Always Managing: My Autobiography (10 page)

Sometimes we saw Jimmy Logie, one of the Arsenal greats, outside the ground. He would have an old brown mackintosh on, tied up with string, selling newspapers. My dad was an inside-forward like Jimmy and he idolised him. He’d go over and buy a paper even if he already had one, just for an excuse to chat to him. Then we’d be in the queue, trying to get a ticket. My dad was a docker, he never had much money, but sometimes if we couldn’t get in the North Bank we’d queue up for seats. Stan Flashman, the famous ticket tout, would walk along the line, flogging his black-market tickets, which we couldn’t afford. My dad hated Stan. He used to slaughter him as he went past. I remember we always had to battle to get into games with West Ham, home or away. One season, the old man shot over Upton Park early, got in the queue, then he reached the front before I arrived and had to go in. I couldn’t find him, he couldn’t find me. We were both panicking. And we got beat about six. Absolutely murdered.

I was a good player, one of the best, as a kid – but I got that from my dad. He could have been a professional, too, but the war intervened. He had it rough as a kid. His dad used to beat his
mum, and then they both died when he was 15. He was in the army at 16 and taken prisoner of war, and by the time he came back home the chance had probably gone for him to make a career out of football. He used to play in the Essex Business Houses League with his mates, but he was on a different plane to most of the players there. All the big amateur teams in London from that time, like Walthamstow Avenue and Leyton, wanted him to join them, but he always refused. He just enjoyed playing football for the fun of it with lads he knew from round our way in Poplar. I used to get dragged all over the place to watch him, but I didn’t mind. He was usually the best player there by a million miles and I felt really proud of my dad. He could do anything with the ball. Years later I can remember going on holiday to a caravan on the Isle of Sheppey with Frank Lampard and his family, and Dad took Frank to the cleaner’s in a kickabout on the green. He was in his fifties by then but he nutmegged Frank, showed one way then went the other – he drove him absolutely mad. Put a ball at his feet twenty years later and he could still do all the tricks.

My football career started when we moved to the Burdett Estate in Poplar. Before that we had one room above my great-grandmother’s house in Barchester Street, but the old properties that hadn’t been bombed were knocked down soon after the war. The Burdett Estate was great because there were loads of flats, loads of kids, and we were shut away in our own little world. There were no cars on the estate, so we’d come home from school and play football until it was too dark to see. There was a patch of grass at the back of the flats which we called Wembley. I’d come home from Susan Lawrence School – most of my mates went to Stebon, but I didn’t want to change – and you’d hear a kid shouting, ‘There’s a
game on at Wembley,’ and that was your cue to run over there with your ball. We’d be there all night after that. Cup final day, we would watch the match, and as soon as it was over, bang, it was back to our own twin towers. One team would be Manchester United, the other Aston Villa, and we’d play our version of the game.

There were about four caretakers – we called them porters – on the estate and we nicknamed one Cheyenne, after Cheyenne Bodie, who was this huge cowboy in a western show on television. It was our little joke because the TV Cheyenne was about 6 feet 4 inches and this bloke was about 4 feet 2 inches, and he’d come and try to nick our ball. We hated him. He’d try to sneak up on us but we always spotted him and ran away. He kept threatening to report us to our mums, until one day this hard old docker called Albert Chamberlain frightened him off. Albert had a boy called Alan, who loved football, and after Cheyenne chased us away, Albert rounded on him: ‘Why don’t you them alone?’ he said. ‘Ain’t you got nothing better to do? What harm are they doing?’ I think Cheyenne was scared of Albert because he let us be after that, but it had put an idea in Albert’s head. ‘Don’t worry about him, boys,’ he said. ‘We’ll start our own team up – we’ll call it Burdett Boys.’ We were all about nine, we were looking at him – we didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. But Albert was as good as his word.

There was a little room in the block of flats in the middle of the estate, called the Matchbox. It was about the size of a matchbox, and I don’t know what its purpose was, because it had never been used, but Albert got the keys and that became our team room. We had a meeting one Friday to set up our XI, and Albert got us kit and a place in the Regent Boys League, which was over the other side of London, north-west, in Regent’s Park. The match was an
hour and the journey there was about three. We had to get a bus, then a train, and there was nowhere to change. We were playing teams from Islington, from Camden, and it turned out the only league he could get us into was an under-11. We were all younger, and some of the smallest ones were no more than eight. We were getting chinned every week, but Albert was soon on the lookout for new players. He found a cracker in Terry Reardon. Terry was 11 but he was already on the way to being a man. When he was just 12 he played in the English Schools under-15 Trophy final for East London Boys against Manchester Boys. He could operate three years out of his age group, no problem. Once Terry joined, Albert started nicking a few lads from the other east London clubs and pretty soon we had enough for two teams. By then we had become the best club in the area. We moved leagues and played on Hackney Marshes and won the title year after year. I’d play for East London on the Saturday, Burdett Boys on the Sunday morning, and then wait for our older team to turn up and play for them, too. And that’s how it all started – running around with Burdett Boys on a patch of land we called Wembley.

There was nothing for me at school. Susan Lawrence had a fancy new name – it used to be Ricardo Street School but was renamed after a local councillor who became a Labour MP – but the headmaster was the same chap that was in charge when my dad went there. I was lucky, though, because it had two good sports teachers, Mr Enniver and Mr Clark, who were really enthusiastic. Mr Enniver loved his cricket, and they both loved their football. We would meet at nine o’clock Saturday morning and play on a red cinder surface; I don’t think I saw a grass pitch until I had left for my senior school. I remember the pair of them going from class to
class announcing the trials for the school football team and asking whether anyone was interested. My hand shot straight up. I got picked and my dad came to watch me. I felt ten feet tall.

Mr Enniver absolutely loved me, and Mr Clark was fantastic for me, too. He only died quite recently. He got in touch late in his life and I saw him quite a few times in the decade before he passed away. Unfortunately, though, I left Susan Lawrence only interested in sport. There were three choices in those days: grammar school, central school or secondary modern. If you were clever you went to our local grammar school, George Green on the Isle of Dogs; the average ones ended up at the central schools, St Paul’s Way or Millwall; and if you were an idiot like me there were two further choices – Hay Currie School or Sir Humphrey Gilbert School in Stepney. They were the roughest schools in the area by a million miles – a pair of nuthouses, really. You had to be pretty poor in class and have failed the eleven-plus exam to end up at a secondary modern, and I think there was only me and one other boy who went there. I chose Humphrey Gilbert, and I remember Mr Enniver taking me aside before I left. ‘Harry, be careful at that school,’ he told me. ‘If you’re not you could get caught up in the wrong things. You’ll have to concentrate. I know you love your sport, but you must watch out. Get in with the wrong crowd and you could end up in prison.’ People now don’t understand what it was like there. They think I exaggerate when I tell them I can’t remember having too many proper classes or proper teachers. It was student teachers who got dumped there, mostly. Young women – they would last a day, or a week at most, and run out crying. I can’t recall any of the names, because we had so many. They would disappear one afternoon and we’d never see them again.

We did no work, we learned nothing. We’d have assembly at nine, and by ten everyone would be bunking off class and meeting up by the toilets to get up to mischief. The education was non-existent. I think there were probably ten kids in my year who left not being able to read or write. I’m not saying I was much better. If I tried to write a letter, you’d think it was a six-year-old who had got hold of the pen and paper. It’s embarrassing, really. My writing is disgusting and my spelling is no better. I might be dyslexic for all I know; it certainly looks like it. I can sign my name or write ‘Best wishes, Harry’ for autographs, but the rest is a mess. I have never composed a letter in my life because I simply couldn’t. If I ever have to put down a proper sentence, I’ve no idea where to put the full stops and commas, and I start off in capitals, then joined-up letters, then back to capitals. Don’t think I’m proud of this. People can’t believe it when they see my handwriting – and everyone I’ve ever met from Sir Humphrey Gilbert or Hay Currie is the same. The education was secondary, but it certainly wasn’t modern.

We didn’t go to school in the way other kids went to school. We caused havoc and then went home. The only way they could keep order was by using the cane. There was one teacher there, Mr Merton, who was extremely scary. He’d bend you over and beat you with the cane, or give you six across the hand. We dreaded being sent to him because he always made sure it hurt. I got the cane a few times, for not turning up to class or banging the lid of my desk repeatedly. One time we all started singing in class and I got the blame. My favourite trick was playing to an audience in woodwork and metalwork. I didn’t have a clue about either of them so I used to act up, get this wiry metal that we used and stuff a load of it
down the back of my trousers. Then I would wind up our teacher, Mr Harris, unmercifully until he flew into a temper and ordered me out in front of the class to get the cane. With the wire down my trousers I couldn’t feel a thing, but I’d be making all these noises, ‘ooh’ and ‘aargh’, as he hit me, all the while winking and grinning at my mates in the room. Everyone would be laughing and Harris wouldn’t have a clue what was going on.

Mr Harris was the saving grace for me, though, because he was also our football teacher. I went there at 11 and was straight in the first team with the 15-year-olds. We played in green shirts, but there was no other kit. Most of the boys wore jeans and army boots, even when representing the school. One of our first matches was against our big rivals Hay Currie, and they beat up Mr Harris after the game. He was the referee and he should have gone crooked and given them a couple of goals. They were big, scary boys – a few of them were members of notorious gangster families in the East End, proper villains in the making – and at the end of the match they chased him as he was trying to drive away on his moped. They pushed him off, trod on his wheels and smashed up the spikes. We all just stood there. We didn’t fancy fighting them, either. Where I came from you either had to be good at fighting or good at running – and I was always a fast runner. I represented the school at everything: football, cricket and athletics, but our equipment was a joke. I came third in the 400 metres at the London Schools Championships, and I ran in slippers. I was only a yard behind the first two, but they had spikes.

When I first went there the school football team practised in the playground, but after a while we started to get a bus out to
Goresbrook Park in Dagenham. The problem was, by the time they had got all the nutters organised on these old green buses, and then sorted everybody out amid the pandemonium at the other end, it was time to come home. We would waste whole afternoons like that. It was only when I got picked up by Tottenham Hotspur that I saw how important it was to train properly.

I was in the C class, for the lowest academic achievers, which did not help. There was a boy called David Thompson, who had a car that he had nicked, a little Mini that he used to leave parked up the road. He could only have been about 14, but he was already a man. He was useless at football, but we got him in the school team because he used to run at people and frighten the life out of them. Not with the ball. He never had the ball. He’d just run at them, ‘Grrr!’, they’d get out of the way and we’d score. It wasn’t a good team, though. My football career started in earnest when I was picked to play for East London Schools. It was at that moment that any chance I had of leaving with qualifications ended. Each Tuesday and Thursday I would excuse myself from school at about two o’clock, with another boy called Johnny Blake, and we’d go over to Hay Currie for our East London Schools training. It wasn’t a long journey but we’d act as if we needed two hours to get there, and then just hang about until all the Hay Currie kids had gone home, and our session began. It was a great thing, and a big thing for me, because East London were a proper team with a proper green-and-gold quartered strip, and Mr Sturridge, the teacher who ran it with Mr Hurley, was also responsible for the England Schoolboys team. It was my first experience of real coaching. We were a unit, we were all mates and
good players, and joining up with that group was the highlight of my week.

I think East London Boys kept a lot of kids on the straight and narrow. I don’t think I would ever have fallen as far as Mr Enniver feared, but I would definitely have got into a lot more trouble had I not been so busy playing sport. I also played cricket for East London, and ran too, and because I was of a high standard I began coming into contact with professional coaches, like Eddie Baily from Tottenham Hotspur and Dennis Allen, Martin’s dad, who played inside-forward for Charlton Athletic. That was probably the best time of my school football years, when Dennis starting coming in once a week to take our team. I think Mr Harris got Dennis in because he knew he had a couple of decent players among the lunatics. School felt like less of a madhouse on those days.