Cultural Dessert

‘My Father and other Working-Class Football Heroes’ by Gary Imlach

12 January 2007

At three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, just as the teams should have been kicking off, Jeannie and I and Alistair Campbell (plus quite a few other Burnley fans) were beginning to make our way back down the steps of the South Stand at the Madjeski Stadium in Reading. Our 3-hour round trip to Reading had been in vain as Burnley’s FA Cup Third Round match was called off at the last minute because of a water-logged pitch, following a torrential downpour as we were making our way towards the ground. Soaked and despondent we consoled ourselves with the thought that at least Burnley would, rather unexpectedly, feature in the draw for the Fourth Round on Monday! And we were in home in time to hear of Macclesfield’s brave exploits at Chelsea and to see Liverpool’s demise at the hands of Arsenal – as well as Henrik Larsson’s inevitable and predictably brilliant debut goal for Manchester United on Sunday afternoon. I love the FA Cup – particularly the Third Round – always one of the cultural highlights of the year for me.

This week I have been reading ‘My Father and other Working-Class Football Heroes’ by Gary Imlach – the story of his father, Stewart Imlach, a professional footballer who played for Scotland in the 1958 World Cup and won the FA Cup with Nottingham Forest in 1959. Shortly after Stewart’s death, Gary decided to try to fill in the gaps in his knowledge of his father’s life. Through interviews with former playing colleagues, managers and friends and analysis of miles of archive newsprint, he reconstructs a fascinating story. This was an era where the players were often earning less than the factory-working fans who came to cheer them on and were very much part of the local working class community – usually combining their playing careers with part-time jobs as plumbers, builders or, as with Stewart Imlach, joiners.

Gary Imlach has produced a brilliant book that is biography, personal memoir, social history and sporting saga. It is wonderfully written – a non-linear narrative dripping with gorgeous phrases. Chapter Three, about Stewart Imlach’s arrival at Bury Football Club in 1952, starts: “Shortly after the residents of Colindale board the Northern Line for their morning commute south into central London, two groups of people set off the other way, into the past. Turn left out of the tube station for the RAF Museum (don’t forget the Airfix shop on the way back), turn right and cross the road for the British Newspaper Library. We had scrapbooks full of cuttings at home, but they were all highlights and headlines, sort of a director’s cut of my father’s career. Here’s where the rushes were stored.”

And when the working-class Nottingham Forest players are training in London ahead of the 1959 Cup Final, “The wives had to face the Savoy on their own. Plates of asparagus were set in front of them like straightened question marks to which they had no answer. The cutlery was a silver-plated trap set to go off if they dismantled it out of sequence. Waiters hell-bent on humiliating them sprinkled cheese on their soup.”

Like his father weaving past mesmerised defenders on the left wing, Gary Imlach negotiates a slalom around the unreliable memories of the remaining survivors of a black-and-white era. And throughout, the book is laced with poignant regret at the masses of questions he never thought to ask his father until it was too late to do so. This is a wonderful book – I urge you to read it even if you have no interest in football.

Labels: Books

posted by Robin Simpson @ 10:28 am