefathers.

Nonetheless look what that investment has done for the image of London and the image of rail travel. It has given even that city of landmarks a new one and made travelling by rail almost sexy.

So where does that leave us in the West Midlands. Travellers from the region will be still be spending millions of pounds a year to get to Heathrow because our own Airport needs a longer runway for those inter-continental flights. There is potential capacity to be used at Birmingham Airport and at East Midlands Airport if the Government stops and thinks for a moment.

Add in some improved rail links to these airports which in the case of Birmingham are already quite good and you have relatively painless expansion. Look if a revitalised St Pancras can make the area around Kings Cross sexy just think what a strikingly designed new New Street could do for Birmingham.

If we include in this the improved cross country rail connections that a new station could deliver and we are looking at a genuinely integrated transport strategy. Isn’t that what they have been telling us for years is the Holy Grail of transport thinking?

I can imagine at some point in the future when the airport is expanded all those planes land at Heathrow and all those people pile out into the terminal and realise there is no space to go anywhere and go straight back home. Like our Government they will never know that a place called England exists. Maybe then a future government will realise the missed opportunity they where presented with in 2007.

The Politics of Migration: Does the Government know if we are coming or going?

The dust appears to have settled on the Hastilow affair so maybe we can begin to have a grown up debate about migration. Not since the debate on unemployment in the 1980’s have government statistics been so mistrusted.

The most recent official government estimates, crudely based on surveys of people arriving and leaving at our airports, show approximately 1,500 migrants arrived to live in the UK every day during 2005.

Now just admitting that can cause some political apoplexy, a definite case of the meaning of things lying not in the things themselves, but in our attitudes to them.

Our Government, naturally want it both ways; they want the benefits of large scale migration without acknowledging any costs or implications. Having failed miserably to increase UK productivity - output per worker, the way left to increase national output is to increase the labour force. For them the arrival of young workers into Britain is a testament to our “flexible” deregulated labour market as migrants go on to add vastly to GDP.

To employers too, relatively undemanding workers are also a good thing, especially if they require low levels of training and can be hired and fired as business demands require.

For the macro economy then this influx of new workers is an unequivocal good thing. I must admit as someone who has no children but who quite likes the idea of having a pension I too welcome these hard working young migrants.

That deregulation is of course less of a good thing when you find out that thousands of illegal migrants are employed by private security services.

When you look at the impact on the micro, the individual, level it begins to look less rosy. Large scale migration puts pressure on all public services, policing, hospitals, and schools but especially on scarce housing resources.

If you are stuck in a low paid job have poor skills and have now to compete with a young graduate, who probably speaks better English than you do, but who works for very low wages, is not an experience to make you feel welcoming.

It is not just at the bottom end of the labour market that competition for jobs with migrant workers is having an impact. England and Liverpool star Steven Gerrard has called for quotas in the Premiership to protect the national team.

And large scale migration is not the only challenge, globalisation, and huge technological change, can for many people be very disorientating. It is easy for the cosmopolitan elite to forget that most of Britain has been demographically stable for a long time; millions do not travel abroad, have no interest in or access to the internet, and do not see why they need to change.

It is understandable therefore that politicians will seek to articulate the concerns of many of these people. After all why else would the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, talk about “British jobs, for British workers” in his party conference speech?

But the data masks a huge amount of coming and going. Thousands of people are also leaving the country. Net around a 1000 people per day are leaving. Half of those leaving are British citizens heading for Australia, Spain and France to build what they see as better lives for themselves.

My guess is that many of those Eastern Europeans who have come to Britain may well too soon begin to return home as many are now returning to Ireland and India. So what is really interesting about these patterns of migration is that there is a huge churn in the numbers. At this point slightly more of those coming to Britain are staying than those leaving but it would be foolish to make tough proposals on immigration until we have better data and a better understanding of just what is going on.

Our weakness as a nation and what made Nigel Hastlows position so very difficult is that we cannot stop this roundabout and get off. The position we are in is that we need migrant workers to sustain the economy and large parts of our public services.

There is nothing to be proud of in having the NHS staffed by Doctors and Nurses recruited from the health services of developing countries. Nor is their anything to be proud of in having so few English players turning out for our premiership football teams.

But that is where we are. If we are to compete successfully in this global labour market for skills and talent then we need a fundamental long term shift in both the attitudes and the skills of our citizens.

For me this will have been achieved when a new Arsene Wenger selects eleven Englishmen to turn out for Arsenal in the Champions league. Now that may well be a long time in the future and will certainly require a process of better education, training, and skills acquisition but most importantly in motivation and attitude. Crude quotas and knee jerk reactions however will not make the process of facing up to our weaknesses and addressing them any easier.

Black Country Dialect II

I have been thinking about the revival in the Black Country dialect in the 1980's. Of course the theory is that it is a residue from before the Great Vowel Shift and its persistence is due to a sense of isolation, lack of social mobility and the small number of educational opportunities for what is a region of a million people.
After all Wolverhampton has had its City status for a very short time and a University for only a little while longer. Economically the sub-region was probably in economic decline from the end of the First World War. With larger scale industry developing in the North West, Birmingham and places like Coventry. The Black Country today is still a place of small firms and family owned businesses.

Well in the sixties and seventies the Black Country had been undergoing a marked change in its fortunes with high levels of development. With relatively progressive local authorities improving education and the communications of the place, an area notoriously difficult to get around.

Then came Mrs Thatcher and more importantly Geoffrey Howe, his budget put paid almost overnight to large swathes of Black Country industry. Much of which was admittedly fairly low in terms of skills, technology and therefore productivity. The scale of the disaster was such that the area is only now beginning to recover from the devastation that the almost total collapse of manufacturing had on the area.

Culturally this political polarisation lead to alternative comedy and punk rock. The Black Country was no exception to this but something else also happened. The culture fell back on itself. There was a renaissance in the Black Country variety show, The Black Country Night Out. It was almost as if we fell back on the old gags, monologues and songs to keep our spirits up.

This variety show, made local stars of Dolly Allen, "Hello, me luvers!" and Tommy Mundon, and others like the king of dialect doggerel, Harry Harrison, well known for his dialect verse in the Black Country Bugle and Jon Raven, folk singer and collector of traditional Black Country ballads.

I remember Dolly Allen telling the joke about the westkit or waistcoat in around 1987, forty years after it was mentioned in Ingram’s book about the North Midlands. She I have no doubt had never heard it from a book but was part of the oral tradition.

This variety show toured almost continually with various changes in personnel although the very dark days of that recession. A cheap way to go out and keep up your spirit and make you feel good about who you where and where you came from and about the resilience which had kept the place going. This was I think why the close social fabric held the place together through these dark days. Whether it has also held us back as times have change is another matter!

But I have no doubt that the dialect revival a badge of local pride was revived thanks to Mrs Thatcher.

Yo cor spake roit!

I had the chance to do a lecture on the sociolinguistics of the Black Country.

Here are the materials I used to explain the place to people unfortunate enough not to know the plerce.

Basically the dialect of the Black Country seems to preserve the way people in England spoke before the great vowel shift!

The The Great Vowel Shift was a gradual process which began in Chaucer's time (early 15th Century) and was continuing through the time of Shakespeare (early 17th Century). Speakers of English gradually changed the parts of their mouth used to articulate the long vowels. Simply put, the articulation point moved upward in the mouth. The vowels, which began being pronounced at the top, could not be moved farther up (without poking into the nose); they became diphthongs1. The upshot has been that the Anglo-Saxons lived (like the Scottish still do) in a 'hoose', and the English live in a 'house'; the Anglo-Saxons (like the Scottish) milked a 'coo', and the English milk a 'cow'; an Anglo-Saxon had a 'gode' day and the English have a 'good' one; an Anglo-Saxon had 'feef' fingers on each hand and the English have 'five'; they wore 'boats' on their 'fate' while the English wear 'boots' on our 'feet'. The Great Vowel Shift is still continuing today in regional dialects; many speakers are now trying to move the topmost articulation points farther up, producing new diphthongs.

So we do genuinely spake Shakespeares english!

“There is nothing throughout the length and breadth of England to compare with the Black Country. It is unique. Much of its appearance is due to a man-made landscape created during the last two centuries, in a ruthless exploitation of its mineral riches. It is a separate and distinct area and not, as often supposed, an extension of Birmingham.”

Louise Wright, The Heart of England, Robert Hale, 1973.

“Iron, coal, limestone and clay, has made the Black Country what it is today.”

Richard Traves, Keeper of Industrial Archaeology Dudley Museum, 1977.

“You have to walk through the Black Country to feel its visual impact. For a start, some of is most fascinating places have no road: it is a region of continual surprises, hidden oddities, sudden, astonishing views. People who have not seen it for themselves will imagine that I am being absurdly romantic to say that it can be indescribably beautiful.”

Caroline Hillier, A Journey to the Heart of England, Paladin, 1978.

When Satan stood on Brierley Hill
And far around he gazed,
He said, ‘I never shall again,
At Hell’s flames be amazed.’

Traditional Ballad.

“I spent the better part of two days staring at this Black Country. The first day was fine and fairly bright. I went from Birmingham through Smethwick and Oldbury to Dudley, which seemed to me a fantastic place. You climb a hill, past innumerable grim works and unpleasant brick dwellings, and then suddenly a ridiculous terracotta music-hall comes into sight, perched on the steep roadside as if a giant had plucked it out of one of the neighbouring valleys and carelessly left it there; and above this music hall (its attraction that week was Parisian Follies) were the ruins of Dudley Castle. I climbed a steep little hillside, and then smoked a pipe or two sitting by the remains of the keep. The view from there is colossal. On the Dudley side, you look down and across the roofs and steeply mounting streets and pointing factory chimneys. It looked as if a great slab of Birmingham had been torn away and titled up there at an angle of forty-five degrees. The view from the other side, roughly I suppose to the north-east, was even more impressive. There was the Black Country unrolled before you like some smouldering carpet. You looked into an immense hollow of smoke and blurred buildings and factory chimneys. There seemed to be no end to it.”

J.B.Priestley, English Journey, William Heinemann, 1934.



“The walks of my childhood were treeless and smoke blighted: they lead me by black canals and among huge slag heaps where no grass could grow, where the sun rarely shone, where a man at night could read his newspaper by the glare of the blast furnaces, lividly reflected in the dense low sky. There was not much to choose in those days between the dingy town and the dingy landscape outside it, except the town abounded in stirring rough-and-independent speech, while the country showed hardly a sign of life and was apparently the habitation of an underground race.”

Henry Newbolt, Letter to the people of Bilston, 1927.

“Black Country people are like their landscape, unbeautiful, unsentimental, with no time for the trimmings of life, but often a warm, if rough, hospitality hides behind the forbidding exterior. Black Country speech is hard for an outsider to understand. It contains inflexions no longer used in everyday English. I bin, thee bist, we bist, yo bin, they bin are declensions of the verb to be. Will becomes woon or woot and a is often sounded as o. Can you translate these? “We `day arf goo coming back in that theer chara.” “Poor owd Alf’s jed, let’s ‘ope ‘e’s gone were we think he ain’t.” Black Country humour is also characteristic, “What are you looking for , Ned?” a collier was asked by his friends . “I’ve lost me weskit,” Ned replied. “Why, y’ foo’ y’ gotten it on!” “Ah, so I have,” exclaimed Ned. Now if yo hadn’y tode me I’d a gone wiaht it.”

J,H.Ingram, North Midland Country, Batsford, 1947-8.

“But let me say before it has to go,
It’s the most lovely country that I know;
Clearer than Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on
The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton.

Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,
That was, and still is my ideal scenery.”

W.H. Auden, from, A Letter to Lord Byron, Collected Longer Poems, Faber and Faber, 1968.

“Then we have the evidence of the Black Country dialect, which local historians stoutly maintain is basically Anglo-Saxon and not the refined ‘Kings English’ of the early universities. The dialect is hard for strangers to understand. …the dialect is more genuinely Old English than can be found elsewhere in England, and since Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales in the fourteenth century using a version of the Mercian dialect, Black Country readers can identify with parts of his writing because they speak or ‘spaken it’ The suffix ‘en’ is one example, for older Black Country people especially will talk ‘of gooin up the housen’. ‘Dun yo knowen who’s got old Ayli’s place?’ they might enquire, whilst ‘Just watch the folken all go by’ appears in an ancient rhyme. ‘Aferd’ for ‘Afraid’ and ‘keche’ for ‘catch, are other Chaucerian examples. …..No commentary on the Black Country would be complete without examples of the hundreds of dialect jokes frequently based, oddly enough, on death and funerals but not indicative of undue morbidity.”

Harold Parsons, The Black Country, Robert Hale, 1986.