‘A reporter trying to reach to the heart of what football is’. Arthur Hopcraft's The Football Man

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A reporter t rying to reach to the heartof what football is . Arthur Hopcraft 'sThe Football ManDave Russell

a

a Department of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropoli tan University,Leeds, UK

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is . Art hur Hopcraf t 's The Foot bal l Man , Soccer & Societ y, 11:5, 677-694

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Soccer & Society

Vol. 11, No. 5, September 2010, 677694

ISSN 1466-0970 print/ISSN 1743-9590 online

2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14660970.2010.497372

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A reporter trying to reach to the heart of what football is.1Arthur Hopcrafts The Football Man2

Dave Russell*

Department of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, UKTaylor and FrancisFSAS_A_497372.sgm10.1080/14660970.2010.497372Soccer and Society1466-0970 (print)/1743-9590 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis115000000September [email protected]

This article examines the origins, content and overall significance of ArthurHopcrafts The Football Man: People and Passions in Football, published in1968. Notable for its polished style and laconic humour, and packed with richdetail garnered from the interviews that form much of its research base, the book

is acknowledged as a valuable source for the study of the game at a criticalmoment in its modernization. However, the book is also seen here as underpinned

by an often-romantic master narrative, rooted in both Hopcrafts personalworldview and wider contemporary discourse about the northern English workingclass, that celebrates football as the peoples game, understood fully only by itsworking-class adherents. Only a modest success commercially, the book washighly acclaimed by critics, although some, notably Brian Glanville, the productof very different cultural context, found it problematic. Despite all potentialcriticisms, however, it is argued that the book deserves its status as a landmarktext, setting a standard for literary excellence among football writers and servingas a source of inspiration for the nascent world of football academia.

Few sports books, and certainly very few focused on football, carry the reputation ofArthur Hopcrafts The Football Man: People and Passions in Football, first publishedin November 1968. Much celebrated on its appearance, it was still deemed worthy of

a fifth edition as recently as 2006.3 Perhaps the most potent evidence of the books

standing is the fact that although sport formed only a relatively small element of

Hopcrafts intellectual territory as a television writer he was bracketed with such

contemporary luminaries as Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter and Jack Rosenthal somany of his obituaries in 2004 began with, or give lengthy attention to, The Football

Man.4 Although this partly reflects the football-obsessed nature of early twenty-first

century British culture, it does capture the extent to which Hopcraft has become cast

as a critical figure within modern sports literature. This article in no sense seeks tochallenge the books reputation indeed, rather the opposite but a work of this stat-

ure demands a properly critical account of its origins, preoccupations and overall place

within the history of football writing. Moreover, although this study only infrequently

strays beyond the sporting arena, it also intends to serve as a stimulus to further work

on Hopcrafts wide-ranging career and to link his football writing to it where possible.A significant figure within British middlebrow culture in the later decades of the twen-

tieth century, he deserves rather more than the marginal position that scholarship

beyond that associated with football has awarded him.

It must be stressed immediately that, for all its standing, the book sold onlymodestly. The initial hardback run was for 6,000 copies with a retail price of 30 shillings

*Email: [email protected]


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678 D. Russell

and Richard Johnson of its publisher, Collins, told Hopcraft that I dont think well

have any trouble selling them and would hope for a quick reprint.5 However, initialorders were slow and the chairman of Collins expressed surprise that some of the book-

sellers were so sticky to start, suggesting that perhaps they are not used to this quality

in a book on football.6 Sales had reached 4,000 within three months of publication,

but this was clearly below expectation and the quick reprint did not materialize.7 A

further 5,0006,000 copies were produced for the Sportsmans Book Club in February1970 and the following year saw a revised Penguin edition. Overall, sales of this paper-

back are not recorded but it is significant that in the periods from January to June 1974

and July to December 1975 it sold only 318 and 598 copies, respectively. Moreover,

both Pan and Corgi, two powerful contemporary paperback imprints, had rejected thebook in 1969. All editions were out of print by 1979.8 Comparison with other football

writing is difficult given the general lack of sales data, but the fact that a fairly workaday

footballers autobiography, albeit one retailing for much less, sold 30,000 copies in the

rather more financially constrained late 1940s and that theFA Book for Boys was selling

a similar number in its final problematic years in the early 1970s, places Hopcraftssales figures in a rather disappointing light.9 However, the books limited commercial

success, partly a reflection of the prevailing market for sports books of this type, should

in no way obscure either its quality or the influence that it has ultimately exerted.

The life and career of a football man

Hopcraft was born in Shoeburyness, Essex, in 1932, into a petit bourgeois household

strongly flavoured by adherence to Methodism. When he was seven his father sold

the debris of his own small grocery business and moved the family to Blackfords, a

small mining village near Cannock in Staffordshire, and became a shop manager.10

One of only two boys in his elementary school to gain a grammar school scholarship,

the somewhat solitary Hopcraft endured a generally miserable time at King Edward

VI, Lichfield, his strong interest in football one of the few avenues for communicationwith his peers. He left at 16 to become a journalist on a local newspaper (where report-

ing on Stafford Rangers was one of his responsibilities), and, after uncongenial

national service, then worked on a number of local and regional papers in Yorkshire

and the north-east of England. Journalist and television presenter Michael Parkinson,

a reporter on the South Yorkshire Times when Hopcraft worked on the rivalBarnsleyChronicle, noted a certain mannered idiosyncrasy in his friends behaviour, recalling

him to be the first reporter I had encountered who wore a bow tie, which took couragein Barnsley in the 1950s.11

Obvious talent took him to the national stage via Daily Mirror in 1956 and thenThe Guardian in 1959, where he combined international feature writing, often on the

developing world, with sometimes slightly offbeat articles on daily life in Britain.

Finally, in 1964, he became a Manchester-based freelance with a portfolio that

included magazine writing, journalism for Granada Television, social reportage and

occasional football features forThe Sunday Times, and an increasing number of thehighly regarded match reports forThe Observerthat he had begun about 1960. His

international interests also continued, leading to a commission from the Freedom

from Hunger Campaign in 1967 to research and write a book on the problems of

world food supply. After several months of extensive preparation involving 45,000miles of travel, this resulted in Born to Hunger, published in 1968 and described by

Hopcraft as largely a travel book; one mans observations on aspects of a massive


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Soccer & Society 679

deprivation.12 The Great Apple Raid, an autobiography-cum-childhood memoir,

appeared in 1970, its style hinting at a turn toward creative writing. Although hecontinued to cover football into the early 1970s, with his World Cup 70 (1970), writ-

ten and edited with Hugh McIlvaney, extremely well received, and always remained

passionately interested in it, he was both suffering from a claustrophobia that made

attendance difficult and showing increasing interest in writing for television. His

play, The Mosedale Horseshoe, written for Granada in 1971, was his first popular andcritical success and effectively opened a new career. He also proved to be exception-

ally able at adaptation, with his treatment of John le Carres novel Tinker, Tailor,

Soldier, Spy in 1979 a particular success. Although claiming a growing irritation at

being alternately patronised and bullied by girls called Fiona flourishing clipboards,he continued working productively in television until his death.13

The Football Man: origins, style and content

The Football Man was by no means the first British football book that could be

termed serious, in the sense of being imbued with a significant degree of literary

and intellectual ambition. In the post-1945 period, high levels of interest in the game

combined with a long-term rise in consumer purchasing power to produce anincreasingly propitious market for football literature, one that encouraged some

authors to move beyond the formulaic conventions that dictated most existing

genres.14 Histories of the game such as Geoffrey Greens Soccer: The World Game

(1953), Morris Marpless A History of Football (1954), Brian Glanville and JerryWeinsteins World Cup (1958) and Percy Youngs many English club histories

produced from the late 1950s, along with certain close studies of specific issues

within football culture, notably Glanvilles Soccer Nemesis (1955) on British foot-ball and the foreign challenge, produced writing and analysis of a quality rarelyachieved with any consistency in earlier decades.15 Glanville, a journalist and novel-ist whose football fiction, The Rise of Gerry Logan (1963), was another significant

moment in the development of football writing, and Young, an academic musicolo-

gist by profession, were particularly highly regarded.16 The latters often highly lyri-

cal studies such asFootball; Facts and Fancies (1950), The Appreciation of Football(1951) andThe Football Year(1956) deserve recognition for being among the earli-

est works to try to emulate the stylistic standards already reached in much cricket

literature. (For all the praise for the literary quality of Hopcrafts work discussed

below, at least one reviewer still foundThe Football Man to be not yet quite in theclass of Young and Glanville.17) John Moynihans Soccer Syndrome, published in

1966, was another work praised for its sharp observation and thoughtful and evoca-

tive writing.

Despite this growing body of work, as Hopcraft was fully aware, the field was

hardly overcrowded. His research file includes a Guardian review of a footballexhibition held at Manchester Art Gallery during the 1966 World Cup that commented

pointedly on how poorly the game had been served by its literature and the media

more generally.

When football journalism has thrown up no quality popular writing, Peter Wilson isacclaimed Sports Journalist of the Year, and the greatest mass audience of all has to put upwith the tawdry verbal imagery of Kenneth Wolstenholme, standards are obviously not atthe level of the game itself.18


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680 D. Russell

It is not difficult to imagine this serving, if not as the actual inspiration for the book,

then at least as a justification for the authors initial commitment to it. Hopcraftappears to have begun working on the project in late 1966 under the working title of

Thunderboots.19 This appellation, so redolent of juvenile sporting fiction, eventually

became merely the sub-title for a section on the ex-Sheffield Wednesday centre-

forward Derek Dooley, one of whose nicknames this indeed was. Other, rather

ponderous chapter titles and sub-headings such as Baggy Pants Solomon TheReferee, were also eventually abandoned in favour of crisper, sparer versions (The

Referee, The Player, The Manager and so forth) that undoubtedly gave the work a

more contemporary feel and heightened the sense of novelty of approach. Hopcrafts

initial synopsis envisaged an intelligent, wider readership rather than one composedof schoolboys or fans of particular teams, probably then the standard audiences for

football publications.20 It is unclear whether the book was commissioned by Collins

or suggested by Hopcraft, but it was clearly a product of the market opportunity

provided by Englands World Cup campaign and the consequent stimulation and legit-

imization of middle-class interest in football, not least via the efforts of the qualitypress, that this engendered.21 Some sections of the book had indeed appeared or been

adumbrated in his journalistic work.22

Hopcrafts stated aim was to explore

the character of football; to consider its effects on peoples lives. I hope that I can explainsomething of footballs compulsion in the main in this book I am more concernedwith people than with technique. Some readers are going to be offended by the omissionof some of their favourite names in football. But this is not a gallery of heroes. I am areporter trying to reach to the heart of what football is. 23

Although the resultant work contained a small amount of historical material, it hasbeen well described by Anthony King as constituting a handbook for the consump-

tion of the game capturing and analysing the major changes that had, in Hopcrafts

phrase, transformed it since 1945 and, more especially, the early 1960s.24 It focusedabove all on those who played, managed and ran the game with the three opening

chapters devoted to players, managers and directors, comprising, respectively, 35, 19

and 10% of the books 244 pages of text. Further chapters focused on referees, the

football fan the only chapter to be enlarged substantially for the Penguin edition in

1971 amateur players, the press, British football and its relationship with theforeign game and, as a form of conclusion, a consideration of possible future trends.

Hopcraft was clearly alert to the value of hard statistical evidence, including, forexample, detailed data on the wages and terms of contract before and after the New

Deal of 19611963 that abolished the maximum wage and fundamentally reformedthe retain-and-transfer system.25 However, as with Born to Hunger, which built up

large pictures through numerous sketches of individuals, the book is essentially

biographical in approach, with the interview the dominant research tool. His subjects

were chosen to illustrate either a particular historical trajectory or a variety of styles

or approaches within the game. The lengthy opening chapter on The Player, forexample, begins with a study of George Best, the extreme example of the modern foot-

ball star, before turning, albeit with frequent diversions, to the construction of a

lineage that considers the changing role, status and meaning of the professional foot-

baller. This runs from Stan Cullis and Stanley Matthews, playing in an inter-warEngland that had no reason to know that the twenties were Naughty and the thirties

had Style and when players were commonly closer to austerity than to flamboyance,


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through to Bobby Charlton, Bests Manchester United team-mate who gets the star

footballers profusion of flattery and lives in a rich mans house in a rich mansneighbourhood.26 His character studies of football managers (Stan Cullis, Alan

Brown, Stanley Mortensen, Sir Matt Busby and Sir Alf Ramsey) were in their turn

intended to illustrate five different managerial styles linked by the common charac-

teristic of a compelling will, while his directors were selected as exemplars of the

fan-turned director (Harold Needler at Hull and Bob Lord at Burnley), the publicschool boy driven by duty (Denis Hill-Wood at Arsenal) and the product of Brick

Street Secondary responding to opportunity (Ken Bates at Oldham).27 This

thoughtful use of collective biography is undoubtedly crucial in creating the books

sense of substance and thoroughness.Ronald Aitken, once Hopcrafts sports editor at The Observer, remembered him a

little bent and a little brooding over his typewriter and writing with dedicated seri-

ousness, weighing and polishing every phrase. This intensity resulted in both great

clarity and literary richness.28 He was expert at capturing the complexities and idio-

syncrasies of players physique and technique. Matthews is described as a slightlyhumped, stiff-looking figure, rather like a Meccano man the ball not kicked by his

feet but nudged between them, deftly and gently like butter being chopped up by a

two-pat grocer. Charlton, alternatively, does not dribble with the ball [he] kicks

the ball close to the ground in front of him, often a long way in front, and runs like asprinter behind it, almost as if there was no ball at all.29 He also had a gift for

capturing atmosphere and his description of the packed football terrace, with its acute

appreciation of the sensual and emotional pleasures involved, is worthy of extensive

quotation.

For those of us who first learned our professional football jammed against the crushbarriers down at the bottom of them, having arrived hours early to establish a position ofcomparative safety rather than submit to the baby protection of the boys pen, they aremore evocative of the wonder of childhood than even old comic-strips are. They arehideously uncomfortable. The steps are as greasy as a school playground lavatory in therain. The air is rancid with beer and onions and belching and worse. The language is a

purple gross of obscenity. When the crowd surges at a shot or collision near a corner flaga man or a boy, and sometimes a girl, can be lifted off the ground in the crush as if bysome massive, soft-sided crane grab and dangled about for minutes on end, perhapsnever getting back to within four or five steps of the spot from which the monster madeits bite. In this incomparable entanglement of bodies and emotions lies the heart of thefans commitment to football.30

Although the book has many serious points to make, it is also marked by frequent

outbreaks of the laconic humour that marked his writing more generally and whichdoes much to maintain interest and pace.31 He was adept at both comic visual descrip-

tion, as when he watched an aged park footballer struck in the stomach by the ball

collapse very slowly, contracting and wrinkling before our eyes like a balloon still

hanging on the Twelfth Day of Christmas, and gentle satire. The football club board-

room is an enviable place to a man committed to his town and to the game, and thedelightful condition of smoking a cigar in it is not conducive to modesty.32 Crucially,

whatever the journalistic tone adopted, Hopcrafts identity as a fan is never far from

the surface. Although it is not until the final pages that he explicitly describes the work

as a book by a football fan, his affection for the game emerges both in set pieces, asin his eulogy to Bobby Charlton, one of the very few players who can bring rheumy-

eyed sportswriters to their feet in a press box, and through the more generalized


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682 D. Russell

enthusiasm that permeates his writing. This ability to be, in Observercolleague Ian

Hamiltons words, both expert and awestruck, to combine journalists know-howwith spectators gratitude, to marry, as the Daily Telegraphs R.H. Williams

described it, documentary precision [with] hopeless but never blind affection for

a game, was central in the construction of a distinctive and novel tone.33

The Football Man had three major areas of interests. Hopcraft was notably

concerned with the implications of the New Deal and was highly sympathetic both tothe players demands in the early 1960s and the individuals who benefited from the

resultant changes. George Best, we are told, is not fundamentally ostentatious; he is

merely young, popular, and rich by lower-middle class standards. It is only because

the pay and working conditions of leading professional footballers were so recentlythose of moderately skilled factory helots that Best and his contemporaries look so

excessively and immodestly affluent.34 Even when acknowledging, in the 1971

edition, Bests petulance on the field and increasingly extravagant lifestyle off it,

Hopcraft refused to moralize; rather he appreciated that Bests increasing disciplinary

problems stemmed from the quite excessive levels of physical punishment used byopponents to negate his skills.35 In a second theme, he was far less sympathetic to the

football establishment. Administrators and directors are shown to be frequently short-

sighted and conservative, and he was much exercised by the fact of a professional

game being administered at club level by amateur directors, at national level, by thefamily doctors, head-teachers and variety of master tradesmen who make up the

Council of the FA and controlled on the pitch by a referee who was still a part-timer,

in fact very nearly an amateur. A plea for professional referees forms a significant

section of his concluding chapter.36

The growing problem of crowd violence formed the third key topic. While

Hopcraft accepted that there was cause for concern, he was highly critical of exagger-ated press reports deliberately intended to shock rather than inform and thereby

creating the impression of a Saturday afternoon scene somewhere between the storm-

ing of the Bastille and a civil rights march in Alabama.37 He rejected any significantlinks between violence on and off the field (interestingly, the possibility of links

between hooliganism and the cultural and economic structures of the game, a focus of

much early football sociology, was not considered), seeing football as a tailormade

area for the activities of the louts with the pimples and knives, and proposed what

he acknowledged to be disciplinary measures with fascist overtones heavier polic-ing, screening and searching at turnstiles and extensive bans as methods of control.38

Perhaps his most original contribution, given the eventual drive toward all-seaterstadiums from the late 1980s as a mechanism for both control and safety, was his call

for what would now be termed safe standing. To end the terrace, he argued, to killoff this animal, this monstrous, odorous national pet, would be a cruel act of denial to

us Has any club asked an architect to create a new style of goal-end terracing?

something which would not merely facilitate freer movement for the disciplinarians

but might also take some of the meanness out of the environment.39

The peoples game

These and other lesser strands within the book are of interest both as records of the

contemporary preoccupations of an informed observer and a contribution to debatesthat are to varying degrees still alive today. However, key to an understanding of

the book and its wider significance is the existence beneath these themes of an


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underpinning master narrative depicting football as the peoples game, with the

people clearly largely coterminous with the working class of the industrial north andmidlands. Hopcraft establishes this trope within his opening words.

The point about football in Britain is that it is not just a sport people take to, like cricket

or tennis or running long distances. It is inherent in the people. It is built into the urbanpsyche, as much a common experience to our children as are uncles and school Noplayer, manager, director or fan who understands football, either through his intellect orhis nerve-ends, ever repeats that piece of nonsense trotted out mindlessly by the fearfulnow and again which pleads, After all, its only a game. It has not been only a gamefor eighty years: not since the working class saw it as an escape route out of drudgeryand claimed it as their own.40

This reading of the game is restated in various ways throughout the book. The notion

of the football profession as source of working-class upward mobility, a better wayof making a living than sweating in somebodys coalmine or dark satanic mill, is

consistently emphasized.41 The inter-war childhood circumstances of Tyneside-born

footballer and manager, Stan Mortensen, are viewed as the archetypal ones for

producing urgent footballers of his generation: a poor home surrounded by more;Derek Dooley is described as having been raised in the working-class Sheffield of

outside lavatories in communal yards and low wages for tough work. The headmaster

of the secondary modern school in Ashington, Northumberland, where England and

Leeds United defender, Jack Charlton, had been a pupil, is enlisted here, with

Hopcraft recording how early prejudice against professional football was supersededby the realization that it was something good for [the boys]. It could be work.42

The most powerful strand of Hopcrafts argument, however, is rooted in his insis-

tence on the working classs ownership of the game, if not in any legal or financial

sense, then at least in terms of emotional investment. The football fan is not just awatcher. His sweat and his nerves work on football, and his spirit can be made rich or

destitute by it.43 It was, too, he argues, an investment that carried extra-sporting

connotations, the game serving almost an oppositional function within working-class

society. Discussing the inter-war period, Hopcraft produced a section that, rich in both

language and the ideological freight it carries, has become one of the books most oft-quoted passages.

The stadiums were planted where the supporters lived, in among the industrial mazes offactories and hunched, workers houses. The Saturday match became more than merediversion from the daily grind, because there was often no work to be relieved. To go to

the match was to escape from the dark of despondency into the light of combat. Here, byassociation with the home team, positive identity could be claimed by muscle and bygoals. To win was personal success, to lose another clout from life. Football was not somuch an opiate of the people as a flag run up against the gaffer bolting his gates and thelandlord armed with his bailiffs.44

His description of the public response to the 1966 World Cup is similarly flecked witha sense of class antagonism. Noting an unexpected communal exuberance in and

around the provincial grounds in which most of the tournament was played, he

observed that, outside the celebrations at the end of World War II, I have never seen

England look as unashamedly delighted by life. The England that he was observing,

however, was a highly specific one.

This was, of course, the true England of the industrial provinces, of blood-black brickand scurrying wind and workers faces clenched tight against the adversity of short-time


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684 D. Russell

working and the memory of last months narrow miss on the pools; our best football isnot played in the bland England, that Camelot of the advertisements in overseas maga-zines. The World Cup was carnival. Here was the apotheosis of the game which liveslike an extra pulse in the people of industrial England.45

Hopcraft then sets this atmosphere, rooted in a deep and real love for the game,against what he perceives as a far different texture of feeling at the tournaments

Wembley final. Watching the game from the stand rather than the press box, he was

struck by the fact that some of his fellows were not football followers.

They kept asking each other about the identity of the English players. Wasnt one of theManchester boys supposed to be pretty good? That very tall chap had a brother in theside, hadnt he? They were there in their rugby-club blazers, and with their Home Coun-ties accents and obsolete prejudices, to see the successors of the Battle of Britain pilotswhack the Hun again it has always nagged at my fond recollection of that day that alot of my companions might have as well been at Wimbledon.46

Central to Hopcrafts case for popular ownership was his belief that terrace culture

was predicated on a particular form of connoisseurship. As he stated at the outset,

football, combining conflict and beauty in something offered for public appraisal,

represented much of what I understand to be art. The notion of football as art was

not new. In the previous decade, for example, the publishers blurb for Percy YoungsFootball Yearhad termed it the ballet of the people and such comparisons probably

have a much longer history.47 What was distinctive about Hopcrafts argument was an

emphasis on it being an art that was most acutely understood by its regular, largely

proletarian devotees.

The people own this art in the way they can never own any form of music, theatre, liter-ature or religion because they can never be fooled in it as they can in these other things,where intention can be deliberately obscured and method hidden beyond their grasp.Football does not ask for faith; it compels examination. Phoney footballers are simply

booted aside. The crowds can be vindictive and brutal, but they can seldom be deceived.They know about their football intuitively, as they know about their families.48

His discomfiture at the World Cup Final came precisely from his being among the

plump-living exercising the privilege of money to bag a place at an eventthousands more would have given their right arms to see and understand.49 This

notion of football as the one art the labourer fully comprehends, of ordinary peopleas the arbiters of a sporting taste shaped by first-hand experience rather than precepts

passed from above, occurs in a number of places in the book.50 Moreover, this special-ist, unaffected appreciation of the game is construed as a key force in protecting the

games integrity and honesty against the commercialization of the game that Hopcraft

records. While he accepts Richard Hoggarts concerns that the peoples springs of

assent were drying up as they became aware of the exploitation that lay behind

much provision of popular entertainment, for Hopcraft, footballs innate truth oftalent and conflict is what keeps it out of that discouraging but true generalization.51

It is significant that his only major addition to the 1971 paperback edition was the

inclusion of a section on one specific working-class fan, Harry Evans, a sheet metal

worker and Liverpool F.C. supporter, detailing his (and his daughters) commitmentto the game and its place in his life.52 Here was his passionate but intelligent fan

made flesh. Crucially, too, Hopcraft chose for this purpose, a fan from the north of


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England. Although, as already seen, Hopcraft tended to use the phrase the industrial

provinces to describe his chosen geographical terrain, The Football Man should beread very much as a celebration of northern England, and particularly a near North

comprising urban and industrial Lancashire, Yorkshire and the northern most parts of

the Midlands. This provides a secondary narrative nested within the larger celebra-

tion of the working class. Apart from Denis Hill-Wood, Ken Bates and England

Manager, Alf Ramsey, all of whom were key figures that happened to be from thesouth, Hopcrafts football men speak very much in northern accents. No featured

player was southern-born or based. Draft material suggests that Chelsea centre-

forward, Peter Osgood, was a possible choice for the portrait of the modern star

which opens the book but the emergence of George Best in the period between plan-ning in 1966 and writing in 196768 made him an inevitable and irresistible replace-

ment.53 Hopcrafts chosen referees were Maurice Fussey and Ernie Crawford, both

from Doncaster, his Sunday footballers were not from the pitches of Londons iconic

Hackney Marshes, but Manchesters Hough End, a great, low-lying urban plain off

one of Manchesters major entry-and-exit roads, the grass bordered on one side by arailway line and on another by a pre-fabricated housing estate.54 As that description

demonstrates, Hopcraft enjoyed capturing a sense of the fabric and flavour of north-

ern life. His section on Boltons Nat Lofthouse contains a description for readers

outside the northern, heavy industrial scene of the work of a coal-bagger, the occu-pation of Lofthouses father. Noting approvingly the unaffected manner of Sheffield

Wednesdays young defender, Sam Ellis, he records that that the words which

occurred most frequently in his conversation, the Manchester voice unmistakable,

were me mum and me dad. In these choices of subject, landscape and sound,

class and place effectively elide, the English working class at serious play in the

region that the national imagination most frequently placed it in.55

The publishers were clearly aware of this geographical bias, suggesting to

Hopcraft that it should do very well in the North, as were a number of reviewers,

who, in the words of theEconomists anonymous contributor, were not entirely happythat Mr Hopcraft is an unabashed northerner, and his heroes players from the north

of Aston Villa.56 It is possible that Hopcrafts choices were simply dictated by rela-

tive ease of travel from his Stockport home: after his mammoth journeys forBorn to

Hunger, this would hardly be surprising. Again, his Observermatch reports were

almost exclusively northern in location and this was probably the football world heknew best in the late 1960s. However, the books geography was to a significant

degree the result of Hopcrafts own allegiances. Although born in Essex and raised inStaffordshire, a county which often falls outside the English north as constructed in

many definitional exercises, he appears to have seen himself as a northerner onecolleague and obituarist described him as northern to his roots not least because of

his close professional and personal association with Manchester and region at a time

of considerable cultural dynamism generated by the launch of Granada Television in

Salford in 1956.57 Features on aspects of northern life were a common part of

Hopcrafts Guardian journalism and much of his earlier television work, such as TheMosedale Horseshoe, about a group of Lake District walkers, The Panel(1971), deal-

ing with professional crown green bowling, andSaid the Preacher(1972), about an

Oldham Methodist minister, was strongly rooted in northern location and character.58

Hopcrafts focus on the working class and the English North places the book in acultural and intellectual world far larger than that structured merely by the state of

contemporary football and the publishing opportunities engendered by the 1966


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686 D. Russell

World Cup. While it is unhelpful to push for too exalted a place forThe Football Man,

it can and should be seen as belonging to a set of works usually situated at variouspoints on the left of the political spectrum, that probed changing patterns of social and

cultural life at a time of rapid growth in popular consumption and/or sought to place

the working class or a wider popular culture at the centre of analysis. This discovery

of the working class can be found in numerous forms of contemporary culture from

Sunday supplement journalism to television, cinema, radio and much else.59 In bookform, A.L. Lloyds Folk Song in Englandand novelist Colin McInness pioneering

assessment of the music hall, Sweet Saturday Night, both published in 1967, are

certainly two, albeit rather different, historical works aimed at the intelligent, wider

readership sought by Hopcraft and showing a similar ambition to give cultural weightand significance to genres too often buried beneath, in E.P. Thompsons famous

phrase, the enormous condescension of posterity.60 In academia, although also

attracting a much wider readership, Richard Hoggarts The Uses of Literacy (1957),

Raymond Williams Culture and Society (1958), E.P. Thompsons The Making of the

English Working Class (1963) and Brian Jacksons Working-class Community (1968)in cultural studies, history and sociology/anthropology, respectively, are among the

best known examples of this new emphasis.

It is not difficult to be reminded of some of the later writers preoccupations and

approaches by Hopcrafts text. This point has been made persuasively and percep-tively in regard to the relationship between Hoggart and Hopcraft in Hughson, Inglis,

and Frees The Uses of Sport.61 They deem The Football Man to be a Hoggartain

style account of working-class culture, with its similarly descriptive language,

interest in collective structures of feeling, use of autobiographical objectivism

through which the author moves from personal experience to wider insight and an

ethnographic approach that, in Hopcrafts case, evocatively sketchesthe crude butearthy sensuality of the terraces.62 They also identify a willingness to use ethno-

graphic insights from football to provide a moral commentary on working-class

culture, again in the manner of Hoggart.63 As they argue, Hopcrafts disappointmentthat older fans have failed to deal with the troublemakers on the terraces, something

indicative of a wider malaise in which we more often seem to be afraid of your young

than influential upon them, is a key example of this tendency. There are also wider

social comments which are, if not moral judgements, then undoubtedly thoughtful and

pointed comments upon contemporary social life.64 He talks, for example, of DenisHill-Woods quite inimitable, English public school style. It is not a matter of accent

but of mould Hill-Wood talks about his family and his own progress through lifelike a man taking the Sunday visitors over the stately home, gently amused at the

gawping, and steering curiosity away from the most private corners with an effortless,kindly switch of direction.65The FootballMan was decidedly a contribution to a

literature that sought to capture the state of the nation and the place of class within it.

If it chimed in with the new interest in working-class culture, it also connected

with one of the north of Englands periodic episodes of increased exposure within the

national culture. Certainly, the height of northern modishness, arguably lasting from1957, the year of publication of John Braines Room at the Top as well as Uses of

Literacy, until about mid-1964, the time by which the Merseysound was waning,

was long over by 1968.66 However, the region was still a focus of some attention and

debate and the book should be viewed as a late addition to this particular northernmoment. The combined force of class and region, then, gave the The Football Man

not only much of its flavour and contemporary feel, but added notably to its wider


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cultural significance. However, as discussed later, its origins in a distinctive, time-

bound cultural context arguably constrained its compass and to some extent bound itforever to the period of its composition.

Critical reception

However modest the books commercial success, it was undoubtedly a critical one. Itwas extensively reviewed and while, as will be seen, certain aspects of the book were

challenged, it was clearly regarded as a major step in the emergence of a mature foot-

ball literature. In terms of style, Hopcraft was sometimes a harsh self-critic and felt

that he could be given to overwriting enormously: I was taken by the sheer pleasureof words.67 Most of his peers clearly did not agree. Charlie Gillett, actually one of his

sterner judges, shrewdly described his style as fluent, economical, self-effacing

English journalism at its best.68 His Observercolleague, Ian Hamilton, was similarly

struck by the self-effacement and the related absence of preaching. He saw this as

best characterized by Hopcrafts interview with Tony Kay, an ex-England interna-tional, imprisoned for four months and banned from football for life in January 1965

for his part in match-fixing.69 We sense that Hopcrafts disapproval, even dislike of

the man is in knotty conflict with his sense of how horribly Kay has been punished.

The interview with Kay was a particularly celebrated section of the book, describedby Brian Glanville simply as splendid.70 It was indeed one of the most thoughtful

and sensitive of the many character sketches within it and forms a clear link to what

critic Nancy Banks-Smith termed the acute but unsensational observation that so

marked his television dramas.71 Overall, several reviewers were prepared to define the

book as the best single volume on the game yet to appear. John Arlott termed it the

most valid and profound study yet of English football, Michael Wale described it asone of the best and most understanding of books about the footballers trade and the

first clearly defined statement on the modern game, while for The Economists

anonymous reviewer it was probably the best [description of the game] that has everbeen written in all its aspects, both as a sport and a social phenomenon.72

Two critical notes were nevertheless sounded. The first was perhaps not so much

a note as a short movement. It came from Brian Glanville in The Sunday Times and it

is worth considering in some detail, partly because it is important to hear dissident

voices among the reviewers, but also because the criticisms show interesting tensionswithin the putative field of serious football writing. Hopcrafts publishers were

clearly infuriated by what one of them referred to as Glanvilles splenetic outburst.Had Hopcraft written, the Collins representative queried, the book [Glanville] wanted

to write?73 Both the description of Glanvilles comments as already seen, he wasfar from universally critical and the reasoning attributed to it were, in fact, inaccu-

rate. Indeed, conversely, the essence of the critique was that Hopcraft had not written

the book that Glanville himself would have produced. While a little healthy profes-

sional rivalry may have fuelled the criticism, it is quite tempting to see it as the prod-

uct of a meeting between two writers who represented antithetical cultural positionswithin the field of sports journalism. In such a reading, Glanville, the confident public

schoolboy, with strong metropolitan and, through his links with Italy, cosmopolitan

networks and allegiances, stands opposed to the rather withdrawn, provincial scholar-

ship boy with strong sympathies for the northern working-class fan.74 This interpreta-tion makes less sense later in their careers, with Hopcraft moving to London in the

1970s to be at televisions epicentre and eventually buying a part-time residence in


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688 D. Russell

Provence. However, in 1968, at least, very different cultural standpoints may well

have led to equally different ways of writing about the game.Whatever the cause, there was clearly a fundamental disagreement about technique

and approach. Glanville had a number of criticisms including (unfairly) Hopcrafts

frequent errors of fact and his deployment of hovercraft writing, in which the prose

is buoyed up on a small cushion of air, reminiscent of the sort of agreeably self-

conscious prose the best popular journalists, like Roland Allen, were writing twentyyears ago in books likeAll in the Days Sport: just this side of the sententious.75 Above

all, Glanville found Hopcraft wanting as an interviewer, depicting him as an outsider

in the football world who feels the need to appear an insider by using extensive inter-

views which actually underline his lack of innate understanding for, and intimate knowl-edge of, his subjects. The resultant interviews are thereby seen as yielding, with

occasional exceptions, nothing but the public face. Hopcraft is criticized, for example,

for failing to ask Denis Hill-Wood for a proper explanation of Arsenals decision to

sack manager Billy Wright in 1967. These comments, while possibly valid if directed

at a standard work of football journalism, both miss the essence of Hopcrafts inter-viewing style, the quiet, almost covert presence that lets the study of a character emerge

over time, and the books fundamental aim. The Football Man was absolutely not an

expose of footballs inner politics and current events, and Glanvilles misunderstanding

serves to point up the originality of what Hopcraft was trying to achieve.As has been argued earlier, Hopcrafts actual aim of trying to explain some of

footballs compulsion took him into, or close to, the realms of sociology and anthro-

pology and it was here that Hopcraft received his most severe and arguably most justi-

fiable criticism. There was undoubtedly plentiful recognition of his efforts, with John

Arlott finding echoes ofBeyond a Boundary (1963), C.L.R. Jamess celebrated study

of the relationship between cricket and, particularly, West Indian society.76

However,others were less impressed. Glanvilles strictures on hovercraft writing imply short-

comings in this direction while, more explicitly, Ian Hamilton commented unfavour-

ably on the books vague speculative lunges and sociological romanticising.77 Themost trenchant remarks were Charlie Gilletts inNew Society.

Unfortunately, the time we live in will not allow a writer of Hopcrafts sophistication(Guardian/Observer) to content himself with recording his responses to the artistry offootball, or even simply to enclose those responses within a discussion of the economiccontext which controls the art. This is the time of the amateur sociologist, and here hecomes again.78

For Gillett, the weaknesses of this particular amateur were most apparent in his chap-ter on The Fan which sets ones teeth on edge. He found the treatment of crowd

violence highly confused with the practice variously condoned, denied, belittled and

disapproved of and was also strongly critical of Hopcrafts preference for safer

terraces as opposed to all-seater stadia. The root of the problem was, he argued,

Hopcrafts own awkward relationship with the football culture. He identifies stronglywith it, yet is himself irretrievably middle class. So his apologia for crowd violence isreminiscent of a communist belief in the essential goodness of the working class; hisadmiration for their stoic endurance of intolerable discomfort in the stands leads him tooppose a design for stadia which would give everybody a seat.

To the charge of middle-class intellectual romanticization and idealization of work-

ing-class culture, Gillett also added that of nostalgia, arguing that Hopcraft ultimately


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rooted his view of football and its cultural significance in a period that had now passed;

despite its modern gloss, this is a book about football in an age just gone, in whichMatthews, Lofthouse and Mortensen were the noble artisan heroes. George Best,

despite the detail with which his life is reported, defies the authors understanding.

While the contemporary reader may not necessarily concur with the specific criti-

cisms, the main thrust cannot be denied: a populist romanticism undoubtedly surfaces

throughout the book. It is by no means a universal feature; one of Hopcrafts distin-guishing characteristics is his ability to puncture myths and challenge lazy thinking.

His comments on sections of the Wembley crowd in 1966 have already been noted.

Again, while Liverpools Kop is warmly appreciated for its knowledge, originality

and humour, he refuses to see it as the site of unstinting good sportsmanship claimedby many of his contemporaries.79 Nevertheless, underneath the sometimes astringent

detail lies a widespread sensibility that restricts critical distance. This partly stems

from Hopcrafts personal adherence to the game, based as it clearly was on the social

and psychological needs of the scholarship boy, but also from the book being too

much a product of its time, too deeply imbued with the desire to sanctify the cultureof the northern working-class.

As a result, Hopcraft offered many large, undefended and unquestioned generali-

zations which have weathered badly. His claim in the opening paragraph that

footballs sudden withdrawal from the people would bring deeper disconsolation thanto deprive them of television was especially exaggerated, even in 1968.80 To posit a

game that attracted only a small minority of the population to watch its elite, profes-

sional variant, generated only sporadic and lukewarm interest among a significant

body of the nations male population and connected infrequently or indirectly with its

female counterpart, as a rival to Britains most deeply rooted leisure pursuit, was to

exercise poetic licence indeed. The proposition became even more flawed with thepassage of time. Reviewing the reissued text in 1988, by which time the game had

become deeply unfashionable within many sections of society and Football League

attendances had fallen by 40% from 30 to 18 million, sports journalist Patrick Barclaycould identify this statement as especially indicative of the dated flavour of some of

the book.81 At the same time, even placing to one side necessary and complex defini-

tional debates that he sidesteps, Hopcrafts view of football as the one art the labourer

fully comprehends runs the risk of patronizing the very working class it sought to

celebrate by elevating one cultural form above others perhaps most notably invarious fields of popular music in which ordinary people have shown great talent,

commitment and understanding.His more general claims for ownership of the game by a working class or people

who have invested it with particularly high levels of emotional commitment were farless fanciful and do capture a critical element of footballs position and function; the

first serious academic social history of British football, James Walvins The Peoples

Game (1975), although not using Hopcrafts work as a source, had a title clearly illus-

trating the authors similar view of the games social dynamics. However, as fellow

football historian Tony Mason pointed out, for all the pioneering value of Walvinswork, it would have been better if the title had ended with a question mark and Hopcraft

would have benefited from similar circumspection.82 Excessive insistence on popular

ownership can obscure too easily numerous other aspects of power relationships within

football and grossly exaggerate the extent to which fans have been able to exercisecontrol. It also tends to deny a place within the post-war football world to those from

higher in the social strata, reason again, perhaps, for Glanvilles strictures.


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690 D. Russell

Legacy

To criticize Hopcraft too harshly and at such a distance would, however, be to ignore

the obvious and important point that one of his greatest achievements was simply to

attempt a broadly sociological-cum-anthropological perspective in the first place.

Moreover, it was an attempt that had an undoubted impact on the nascent disciplineswithin what might loosely be termed football studies. The pioneering sociology,

anthropology and history of football that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s

would have occurred without Hopcraft. The pressing problem of hooliganism

provided a practical issue that would inevitably draw in academic expertise and it

would have been strange indeed if the new social history that sought to engage with

history from below had managed to avoid engagement with such a significant

cultural form. Nevertheless, Hopcraft undoubtedly gave encouragement, intellectual

sustenance and material for those seeking to find academic space for sport.

Two scholars in particular drew productively from his work. In the field of history,

the American scholar Chuck Korr was a notable advocate of Hopcrafts work. Theywere certainly in correspondence by 1975 when Korr, as well as sympathizing with

the writer over some irritating reviews of his TV play, The Nearly Man, sent him a

working copy of a piece on the origins of West Ham United.83 In this, Korr argued

that anyone seeking to analyse the social implications of football should use the

comments of the English playwright and journalist, Arthur Hopcraft. He eHe quoted

approvingly from the opening paragraphs ofThe Football Man, stressing in particular

the need to place class at the centre of discussion. A revised version was eventually to

appear in theJournal of Contemporary History, thus becoming one of the very first

academic studies of professional football to appear in a scholarly history journal.84

While Korrs article actually challenged Hopcrafts central thesis by stressing thelimits to working-class control in the context of West Hams early history, his debt to

him is clear. Significantly, Korr attempted (unsuccessfully) to persuade the University

of Illinois Press to republish what remains the classic work on soccer in 1986.85 He

recorded that he had used it in class for years, until it became impossible to obtain

copies. The response of the students was enthusiastic and the book has a large follow-

ing among sports historians and sociologists. With due allowance for the need to

impress publishers, his description of it as a combination of three highly regarded

publications, Peter Axholms The City Game (1970), on black basketball, Roger

Kahns study of the Brooklyn Dodgers, The Boys of Summer(1971) andSportsworld

magazine, is clearly indicative of his regard for Hopcrafts work.

English sociologist, Chas Critcher, although presumably lacking any personal link

with Hopcraft, was another to make enthusiastic use of his work. His 1979 article,

Football since the war, an overly schematic but invaluable early attempt to develop

a typology of professional footballers rooted in an appreciation of broader shifts withinworking-class culture, made frequent reference to The Football Man.86 The book

earned eight of his forty-three footnotes, and was used to underpin Critchers approach

and provide key evidence for some of his argument. An extended section of the football

as flag run up against the gaffer quotation cited earlier was used to sustain Critcherscase for footballs centrality to the common working-class experience.87 Again,

when explaining that he is seeking to capture the relationship between the footballers

behaviour on the field and his bearing off it, he adopts Hopcrafts term style and thelatters definition of this as the style and substance of the man, as affected by the

game, as his key term.88 Crucially, Hopcrafts almost poetic descriptions of a players


16/19


physical appearance and cultural aspirations Stanley Matthews, with the sadly

impassive face a representative of his age and class, brought up among thrift andthe ever-looming threat of dole and debt, Bobby Charlton, the classic working-class

hero who has made it to glamour and Nob Hill are often preferred to more obviously

objective sources in the building of Critchers typologies.89 Although Hopcrafts value

to the academy became ever more limited as the football world altered and the schol-

arly treatment of it grew in scale and sophistication, the book continued and, indeed,continues to feature among footballs footnotes.

It is also noteworthy that, as Anthony King has argued, Hopcrafts work and distinc-

tive analysis has had a long-term influence on the construction and sustenance of more

widely consumed popular narratives of the game. The Football Man has been bothprecursor and source for what King terms the mythic populism underlying much of

the new football writing of the late 1980s and 1990s, in which largely middle-class

authors saw the football terrace as the home of the true working class and the game

that he described in the 1960s as representing an age of lost innocence.90 As recently

as 2008, a booksellers website recommended the work as ideal for those who aredisenchanted with the modern game The Football Man takes the reader back to the

heart and soul of the national game when pitches were muddy and the players were

footballers not brands.91 While the books ideology was very much a product of its

age, that ideology has clearly had the power to speak to later generations.As its sales figures demonstrate, The Football Man was noFever Pitch, no publish-

ing cause clbre selling 30,000 hardback and 246,000 paperback editions in less than

three years after publication.92 It could not be so. The market for football literature was

simply too underdeveloped and it required the much altered context of the late twentieth

century and an ever more footballized society for this to be the case. At the same

time, although some key works followed in its train, notably Hunter Daviess The GloryGame (1971) and Eamon Dunphys Only a Game? (1975), the publication of which

surely owed something to Hopcrafts path finding, footballs ever more problematic

role in British culture, particularly from the early 1970s to the nadir of the mid-1980s,prevented the book from acting as a stimulant to a continuous supply of serious football

literature. Moreover, as argued here, the book itself can be seen as flawed in important

ways. Nevertheless, its importance is undeniable. As Hopcraft argued, There is more

eccentricity in deliberately disregarding [football] than in devoting a life to it and

Hopcraft challenged the disregard for serious coverage of the game that pervaded Brit-ish culture.93 The book remains a rich source for scholars of football in the 1960s. It

is a detailed and thoughtful record of key events, institutions and personalities withinthe game and an evocation of the structure of feeling of football during the period

of the authors observation most certainly, but also the informed commentary of anespecially astute and sympathetic observer of a game at a critical moment in the reshap-

ing of both its internal structures and its wider place within society.94 It set a standard

for literary excellence among football writers to which many have aspired, but few have

attained, and was a source of inspiration for the nascent world of football academia.

The Football Man was undeniably a landmark text.

Notes1. Hopcraft,Football Man, 10. All quotations are from the 1968 edition unless otherwise stated.2. Elements of this article were aired at the Sport, Writing and History Conference, orga-

nized by the International Centre for Sport, History and Culture, De Montfort University


17/19

692 D. Russell

in conjunction with the Sports Literature Association, in September 2008. I am grateful todelegates for comments. I am also especially grateful to Richard Holt for loan of materialsand to Ian Johnston at Salford University for his help with accessing the Arthur Hopcraft

papers (AHP) in the Universitys archives and for his exemplary stewardship andchampioning of those papers.

3. A Sportsmans Book Club edition appeared in 1970, followed by a slightly revised editionfor Penguin in 1971. The 1968 text was reproduced by Sportspages in 1988 and AurumPress in 2006.

4. The Guardian, November 26, 2004; The Independent, November 26, 2004; The Times,November 27, 2004.

5. Letter to Hopcraft, August 5, 1968, AHP 2/2.6. Letter from Walter Collins to Hopcraft, December 16, 1968, AHP 2/2.7. Letter from Richard Johnson to Hopcraft, February 19, 1969, AHP 2/2. It is not clear

whether any reprint was undertaken; 660 copies were sold between July 1976 and June1977, which, given that only 2,000 were in stock seven years earlier, perhaps suggests avery limited later print run. Royalty statements, AHP 2/2.

8. Royalty statements, AHP 2/2; letters from Richard Johnson to Hopcraft, February 19,1969, November 19, 1969, AHP 2/2; letter from Collins publishing house to Hopcraft,

March 22, 1979, AHP 2/2. Later editions again do not seem to have reached anything otherthan respectable levels. See, for example, royalty statement for 1988 edition, AHP 2/3. The

book sold just 220 copies in 1992, the year ofFever Pitch.9. Glanville,Football Memories, 55; Russell, Interesting and Instructive Reading?, 246.

10. Hopcraft,Apple Raid, 311.11. Foreword to Hopcraft,Football Man (London: Aurum edition, 2006).12. Hopcraft,Born to Hunger, x.13. The Guardian, November 26, 2004.14. On football literature more widely, Russell, Interesting and Instructive Reading?;

Woolridge, These Sporting Lives.15. The best tool for approaching this writing is the indispensable Seddon, Football

Compendium.16. On Gerry Logan, see Hill, Sport and the Literary Imagination.17. Eric Todd, The Guardian, November 29, 1968.18. The Guardian, July 12, 1966. See AHP 2/2.19. This paragraph draws largely on Hopcrafts typescript working notes dated October 31,

1966, AHP 2/2.20. Ibid.21. Russell,Football and the English, 197. Coverage of the game in the broadsheets had been

growing since at least the late 1950s, however.22. See for example, The Observer, April 3, 1966, on Harold Needler; September 24, 1967 on

Sir Matt Busby; November 19, 1967 on Alan Brown; and December 31, 1967 on DenisHill-Wood. The papers magazine featured extensive extracts from the book on November17, 1968, the day before publication.

23. Hopcraft,Football Man, 10.

24. King,End of the Terraces, 186. Hopcraft,Football Man, 227.25. Hopcraft,Football Man, 408.26. Ibid., 30, 25, 86.27. Ibid., 103, 143, 152.28. The Guardian, November 26, 2004.29. Hopcraft,Football Man, 26, 84.30. Ibid., 189.31. In an article on the Grand National, for example, he describes a bookie as being by Nattie

Dresser out of Perpetual Patter. The Guardian, May 27, 1961.32. Hopcraft,Football Man, 200, 140.33. The Observer, November 24, 1968; The Daily Telegraph, December 20, 1968. See also,

Bose, The Sporting Alien, 30. He attaches the fan label to himself at the outset in thesecond edition.

34. Hopcraft,Football Man, 18.35. Hopcraft,Football Man (1971 ed.), 202.36. Hopcraft,Football Man (1968 ed.), 141, 165, 23943.


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37. Ibid., 180.38. Ibid., 187, 189.39. Ibid., 18990.40. Ibid., 9.41. Ibid., 201,42. Ibid., 120, 57, 90.43. Ibid., 197.44. Ibid., 223.45. Ibid., 219.46. Ibid., 222.47. Young,Football Year, back jacket.48. Hopcraft,Football Man, 910.49. Ibid., 219.50. Ibid., 221. See also, for example, p. 22, where football is described as the peoples art,51. Ibid., 51.52. Hopcraft,Football Man (1971 ed.) 14952.53. Another was Alan Ball. Hopcrafts typescript working notes dated October 31, 1966,

Hopcraft papers, AHP 2/2.

54. Hopcraft,Football Man, 199.55. Russell,Looking North.56. Letter from Walter Collins to Hopcraft, 16 December, 1968, AHP 2/2; The Economist,

December 21, 1968. See also, The Times, November 14, 1968;New Society, November 28,1968 andThe Observer, November 24, 1968, in which Ian Hamilton detected a particularSheffield Wednesday bias.

57. On definition, Russell,Looking North, 1418; The Guardian, November 26, 2004.58. For example, The Guardian April 28, 1961 on Liverpool dockers nicknames; January 22,

1962 on Mersey pilot boats; February 2, 1963 on Bury Black Pudding and April 13, 1963on whippet racing. Scripts, working papers and critical reviews for all of Hopcrafts playsare to be found in the University of Salford Archive.

59. Laing,Representations of Working-class Life.60. Thompson,Making of the English Working Class, 13.

61. Hughson, Inglis, and Free, Uses ofSport, 1605.62. Ibid., 161.63. Ibid., 162.64. Ibid., 162; Hopcraft,Football Man, 184.65. Hopcraft,Football Man, 153.66. Russell,Looking North, 28.67. Interview inLancashire Evening Telegraph, March 31, 1972.68. New Society, November 28, 1968. Gillett, then in the infancy of his career, was eventually

to be one of Britains most respected popular music journalists and broadcasters.69. The Observer, November 24, 1968; Hopcraft,Football Man, 7481.70. The Sunday Times, December 22, 1968.71. The comment was made in reference to The Mosedale Horseshoe. The Guardian, March

24, 1971.72. Undated and unreferenced cutting in AHP/2/2; The Times, November 14, 1968; The

Economist, December 21, 1968.73. Letter from Richard Johnson to Hopcraft, February 19, 1969, AHP 2/2.74. For his rich autobiography, Glanville,Football Memories.75. The Sunday Times, December 22, 1968.76. Undated and unreferenced cutting in AHP/2/2.77. The Observer, November 24, 1968.78. New Society, November 28, 1968.79. Hopcraft,Football Man, 191480. Ibid., 9.81. Independent, December 1, 1988.82. Mason, Football and the Historians, 1378.

83. Letter from Chick Korr to Hopcraft, December 2, 1975, AHP2/3.84. Korr, West Ham United.85. Letter from Chuck Korr to Arthur Hopcraft, November 12, 1986, AHP2/3.86. Critcher, Football Since the War.


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694 D. Russell

87. Ibid., 161.88. Ibid., 163.89. Ibid., 164, 165. Critcher could be critical of Hopcraft, especially his reluctance to link

hooliganism to football itself. See 1712.90. King, Terraces, 18385.91. http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/displayProductDetails.do?sku=3467056

accessed July 1, 2008.92. King, Terraces, 177.93. Hopcraft,Football Man, 9.94. Hughson, Inglis, and Free, Uses, 163.

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Critcher, C. Football Since the War. In Working Class Culture. Studies in History andTheory, ed. J. Clarke, C. Critcher, and R. Johnson, 16184. London: Hutchinson, 1979.

Glanville, B. Football Memories. London: Robson Books, 2004.Hill, J. Sport and the Literary Imagination. Essays in History, Literature, and Sport. Oxford:

Peter Lang, 2006.Hopcraft, A. Born to Hunger. London: Heinemann, 1968.Hopcraft, A. The Football Man. London: Collins, 1968.Hopcraft, A. The Great Apple Raid and Other Encounters of a Tin Chapel Trio. London:

Heinemann, 1970.Hughson, J., D. Inglis, and M. Free. The Uses of Sport. A Critical Analysis. London:

Routledge, 2005.King, A. The End of the Terraces. The Transformation of English Football in the 1990s.

London: Leicester University Press, 1998.Korr, C. West Ham United Football Club and the Beginning of Professional Football in East

London, 18951914. Journal of Contemporary History 13, 2 (1978): 21132

Laing, S. Representations of Working-class Life. London: McMillan, 1986.Mason, T. Football and the Historians. International Journal of the History of Sport 5, 1

(1988): 13642.Russell, D. Football and the English. Preston: Carnegie Publishing, 1997.Russell, D. Looking North. The North of England and the National Imagination. Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 2004.Russell, D. Interesting and Instructive Reading? The FA Book for Boys and the Culture of

Boyhood, 19451973. Journal of Sport History 34, 1 (2007): 23152.Seddon, P. A Football Compendium. Wetherby: British Library, 1999.Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.Woolridge, J. These Sporting Lives: Football Autobiographies, 19451980. Sport in History

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Young, P. Football Year. London: Phoenix Sports Books, 1956.

Documents

‘A reporter trying to reach to the heart of what football is’. Arthur Hopcraft's The Football Man