Double Title Winner Possessed Vital Patience, Too
With the funeral of Colin Booth taking place in Oxford on Wednesday, David Instone pays tribute to one of Wolves’ few remaining links to their glory days after his recent passing-away at the age of 90.
Colin Booth (left) in action against his boyhood favourites Manchester City early in 1955-56. Eddie Clamp is the man threatening in the air in Wolves’ 7-2 win.
How good was Colin Booth! And how good were Wolverhampton Wanderers when he was playing for them! Please note that exclamation marks have been used there, not question marks, in order to make the point that both were outstanding.
Twenty-seven goals in 82 matches for a club absolutely at the top of the English game – one with whom he struggled to hold down a regular place – are the bald statistics of the inside-forward’s Molineux stay.
Along with helping in the winning of two League titles, he also jousted with some of Europe’s finest sides under those intoxicating lights and then went on to top-score in two successive seasons for a good Nottingham Forest side.
That gives another sound indication of his performance levels and challenges faced – a forward impressive enough to carry the East Midlanders’ main attacking threat had been more on the fringes at Molineux. Wolves, as the record books and League tables demonstrate, were that strong. First-team places were at a sky-high premium.
It gave Booth extra pride to see Stan Cullis’s side catch and overtake Manchester United in the late 1950s. As a youngster, he had been coveted by The Reds after being born and groomed a few miles up the road in Middleton.
Booth (in blazer, front right) with an England Schoolboys squad also containing Eddie Clamp (far left of back row) and Johnny Haynes (in front of Eddie’s left elbow).
He captained Manchester Boys to the final of the English Schools Trophy, skippered Lancashire Boys as well and inevitably attracted attention from Matt Busby. But his father sensed there would be hassles ahead from ticket-hunting friends if he signed and succeeded at Old Trafford. So he urged him to leave the city to pursue his chosen career.
We shudder to think of where he might have fitted into the tragic Munich story if United had lured him in. Instead, he retained clear memories of running out at their home with Wolves a few days after the winning of the 1957-58 League Championship and enjoying the sporting guard of honour staged by a club rebuilding following the horrors of the crash.
“There were no celebrations when we won 4-0 there,” he told me several years ago. “It was very sad. They had second and third-team players in their side after the disaster. They just had to get through their fixtures.”
Booth, who had favoured Manchester City as a youngster and held a particular torch to keeper Frank Swift, was a reserve for an England schoolboys side containing Johnny Haynes and Eddie Clamp for a game against Scotland at Wembley .
Interest in him was high and Wolves, having watched him several times, won the race after a scout turned up at the family’s home in Greater Manchester.
He was on the groundstaff with Norman Deeley and steadily climbed the ranks; via the Wolverhampton Amateur League and Worcestershire Combination teams to the reserves. He soon learned not to dally on the ball for too long!
Booth had been a wing-half in his formative days (a defensive midfielder to younger readers) and, amid his early homesickness, recalled Ron Flowers being signed. “He was a class act,” Colin recalled relatively recently. “Slater, Wright, Flowers was the best half-back line I ever saw…..I’m glad I played with them and not against them.” When he did return to Molineux as a Forest player, Slater welcomed him home by despatching him over the wall and among the spectators.
Patience was always a byword for Booth at Wolves. Having signed as an apprentice in 1950, he had to wait until 1955 for his first-team debut – in a 1-0 Easter home win over Villa – but was in the side at the end of the season as they narrowly failed to retain their League title.
His first senior goal came, appropriately, in a 7-2 slaughter of Manchester City early in 1955-56, the campaign he remembered as his best. In it, he played 27 League and Cup games and netted seven times, including a last-game hat-trick at Sheffield United.
He topped the 20-game mark again the following season and highlighted it spectacularly with a four-goal blast in a 5-2 home victory over Arsenal in the late autumn.
Colin on tour with Wolves in South Africa in 1957 at a time when his star had risen considerably at Molineux.
Booth seemed to be on the verge of greatness but ran into familiar problems for the era. He was up against Peter Broadbent, Jimmy Murray, Dennis Wilshaw and Bobby Mason in the clamour for senior jerseys.
When Wolves regained their championship crown, he was restricted to 13 League games, followed by the same number as more glory was secured 12 months later. His seven goals in 1958-59, including a hat-trick when Portsmouth were beaten 7-0 at Molineux, confirmed, though, that his golden touch was still alive.
Cullis was impressed enough after the home and away Christmas wins over Pompey but not everyone was. Colin regaled us with the tale of how he took his wife out to dinner that night and was told by her that she didn’t think he had played that well!
Not even the thrill of helping in two title triumphs could shift his mind away from thinking he needed to be playing more regularly. The once-capped England under-23 international – he appeared in a goalless draw with France at Bristol City – had Sheffield Wednesday and Everton chasing him, favoured going to another interested top-flight club, Birmingham, but ended up at Forest; because, he thought, that’s where Cullis wanted him to go.
Of his total of League and Cup games for Wolves (82), Booth told us around a decade ago: “It might not sound very high but you have to remember that Peter was always one of the first names on the team sheet and we had players like Roy Swinbourne, who had such bad luck, Jimmy, Dennis and Bobby Mason as well. I feel privileged that I played with such great players.
“I was never a great player but you had to be decent to play even 20 games in Wolves’ first team then. When I went to Nottingham Forest, I played almost every one.
“They played a more controlled game than Wolves, who were more positive and got better results without playing such nice football. Forest had not long won the FA Cup when I went there in the autumn of 1959.
“I had to play more up front for them and I had two years there, then two at Doncaster.”
One of the inside-forward’s regrets was meeting the great Alfred Di Stefano on a Spanish beach decades later and not asking for an autograph or a photograph together, the two having been on opposite sides when Wolves drew 2-2 away to Real Madrid in 1957.
Bobby Mason ….a friend and rival for a Wolves first-team place in the second half of the 1950s.
We might also have expected to hear that he was unhappy about his longest unbroken run in Wolves’ first team standing only at the dozen successive games he had in 1956, straddling the end of one season and the start of the next.
But he bided his time in the main and even found the selflessness to sympathise with Mason over what he thought must have been the crushing disapppointment of missing out on an FA Cup final place.
In South Yorkshire, Booth scored twice when Doncaster registered their record League win (10-0 at home to Darlington in Division Four in January, 1964), helping himself to no fewer than 62 goals for them in two seasons. Then he became one of the few men to go to Oxford and Cambridge!
His final League club were Oxford United, where his 23 goals in 1964-65 made him their top scorer and helped them win promotion from the Fourth Division. His skipper at the Manor Ground was Ron Atkinson but a cruciate knee ligament injury suffered in a friendly at Reading stopped him kicking a ball for 18 months.
A surgeon recommended him to go semi-professional, so, compensated to the tune of £1,000 for the loss of full-time status, he dropped into the Southern League by joining Cambridge United, from where he moved on to Cheltenham.
Oxford, where he met his second wife, Carol, was drawing him in and, during a stay around the city of more than 20 years, he worked at a hospital at which she was a senior sister in theatre. He was then employed as a porter at Stafford Hospital after a visit to the town with his in-laws for a cat show had opened their eyes to the considerably lower house prices there.
Colin Booth near his former Hampshire home in more recent years.
The couple were in the Midlands from 1988 to 1992, with Booth enjoying his golf at Ingestre Park, but they hankered for a move to Bournemouth, where Carol grew up.
Another upheaval followed and we reported that he had bumped into Bobby Mason when having a coffee in a hotel in Christchurch about 30 years ago. Both inside-forwards were resident at the time on the South Coast but Colin eventually relocated to Oxford once more and spent his final months in a care home there. He died on May 12, five months on from his 90th birthday.
We thank Steve Gordos for his help in the compiling of this tribute.