Considered the father of football journalism in England, Brian Glanville was a regular fixture in press boxes up and down the country since the late 1940s, until he passed away aged 93 last week.
He wrote with distinction for the Sunday Times and World Soccer magazine, and also contributed to the Arsenal Magazine back in the 2005/06 season - the club he supported. In tribute, we are reproducing articles from that time highlighting his exceptional knowledge and writing style - this piece recalls his memories of watching us from the stands as a schoolboy in the 1940s.
Memory, as we know, is a strange and random phenomenon. Events and details stay in the mind even for generations after their occurrence. By contrast, things which have been seen or heard quite recently slip out of the mind.
So far as football is concerned, I am quite convinced of one thing: a fan's memories are far sharper, immediate and focused than a journalist's. This, plainly, is because the fan cares, he has an emotional commitment where the journalist, notionally at least (there are so many overt West Ham fans in the London press box!) is by definition detached and objective.
So I have memories as a schoolboy Arsenal fan, taken to matches by my Irish father, of games that took place in the early 1940s, while a host of Arsenal matches which I have reported over the years have, in the words of George Orwell's 1984, gone down the "Memory Hole'.
So into the time machine back, back, back to August 1942, the opening of a transitional, wartime season of regionalised leagues. Arsenal were due at Charlton, a game made especially intriguing by the fact that Bryn Jones was due to return to the team after many months away in the Army.
Bryn, at that time a Welsh international inside-left, was the most expensive player in the history of British football. In the summer of 1938 Arsenal, desperate to replace their inspirational playmaker, the little Scot Alex James, had paid Wolves £14,000 for Jones. Even when you make allowances for the massive inflation there has been since then, the fee is dwarfed by the enormous sums being lashed out today for star players; and others.
My father and I arrived at The Valley by tram, which was the customary way of doing it then. Indeed, when Charlton's crowds later declined in post-war years, it was the disappearance of the trams which was conventionally blamed. There was an instant shock for Arsenal fans, not least my 10-year-old self. George Swindin, the regular 'keeper, then serving in the Army, had failed to turn up. In his place figures tall Leslie Compton, who had been down to play left-back.
Older brother of the protean Denis, a glorious batsman as well as a splendid outside left, Leslie had been with the Gunners since 1932, but had failed by the start of the war to gain a regular place, even though, during the course of those seven years, he played in two England trials.
The war years changed all that. He even played for England as a centre-forward, later figuring in the team at right-back. His appearance in goal, as a makeshift, contrasted with Charlton's 'keeper, the famous and flamboyant Sam Bartram, red-haired and irrepressible. But Leslie [above] was also the Middlesex wicketkeeper in county cricket, and thus well-used to using his hands. In the event, he used them somewhat less than Bartram.
With Jones rampant, scoring a hat-trick, Arsenal thrashed Charlton 6-2. But I didn't see their last goal nor the two late ones the Charlton right-winger Charlie Revell scored for the home team. At 5-0 my father hustled me away, afraid that we might miss the tram. Another memory was of a group of laughing Charlton fans in a sparsely populated stand shouting "come on, Treacle!". Years later I discovered that this was the nickname of Charlton's England international outside-left, Harold Hobbis.
On to the bleak memory of Christmas Day, 1942, Chelsea versus the Gunners at Stamford Bridge. My father and I went as the guests of an honourary uncle, Willie Warshaw, ex-air-force gunner in World War One, devotee Chelsea and cricket fan.
The omens were not promising. The following day in Cardiff, the RAF were due to play the Army which meant that no fewer than six of the Gunners' first choices (most soccer stars were kept at home then in the physical training units) had to watch from the stands, forbidden to pre-empt the Cardiff game; which would also keep them out of the Boxing Day return at White Hart Lane, where Arsenal played their home games 'till after the war. Those famous six included the brilliant England goalkeeper George Marks, Denis and Leslie Compton, and the amateur centre-half, Bernard Joy [below].
"We've got no backs!" lamented Uncle Willy when the team changes were announced, which made me smile, a smile which wouldn't last for long. Little did I know then that the Chelsea right-back, a late alteration to the programme, was none other than Walter Winterbottom, then a Manchester United footballer, later to manage the England International team for 16 years.
Arsenal's team was a thing of threads and patches. There was a goalkeeper called Noel Watson Smith of Yorkshire Amateurs, whose name is emblazoned on my memory just as Queen Mary Tudor averred that the word Calais was imprinted on her heart. He wasn't very good. Nor was a right winger named Colley, whom my father called The Invisible Man.
At inside-right was a powerful Scottish guest in Peter McKennan, for Chelsea; on their left wing the formidable Scotland and Liverpool left winger Billy Liddell. And at centre forward an amateur from the Walthamstow Avenue club, Bernars Bryant, destined to score no fewer than four goals, then fade from view. Though Harry Homer, inspired editor as "Marksman" of the Arsenal programme, years later rediscovered him working as a barman at the House of Commons.
5-2 Chelsea won that game and in my shock and misery burst into tears. A fan turned round from the seat in front of me to say consolingly: "If all Arsenal's fans were like you." My father and I didn't go to Tottenham the next day. Uncle Willy did and came triumphantly to tea - it had been another morning match - to tell us that this time, Chelsea had won 5-1.
Abundant consolation came late in the season, one in which despite that awful Christmas, the Gunners would do the League and Cup double. At Wembley, they took on Charlton Athletic again, in the League South Cup Final, and beat them by a thundering 7-1, the only Charlton goal coming from a penalty by the Welsh international George Green, whom I used to keep meeting in future years.
Arsenal had scored those six against Sam Bartram but I think he would have saved some of the seven they got that bright afternoon against his deputy, one Sid Hobbins; years later to become the Orient Chief Scout and to approach me in 1957 for help in getting their manager Alec Stock to Roma.
Believe it or not, it happened, through the offices of the volatile little agent Gigi Peronace, though Alec didn't hold out for long. Odd indeed how certain images stay in the memory. I still vividly recall Ted Drake, inside-right that day, but as centre-forward once the scorer of seven goals away to Villa, chasing the ball, and ending up with a jocular flourish his arm around Hobbins' shoulders.
"Drake worked harmoniously with Lewis," wrote Frank Butler, then the most prominent of football writers, in the Sunday Express, (he also wrote for the Daily), "gained reward with two splendid goals." Reg Lewis, who got 100 goals for the Gunners from centre-forward in three wartime seasons, scored four that day. "Charlton," wrote Butler, "were like a fat man collapsing onto a deckchair." Why on earth do I remember all this when so many greater pieces of prose have faded from the mind?
Etched in the memory is a wartime game I didn't even attend; the Gunners against Moscow Dynamo in thick Tottenham fog in the winter of 1945. Dynamo had arrived from a Russia which had lost 20 million people in the brutal war against the Nazis. The then Sunday Express columnist Paul Irwin went to see them train at White City and dismissed them as "a bunch of earnest amateurs, so slow you can almost hear them think." Not remotely capable of playing Britain's best. Oh, boy!
Before a vast, overspilling crowd at Stamford Bridge Chelsea's heads spun as the "slow" Dynamos bewildered them with their pace and passing; though they were lucky to draw with an offside goal. They then got 10 against poor poor Cardiff, and faced an Arsenal team bolstered with guest players; even the famed and fabulous Stanley Matthews.
But the game was rightly derided as a "fog farce" which should never have been started; by a Russian referee Latychev who absurdly stationed himself on one side of the pitch, his linesman on the other. Dynamo at one stage had 12 men on the pitch. By hook or by crook the Russians somehow won 4-3. And Latychev survived to referee the 1962 World Cup Final in Chile.
Ronnie Rooke was one of Arsenal's guest players that day, then the robust Fulham centre-forward, into his 30s possessed a dynamic left foot. Little could one know that, come the following season, when official soccer restarted and Arsenal initially struggled, he would arrive at Highbury for peanuts; to his own amazement.
As with the Dynamo fiasco, I was at boarding school and didn't see it, but in August 1947 I saw him score a spectacular goal, this too, etched in the memory, in a dramatic game against Manchester United. At inside-left to Reg Lewis, he advanced, and from some 30 yards let fly an astonishing left-footed shot which soared into the top corner of the United goal, kept by Crompton. The Gunners won narrowly, 2-1.
From time to time, I used to sneak up from school to watch them play; a beating offence. And so I saw a future star right winger in Arthur Milton play his first game for the club in a friendly at Fulham. And, cycling 19 miles each way across The Hog's Back, watched him play impressively for Arsenal reserves at inside-right against Aldershot reserves.
Later, I'd see him sparkle on the right wing for those reserves at Highbury; prior to reaching the first team and getting his one England outing at Wembley in October 1951 against Austria. A marvellous start, two fine, wasted centres; then obscurity.
Read more Brian Glanville on Highbury's strangest moments
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