when Alf and Rita were both born, there were just 3,090 divorces in England. By 1939, the figure had risen to 8,254. By 1950, however, the divorce rate had soared to 30,870 a year. So it is hardly as if Alf and Rita were causing a public scandal. Though the true nature of Alf’s marriage has never before been revealed, there have occasionally been wild rumours in the football world about his relationship with Rita. It was whispered breathlessly, for example, that she was ‘the daughter of an admiral’. Others said that Alf had ‘stolen his bride from his best mate’. Neither is remotely true. Rita was, like Alf, born in the working class and had merely contracted an unfortunate first marriage. ‘There was no sense of Alf stealing her,’ says Pat Millward. ‘When they met, she was already waiting for a divorce.’ Nevertheless, Rita Norris’ past undoubtedly heightened Alf’s sense of wariness about discussing his private life. It was another uncomfortable subject that he would prefer to avoid, like his father’s job or his alleged elocution lessons or his supposed gypsy background. After his marriage, the barriers were put up even higher, as Margaret Fuljames, his secretary at the FA for many years, recalls:
He hated any intrusion into his private life. Like the Daily Mail would ring almost every year on his birthday, looking for a diary piece, a light little comment from him or his wife, and Alf would never have anything to do with that. He felt it was nothing to do with who he was or his job as England manager.
For all its inauspicious beginnings, Ramsey’s marriage proved a successful one. Rita changed her name to Victoria, though Alf always knew her as Vic, and she was happy to concentrate on building their home and supporting Alf. In typically practical terms, Alf once set out the proper role of a player’s spouse:
A footballer’s wife needs to run the home completely so that he has no worries; give him the sort of food he likes and should have; and to work only for his good and the good of his career. She must know that she will rarely see him at weekends – and the better player he is, the less she will see of him. A footballer could be ruined by a wife who let him have all the household responsibilities, fed him the wrong diet and gave him no peace of mind. My wife has been splendid. I have been very lucky.
In her turn, Vickie returned the compliment. ‘I was privileged to have met and married Alfred and I enjoyed a very wonderfully happy life with a kind and generous man,’ she wrote to me.
Alf proved a loyal, honourable husband, giving her not the slightest moment’s suspicion that he might stray. Unlike a lot of successful sportsmen, who revel in the flash of a knowing smile or a whiff of perfume, Alf was too innocent to be at ease with sophisticated femininity. ‘I don’t know much about women and the only women I know are footballers’ wives,’ he said, at a time when the phrase ‘footballers’ wives’ had yet to become the embodiment of predatory lust. His love for Vickie was certainly genuine. ‘He’s the nicest man in the world. Never quarrels or loses his temper. He even listens to my views on football,’ Vickie told the Daily Mail in 1962. They never had any children of their own, but Alf proved a good step-father to Vickie’s daughter Tanaya, who went on to marry an American and settle in the USA.
Pat Millward says: ‘They were a very close couple. Alf was devoted to her.’ Despite his comments about a wife’s duties, Alf was not the stereotyped husband of his generation, treating all housework as the preserve of women. Ken Jones has this recollection of the domesticated Alf:
In 1974 I was doing some magazine pieces with him and Brian James, the Daily Mail’s football writer. So I picked him up at Liverpool Street and took him over to my house. We did some work in the morning, and then sat down to lunch cooked by my wife. All went well and we had a few drinks – Alf liked a drink. Then after lunch, I said, ‘Right, back to work.’
To which Alf immediately said, ‘Hold on, what about the washing up?’
‘The washing up?’ I said in astonishment.
‘Yes, the washing up.’ And he went off into the kitchen to help with my wife. There he was, with his elbows in the sink. From that day on, he was always a hero to my wife.
John Booth, who became a close friend of Alf after his retirement, says: ‘Everything always had to be spotless with Alf. He liked everything clean and tidy. He once came into my kitchen and started cleaning the sink and kettle.’
Whatever his virtues of fidelity and domesticity, it could not be claimed that Alf was the most romantic of men. Even Victoria, in one of her rare comments to the press, expressed her desire for her husband to show more emotion. ‘I wish he would let his hair down occasionally and throw his cap over the moon. It would do him a power of good. There is nothing spectacular ever in his reactions,’ she said in 1965. Early in his marriage, his relentless tunnel vision about football could be hurtful. On one occasion, when she was waiting outside the Spurs dressing-room after a game, he came out, completely ignored her because he was so wrapped up in his own thoughts, and proceeded to walk down the corridor until he was reminded that he had forgotten his wife. Ron Reynolds, the Spurs deputy goalkeeper of the early fifties, recalled meeting Alf and Vickie at a social event:
We had a meal and afterwards there was a dance. Alf came over to me and said, ‘I want you to meet somebody.’ He took me along and introduced me to Vickie. Within a matter of thirty seconds, he said, ‘You won’t mind having a dance with her, will you?’ Alf didn’t want to dance, he wanted to talk about football to the people there and so he lumbered me! She was very nice, but I was just a country lad, twenty-two years old, a bit out of my depth. I was practically speechless:
His innate lack of demonstrativeness stretched into his marriage. He famously explained that if he and his wife ever had a row, he liked to ‘shake hands and make up’. Nigel Clarke says that he ‘never, ever saw he and Vickie touch each other, embrace or be tactile. They would shake hands when they saw each other. I always had the feeling that Alf was not very worldly wise in sexual matters.’ And though he was a loving step-father, he could not always get excited about his daughter’s youthful activities. Tony Garnett, who covered all of Alf’s Ipswich career, told me of this incident:
Alf was a shrewd man but he was very limited in anything bar football. I remember I ran into Tanya on the train at Liverpool Street. She had just been to the ballet. She was keen on that, like her mother. And I said to her, ‘You know your dad is just two compartments ahead.’
‘Oh, I don’t want to go and sit with him. He won’t be interested in what I have been doing.’
For all his carefully cultivated refinement, Alf could occasionally be crudely masculine. Roy McFarland, the Derby and England defender, remembers an incident in December 1971, when England were on tour in Greece. There was the usual banquet after the game, which the players imagined would be followed by the usual boring speeches. Instead, a ravishing, scantily clad belly-dancer appeared before them. McFarland recalls:
All the lads started coming back from the bar for a closer look. Once she had finished her act, some of us went out to get some fresh air, and then we got on the bus. Alf came out of the reception, sat down in his usual seat, then turned to us and said: ‘Lads, what about that belly dancer! Fucking great pair she had, didn’t she?’ It was so unexpected. We could not stop laughing. He said things like that, which made him all the more endearing. It was a warm feeling to be part of that humour.
George Cohen, the Fulham full-back who knew and understood Alf better than any of the 1966 winners, gave this thoughtful analysis of their marriage:
Alf was, no doubt, a product of his times and when they had passed few men would ever have had more difficulty in adapting to a new style – and new values. His marriage to Vickie was a perfect reflection of this. He worshipped her but he also expected everything of her. She served him, as so many women did their husbands in those days and in return he adored her. If ever anyone walked in a man’s goals in the process. Stoke were crushed 6–1, Portsmouth 5–1 and, most remarkably of all, Newcastle United 7–0, witnessed by a crowd of over 70,000 at White Hart Lane. The Daily Telegraph gave a graphic description of how Tottenham operated:
The Spurs principle is to hold the ball a minimum amount of time, keep it on the ground and put it into an open space where a colleague will be a second or two later.