Queen Elizabeth II's New Year Honours list was published on the first day of 1967. It contained just two names who had led England to the World Cup six months earlier – Bobby Charlton would have to wait until 1969 and Geoff Hurst until 1979, but there was an OBE for Three Lions captain Bobby Moore and a knighthood for the architect of it all: manager Alf Ramsey.
When the England boss received his honour at Buckingham Palace, it was met with widespread public acclaim, but the man himself remained so closed and uncommunicative that newspapers dubbed him ‘The Silent Knight'.
Apart from his wife and mother, people found Ramsey aloof or standoffish, and he had few close friends. It was a natural reticence that had become entrenched during his 11 years tussling with ‘the impossible job' as Three Lions boss from 1963 to 1974. What secrets lay behind this enigma's life and success?
Insults and rumours
Given that West Ham trio Moore, Hurst and Martin Peters had all played decisive roles in England's victory against West Germany, it was fitting that Ramsey's own story started in east London – in Becontree Heath, where he was born in January 1920.
Nowadays, it's part of the borough of Barking and Dagenham, but back then it was quite different. Ramsey was not, as is often wrongly assumed, an East End Londoner – he was a country boy, whose parents and grandparents lived and worked in rural South Essex.
Shortly after his birth, that landscape of cottages, small farms and market gardens was bulldozed due to 15 years of incessant building, adding more than 25,000 new houses, and effectively absorbing small towns like Barking and Dagenham into London. That mattered to Ramsey because he became marked out as ‘other' in that sprawling new estate.
The first barrier Ramsey faced might seem extraordinary to people familiar with images of him in the 1960s. On TV, he looked like a white, middle-aged member of the middle class. But as a child, he suffered a racist nickname that reflected his darker skin tone, and was referenced thereafter as ‘D****e'.
Ramsey never used that nickname about himself, nor ever acknowledged it in public – all of which strongly suggests it felt as vile to him then as it is considered now. That still didn't stop Jimmy Greaves, a member of England's 1966 squad, from referring to it openly while Ramsey was still alive, in his 1993 book.
Ramsey's childhood nickname had been printed in a national newspaper in 1952, when he was still a prominent player for England, and was referred to on television in 1969. It had also been common, though only whispered, knowledge among football players and journalists from the late 1940s to the 1980s.
The reason that Ramsey's nickname stuck links to a second prejudice. Within football, throughout his career, he was strongly rumoured to come from a GRT (Gypsy, Roma, Traveller) family. During his lifetime, Ramsey's nickname was often used to demean, insult and label GRT people, just as it was about those from other ethnic minorities. Greaves cited both Ramsey's nickname and his rumoured background. Moore once even dared reference the rumour in public.
A prominent sports journalist recalled travelling on a team bus through Central Europe in 1973, with Ramsey, England's players and all of the country's leading football reporters. The bus slowed down to overtake a convoy of Romani Gypsy caravans, at which point Moore called out: “Alf, there's some of your relatives over there.”
Ramsey, the reporter noted, went “crimson with fury”, adding that “it was always accepted in the football world that Alf was a Gypsy”. Such details undermine an established narrative: that England's 1966 World Cup victory was uniformly ‘white'.
Yes, the squad was drawn primarily from urban, industrial working-class communities, in the years before the children of migrants of the Windrush generation had reached the elite level of English football. Yet that 1966 squad was managed by someone labelled from childhood with a nickname that reflected his darker skin tone and whose family were racially, detrimentally rumoured as Gypsies.
In 1978, the multicultural threads of English football became publicly, proudly visible when Viv Anderson was capped as England's first black senior player. But Ramsey won his own first cap in 1948, three decades earlier, and appeared 32 times for the Three Lions, including at right-back during the infamous defeat to the USA at the 1950 World Cup. As England manager, he also gave senior caps to Paul Reaney, a player now often described as biracial in background.
Dog days are over
Racially loaded nicknames were only some of the obstacles Ramsey had to overcome to achieve greatness. His was a financially challenged, sometimes impoverished upbringing, and his family tree was dotted with dealers in hay, straw and other agricultural foodstuffs.
His father, grandfather and numerous great-uncles and cousins were canny businesspeople whose dealing was precarious but entailed travelling all over south Essex and east London, using horses, carts and wagons. Meanwhile, his mother and other female relatives were gritty and thrifty, both in paid work and the unpaid labour of holding family life together.
No wonder Ramsey drove his players hard, epitomised by his management of Gordon Banks, England's keeper in 1966. Banks was renowned for his work rate and relentlessness in training, but on only his second England cap in 1963, he conceded a goal from a long-distance Brazilian free-kick. Because Ramsey had explicitly coached against precisely that scenario, he calmly but pitilessly took Banks apart for his lapse post-match.
The message to the goalkeeper and his listening team-mates was unmistakable: nothing less than total effort, complete concentration and absolute ambition would ever be good enough.
In September 1962, Ramsey declared during a carefully choreographed newspaper interview that, given home advantage in 1966, England could and perhaps should win the World Cup. Such a bold assertion seemed totally out of character with his habitual cautiousness, and he hadn't yet been interviewed for the manager's job, which had become vacant when Walter Winterbottom resigned following defeat to Brazil at that summer's World Cup in Chile.
But calculating odds, via dog racing, was in Ramsey's family DNA. In the early '50s, their tiny cottage was listed as the registered address for racing greyhounds owned by Ramsey, his parents and two siblings.
In 1949, Ramsey moved back home as a 29-year-old after his transfer from Southampton to Spurs, where he would play a key role in helping his new club to win promotion in his first season, then remarkably become champions of England for the first time ever during the following campaign.
Back at home, his elder brother Albert trained and raced numerous dogs. Alf's team-mates knew him as an excellent gambler on greyhounds. Indeed, his 1955 recruitment to manage Third Division South side Ipswich Town was sparked by the Ipswich greyhound stadium's owner hearing a whisper, on the dog racing grapevine, that Ramsey was available at the end of his time at Spurs, where he'd become club captain.
Taking over as Ipswich boss at 35, within the space of just seven years he guided the team to the Third Division South, Second Division and then First Division titles – just as during his playing days at Spurs, the latter two league titles incredibly came in back-to-back seasons. Within months, he would be confirmed as England's new boss.
Shaped by war
As with the greyhounds, when Ramsey assembled his squad for 1966, he knew how to back a long shot. Leeds' Jack Charlton, for example, was unglamorous and uncompromising at centre-half – the brother of the world-famous Bobby Charlton, but nearly 30 when Ramsey first capped him against Scotland in April 1965.
How many players of that age have gone from an international debut to winning the World Cup in just 15 months? That the manager had the courage to back the defender reflected something else – as a player, Ramsey had likewise developed unusually late. Between 14 and 16, he played no football at all. From 16 to 20, Saturday shop work meant that Sunday football was his only serious option. Officially, though, Sunday football was banned by the FA until 1960.
As if that wasn't enough of a barrier, in 1940, Ramsey started six years in uniform, at the age of 20. Although the British Army developed him as a footballer and leader, and from 1943 he played a few wartime games for Southampton, it wasn't until Ramsey was nearly 27 that he played his first full professional game in a competitive peacetime league. His England debut came at age 28, only a year younger than Jack Charlton.
The British Army developed him as a footballer and leader, and from 1943 he played a few wartime games for Southampton. It wasn't until Ramsey was nearly 27 that he played his first full professional game in a competitive peacetime league
Another 1966 finalist born of similar grit was Nobby Stiles. The Manchester United midfielder was one of the first professional footballers to wear contact lenses, but bad eyesight wasn't to blame for his barbaric challenge on France's Jacques Simon during the Three Lions' last group game at the World Cup.
Stiles wasn't booked, but the controversy that tackle caused, and Ramsey's response to it, revealed more of the manager's deep-seated traits – demanding and rewarding loyalty, while also stubbornly refusing to be intimidated either by FA hangers-on or shrill journalists.
Stiles' brilliance in defensive midfield and his ability to judge and execute flawless, seemingly simple passes helped Ramsey to balance and link two of England's genuinely world-class players – Moore at the back and Bobby Charlton in attack. Yet following Stiles' tackle, prominent voices within the FA and the media wanted him dropped.
Ramsey's response was simply to ask his player, “Was that tackle accidental or deliberate?” When Stiles predictably insisted it was mistimed, not malicious, Ramsey persisted in picking him.
In the even tougher tests against an abrasive Argentina in the quarter-final, and the flair of Portugal in the semis, Stiles' immaculately self-disciplined contributions were major factors in England's progression.
Where had Ramsey first learned that strong leadership is built on trust? From his six years in the army, when he rose from private to company quartermaster sergeant. That military experience made Ramsey clear-minded and unbending.
During their international careers, he disciplined eight of England's line-up from the 1966 final. Anyone who needed telling the same thing more than twice about a coaching point, or persistently breached Ramsey's stringent discipline – early bedtimes, shared leisure time, rationed alcohol and smart appearance – was simply not selected again.
England's 1966 squad assembled at Lilleshall in early June for their intense pre-tournament training. On the first evening, Bobby Charlton recalled how Alan Ball, who'd just turned 21, “slipped out for a pint” with Stiles. On discovering them, Charlton said: “Alf simmered for a moment, then rasped, ‘All of you, get out of my sight.'”
Ramsey's anger can be explained by something else that Charlton observed, namely the date. “We reported for duty – a phrase that I do not use lightly – on June 6, which was the 22nd anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy,” the Manchester United star explained. “Our lives were not at risk, but Alf made it abundantly clear that our reputation for competitive honour and patriotism was.”
On that date in 1944, aged 24 like Stiles and Hurst in 1966, Ramsey was helping to prepare hundreds of fellow soldiers to land on French beaches and crawl into a storm of bullets. He knew that many would be killed or maimed.
The new radical
To modern eyes, much about Ramsey's life story feels old and, given a lifespan from 1920 to 1999, he was unarguably a creature of the 20th century. Ramsey's conservative suit, shirt and tie style of dress, together with his attempted but inauthentic ‘BBC English' speaking voice, reinforced that fusty, repressed image.
And yet his background was far from conventional. How many football careers have been saved from oblivion by four years of ‘illegal' Sunday games as an adolescent and kept alive during six years of army service, but finished by earning more than 30 international caps as a player, before going on to lift the World Cup as a manager?
Ramsey's conservative suit, shirt and tie style of dress, together with his attempted but inauthentic ‘BBC English' speaking voice, reinforced that fusty, repressed image.
The real Ramsey was a classic English underdog from a diverse background. A childhood in inter-war poverty, an early adulthood in post-war austerity, and a management career within the English class system that pushed him to disguise his background, rather than celebrate it as footballers might do today.
In crucial respects, Ramsey was also a modernising reformer, rather than an establishment stooge. As Three Lions manager, he banished the madness of an FA committee of old men picking the team. Indeed, he refused to take the job unless he was given total control over player selection.
He also experimented with radical new tactics – using the young, high-energy, open-minded football brains of Ball and Peters to play in ways that midfielders had never really done before. The pair would flex between attack and defence, between the middle and the flanks, not rigidly according to notional positions allocated pre-game, but in response to how the play was flowing.
Ramsey shocked and surprised people by picking no wingers during the crucial knockout stage of the World Cup. He would instead rely on Ball and Peters, plus full-backs George Cohen and Ray Wilson, to provide enough unpredictable attacking width to flummox opponents.
It was also essential, in such a setup, for attacking players like Bobby Charlton, Roger Hunt, Greaves or Hurst to follow instructions, understand the strategy and think defensively when necessary. That meant Ramsey choosing to play Hurst over Greaves – a decision slated by many journalists, but ultimately validated when the West Ham striker scored a hat-trick in the final.
Nor was tactical innovation the only surprise about Ramsey. While winning the league as a player with Tottenham, he also committed to coaching amateur adult teams twice a week at the Eton Manor Boys Club.
In 1955, when starting his managerial career at club level, homosexuality was viciously persecuted and vigorously prosecuted, but over the 18 months that followed, his management saved the career of a young player threatened by both.
The player had been pressured in court to admit to what was then illegal homosexual behaviour, though Ramsey judged that footballer not on a court case, but through his skills on the field and his character off it.
Sir Alf Ramsey wasn't just a football genius, he was a hero for his own age and should remain so in ours. Sixty years after his greatest glory, the Silent Knight's achievements live on.
Grant Bage's book The Unseen Sir Alf, by Pitch Publishing, is available to buy here
