Portsmouth scored after half an hour, for which Swift blamed himself. There’d been a brief shower of rain, which normally would have prompted him to put his gloves on. But he’d peered up the other end to see Portsmouth’s keeper had left his in the back of the net. Not trusting his own judgement, Swift did, too, and paid for it when a shot across him from the right slithered through his fingers as he dived. In the dressing room at half-time, the Manchester City centre-forward, Fred Tilson, told Swift to stop looking so miserable about it. Tilson added he’d score twice in the second half, which he did. The second came with only four minutes to go. Suddenly Swift, aged nineteen, realised he might be on the point of winning a Cup Final.
The photographers sitting at the side of his goal began to count down the minutes and seconds for him. Seeing how tense he was, they may have been trying to be helpful. Equally, men of Fleet Street, they might have had their minds on the story. Swift started to lose control of his with about one minute remaining. With fifty seconds left he was thinking of his mother and if the Cup would take much cleaning. At forty seconds he worried whether the king would talk to him. At thirty seconds, Matt Busby smashed the ball into the crowd to waste time and a photographer shouted, ‘It’s your Cup, son’. As the whistle went he stooped to get his cap and gloves from the net, took a couple of steps out of it and ‘everything went black’.
Swift was the favourite of millions of young fans thereafter. Among them was my dad, listening to the game on the wireless. He was to leave school at the end of that term, a month before his fourteenth birthday. For Swift at nineteen to be in a cup-winning team was enough in itself to make him a Kids’ Own hero. His faint in the Wembley goalmouth only heightened this. Though he was a virtual Superboy of the day, he showed himself vulnerable to pressure like anyone else, a big kid after all. Laid out on the turf, he was brought round by cold water poured on his face and dabbed by the trainer’s sponge. He was helped to his feet and limped across the pitch and up the steps to the Royal Box to get his medal from George V. The king spoke to him through what Swift described as a ‘dizzy mist’ and, at greater length than was customary, asked how he was, told him he played well and wished him good luck. The king sent a message the following week, via the Lord Lieutenant of the County of Lancashire, inquiring after Swift’s health.
Throughout his career, Swift showed himself to be not only a large person, but also a large personality. He’d turn and wave to the crowd, acknowledge their shouts, even chat if the ball was at the other end. He applied an occasional flourish to his leaps or dives for the crowd’s benefit. These were ‘flash’, though within limits. A dive when you could keep your feet, or a punch when a catch was feasible, was not the thing. Swift’s principle, however, was that as long as it was safe, where was the harm in the bit of extra for effect?
Among British keepers, Swift pioneered the skills of throwing the ball, something he’d picked up from watching water polo. Crowds tended to feel short-changed by a keeper doing anything but clearing the ball out of his penalty area with a hefty boot. But Swift had enormous strength and huge hands – the length of the average person’s foot – with which he could pick up or catch a ball single-handed. He’d hurl it over half the length of the pitch, and guide it far more accurately than could be accomplished with a hopeful punt. An extrovert character, it was one of the ways he imposed himself on the game. Swift was generally good at making himself known, not least to referees whose decisions he felt unable to go along with. Against the football hierarchy, he also became a vociferous campaigner for players’ wages and conditions.
After his Cup medal, Swift’s club career reached another peak when Manchester City won the league in 1937. Runners-up were Charlton Athletic, whose goalkeeper, Sam Bartram, had a similar personality and style. Not quite of Swift’s physical dimensions, he was a tall and broad, red-haired character, who indulged in the flamboyant when opportunity arose. Much thanks to him, Charlton had climbed in successive seasons from the Third Division South, through the Second, to challenge for the First Division title itself. Swift and Bartram were identified as future rivals for a place in the England team and at one stage Bartram appeared the most likely contender. The season after Charlton ran Manchester City closely for the championship, he played for the Possibles against the Probables in an England trial.
Swift and Bartram had been born within weeks of each other a little before the start of the First World War. From, respectively, the industrial north-west and north-east, they grew up in regions feeling the worst of the post-war recession. The country’s mood was also steeped in memories of one awful conflict and the strengthening conviction that a worse one was on the way. The Great War had had the wonders of the trenches and ‘going over the top’; everyone knew the next war would bid goodbye to all that with mass aerial bombardment of the cities. Swift and Bartram were products of the widely-held view among ordinary people that there was little sane reaction but to laugh, make the best of it and pretend the worst was not going to happen. If ever the laughter had to be prompted a little, there were always characters around like Swift and Bartram to help its orchestration. Vaudeville keepers in their way, they played in response to popular demand.
In any of their off-duty pictures I later saw – team photos, head-and-shoulders portraits, or shots of them being introduced to one dignitary or another before a big game – they were always at least smiling. In accounts of their matches that I read or was told about, their presence dominated. Each was likely to rush from the keeper’s 6-yard box, to the edge or beyond the penalty area to clear the ball, forsaking their hands and heading it if necessary. This was a way of doing things much more familiar to keepers on the continent. It brought the keeper out of his remote condition and into closer touch with his team. Both Swift and Bartram were students of the style of Harry Hibbs – now nearing the end of his career – and sought advice from him on how it was all meant to be done. But notes taken, they moved far beyond the role of humble ‘custodian’.
Two weeks after my dad’s nineteenth birthday the war was declared, an occasion as stressful at that age as playing in the Cup Final. After listening to Chamberlain’s announcement, he went out in the back garden where his dad grew the vegetables and, as the phrase has it, broke down. His father followed and tried to help: ‘That’s OK, son, there’s nothing to worry about,’ he might have offered. ‘I passed through the Menin Gate and the various battles of Ypres. Nasty explosion at the Somme, of course, and this open hip wound still plays up. But I survived – when most of the Beds and Herts were wiped out, they made me sergeant major for a day till reinforcements arrived.’ But, in that moment, my Bedfordshire grandfather opted to stay quiet.
For two years my father’s bricklaying had him on such essential works as building the Tempsford aerodrome. A Stuka came for a few minutes one afternoon and strafed the hundred or so of them working up the sheer face of the cooling towers at Barford. The bombing of London had prompted my mum’s move to the country and they got married after he was called up into the Royal Signals. In Greenock he and several thousand others were put on ships which sailed west almost as far as Iceland. They weren’t told where they were going, up to the point the boats turned to plunge south. Through the Bay of Biscay the weather was so rough the convoy’s members were rarely in sight of each other. Maybe the conditions were a problem for the German U-boats as well. The next convoy out a fortnight or so later lost a third of its number. My dad’s ‘never saw a seagull’. Straight, more or less, from Sandy, Bedfordshire, he arrived at the Saharan fringes of North Africa, landing with the army in Algiers in 1942.
Across Algeria and Tunisia, the task of pushing back Rommel and his Afrika Korps allowed little opportunity for football or any other game but was carried out in a spirit not seen elsewhere in the war. The British troops viewed Rommel as a ‘good bloke’, a German but a fair one. This