was an outside loo in a little shed in their back garden. You could see their tin bath hanging up on the wall outside. They were never a family to tell other people their business. Alf’s mother was a dear old thing. When they were installing electricity round here, she wouldn’t have it, said it frightened her. Alf’s father was also a very nice man. He sometimes kept pigs and we would go round have a look at the little piglets in the garden.
Alf always maintained that his was a close family. ‘My mother is in many ways very like me. Like me she doesn’t show much emotion. She didn’t, for instance, seem very excited when I received my knighthood. But she is very human and I like to think I was like her in that respect,’ he wrote in a 1970 Daily Mirror article about his life. He also felt that, despite the lack of money, his parents had taught him how to conduct himself properly. ‘He told me that he was brought up very strictly and that is why he was such a stickler for punctuality and courtesy. He said that it was part of his upbringing to be courteous and polite to people,’ says Nigel Clarke.
Alf was one of five children. He had two older brothers, Len and Albert, a younger brother Cyril, and a sister, Joyce, though he was the only one to go on to achieve public distinction. Cyril worked for Ford; Len, nicknamed ‘Ginger’, became a butcher; and Joyce married and moved to Chelmsford. Albert, known in Dagenham as ‘Bruno’, was the least inspiring of the siblings, utterly lacking in Alf’s ambition or focus. A heavy drinker, he earned his keep from gambling and keeping greyhounds. Alf himself was always interested in the dog track, liked a bet and was a shrewd gambler. But he never allowed it to dominate his life in the way that Albert did. ‘Bruno was a big chap. I can picture him now, with a trilby turned up at the front. He had a great friend called Charlie Waggles and the two of them never went out to work. At the time I thought that was terrible. They just gambled on the dogs,’ says Jean Bixby, who grew up in Dagenham at this time. In later life, Bruno’s disreputable life would cause Alf some embarrassment.
From the age of five, Alf attended Becontree Heath School. Now demolished, Becontree Heath had a roll of about 200, covering the ages of four to fourteen. Alf was neither especially diligent about his lessons nor popular with his fellow pupils. ‘I was never particularly clever at school. I seem to have spent more time pumping at footballs and carrying goalposts,’ Alf once said. ‘He was a year above me but I remember him all right. Know why? ’Cos he looked like a kid you wouldn’t get to like in a hurry,’ said one of them in a Sun profile of Sir Alf in 1971. For all his introspection, Alf was not a cowardly child, as he proved in the boxing ring at school. ‘I weighed only about five stones, but I was a tough little fighter. I won a few fights,’ he later recalled. But when he was ten years old, he was pulverized in a school tournament by a much larger opponent. ‘He was about a foot bigger than I was and I was as wide as I was tall. I was punched all over the ring.’ That put a halt to his school boxing career, though for the rest of his life he retained a visible scar above his mouth, a legacy of that bout. Alf was also good at athletics, representing the school in the high jump, long jump, and the one hundred and two hundred yards. And he was a solid cricketer, with a sound, classical batting technique.
But, as in adulthood, football was what really motivated Alf Ramsey. ‘He did not have much knowledge of the world. The only thing that ever seemed to interest him was football,’ says Phil Cairns. ‘He was very withdrawn, almost surly, but he became animated on the football field.’ From his earliest years, Alf demonstrated a natural ability for the game, his talent enhanced not only by games in the fields behind Parrish Cottages, but also by the long walk to and from school with his brothers. To break the monotony of the journey, which took altogether about four hours a day, the boys brought a small ball with them to kick about on the country lane. On one occasion, Alf accidentally kicked the ball into a ditch, which had filled with about three feet of water after heavy rainfall. He was instructed by his brothers to fish it out. So, having removed his shoes and socks, he waded in, soon found himself out of his depth, and was soaked to the skin. On his return home, he developed a severe cold and was confined to bed for a week. He wrote later: ‘That heavy cold taught me a lesson. I am certain that those daily kick-abouts with my brothers played a much more important part than I then appreciated in helping me secure accuracy in the pass and any ball control I now possess.’
Alf’s ability was soon obvious to his schoolmasters. One of his teachers, Alfred Snow, recalled in the Essex and East London Recorder in 1971: ‘I was teaching at Becontree Heath Primary and I taught Alf Ramsey for two years. I remember him particularly well because he was so good on the football field. It didn’t really surprise me to see him get where he has.’ At the age of just seven, Alf was placed in the Becontree Heath junior side, in the position of inside-left. His brother Len was the team’s inside-right. Alf’s promotion to represent his school meant that, for the first time, he had to have proper boots. His mother went out and bought him a pair, costing four shillings and eleven pence – with Alf contributing the eleven pence from the meagre savings in his own piggy bank. ‘If those boots had been made of gold and studded with diamonds I could not have felt prouder than when I put them on and strutted around the dining room, only to be pulled up by father. “Go careful on the lino, Alf,” he said, “those studs will mark it,”’ Alf’s ghost-writer recorded in Talking Football.
By the age of just nine, Alf, despite being ‘a little tubby’, to use his own phrase, had proved himself so outstanding that he was made the school’s captain, commanding boys who were several years older than himself. He had also been switched to centre-half, the key position in any side of the pre-sixties era. Under the old W-M formation which was then the iron tradition in British soccer, based around two full-backs, three half-backs, two wingers and three forwards, the centre-half was both the fulcrum of the defence and instigator of attacks. It was a role ideally suited to Alf’s precocious footballing intelligence and the quality of his passing.
His performances brought him higher honours. He was selected to play for Dagenham Schools against a West Ham Youth XI, then for Essex Schoolboys, and then in a trial match for London schools. But in this match, Alf’s diminutive stature told against him. He wrote:
I stood just five feet tall, weighed six stone three pounds and looked more like a jockey than a centre-half. In that trial, the opposing centre forward stood five feet, ten and half inches and tipped the scale at 10 stone. After that game I gave up all hopes of playing for London. That centre-forward hit me with everything but the crossbar, scored three goals and in general gave me an uncomfortable time.
Compounding this failure, a rare outburst of youthful impetuosity led to a sending-off for questioning a decision of the referee during a match for Becontree Heath School. The Dagenham Schools FA ordered him to apologize in writing to both the referee and themselves. He did so promptly, but it was not to be his last clash with the authorities.
For all such problems, Alf had shown enormous potential. ‘He was easily the best for his age in the area,’ says Phil Cairns. ‘He was brilliant, absolutely focused on his game. He was taking on seniors when he was still a junior. Everyone in Dagenham who was interested in football knew of Alf because he was virtually an institution as a schoolboy. He was famous as a kid because of his football.’ Jean Bixby’s late husband Tom played with Alf at Becontree Heath: ‘Alf was a very good footballer as a boy. Tom said that he had great control and confidence. He always wanted the ball. He would say to Tom, “Put it over here.”’
Yet Alf’s schoolboy reputation did not lead to any approaches from a League club. He therefore never contemplated trying to become a professional footballer when he left Becontree Heath School in 1934. ‘I was very keen on football but one really didn’t it give much thought. There was no television then, and football was just fun to do,’ he told the Dagenham Post in 1971. Instead, he had to go out and earn a living in Dagenham to help support his family; this was, after all, the depth of the Great Depression in Britain, which spawned mass unemployment, social dislocation and political extremism. Alf first applied for a job at the Ford factory, where wages were much higher than elsewhere. But with dole queues at record levels, competition for work there was intense and he was rejected. Following a family conference about his future, he then decided to enter the retail trade, beginning at the bottom as a delivery boy for the Five Elms Co-operative store in Dagenham. The occupation of a grocer might not