Chapter 2
[1] “Ted” Heath (1916-2005), MP for Bexley and Prime Minister from 1970 to 1974 was an avowed bachelor, yachtsman, and very “old school.” He tried to rein in the unions, but there were disasters in his strategies, notably the Industrial Relations Act that established a special court that imprisoned striking dockworkers. There were two miners' strikes during his tenure as prime minister, the latter precipitating the nightmare Three Day Week.
[2] There is little doubt that the concept of the unions was historically of social benefit when viewed against some tyrannical practices of unscrupulous business owners in the industrial revolution. However, by the 1970s, the far left-wing tendencies of some union leaders took the movement in extreme directions far removed from the simple expedient of “fair play for all.”
[3] Since being a biochemistry undergraduate at Hull University I had shifted my dream away from being the Wolverhampton Wanderers goalkeeper to being a university lecturer. It seemed like my dream would come true in 1983 when I interviewed for a new department covering biotechnology at Imperial College in London. I found the demeanor of the interviewing panel pompous in the extreme, and I was convinced after a few minutes that I had screwed things up. So I decided to be myself (or at least who I was at that time in my life) and with a degree of bluntness that (from this distance) I cringe about, I let them have it as I saw it. After an hour or so, I was asked to go and wait in the room of Professor Brian Hartley FRS…and I waited. About an hour later Hartley (a fellow north country man) burst through the door, poured out two glasses of sherry, and pronounced how delighted he was with my up-frontness and said that he had convinced them that I was the man for the job. We celebrated and in due course I made for my Crawley home via the Tube and British Rail. “I should be delighted,” I said to Diane, “but it feels all wrong.” Next morning I went in to BRF and met with the Director-General, Professor Bernard Atkinson. “I need to tell you that I am leaving, to go to Imperial College.” He smiled, “Yes, you are indeed leaving. But not there. I have been negotiating your transfer for weeks: You are going to Bass in Burton-on-Trent.” The relief and joy was immense. I was going to a great brewing company, I was getting out of the southeast rat-race—and I would be less than 30 miles from Wolverhampton. At the age of 31 I would be able to get my first season ticket for my beloved Wolves. Academia could—and would—wait.
[4] David W. Gutzke. “Runcorn Brewery: The Unwritten History of a Corporate Disaster,” Histoire sociale/Social History 41 (May, 2008): 215-51.
[6] One of Bass's key performance criteria was Right First Time: measures of how consistently a product could be delivered within specification. Notable among these indices was the assessment with what regularity the beer after filtration was within target for its content of carbon dioxide and absence of oxygen. At Preston Brook, our score was 20 percent—in other words, on 80 percent of the runs we were wrong first time. This was all to do with bad brewery design, but the company was never going to invest in correcting this when faced with such industrial strife.
[7] These days known as the British Beer and Pub Association (http://www.beerandpub.com).
[12] Home of my favorite soccer team, Wolverhampton Wanderers (www.wolves.co.uk). It looked to be an auspicious time in 1983 when I got my first season ticket to Wolverhampton Wanderers (see this chapter's endnote 3). Wolves had just been promoted back to the top flight, and I could look forward to the likes of Manchester United, Everton, Tottenham Hotspur, and the rest gracing the Molineux green. The first game of 19831984, a 1-1 tie with Liverpool, flattered to deceive. In a word, Wolves became everybody's whipping boys.
Week after week the team would be tanked. Worst of all, there was no money to spend to improve the talent. Bad decisions and dubious investments had led to a crisis of colossal proportions behind the scenes and little did we know it (or perhaps we did), but the club was folding even faster in the corridors of power than it was on the lush turf. In successive seasons Wolves went down to the second, third, and fourth divisions. (The equivalent in the States would be the Oakland Athletics finding themselves in Class A ball after three years of free-fall and facing the likes of Rancho Cucamonga and Stockton.) Meanwhile the ground was crumbling. What bigger challenge could there be to one's loyalty? The crowd disintegrated to a very few thousand. But faith and faithfulness are all I know, in whatever I do.
It was painful to witness for somebody who remembered the glory days when Wolves were one of the top teams in the world. Each Saturday, though, with unquestioning loyalty I jumped into my car (a company one with all costs met—Bass were extremely generous to their managers) and drove to the game. Three hours later I would be home, miserable. Lost again.
In our village (Barton-under-Needwood) lived a well-known ex-football player and later manager, Tim Ward. He had played for England as a young man, and later managed a range of senior clubs. Now he was retired, and he quickly became a good friend and benevolent uncle to Peter and Caroline, the latter newly arrived. It was he that asked if I would like to meet Stan Cullis. Imagine asking a Yankees fan if she fancied a burger and a beer with Babe Ruth, and you will get a feel for this. Cullis had been captain of Wolves and England and the manager when Wolves won three Championships and two FA Cups, as well as forging a path for English clubs in Europe with a series of celebrated floodlit friendlies against the world's top teams before the days of the European Cup.
I drove Tim to a restaurant high on a hillside in green and rolling Worcestershire, where we had lunch with this godlike entity. For once I just listened, as two legends of the game reminisced and shared their tales, only one or two of which were possibly exaggerated. Later Tim introduced me to other immortal foot-ballers—from Sir Stanley Matthews to Billy Wright. Tim was a quiet, understated man, who knew his football, though perhaps not his beer. “Is this one OK?” he would ask if I went to his home. It was always a super strength lager—10 percent alcohol.
Meanwhile the Wolverhampton evening paper, the Express and Star, printed one horror story after another as they chronicled the demise of the mighty Wanderers. The worst piece of all came late in 1985. The club had so little spare cash that they had failed to pay the bill for the delivery of milk. Imagine that, if you will. Later in the same article they said that the following Saturday’s match day program would be the last, as they no longer had the wherewithal to put it together and get it printed.
Instantly a light bulb went on in my head and I grabbed for paper, envelope, and stamp, and I wrote to the club. I said that no program pretty much would mean no club and that I had done a lot of writing (an exaggeration—it was scientific articles pretty much entirely) and I knew a fair bit about the club (not an embellishment—once upon a time I used to have total recall of fourth teams from years before). Could I help?
Two days later there was a reply from then chief executive, Gordon Dimbleby, inviting me to come on down, and so, later that afternoon and for the first time in my life, I found myself in the hallowed (spiritually if not physically) halls of my life's heroes. Before the week was out my first article had appeared in the program—and with what irony was the opposition that day the team from my boyhood home, Wigan.
I instantly became a regular correspondent. Each home game I would write something irreverent (some might say irrelevant), but I was in some form of heaven. And when people worked out that I was Mr. “Sidelines” and said they enjoyed what I wrote, then I puffed up bigger than any parakeet.
Wolves, though, continued to be in turmoil, and that extended to the program. At the season's close the program was franchised out—and I went with it. The new editor was Don Stanton, who I instantly gelled with. He had been a referee in senior nonleague circles, and ran the line in the Football League. He had been linesman in the 1974 FA Cup final. Don encouraged me not only to do my tongue-in-cheek column, but also to conduct a series of interviews with characters relevant to Wolverhampton Wanderers. These extended to the manager and his coaches, the Chairman and Vice-Chairman, through countless others, including the guy who made the sweet half-time tea and who scrubbed the baths. One half-time, Don came up to me in my usual place in the stands, asking me to come with him to meet somebody who had expressed a wish to meet and who had granted an interview. Dutifully I trotted along, to be met by a tall, rugged-looking guy with long curly blond hair. It was Robert Plant, singer for the legendary rock band Led Zeppelin, also a huge fan of Wolverhampton Wanderers.
“Charlie Bamforth,” he said, “delighted to meet you. I love what you write.”
I mumbled that I was quite impressed with his talents, too, and that I would really like to do an interview with him. He said that it would have to wait as he was going on a world tour. “That's OK,” said I, “so am I!” Which was true: I was off to a brewing conference in Australia.
Several weeks later the interview was in the “can,” but not before Robert had been told by one of the elderly women in the club shop, behind which we were to do the interview, that he needed a haircut.
The only folks off-limits to me for my interviews were the existing playing staff, for reasons I never quite understood. The joke at the time was that Charlie Bam-forth had interviewed lots of players, but most of them were dead. It is true that I interviewed a substantial number of former stars, not only from Wolves. Their names would read like panoply of legends to any English football supporter: Sir Tom Finney, Dennis Tueart, Joe Fagan, Joe Mercer, Billy Wright, and many more. Finney is held by many to be one of the best half dozen footballers of all time. He was born and raised 15 miles from me, and when I bought him lunch at the Tickled Trout in his native Preston, we were treated like royalty. And what a modest man.
Some of these articles appeared in national soccer magazines. By now, too, I was writing for all the other match day programs that Don Stanton published, namely Birmingham City, Walsall, and Shrewsbury Town. Every week I had at least two articles to write. And so, to this day, I can look to more than two to three times more articles written on soccer than on beer.
Luckily for me, Bass as a company was very much into football. And one thing that I hadn't clocked was that they had had a major involvement in Wolverhampton Wanderers.
The man who told me this was otto Charles Darby, Chairman of Bass Brewers before Robin Manners. As a young sprog, newly into the company, I was seated next to Darby at a major company dinner. The policy was clearly one of seeing whether the youngster could hold his own in exalted company. I got off to a good start by saying something like “I wonder, Mr. Darby, would you be the same 'O. C. Darby' that features as an author on a paper about P-glucans in the Journal of the Institute of Brewing from the early fifties?” He was—and I could see that he was impressed. The conversation flowed, and then we got to talk about Wolves.
“You know, Charlie, as the club were restructuring when the receivers were in, they asked me to be chairman.”
My pupils clearly dilated. He looked at me, plainly.
“Would you have taken that job?” he asked.
“I certainly would,” was my retort. His look said it all.
“But then again, Mr. Darby, I am just a simple scientist.”
“Yes, Charles,” he replied. “I think you're probably right.”
One of the most valuable pieces of silverware in the English football trophy cabinet is the Bass Charity Vase, which is competed for preseason by clubs in the Midland area. I soon found myself writing large chunks of the program for that event, as well as helping out by collecting money at the turnstiles. Such a role helped me truly see people for what they are worth. Some football types—notably club managers—would breeze past with their noses in the air, far too important to pass the time of day with “ordinary people.” Sometimes, though, you would encounter a nugget. For instance, I well remember serving a long line of folks trying to get in before kick-off and right at the back, patiently waiting his turn, was Graham Taylor, at the time the manager of Aston Villa. Eventually he found his way to the front and proffered a £20 bill. (He could legitimately have got in for free, but he insisted on paying.) Admission was £2, so I started to count out the change. “No, son, it's for charity,” and he walked in. Later he would become the manager of the English national team and was pilloried and abused. If only the millions who decried him realized the humility of the man.
Bass also went into soccer sponsorship big time. Our biggest brand—and the best-selling beer in England— was Carling Black Label, and that name was used to sponsor the Football League Championship. Its sister brand in Scotland, Tennent's, was used to sponsor competitions north of Hadrian's Wall—but was also used to adorn the Charity Shield, a game played at Wembley preseason between the previous season’s League Champions and FA Cup Winners.
Knowing of my other life, the powers that be at Bass decided that I should be their correspondent at Wembley. Perhaps what followed was the pinnacle of my soccer-writing career (though I did visit the Wembley press box on two further occasions) for I found myself lunching with the doyens of football scribes from Fleet Street before the big game. Nervous in such exalted company I bolted my food (Diane would say that I therefore did not change the habit of a lifetime) and found my way up to the press box early. I plonked myself in the allotted place in front of a television monitor and a telephone. A schoolboy international game was in progress, so I started to write. There was nobody else there. One by one, the professional writers arrived, more than one asking me for the lowdown on the warmup game that they had missed while enjoying their Chardonnays and Liebfraumilchs.
Back in Wolverhampton, Wolves were doing much better. They narrowly missed going back up to the third division, in a game where (with Diane's blessing) I had sponsored the match ball. The following year they did go up, and then again were promoted the following year. Rapidly the fair weather fans reappeared.
And week after week I would find myself sitting alone (and later with Peter, now thoroughly indoctrinated into the religion of Wolves), desperate for success for the team. If they scored early, then for the rest of the game I would be on tenterhooks, praying for the final whistle. I could see only one team, the one in old gold shirts. I wasn't watching a football game, I was single-mindedly focused on us winning a war, with no sense of the beauty of the challenge and oblivious to the truth—that it takes two to tango. If only I had known then that this was an ultimate form of yin and yang.
One Saturday, when Wolves were not on show, I took Peter along to a minor league game in Northwich, Cheshire. I had no “ownership” of either side and the crowd was smaller and altogether gentler. There were those at Wolverhampton who seethed with rage, a myopic devotion that could spill into violence. (I had been a victim of it way back in 1968, when a Tottenham fan decided he wanted my gold and black scarf, and kneed me in the “wedding tackle” in order to purloin it.) But here in Northwich was bonhomie, softness, a higher ethos. Certainly, the on-field quality was second or third rate, but I realized that the experience I was yearning for was holistic, and that the product on the pitch was by no means the first priority.
I wrote a report on the game that dwelled as much on what happened off the field as what occurred on it, and the nations' leading nonleague football magazine published it. And there started my second soccer-writing career, as I toured nonleague grounds, reporting for this magazine and others as much on the quality of the pies and the Bovril as I did on the tactics and the score line. I turned up unannounced and was even referred to after a game on the bleak Essex coast as “nonleague football's very own Egon Ronay.”
Perhaps it is only now that I realize just how accommodating Diane was with all this. By day I would be working long, long hours in a job that would increasingly take me to far-flung corners of the globe, and then on Saturdays she would wave good-bye as Peter and I headed off to our selected game. Her patience was about to be challenged even more.
I remember the moment the idea struck. I was up a ladder painting our home in Helsby, Cheshire, when my mind started thinking laterally. It went something like: Didn't make it as Wolves' goalkeeper—did make it as a writer. Hey, let's link the two—write a book about Wolverhampton Wanderers keepers.
I was down the ladder in an instant, jabbering away about my notion to Diane. She smiled: “Do it.” Has any man ever had a more supportive wife?
And so over the course of the next several months I wrote the book In Keeping with the Wolves that was published by Don Stanton. I traced as many goalkeepers as I could who had played for Wolves (including the reserve teams) since the Second World War. Many granted interviews. I found myself on the banks of Loch Lomond and in the beauty of the Swansea bay. I chatted with television stars such as Bob Wilson. I met some in their homes, like my boyhood hero Phil Parkes, and the greatest of them all, Bert Williams, who confided that one of his worst moments was being the keeper in the 1950 World Cup debacle when the mighty England were defeated by the United States (I have interviewed two other England players from the same game— neither cherished the memory).
Diane's patience snapped just the once, when I announced that I was heading off 100 miles or more one Sunday afternoon to interview Tim Flowers at Kenilworth Castle (Flowers would become the England keeper). She hurled the newly filled tea pot at me, but it mostly missed.
Although I gave up soccer writing soon after coming to the States, I rediscovered it in 2009, interviewing former players for wolvesheroes.com.
[14] The long handles that are used to pull the beer from casks in the cellar through suction, as opposed to taps that trigger the pushing of beer out of kegs by the injection of carbon dioxide.
[15] The author is gratified by the existence of Cask Marque (http://www.cask-marque.co.uk), an organization committed to ensuring the excellence of traditional cask ales.
[18] How enlightened were those days for a brewing company to have two research departments: The vast majority these days have none.
[19] Cricket. When playing cricket, it was always somewhat intimidating to turn up at the Park Royal ground of Guinness. In the changing rooms there were photographs from games in Guinness's history, such as “Guinness versus West Indies.” I got my highest ever batting score against Guinness. I think it was 26.
[20] Greene King introduced a canned version of its wonderful Abbot Ale with a widget. The customers didn't like it, so the company withdrew the device and pronounced on the can that it was “widget-free ale.” Bass Ale in a can never did have a widget, the label proclaiming “For Head, Pour Quickly.”
[21] Casks are containers for traditional ales that are nonpasteurized and that rely on residual yeast to convert priming sugars to deliver low levels of carbonation. The beer is drawn from the cask either by gravity through a tap (cask behind the bar) or by drawing through pipe runs using beer handles. Kegs are containers holding draft beer that is filtered and carbonated in the brewery and then dispensed by using gas from cylinders of carbon dioxide or “mixed gas” (carbon dioxide and nitrogen).
[23] Tax rates in Europe, April 2009 (pence per pint):
|
Finland: |
61.74 |
|
Ireland: |
51.99 |
|
UK: |
45.89 |
|
Sweden: |
43.15 |
|
Denmark: |
19.42 |
|
Slovenia: |
17.95 |
|
Netherlands: |
17.08 |
|
Italy: |
14.76 |
|
Estonia: |
12.88 |
|
Austria: |
12.56 |
|
Cyprus: |
12.51 |
|
Hungary: |
11.12 |
|
Belgium: |
10.74 |
|
Slovakia: |
10.36 |
|
Poland: |
9.46 |
|
Portugal: |
9.05 |
|
Greece: |
8.54 |
|
France: |
6.91 |
|
Lithuania: |
6.44 |
|
Spain: |
5.71 |
|
Czech: |
5.55 |
|
Latvia: |
5.35 |
|
Luxembourg: |
4.98 |
|
Germany: |
4.94 |
|
Bulgaria: |
4.82 |
|
Malta: |
4.71 |
|
Romania: |
4.15 |