1966: We won! Then silence...
Football and Englishness, then and now. Some life writing inspired by the England team...
30 July 1966: Moments after the final whistle blew on England's World Cup victory, I ran to our front door and flung it open. I wanted to join in the dancing, cheering and general happiness I imagined would break out along our street - a redbrick terrace in Leigh, Lancashire.
There was silence. It was early evening: half the street already in shadow. I could hear the telly behind me, the posh commentator burbling away. But on the street, nothing. Not a single other door opened. Not a single lace curtain twitched.
I waited. My six year old logic told me that there would soon, after a few minutes once people had put the kettle on and recovered their poise, be a massive outbreak of public joy.
Because we had beaten not just anyone, but The Germans: the intended victims of at-at-at-at-at!, the sound 6 year old kids make when firing a pretend machine gun. The Germans, who'd perpetrated all those atrocities during the War, shown on the bubblegum cards, including this one, which was “banned” in schoolyards, but we saw it anyway.
Surely people would be ecstatic with revenge? I wanted to shout - but what? Hurray? I opened my mouth and closed it. Someone else would have to start it.
The doors stayed shut. The street stayed silent. After a minute my Mum called me back to the living room. As she closed the door, quietly, she peered into the street just to check that nobody had seen me.
A few minutes later, if I recall correctly, the match broadcast ended. I don't know if the BBC showed Juke Box Jury, as per the archived schedule, but I do remember a BBC News bulletin. They reported England's victory and then moved on, and so did we.
You have to be careful with memory. A few months later, my Dad took us to the cinema to see the movie Goal! (1966). It was shot in colour, and is the source of most of the video you will have seen of the event.
But the actual match was broadcast in black and white. So my authentic memories of those 120 minutes are in monochrome: the crisp shadow of the goalposts lengthening on the field as extra time dragged on.
My clearest recall is of that moment when the commentator says "some people are on the pitch..." - not just his rising excitement, but the moan of disgust my Dad gave at the idea of a pitch invasion during the last seconds of the game.
What I do not remember is any form of hype, certainly not in our Lancashire cotton community. There was no drinking in the street. No wearing of football colours. No flag displays at all that I can remember. (I’m writing this partly because, when I just told all this to a 20-something Labour comrade, they found it hard to believe).
As for the England flag, most people wouldn't even know where to find one 1966, let alone fly one. As you can see from this screen grab of the coverage, the crowd at Wembley were overwhelmingly waving the Union Flag.
There was no social media, no messaging and for most working class people no telephone. The pubs closed at three, reopened at half past five and had to be shut by ten.
Yes, the sports pages of the tabloids were full of words and pictures about the England team in the build-up - but the front pages covered strikes, diplomacy and the war in Nigeria. Even the BBC schedule for the day had promised cutaways to Glamorgan v West Indies “at certain intervals during the afternoon”.
It was, in short, an event from another epoch.
Though there was a lot of subtextual glee about beating the Germans, all references to the war among adults I knew at that time was smothered in the language of grimness and vagueness.
My uncle had survived being torpedoed in the Atlantic. My Mum's father had died of TB during an air-raid, while everyone else was in a shelter. My paternal Grandfather had gone underground for three continuous days with the rescue team in the 1939 Crombouke Mine disaster. My Grandma had worked in munitions. But these were facts I had to prise out of them, or their surviving relatives, decades later. Nobody in 1966 wanted to talk about the War.
So nobody was going to rush into the street because we'd beaten West Germany. It wasn't that kind of time, and Leigh wasn't that kind of place.
All public spectacle in the society I grew up in had to be planned and performed to a well-defined etiquette. Like when the circus came to town, or when they staged the annual Miners' Gala on a playing field, or the strange sectarian "walking day" parades that our rival churches - Catholic, Church of England and Methodist - made us do, with our stiff white shirts and and rosary beads.
I can remember only one spontaneous public event happening in our street: a sudden, thrilling turnout by all the Dads, watched by Mums from their doors and kids from the roadways, to throw sparrow chicks back up to the gutters. On a certain day, at a certain hour, hundreds of chicks had fledged and started to throw themselves out of the guttering where they’d nested; and our fathers had a great time throwing them back up there, whether dead, half-dead or still chirping.
It was over in a few minutes, and then everyone trooped back to their homes to sit through the interminable list of Scottish football scores that preceded the Rugby League results on the radio.
At 5pm on 30 July 1966 I'd have settled for something like that. This Sunday I'm expecting more.
If England win Euro 2020, the country will basically ejaculate. All of politics and social life is being framed around the possibility that a multi-ethnic team, whose main brand value is anti-racism, and with none of the narcissistic swagger of their predecessors, might actually win. It will be a massive moral victory against both the government and their elderly racist support base.
The 1966 match was only mildly symbolic in the popular imagination. The social subtext was obvious: the Charlton brothers were from a mining family, Nobby Stiles was a short, bald bloke from Collyhurst, Martin Peters' Dad was a lighterman on the Thames. These were working class blokes playing what the football writers called a "hard tackling" game. Whatever the posh people on the telly thought, or said, the players were of and from the working class.
But that wasn't such a big thing. Everybody - apart from a tiny elite in their James Bond world of Mayfair clubs - was part of a society dominated by work, decency, restraint (and of course its flip sides - racism, domestic violence, organised child abuse and imperialist hubris).
Sunday will be different. Win or lose, it will be enormously symbolic - because ours is a society that now lives on symbolism. The match will be, simultaneously, a mass global event - in which hundreds of millions of people will see eleven Englishmen take the knee - and an intense local street experience, drawing in women, people from ethnic and religious minorities, and children.
We will express emotions to each other that my parents had no words for; people whose sexual and gender identities would have been illegal or impossible in 1966 will hug each other; our voices, our body language, our physical boundaries will be completely different from those of that monochrome world.
The moment will be intensely political - because the right-wing populist cabal that runs the Tory party chose to make it so.
They, and their media allies, jumped on the American-inspired narrative that "taking the knee is Marxist"; that anti-racism is "divisive". It must have looked clever, riding the wave of lies and emnity unleashed by the American far right against Critical Race Theory and Cultural Marxism.
As white supremacists booed England from the stands, the Tories could feel their pain, but not the pain of the black players who’d struggled against a lifetime of prejudice - and who would still get asked, like Raheem Sterling was after his winner against Croatia, “Have you justified your selection?”.
The Tories can plaster Downing Street with England flags, hire photographers to snap them cheering England's goals while they plot the drowning of refugees off Dover. But they can't undig the hole they've fallen into.
Their entire electoral strategy is to sow divisions across working class communities, using racism, Islamophobia and English nationalism. And it’s backfired.
What’s emerged during the tournament is a rival English national ethos, centred around tolerance, respect and exemplary personal behaviour by the team.
This didn't happen by accident. The English FA's marketing, using the players' own stories and constantly seeking paths to empathy with the real England, is part of a bigger game - fending off the rise of the superclubs’ financial power and the threat of a European Super League.But its effect is clear.
Gareth Southgate's team, and the fans' reaction, is redefining Englishness at a critical moment.
That kid on the doorstep in July 1966 was British. It barely occurred to me that I was also “English”: in the Blue Peter ideology, Britain was basically England with some Celtic nations at the periphery. The social myth I was taught at school, and by my family, centred on a four-nation British imperialism: the Scots Greys at Waterloo, the Welsh Borderers mowing down Zulus at Rorke's Drift, the Irish hussars at Balaclava. That’s why the flags at Wembley 1966 bore three colours, not two.
Today, it looks highly likely that the United Kingdom will break up. Maybe we'll get away with something like a federation; maybe not.
Either way, the nationalisms in play are not about Britain anymore: Scotland's independence project is driven by a cosmopolitan, globalist nationalism; the anti-Unionist population in Northern Ireland are feeling the strong pull of a successful Eurozone economy; Welsh Labourism, which remains the dominant ideology of the urban heartlands, is heavily fused with national culture, language and consciousness.
In 2015, after reporting both the Scottish #Indyref and the SNP's Westminster breakthrough, I wrote a Guardian column headlined "I Don't Want To Be English", and predicted that any attempt to foist an English identity from above, to replace our British one, would fail - because regional and class frictions within England would prove stronger.
But that was before Brexit, before Trump and before the culture war began in earnest. If I support Scotland's right to secede, and a United Ireland, plus the inevitable increase in Welsh political autonomy these developments would create, I have to take part in creating a new, English national identity from below.
That's what the team and its fans are doing. They started out beleaguered, booed from the stands by the same boneheads who booed the Croatian national anthem, and stigmatised by the government. They've ended up executing one of the most spectacular Gramscian cultural coups in modern history.
I still don't think it will be easy. The NF no longer owns the St George cross, and British Army barracks now display posters warning recruits against "RWX" - right wing extremism. But the racist right still thinks it owns the intellectual property rights over Englishness.
Building a new, English national identity that is neither nationalist, nor imperialist, nor toxically militarist will be hard, because much of the English story, from 1603 onwards, is about the creation of the Union as the stepping stone to Empire.
But if anyone is going to do it, it’s the Millenials and Generation Z-ers - the first generation of football players and fans who were born as networked individuals.
As Raheem Sterling put it, in a moving autobiographical sketch on The Players Tribune:
"England is still a place where a naughty boy who comes from nothing can live his dream".
If I do have to be English, that's the kind of English I want to be.
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