the population of Dagenham in the 1930s provided a lucrative market for local businesses. In addition, there was a high demand for grocery deliveries in the area, because public transport was poor.
Alf immediately demonstrated his conscientious, frugal nature by giving the great majority of his earnings to the family household. ‘Every day I’d cycle my way around the Dagenham district taking to customers their various needs. My wages were twelve shillings a week. Of this sum, I handed over ten shillings to my mother, put a shilling in the box as savings and kept a shilling for pocket-money,’ he wrote. After several years carrying out these errands, Alf graduated to serving behind the counter at the Co-op shop in Oxlow Lane, only a short distance from his home in Halbutt Street.
He later claimed to be happy in his job, but what he missed was football. For two whole years, he could not play the game at all, since he had to work throughout Saturday and there was no organized soccer in Dagenham on Thursdays, when he had his only free afternoon. But then, in 1936, a kindly shopkeeper by the unfortunate name of Edward Grimme intervened. Grimme had noticed that a large number of talented Dagenham schoolboy footballers were being lost to the game because of their jobs. So he decided to set up a youth team called Five Elms United. Because of his excellent local reputation, Alf was soon asked to join. He had no hesitation in doing so, despite the weekly sixpence subscription, which left him hardly any pocket money. But he did not care. He was once more involved with the game he loved.
Grimme’s Five Elms United held their meetings on Wednesday evenings and played on Sunday mornings in a field at the back of the Merry Fiddlers pub. Playing on the Sabbath was officially banned by the FA in the 1930s. Strictly speaking, after breaking this rule, Alf Ramsey should have been obliged to apply for reinstatement with the Association, once he became a League player, by paying a fee of seven shillings six pence. ‘I was most certainly conscious that Sunday football was illegal then but it presented me with the only opportunity to play competitive football. Technically, I suppose, never having paid the reinstatement fee, I should never have been allowed to play for England or Spurs or Southampton,’ Alf wrote later. So, in effect, the World Cup was won by an ineligible manager.
Playing again at centre-half, Alf showed that none of his ability had disappeared, despite his two-year absence from the game. In fact, he was physically all the more capable because of his growth in height and his regular exercise on the Co-op bicycle. Tommy Sloan, now one of the trustees of the Dagenham Football club, saw Alf play regularly before the war on the Merry Fiddlers ground: ‘It was quite a good pitch there. All the lads played in the usual kit of the time, big shin guards and steel toe caps in their boots. Alf was a very impressive player. He used to tackle strongly, but fairly. He had a very powerful kick, especially at free kicks. He was subdued, never threw his weight about and was a model for any other youngster.’ Alf himself felt he benefited from the demanding nature of those teenage games with Five Elms, ‘I have often looked back upon those matches. Most of them were against older and better teams but we all learnt a good deal from opposing older and more experienced players. They were among the most valuable lessons of my life.’
It is interesting that many of the traits that later defined Alf Ramsey, including his relentless focus on football, his taciturnity and his attempt at social polish, were apparent in his teenage years. For all the poverty of his upbringing in Parrish Cottages, he had nothing like the usual working-class boister-ousness of his contemporaries. George Baker, who grew up near Halbutt Street and later became head of the borough’s recreation department, told me: ‘I was born within two years of Alf and I knew him and his brothers. As a lad, he was not like the locals. He somehow seemed a bit intellectual, a bit distant. He spoke a little bit better than the rest of us. He was pleasant, but he was different.’ Beattie Robbins came to know him in the thirties, because one of her relatives worked with him in the Co-op: ‘I remember him as well spoken, just as he was in later life. He was very nice, but seemed quite shy. I knew him best when he was about 17. He was polite, dignified, a very reserved person. We once went on a coach trip to Clacton with the Five Elms team and he sat quietly on the bus at the front. He did not play around much like some of the others. His life seemed to be just football.’
As he grew older, Alf appeared only too keen to distance himself from his Dagenham roots. The journalist Max Marquis wrote sarcastically in his 1970 biography of Ramsey, ‘There are no indications that Alf is overburdened with nostalgia for his birthplace…in fact the impression is inescapable that he would like to forget all connections with it.’ His Dagenham contemporary Jean Bixby, who worked with Alf’s brother Cyril at Ford, argues: ‘The trouble with Alf Ramsey was that he tried to make himself something that he wasn’t. He went on to mix in different circles and he tried to change himself to fit in with those circles. Yes, even as a child he was slightly different, but he was still ordinary Dagenham. Then he went away and changed. He was not one of the boys anymore. He became conservative, not like the others who all stuck together. He was one apart from them.’
At the heart of this unease, it has often been claimed, was a feeling of embarrassment not just over the poverty of his upbringing, but, more importantly, over the ethnic identity of his family. For Sir Alf Ramsey, knight of the realm and great English patriot, was long said to come from a family of gypsies. This supposed Romany background was reflected in the family’s fondness for the dog track, in the obscure way his father earned his living and in Alf’s own swarthy, dark features. ‘I was always told that he was a gypsy. And when you looked at him, he did look a bit Middle Eastern,’ says his former Tottenham Hotspur colleague Eddie Baily. Alf’s childhood nickname in Dagenham, ‘Darkie Ramsey’, was reportedly another indicator of his gypsy blood. ‘Everyone round here referred to him as “Darkie” and it was to be years later that I found out his name was actually Alf,’ recalled Councillor Fred Tibble. Even today, in multi-racial Britain, there is less tolerance towards gypsies than towards most other ethnic minority groups. And the problems of prejudice would have loomed even larger in the much more homogenous Britain of the pre-war era. In a Channel Four documentary on Sir Alf broadcast in 2002, it was stated authoritatively that ‘Alf had to put up with casual racism. Dagenham locals believed that he came from a gypsy background and so inherited his father’s nickname, Darkie Ramsey.’
There is no doubt that Alf was acutely sensitive about these claims and this may have accounted for some of his habitual reserve. The journalist Nigel Clarke, who knew him better than anyone else did in the press, recalls this incident on tour:
The only time I ever saw Alf really angry was when we were going through Czechoslovakia in 1973 with the England team – in those good old days the press would travel with the team. We were all sitting on the coach as it drove past some Romany caravans. And Bobby Moore piped up, ‘Hey, Alf, there’s some of your relatives over there.’ Alf went absolutely crimson with fury. He would never admit to his Romany background and hated to discuss the subject. He used to say to me, ‘I am just an East End boy from humble means.’ But it was always accepted in the football world that he was a gypsy.
The rumours might have been widely accepted but that did not make them true. Without putting Sir Alf’s DNA through some Hitlerian biological racial profile, it is of course impossible to be certain about his ethnic origins. Indeed, the whole question could be dismissed as a distasteful irrelevance were it not for the fact that the charge of being a gypsy seems to have played some part both in Alf’s desire to escape his background and in the whispers against him within the football establishment. Again, Nigel Clarke believes that the issue may have influenced some snobbish elements in the FA against him: ‘Alf had a terrible relationship with Professor Sir Harold Thompson. An Oxford don like that could not stand being lectured by an old Romany like Alf. That’s when he began to move to get his power back and remove Alf’s influence.’
Yet it is likely that much of the talk about Alf’s gypsy connections has been wildly exaggerated, even invented, while the eagerness to turn a childhood nickname into a badge of racial identity seems to have been based on a fundamental error. According to those who actually lived near him, Alf was called ‘Darkie’ simply because of the colour of his thick, glossy black hair. In the 1920s in the south of England, ‘Darkie’ was a common moniker for boys with that hair type. ‘The Ramseys were definitely not of gypsy stock,’ says Alf’s former neighbour Pauline Gosling. ‘That is where that TV documentary got it wrong.