a Southampton director as early as 1914, had become club chairman in 1936, then resigned during the war to act as secretary-manager, before returning to the boardroom to serve as chairman and later vice-president in the 1950s. For all his advanced years, he was also something of a ladies’ man, who, in the words of the Southampton historian David Bull, ‘had a way of flirting with the young wives and girlfriends at the club’s social functions’.
After introducing Alf to the other Southampton players, Sarjantson then asked Alf about his expenses. According to his 1952 autobiography, Alf told his manager that his only claim was for his ‘twopenny halfpenny tram fare from my billet’. In response, Sarjantson ‘dived into pocket’ and pulled out the exact amount. But later, in 1970, Alf gave a much more convincing version, one that reflects the flexible attitude of clubs towards expenses in the days of the maximum wage:
I told Mr Sarjantson that since we were stationed in Southampton I did not have any expenses. He said, ‘Well, if I give you thirty bob is that enough to pay for your taxi fare?’ I said it was more than enough. It was the first time anyone had given me any money for playing.
Alf was equally flexible about his age. In his 1952 book he claimed that when he played against Luton, ‘I had just reached the age of twenty-two’. In fact, he was only three months away from his 24th birthday.
Having sorted out Alf’s expenses so generously, Sarjantson then produced a set of forms for him to sign as an amateur. After his last experience with Portsmouth, this time Alf was only too glad to know that his signature would definitely be followed by a match. ‘As the London-bound train swished through Eastleigh station, I signed for Southampton Football club,’ recorded Alf. On the train up to Luton, he sat beside the Saints inside-forward Ted Bates, later to be manager at the Dell, and who, like Alf, had been a grocery delivery boy in his teens and whose wife Mary was soon to become the first female assistant secretary in League football. ‘Throughout the journey, he told me what I could expect from football: the kind of teams we would be meeting and other little facts which meant a great deal to a new recruit,’ wrote Alf. His first appearance for the Saints was a tight match, one that left him disappointed with his own performance, which he felt was far below the standard of the rest of the side. Ten minutes from the end, Southampton were winning 2-1, when Alf gave away a penalty. ‘I remember tackling someone rather hard,’ he said in 1970. Luton scored from the spot and Alf sensed that ‘several of my colleagues were giving me black looks’. Fortunately Don Roper restored the lead for Southampton soon afterwards, so Alf’s first outing resulted in victory. And he had perhaps been too hard on himself: the view of the Southern Daily Echo was that ‘the defence as a whole functioned satisfactorily’.
They did far worse in their next game, when Southampton were beaten 7-1 by Queen’s Park Rangers in the League South, the makeshift wartime replacement for the Football League. ‘Ramsey at centre-half rarely countered the combined skill of the opposing centre-forwards,’ said the local press. But Sarjantson, with stretched wartime resources, did not drop the faltering defender immediately. Alf played three more League South games in that 1943-44 season before being posted with his battalion to County Durham. Despite his mixed fortunes, he had enjoyed his brief spell with the club. ‘What fascinated me was meeting the players, sitting with them, having lunch on the train, talking football. All very interesting. It left a great impression on me, and probably started my ambition to become a professional footballer,’ he wrote in 1970.
Yet Alf, with such limited experience, was still plagued by lack of belief in his own ability and worries about finance. It is striking that when he was stationed in Durham, he played little senior competitive football. He turned out for his battalion in one match at Roker Park against Sunderland, but failed to do enough to persuade Sunderland’s manager, Bill Murray, to invite him to play in any wartime games, even though the relaxed registration rules of the period allowed a soldier to guest for almost any club he wanted – one reason why the garrison town of Aldershot was packed with star servicemen like Tommy Lawton. And when Alf was posted back to Southampton at the beginning of the 1944-45 season and performed well in a trial match, he once more hesitated about becoming a professional after Sarjantson had offered him a contract with Southampton, earning £2 per match. Alf was never one to make swift decisions. He told Sarjantson, with a touch of boldness that masked his inner doubts: ‘Although I’ve played in professional football as an amateur, I know practically nothing about it. And what if I don’t like the club?’ Sarjantson replied that if Alf wanted to leave the club at the end of the season, Southampton would not stand in his way. Having received that assurance, Alf agreed to sign. He was finally a professional footballer
Just before the start of the 1944-45 season, Alf picked up an injury, playing for his battalion against – ironically – Southampton. It was therefore not until Christmas that he had his first game as a professional. And it could have hardly been a bigger fixture, as Arsenal took on Southampton at White Hart Lane, Highbury having been badly bombed. Facing the legendary centre-forward Ted Drake, Alf had the best game of his career to date. He admitted he was a ‘little overawed’ at the start, but, according to the Southern Daily Echo, ‘Ramsey, stocky and perhaps an inch shorter than Drake, did much that pleased, although the Arsenal leader scored two goals.’ Ramsey, for the first time, had proved that he could make it at the highest level; his confidence soared as a result. And it went up even further when, as a result of injuries to other players, he was switched from centre-half to inside-left. When Southampton beat Luton 12-3 in March 1945, the second highest score in the club’s history, Alf scored four times, with the Echo commenting that ‘he can certainly hammer a ball’.
Altogether Alf made 11 League South appearances that season. At its close, Sarjantson asked him to sign again for the club. Alf agreed to do so, but 1945-46 turned out to be a frustrating season, as he made little real advance on the previous year. He played just 13 of the 42 League South matches, and was frequently asked to play up front as centre-forward, not his favourite position because of his lack of speed. ‘I was nothing else than a stop-gap and was happier playing at centre-half. ’ But his natural football ability shone through wherever he played, in the front line or in defence. He scored a hat-trick in a 6-2 win over Newport and was lethal in two successive games against Plymouth. The writer and Southampton fan Bob Holley has left this account of Ramsey as a dashing striker, scoring twice in a 5-5 draw at the Dell in August 1945, delighting Saints fans in the painful aftermath of the war:
It is difficult now to picture how drab everything was in the summer of 1945, the bombsites, the shortages, clothes ‘on points’ and food rationing still in force, and how deprived we all felt of professional sport. Small wonder that, in the first post-war season, so many fans crammed through the turnstiles each Saturday despite the fact that there were only two makeshift Leagues – the pre-war First and Second Division clubs divided geographically, north and south.
Turning to the game against Plymouth, he wrote that it
left us breathless and excited and not particularly bothered that we had dropped a point. Their centre-forward scored a hat-trick. Our centre-forward, however, had bagged two. He was a tearaway sort of player, shirt sleeves flapping, hair all over the place, not particularly skilful as I remember but able to ‘put himself about’ as centre-forwards were expected to do in those days. His name? Ramsey, Alf Ramsey – or ‘Ramsay’ as the programme for this game, and indeed many thereafter incorrectly put it.
The biggest cause of frustration, however, was not programme misspellings or positional changes, but the fact that in December 1945, when most of Britain was trying to return to peacetime normality, Sergeant Ramsey was shipped off to Palestine by the War Office. He was there for six months, and once again his gift for football leadership quickly emerged, as he was asked to captain a Palestine Services XI, a team which contained such distinguished players as Arthur Rowley, who scored more goals in League football than any other player, and Jimmy Mason, the brilliant Scottish inside-right. On his return home in June 1946, Alf found a letter from the new Southampton manager, Bill Dodgin, the former Saints captain who had taken over from Sarjantson at the end of the war. Dodgin told Ramsey that he wanted to meet to discuss the terms of a new contact. At the same time, the Dagenham Co-op were offering Alf a return to his old job behind the counter. It may now seem absurd that Alf could have even been tempted by this latter offer, yet,