a gypsy. I know that for a fact.’ Jean Bixby is of the same view: ‘His brother Cyril and I worked in the office at Fords and he was a quiet, decent chap. I have heard it said that Alf was a gipsy, but to know Cyril, I could not believe it. Cyril did not seem to be from gypsy stock at all.’ Nor did the family’s ownership and farming of the same plot of land in Dagenham for several generations match the usual pattern for travelling people moving from one area to another. In fact, some of the land used for the building of the Becontree Estate around Halbutt Street had originally been owned by Alf’s grandfather and was sold to the council. As Stan Clements, who played with Alf at Southampton in the 1940s, argues. ‘I never thought Alf was a gypsy. I cannot see that at all. When I first met him, his entire appearance was immaculate. And gypsies don’t own land for generations.’ Alf’s widow denied that he was gypsy. ‘That wasn’t true. I don’t know where that came from,’ Lady Victoria has told friends. And Alf himself, when asked about his origins in a BBC interview, snapped, ‘I come from good stock. I have nothing to be ashamed of.’
Yet, despite this protestation, there always lurked within Alf a sense of distaste about his Dagenham upbringing. He went out of his way to avoid the subject and seemed to resent any mention of it. Terry Venables, who also grew up in Dagenham and later was one of Alf’s successors as England manager, experienced this when he was selected for the national side in 1964, as he recalled in his book Football Heroes:
When Alf called me into the England set-up, my dad said to me, ‘Tell him I used to work with Sid down the docks. He was Alf’s neighbour and he’ll remember him.’ It sounded reasonable at the time. Now picture the scene when I turned up for my first senior England squad get-together. For a start, I was in genuine awe of Alf, who came over and shook my hand. ‘How are you?’ he asked. ‘Fine, thank you very much,’ I replied. ‘By the way, my dad says do you remember Sid? He was your next-door neighbour in Dagenham.’ Had I cracked Alf over the head with a baseball bat he could not have looked more gob-smacked. He stared at me for what seemed like a long, long time. He didn’t utter a single word of reply; he simply came out with a sound which if translated into words would have probably read something like, ‘you must be joking’. He must have seen I was embarrassed by this but he certainly did not make it easy for me.
Ted Phillips, the Ipswich striker of Alf’s era, recalls a similar incident when travelling with Alf through London:
We were on the underground, going to catch a train to an away game. And this bloke came up to Alf:
‘Allo boysie, how you getting on?’ He was a real ole cockney. Alf completely ignored him, and the bloke looked a bit offended.
‘I went to bloody school with you. Still on the greyhounds, are ya?’ Alf still said nothing.
When we arrived at Paddington, we got off the tube and were walking through the station when I said to Alf:
‘So who was that then?’
And he replied in that voice of his, ‘I have never seen him before in my life.’
It was the change in Alf’s voice that most graphically reflected his journey away from Dagenham. Terry Venables, like several other footballers from the same area, including Jimmy Greaves and Bobby Moore, always retained the accent of his youth. But Alf dropped his, developing in its place a kind of strangulated parody of a minor public-school housemaster. The new intonation was never convincing, partly because Alf was a shy man, who was without natural articulacy and could be painfully self-conscious in public, and partly because his limited education meant that he lacked a wide vocabulary and a mastery of syntax. Hugh McIlvanney says:
Alf made it hard for some of us to like him because of the shame he seemed to feel about his background. We all understand there can be pressures in those areas but the voice was nothing short of ludicrous. There were some words he could not pronounce and the grammar kept going for a walk. That could be a problem for any human being but, for Alf, it almost became a caricature.
In his gauche attempts to sound authoritative, particularly in front of the cameras or the microphone, Alf would become stilted and awkward, littering statements with platitudes and empty qualifying sub-clauses. One extreme example of this occurred when he was being interviewed on BBC Radio in the early sixties:
‘Are you parents still alive, Mr Ramsey?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Where do they live?’
‘In Dagenham, I believe.’
In his 1970 biography, when Ramsey was still England manager, Max Marquis gave a vivid description of Alf’s style. Describing his language as ‘obscure and tautological’, Marquis said that Ramsey
is unable to communicate with any precision what he means because he will never use a single-syllable word when an inappropriate two-syllable word will do and he dots his phrases with some strange, meaningless interjections…His tangled prose, allied with his capacity for self-persuasion, has made for some of his quite baffling pronouncements. In public he lets words go reluctantly through a tightly controlled mouth: his eyes move uneasily.
Because Ramsey never felt in command of his language, he could vary wildly between triteness and controversy. He could be absurdly unemotional, as when Ipswich won the League title in 1962, perhaps the most astonishing and romantic feat in the history of English club football.
‘How do you feel, Mr Ramsey?’ said a breathless BBC reporter, having described him as ‘the architect of this miracle’.
‘I feel fine,’ replied Ramsey, as if he had done nothing more than pour himself a cup of tea.
Yet this was also the man who created a rod for his own back through a series of inflammatory statements, like his notorious description of the 1966 Argentinian team as ‘animals’ or his claim in 1970 that English football had ‘nothing to learn’ from the Brazilians. As Max Marquis put it, ‘Ramsey is like a bad gunner who shoots over or short of the target.’
A serious-minded youth, always striving for some kind of respectability, Alf did not have as strong a working-class accent as some of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, his speech could not help but be influenced by his surroundings. ‘Dagenham had its own special brogue, and Alf spoke with that,’ says Phil Cairns, ‘It was a sort of bastardized cockney. He certainly had that accent as a child. I did notice how his voice changed when he got on in life. It was so obvious. When he had a long conversation, you would hear that he made faux pas.’ Eddie Baily, who was Alf’s closest friend at Spurs, told me of the difference he saw in Alf once he had gone into management with Ipswich Town:
He was cockney to me but I noticed his voice changed after he left Tottenham. When I saw him after that, his voice was refined. I would say to him, ‘What are you doing? Where did all this come from? You’re speaking very well, my old soldier.’ He would just laugh at that. I could always have a go at him. But I think the position that he took made him want to be a little bit better when he had to do negotiations and all that.
It has always been alleged that this distinct change in Alf Ramsey’s voice was as a result of his taking elocution lessons in the mid-fifties. Indeed, the idea of Alf’s elocution lessons has become more than just part of football folklore: it is now treated as a fact. Both Ramsey’s previous biographers, Max Marquis and Dave Bowler, state without any reservation that he underwent such instruction. The late John Eastwood, who wrote a massively authoritative history of Ipswich football, reported that ‘it was well known that Alf took himself off for the two-hour elocution lessons to a woman at the ballroom dancing school near Barrack Corner in Ipswich’. Another, far less believable, version has been put forward by Rodney Marsh, the charismatic striker of the seventies and later Sky TV presenter, who has claimed that Ramsey took ‘elocution lessons, paid for by the FA, around the time of the World Cup in 1966’. Anyone who knew about either the parsimony of the FA or Alf’s contempt for the Association’s councillors would know that this assertion was nonsense.
Yet the absurdity of Marsh’s statement only exposes the weakness of the conventional wisdom that Alf underwent elocution training. The fact is that ever since his youth, Alf was on a mission to improve