For instance, on the evening of the World Cup Final there was a celebration dinner at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington High Street. Everyone was there: players and officials of the four semi-finalists, the World Cup organizing committee, the upper ranks of the Football Association. Everyone but the wives. The banquet was stag. In that era, not one of us found that at all remarkable and if Alf Ramsey said, ‘No wives’, then that was how it had to be. There was a wide gulf between managers and players in those days and not one of them would have questioned his decision. In our day we always did what we were told to do.
So we wives were herded into the Bulldog Chophouse in another part of the hotel. The only women allowed into the banquet were the official photographer, Sally Lombard, and her two assistants. One was Estelle Lombard, Sally’s niece. The other was Betty Wilde - who just happened to be my mother.
The explanation? Sally Lombard’s company, Jalmar, held the photographic concession at all the top London hotels. My mother was no photographer, but she and Sally were great, great friends. They went way back. As soon as it looked as if England would make the Final, the two of them hatched the idea between them. My mother kept it a tightly-guarded secret and Bobby and I were both astonished when she told us. What a coup! I wasn’t jealous - far from it. I thought my mother was brilliant to have got herself in.
I didn’t manage to set eyes on Bobby until around midnight, when photographers got us together for a picture on the roof terrace. Normally about as hot-headed as a snowman, that night he was a different man, wild with happiness and excitement, just radiating joy. The trophy was in his hands and I’m not sure who got kissed the more passionately, me or Jules Rimet.
As we left the hotel, I gasped - thousands of people were waiting outside just to get a glimpse of him. Bobby was so moved that he actually couldn’t speak. As for me, that was the moment when it really sank in how much he meant to the fans. Forget the Prime Minister and Prince Charles, forget John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger. That night, Bobby was the most famous man in England.
It was a real shame that there wasn’t a party laid on for the lads and the wives and girlfriends. It would have been lovely to celebrate together. Instead we all split up, with Bobby and I and a couple of the others heading for the Playboy Club. When we arrived everybody stood up and applauded. The atmosphere was just fizzing with electricity. Burt Bacharach was there with Victor Lownes, who ran the club and was Hugh Hefner’s business partner, and he asked Victor to introduce him to Bobby. All the bunny girls were crowding round taking pictures. It ended up with Bobby on stage singing Stevie Wonder’s ‘One, two, three’ -with hindsight, perhaps Geoff Hurst, the hat-trick hero, should have been up there singing that. And I had a song dedicated to me as well - ‘My Cherie Amour’. What a fantastic night.
We got back to the hotel at around 3 am and tumbled into bed, dazed with happiness and triumph. The next day everyone went to the ATV studios, where the team appeared on a show hosted by Eamonn Andrews, and after that we went back to our house in Gants Hill on the eastern outskirts of London. It was our first marital home and cost £3,850. We’d started saving up for it the minute we got engaged at Christmas 1960.
Everyone came to terms with the events of the weekend in their different ways. Geoff Hurst mowed the lawn, then washed his car, the same as he did every Sunday afternoon. Martin and Kathy Peters had gone home early after the banquet because they had just bought a new house and Kathy had dealt with the move on her own while Martin was away with the England squad preparing for the World Cup.
Jack Charlton, several sheets to the wind, famously woke up in a sitting room in Leytonstone, having spent the night on the sofa of a complete stranger. When he tottered outside the next morning, a Geordie voice said, ‘Hello, Jack!’ from over the garden fence. It was a lady from his home town of Ashington, down in London for the weekend to visit relatives.
And the most celebrated man in England and his wife? With our heads still in the clouds, we held a party for our friends and re-lived the day. But after the guests had gone, everything just felt a bit flat, to be honest. Bobby poured himself a lager and tried to settle down to watch television, while I cleared up the glasses and looked back on the last eight weeks.
I’d loved every minute of it, of course I had. It had been heady and exhilarating, but a bit crazy, too. And with Bobby away with the team most of the time, I hadn’t been able to share the fun with him. Now we were back to normality. It was time to come down off the clouds, I thought. I didn’t know whether I felt relieved or bereft. Both, perhaps.
Whatever I thought normality was, we weren’t back to it for long. I realized that when the telegram dropped onto the doormat a few days after the Final. It gave a date, followed by the message: PARTY STOP WOULD LOVE TO SEE YOU STOP LIONEL BART.
We were really excited and nervous. When we asked around, we found it was going to be a real showbiz party, so I went out to buy a new dress. It was green lace and knee-length. On the day I had my hair done specially, with a hairpiece that fixed on with an Alice band. Confident that I truly looked the part, I set off with Bobby to Lionel Bart’s house.
It was wonderful. I’d never been inside anything like it. The walls and ceiling of the guests’ cloakroom were all mirrored and the loo itself was set in a huge golden chair. You really could claim to be ‘on the throne’! Bobby and I were shown into a room full of guests. It was like walking into a photograph of a cross-section of Sixties glitterati.
Bobby and I weren’t complete hicks. We were living in an age when working-class people were starting to make a lot of money in fashion and showbiz. Football was part of their roots, so naturally he was one of their heroes. We’d already started to rub shoulders with some of his up-and-coming East London contemporaries - Terence Stamp, who came from Plaistow, the same stamping ground as Martin Peters, was one of his drinking buddies, and Kenny Lynch, the entertainer, had been a mate ever since they’d met at the Ilford Palais, in the days when Bobby was captain of England Schoolboys.
Then there was Dougie Hayward, the so-called ‘celebrity tailor’ in Mount Street, Mayfair. Dougie, who made suits for Michael Caine, Tony Curtis, Peter Sellers, Kirk Douglas and the racing driver Jackie Stewart among others, was another East End boy who was mad about football. I bought Bobby one of his bespoke green velvet smoking jackets.
Johnny Haynes, the last England captain but one before Bobby, had introduced us to the White Elephant, a private dining club in Curzon Street; it had been a favourite haunt of ours for a long time because Bobby was never interrupted by autograph-hunters there and we could enjoy a night out undisturbed. Because it attracted all the main stars of the time, we’d met Robert Mitchum, Sonny and Cher, and Sammy Davis Junior.
But this wasn’t an exclusive club we were in; it was a celebrity’s home. I quickly took in the presence of Tom Jones, Joan Collins, Anthony Newley, Alma Cogan, some of The Who, one of the Stones. The odd thing was that they were all sitting on the floor, though after a while I spotted an empty chair. By then, Bobby and I had had a couple of glasses of champagne for Dutch courage, so I clambered across all these famous people and sat down in it.
I had Joan Collins sitting on the floor on one side of me and Anthony Newley, her then husband, on the other.
‘Who is she?’ Joan Collins whispered to Anthony Newley as she looked up at me.
‘I don’t know,’ said Anthony Newley, ‘but I think she’s sweet.’
The penny dropped. ‘I’m not meant to be here,’ I thought, and tripped back to where I’d come from. I had suddenly realized that the throne might have been in the loo but the chair was the next best thing, and the king who was meant to sit on it was Bobby.
Bobby was the son of a gas-fitter and I’d been a junior secretary at Prudential Assurance. We’d always been in awe of these celebrities, but as far as they were