Manchester City reached the 1955 and 1956 Cup Finals with Bert Trautmann in goal. It had seemed a crazy decision by them to have a German keeper. Badly bombed in the war and with a large Jewish population, Manchester was not likely to feel well disposed towards him. Then, someone had to follow Frank Swift and, as England had found with Ditchburn, anything like a ‘normal’ goalkeeper would have had a tough job. No one would have been able to ‘do it like Frank could’. Manchester City’s first choice had been Alex Thurlow, who was taken ill and died of tuberculosis. Trautmann was drafted in, his one advantage that his nationality lowered the level of the crowd’s expectations. Anything good from a German was bound to be better than the fans had anticipated.
When he was a boy in Bremen in north Germany, Trautmann had joined the Hitler Youth. This was shocking to learn but, when you thought about it, not much different from my joining the 31st North London cubs over the canal bridge in Vincent Terrace. You went for the games, suffered the church parade every fourth Sunday, and tolerated the rigmarole of learning to fold the flag and not to fly it upside down. From our get-togethers, there was little or no grasp of any underlying mission.
Trautmann had been a paratrooper, my dad said, which was ‘very important’. Paratroopers were an elite force on either side, floating above the dirtiness of war. My dad’s brother Cecil was at Arnhem. Under fire and moving from house to house, he and a mate had stopped to shelter in a doorway. He heard a gurgling sound and turned to see the throat of his friend had been cut by shrapnel. I thought paratroopers were small men: my uncle was 5 feet 5 inches and, as a signwriter by trade, often found himself working at the extent of his ladder. Trautmann was tall, at 6 feet 2 inches. Short or long, you knew they were tough.
Trautmann was blown up in retreat from the Russian front, then later buried in rubble and injured in a bombing raid in France. Captured by the Americans when the Allies invaded Europe, he assumed he was going to be shot; armies on the move didn’t always want the bother of prisoners. Instead he was allowed to slip away, picked up almost immediately by the British and shipped to England in 1945. The prospect of seeing Germany again, he said, was only a dream: ‘es war ein Traum’. Yet he stayed on when the war finished. My mum had told me German prisoners had to be kept in captivity because they wanted to escape and get back and fight. Only one ever managed to get free and off the island. The Italians, in contrast, weren’t bothered. Those in Sandy were allowed to roam more or less free. They hadn’t wanted to go to war like the Germans. The fact Trautmann didn’t want to go home, I assumed, meant he must have been different.
He was blond like Bert Williams, though altogether more outgoing. In his photos he invariably smiled. My dad said he was a ‘good bloke’, like Rommel, one among the enemy who gave you hope. The Chief Rabbi of Manchester came out in support of him. As a keeper, he didn’t court acclaim and got down to the job. He was no showman, but he had an important element which was familiar. He engaged the crowd, waved and chatted to them from his goalmouth at the start of the game and even between opposition attacks. It was a direct echo of his predecessor Swift, who before the war had assured the crowd it’d be all right. Now after it, Trautmann seemed to be saying the same. He liked us and people liked him. Just before the 1956 Cup Final he became the first goalkeeper – leave aside the first foreigner, the first German – to be made footballer of the year.
When my dad got back from work on Saturday afternoons he sometimes took me to the cinema. On Cup Final day Moby Dick was on at the Carlton, beyond the Essex Road library by the tube near New North Road. By the time he was ready and we had passed by at my grandparents to say hello, the match was not far away from starting. Birmingham City and its veteran keeper Gil Merrick with his dark moustache were firm favourites. A German smiling cheerily at the future was cast as underdog. Arthur Caiger, the small man in a baggy suit who stood on the high wooden platform wheeled out on the pitch for the communal Wembley singing, was saying: ‘Now, Birmingham City fans don’t have a song of their own, so I’ve chosen one for them.’ He asked everyone to join in with ‘Keep Right on to the End of the Road’. The band in bearskins and red tunics struck up what sounded like the Funeral March. Televised Cup Finals were no substitute for something to go out for; I was happy to leave for the pictures.
Moby Dick kept just the right side of very frightening. Captain Ahab was the brooding, isolated type, fixed in his goal. He suffered a kind of death on the cross. His arms were out, strapped to the side of the whale by the harpoons and ropes. As it smashed in and out of the waves, its eye kept staring at the camera. My father liked the whirlpool the whale made at the end, which sucked everything into it, except the one person who survived to tell the story. It was clever how they achieved that effect, my dad said, with what was actually a large piece of concrete.
When we got back home Manchester City and Bert Trautmann had won 3–1, which was good. Trautmann had been injured quite badly near the end, but had played on, which was even better. There were the photos in the Evening News and in the papers my grandad brought back from Fleet Street next morning. Trautmann was being led from the field at the end, head down, hand clasped to the left side of his face. The front of his jersey was soaked from the water splashed over him by the trainer with his sponge and bucket. Another showed Trautmann diving at the feet of Birmingham inside-left, Peter Murphy. His hands were gripping the ball on the ground but his bare neck was close to Murphy’s outstretched left leg and his right, about to follow through. It must have been that one that had caught him. The clash had happened fifteen minutes from the end and Trautmann spent the rest of the game staggering around his goalmouth in agony. One newspaper was amazed how he came through ‘this alarming situation’. We heard he had been taken for X-rays; later, that he had broken his neck and nearly died.
If Trautmann was well-regarded before the match, there was no measuring his popularity after it. There could be no clearer example of a keeper who ‘took it’, which was precisely what the best British keepers were meant to do. Yet this one was a German and people loved him for it. He hardly seemed foreign at all and was really ‘one of us’. Also, it only added to his attraction that he wasn’t. He could have had a British passport if he’d asked and would have certainly played for England. For some reason obviously not connected with the quality of their keepers, Germany failed to select him. But Trautmann didn’t seek to become a British citizen. As he said, that wasn’t what he was. My dad told me this with approval and it met with national acclaim. Had he applied to become British, he’d have been seen as toadying up. His only reward in terms of international honours was that he was chosen to captain the English Football League in a couple of matches. His lasting achievement was to inspire a national change of mood. In the future we might have to get along with these people and Trautmann showed it was possible. He did more than any other person for post-war reconciliation between Britain and Germany. In passing, he also performed the almost unbelievable trick of remaining an outsider while winning the acceptance of the crowd.
The Brazilians had been in the stadium watching the Cup Final. They were in town for the first game between Brazil and England the following Wednesday. I spent a long time over reports of the match in the papers. They were the first team of top standard England had played that had a number of black players. They came from somewhere that was almost of another world, yet at the same time quite familiar. If you looked at an atlas, Brazil was on the border of British Guiana, one of the outlying pink bits of the British Empire. In a sense, the Brazilians were our next-door neighbours The way we went about things, however, didn’t bear a great deal of resemblance. You couldn’t tell exactly from the pictures in the papers that their team was in yellow shirts and light blue shorts, but their outfits were obviously much trimmer than ours. The shirts had collars. These weren’t limp and floppy but looked like they might have been ironed, as if the shirt could double for use on a summer Sunday School outing. The goalkeeper Gilmar had a collar poking out from under his top and wore an all light-grey outfit that must have been specially tailored for him. His wasn’t a jersey he gave back at the end of games, with a view to it being baggily handed down through the keeping generations. On it was the globe, dotted with stars, of the Brazilian flag. It was all a bit pretty-pretty compared with what we were used to.
The reports said the