Between the Sticks. Alan Hodgkinson
a great attraction for the young people of Rotherham, the place was invariably packed, full of atmosphere and the optimism and anticipation that one can only find at the edge of a dance floor. The type of dancing we did was ballroom dancing, the foxtrot, dashing white sergeant and, later in the night, when things got wild, we jitterbugged. From a lad’s point of view, the great advantage to ballroom dancing was it enabled you to hold the girl you were dancing with. Much modern dancing involves couples not touching at all; not so in those days. For many a lad, when a girl consented to dance and he placed his arm around her waist it was a great thrill, albeit, in many cases, this proved to be the extent of their sex life until he married her.
Brenda was widely considered to be one of the most fashionable girls who attended the dance. In the post-war years there was little to be had in the way of fashion as far as young working-class people were concerned, but when it came to clothes and her appearance, Brenda possessed the all-important attribute of imagination. I recall her once wearing a fulsome skirt in what was known as a ‘tulip cut’ with a netted skirt underneath. With her hair in a bubble cut courtesy of a Twink perm, I remember feeling very special with her on my arm as we walked about the dance hall and she attracted admiring looks from other lads, some even in their late teens. Like the majority of other lads, I dressed in a short-sleeved V-neck sweater of the Fair Isle variety, shirt, tie and baggy trousers purchased off the peg from the Co-op. I longed to own a suit, as did every lad, but family budgets didn’t go to suits for sons. Though I felt I never dressed as stylishly as Brenda, she didn’t seem to mind. She liked me for who I was, which, pardon the pun, suited me fine.
In addition to playing in goal for my school, the District team, Sheffield Boys and Hallamshire County, I also played on a Saturday afternoon for my local youth club before, at the age of fourteen, gaining my first taste of ‘open-age’ football when I signed for the Dinnington Colliery Welfare team.
The Colliery Welfare team played in a league consisting of other colliery welfare clubs and works teams in the South Yorkshire area. In addition to miners, the various local leagues comprised teams for steel-workers, smelters, cutlers, engineers, railway workers, tram and bus drivers, firemen, policemen, painters and decorators, even milkmen. There was, however, not one team from any of the professions. Football was considered the property of the working classes and the notion was that it should be played by them because they were the only people with the talent to play it.
I remember being very excited at the prospect of playing at enclosed grounds whose pitches boasted goals with nets and were bordered by a wooden railing, rather than on a park pitch situated among up to half-a-dozen other pitches. The colliery welfare teams contained the usual characters one will find in any football team at that level of the game. The cultured inside-forward, who wore his hair a little longer than everyone else and played with the air of a grammar school boy among elementary school pupils. The bull-in-a-china-shop centre-forward who was expected to run through a brick shit-house and expected to be roundly abused if he shirked it. The wingers: on one wing a tall, skinny flyer who was all bone and elbow whilst, on the other flank, as if to balance things out, a small and squat winger with bandy legs who, although lacking the pace of his counterpart, was full of trickery. The full-back who never spoke, went about his business in silent efficiency and showed such a lack of emotion you were left to wonder what, if any, enjoyment he got from football at all. The hard-man wing-half, with shin-pads like castle doors who never buttoned his shirt even on the coldest of days, his chest hair protruding from his shirt like stuffing from a burst sofa. The towering centre-half with a granite chin and a forehead hammered flat through contact with a thousand muddy footballs, whose muscular legs would protrude from his cotton shorts like bags of Portland cement. The niggler wing-half who, from the kick-off kept up an incessant verbal harassment of the referee – ‘Bloody hell, Ref, get a grip. Hey, Ref, hand-ball, you missed that. Ref, you’re having a bad one. Hey, Ref, handball. Bloody hell, Ref, he was late. Hey, Ref, he’s all over me. ’king hell, Ref, I never touched him. Hey, Ref, your linesman missed that. Come on, Ref, he’s having the shirt off me back. Bloody hell, Ref, you can’t give that. Hey, Ref, offside, a mile off! Thank you!’
Even at the age of fourteen I never felt overawed at the prospect of playing against men in their twenties and thirties. I think this had much to do with the fact since early childhood I had always played against boys who were older than me. I relished the challenge of pitting myself against what were very decent amateur players, some of whom enjoyed legendary status in local Sheffield football. It was a standard of football far removed from school and youth club football; it was far and away quicker, more physical, more aggressive. Players would swear loudly as they chased the ball across a Lowry landscape and, joy of joys, thumbnail reports of these matches would appear in the Sheffield Star. As a boy of fourteen, the first time I saw my name in print in the Sheffield Star I must have read the match report a hundred times, before cutting it from the sports page and carefully gluing it into a virginal exercise book, on the cover of which I had somewhat optimistically written,
‘Match Reports’.
On leaving school in 1951 at the age of fifteen, I got a job in the local Co-op store as a butcher’s assistant with a view to one day learning the trade. I was very half-hearted about the prospect of being a butcher, though I never dared tell Dad; I took the job because I finished work at noon on a Saturday, which meant I was then free to play football in the afternoon.
Saturday was a long day. I was up with the sparrows’ fart at a quarter past four, started work at the Co-op at five, where my first job would be to defrost the freezer then arrange the various cuts of meat, sausages, pork pies and what have you on the display counters. Before the store opened the manager would come and inspect my handiwork, and would indicate that everything was in order simply by a single nod of his head. I would then do a variety of jobs around the shop and help out behind the counter until noon, when I collected my wages: the princely sum of £1. 2/6d (£1.12½p). That done, I would head for home, pay Mum my board and lodging and have a bite to eat before setting off to play football. In the evening, I would collect Brenda and we would go off dancing with our friends.
In the event my time with the Colliery Welfare team was short-lived. After twenty or so games I was approached by non-League Worksop Town and, keen to try my hand at a higher level of football, signed for a club where, unbeknown to me, serendipity would shape my future career and life.
For working-class people there was no such thing as fashion in 1952, after all, what could you possibly wear during rationing? We relied on functional clothes, mostly woollen hand-me-downs, previously worn by parents, older siblings or, in many instances, both. In the early fifties a young person’s taste in fashion was dictated by what was least itchy.
If you were a lad in your mid-teens and wanted to appear grown-up and smart, the crowning ambition was to own a suit. They were worn only on special occasions: to church on Sundays, for weddings, funerals, christenings, hot dates and to celebrate a Sheffield United away win. (I’m joking about the latter, but only a little…)
Most adult men owned a suit and the vast majority had been given it by the government when they were ‘demobbed’ from the forces at the end of World War Two. Demob suits, as they were known, were of plain cloth in either dark blue or brown and came in only two sizes – too small or too big.
As was the case with every other lad too young to have served in the war, I didn’t enjoy this dubious distinction. As a lad of sixteen, however, I longed to have a suit of my own and not simply because I wanted to appear smart. It offered real kudos in Laughton Common and the same was true of Sheffield and Rotherham. If you were young and owned a suit, other lads were in awe of you and, more importantly, you found yourself very popular with the girls.
I was still working as a butcher’s assistant at the local Co-op store when I signed as an amateur for Worksop Town. Such was my desire to own a suit that I hit upon the plan to buy one by saving some money from my weekly wage, still just £1. 2/6d, from the Co-op. I reasoned that once I had paid my mum for my board, deducted necessary personal expenses such as train and bus fares to and from Worksop Town for training and matches, ceased going to the cinema once a week, stopped buying fish ’n’ chips on a Friday night, went dancing every third Saturday night and continued to wear an old pair of football boots handed down to me by an uncle