However, all this was not a burning issue for me as I waited on Lever Street to see my girl, no more than it was for most young footballers. Most of us, I suppose, belonged to a breed of dreamers, working-class boys who, because of a certain ability, had been able to join a world isolated from so many everyday cares. No, we couldn’t, like the young stars of today, give ourselves financial security for life when we signed a single contract, but we could do what we loved and tell ourselves that we had been given well-paid jobs, certainly receiving more than our fathers who worked in factories and mines.
The fact that seems so odd, in these days when every player seems to have an agent agitating aggressively for better terms, is that the issue was so low on the everyday agenda of the dressing room. When in time a young player acquired a wife and had children, and had a mortgage to pay, perhaps his thoughts turned more to money, but it happened so slowly, and with such little force, that someone like Cliff Lloyd, a former player and a brilliant secretary of the Professional Footballers’ Association, must sometimes have despaired of ever generating the kind of commitment and passion for the union cause which would eventually break the £20-a-week maximum wage.
Though in time I became interested in the PFA, and worked with Cliff, I was certainly not in the forefront of protest – unlike my young club-mate John Giles, who, before building his reputation at Leeds United, had the nerve to challenge Matt Busby over wages. I might have warmed to those impassioned speeches by the lads back at the electrical factory in Broadheath, but in my own life I was like so many of my co-workers. I took what was offered. Someone like John Giles, who I know cared passionately about the game and was deeply dedicated to improving his skill and his knowledge, would no doubt say that I had not so much bought the football dream as inhaled it, but for me it was always the privilege of playing football that was uppermost in my mind. I had that, and – certainly as I saw it then – I had good money for anyone of my age and my background.
It was only later, when I had my responsibilities as a family man and realised, for the first time maybe, how hard it was to put money on one side for the future, that I too began to ask the question that was being posed increasingly in activist PFA circles: where is all the money going – and where did it go in those incredible boom years after the war, when every ground seemed to be filled to the rafters and yet a great player like Wilf Mannion returned from England duty at Hampden Park, after being watched by 120,000, sitting on his cardboard case in a third-class rail carriage?
The money certainly wasn’t all used in players’ wages. Also, how much was being spent on the grounds? Of course that question was still being asked when the Taylor Report was published in the wake of the Hillsborough tragedy in 1989.
I would never be militant. I would never issue ultimatums. It simply wasn’t my style. But then, perhaps inevitably, I did come to consider the differences between football and, say, show business. Mike Yarwood’s vision of me as a toff certainly had more to do with appearances than any financial reality. When he saw me on Lever Street I was on £16 a week in the winter, £14 in the summer. The rises came at the rate of £2 per union negotiation, but when the maximum reached £20 the PFA suddenly raised the stakes in a way that shocked the bosses of the Football League. The demand was for a £4 rise and the response was indignant. ‘This is ridiculous,’ said the League.
It was at this sticking point that the pressure for a strike began to build at a greater rate, and created the atmosphere at a PFA meeting in Manchester that, looking back, I grew to believe may have been the moment that changed the whole of football.
There were a few anti-strike speeches, and one of them was notably articulate: the argument that a strike would be ruinous to the game, and to the prospects of the players, was hammered home. It was a strong speech, but its effect was counter-productive. It brought the fierce Bolton Wanderers full back Tommy Banks to his feet. He said that while it was true we did not have to clock on at a factory or go down a mine, we did entertain thousands of people, and however hard a lad worked down the mine he didn’t have to take on Stanley Matthews. ‘Am I worth a rise?’ asked Banks. ‘Yes, I am. I was never paid enough for the number of times I was ridiculed by Mr Matthews.’ He sat down to deafening applause.
When the £20 maximum wage limit was finally abolished in 1962, when Johnny Haynes became the first £100 a week footballer, my wages were raised to £35. By then I was an established England player.
In my eyes it was a dramatic pay rise, but Jimmy Murphy told me how the figure had been reached. He and Matt Busby had been running through the squad list, discussing the progress of individual players and what might be their proper reward now that the maximum wage limit was being dismantled. Apparently, when they reached my name they agreed that I would
