My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes by Gary Imlach

Author:Gary Imlach [Imlach, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-06-29T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Watching the Cup Final on Television

UNBELIEVABLY, ALMOST UNFORGIVABLY, I’D never watched the 1959 FA Cup Final.

I’d seen the goals countless times, especially the first: my father shrugging off the Luton Town full-back and cutting a perfect ball into the path of Roy Dwight. But I hadn’t seen the whole thing – we didn’t have a tape. Sometime in the 1970s my dad had tried to get one, writing to Bob Wilson who was then presenting the BBC’s FOOTBALL FOCUS. He’d sent us some highlights – twenty minutes’ worth – which apparently was all they had.

The suspicion remained that there must be something more substantial in the archives, and when my father became seriously ill I’d thought about going back to ask again. But apart from one brief exchange in the hospital when he was first admitted – ‘I think I’m finished, don’t tell Mum’ – we’d never acknowledged that he was dying, and to flash his life before him on videotape seemed somehow an affront to his stoicism.

So it was only afterwards that I called the BBC. I knew people who knew people and I wasn’t expecting it to be much of a problem. But word came back that Bob Wilson had been right the first time – all they had in the library was a highlights edit and shots of the homecoming parade through the streets of Nottingham. When I’d gone searching for my father’s appearance on the very first Quiz Ball – broadcast live from St Joseph’s Hall, Highgate in 1966 – I had been prepared for failure from the start. A football-themed quiz show that might never get off the ground was hardly likely to head the BBC’s archive priorities. But the 1959 FA Cup Final? How could they not have the 1959 FA Cup Final? My father’s finest hour wasn’t a wedding speech captured on Super 8 and liable to be lost in a house move, it was the broadcast record of the nation’s greatest sporting institution.

‘Yeah I know, I’m sorry, but we just don’t have it. I was really surprised myself.’ The Match of the Day librarian couldn’t have been more sympathetic, but the ’59 Cup Final seemed to have joined Dixon of Dock Green and early episodes of Dad’s Army among the ranks of the BBC’s disappeared.

And that’s where I would have left it had it not been for Dave Pacey, the man who scored Luton’s only goal in the final. I’d called him up to talk about his memories of the goal and the game, when he let slip that he had the whole thing on tape – he’d got it from the BBC eighteen years earlier. This raised twin prospects: either the match was still crouching in the dark somewhere deep inside the BBC, invisible to the filing system because of a computer glitch, some cataloguing mistake; or – much worse than never having been kept at the time – it had been wiped only in the past couple of decades.

I went back to my man at the BBC, who agreed to look again.

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