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A reporter trying to reach to the heart of what football is. Arthur Hopcraft's The Football Man
Dave Russell
a a

Department of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, UK Available online: 06 Sep 2010

To cite this article: Dave Russell (2010): A reporter trying to reach to the heart of what football is. Arthur Hopcraft's The Football Man , Soccer & Society, 11:5, 677-694 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2010.497372

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Soccer & Society Vol. 11, No. 5, September 2010, 677694

A reporter trying to reach to the heart of what football is.1 Arthur Hopcrafts The Football Man2
Dave Russell*
Department of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, UK
d.c.russell@leedsmet.ac.uk DaveRussell 0 500000September 11 2010 Original Francis 1466-0970 Francis Soccer and (print)/1743-9590 (online) 10.1080/14660970.2010.497372 FSAS_A_497372.sgm Taylor &Article 2010 Society

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This article examines the origins, content and overall significance of Arthur Hopcrafts The Football Man: People and Passions in Football, published in 1968. Notable for its polished style and laconic humour, and packed with rich detail 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 critical moment in its modernization. However, the book is also seen here as underpinned by an often-romantic master narrative, rooted in both Hopcrafts personal worldview and wider contemporary discourse about the northern English working class, that celebrates football as the peoples game, understood fully only by its working-class adherents. Only a modest success commercially, the book was highly acclaimed by critics, although some, notably Brian Glanville, the product of very different cultural context, found it problematic. Despite all potential criticisms, however, it is argued that the book deserves its status as a landmark text, setting a standard for literary excellence among football writers and serving as a source of inspiration for the nascent world of football academia.

Few sports books, and certainly very few focused on football, carry the reputation of Arthur Hopcrafts The Football Man: People and Passions in Football, first published in 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 so many 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 to challenge the books reputation indeed, rather the opposite but a work of this stature 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 twentieth 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 only modestly. The initial hardback run was for 6,000 copies with a retail price of 30 shillings
*Email: d.c.russell@leedsmet.ac.uk
ISSN 1466-0970 print/ISSN 1743-9590 online 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14660970.2010.497372 http://www.informaworld.com

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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, initial orders were slow and the chairman of Collins expressed surprise that some of the booksellers 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 February 1970 and the following year saw a revised Penguin edition. Overall, sales of this paperback 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 the book 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 the FA Book for Boys was selling a similar number in its final problematic years in the early 1970s, places Hopcrafts sales 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 communication with his peers. He left at 16 to become a journalist on a local newspaper (where reporting 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 rival Barnsley Chronicle, 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 courage in Barnsley in the 1950s.11 Obvious talent took him to the national stage via Daily Mirror in 1956 and then The 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 for The Sunday Times, and an increasing number of the highly regarded match reports for The Observer that 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 45,000 miles 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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deprivation.12 The Great Apple Raid, an autobiography-cum-childhood memoir, appeared in 1970, its style hinting at a turn toward creative writing. Although he continued to cover football into the early 1970s, with his World Cup 70 (1970), written 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 and critical success and effectively opened a new career. He also proved to be exceptionally 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 an increasingly 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 Jerry Weinsteins 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 football and the foreign challenge, produced writing and analysis of a quality rarely achieved with any consistency in earlier decades.15 Glanville, a journalist and novelist whose football fiction, The Rise of Gerry Logan (1963), was another significant moment in the development of football writing, and Young, an academic musicologist by profession, were particularly highly regarded.16 The latters often highly lyrical studies such as Football; Facts and Fancies (1950), The Appreciation of Football (1951) and The Football Year (1956) deserve recognition for being among the earliest 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 found The Football Man to be not yet quite in the class of Young and Glanville.17) John Moynihans Soccer Syndrome, published in 1966, was another work praised for its sharp observation and thoughtful and evocative 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 football exhibition 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 is acclaimed Sports Journalist of the Year, and the greatest mass audience of all has to put up with the tawdry verbal imagery of Kenneth Wolstenholme, standards are obviously not at the level of the game itself.18

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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. Hopcraft appears 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 centreforward Derek Dooley, one of whose nicknames this indeed was. Other, rather ponderous chapter titles and sub-headings such as Baggy Pants Solomon The Referee, 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 composed of 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 legitimization of middle-class interest in football, not least via the efforts of the quality press, 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 explain something of footballs compulsion in the main in this book I am more concerned with people than with technique. Some readers are going to be offended by the omission of some of their favourite names in football. But this is not a gallery of heroes. I am a reporter trying to reach to the heart of what football is. 23

Although the resultant work contained a small amount of historical material, it has been well described by Anthony King as constituting a handbook for the consumption 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 focused above 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 the foreign 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, for example, detailed data on the wages and terms of contract before and after the New Deal of 19611963 that abolished the maximum wage and fundamentally reformed the 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, for example, begins with a study of George Best, the extreme example of the modern football star, before turning, albeit with frequent diversions, to the construction of a lineage that considers the changing role, status and meaning of the professional footballer. This runs from Stan Cullis and Stanley Matthews, playing in an inter-war England 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 mans neighbourhood.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 characteristic 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 public school 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 seriousness, weighing and polishing every phrase. This intensity resulted in both great clarity and literary richness.28 He was expert at capturing the complexities and idiosyncrasies of players physique and technique. Matthews is described as a slightly humped, 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 a sprinter 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 crush barriers down at the bottom of them, having arrived hours early to establish a position of comparative safety rather than submit to the baby protection of the boys pen, they are more evocative of the wonder of childhood than even old comic-strips are. They are hideously uncomfortable. The steps are as greasy as a school playground lavatory in the rain. 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 flag a man or a boy, and sometimes a girl, can be lifted off the ground in the crush as if by some massive, soft-sided crane grab and dangled about for minutes on end, perhaps never getting back to within four or five steps of the spot from which the monster made its bite. In this incomparable entanglement of bodies and emotions lies the heart of the fans 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 which does much to maintain interest and pace.31 He was adept at both comic visual description, 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 boardroom is an enviable place to a man committed to his town and to the game, and the delightful 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, as in his eulogy to Bobby Charlton, one of the very few players who can bring rheumyeyed sportswriters to their feet in a press box, and through the more generalized

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enthusiasm that permeates his writing. This ability to be, in Observer colleague Ian Hamiltons words, both expert and awestruck, to combine journalists know-how with 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 to the 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 recently those 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 by opponents 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 shortsighted 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 the family 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 exaggerated press reports deliberately intended to shock rather than inform and thereby creating the impression of a Saturday afternoon scene somewhere between the storming of the Bastille and a civil rights march in Alabama.37 He rejected any significant links 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 policing, screening and searching at turnstiles and extensive bans as methods of control.38 Perhaps his most original contribution, given the eventual drive toward all-seater stadiums 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 kill off 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 debates that 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 and midlands. 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 urban psyche, as much a common experience to our children as are uncles and school No player, manager, director or fan who understands football, either through his intellect or his nerve-ends, ever repeats that piece of nonsense trotted out mindlessly by the fearful now and again which pleads, After all, its only a game. It has not been only a game for eighty years: not since the working class saw it as an escape route out of drudgery and claimed it as their own.40

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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 way of 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 superseded by 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 insistence 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 a watcher. 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 oftquoted passages.
The stadiums were planted where the supporters lived, in among the industrial mazes of factories and hunched, workers houses. The Saturday match became more than mere diversion 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, by association with the home team, positive identity could be claimed by muscle and by goals. To win was personal success, to lose another clout from life. Football was not so much an opiate of the people as a flag run up against the gaffer bolting his gates and the landlord armed with his bailiffs.44

His description of the public response to the 1966 World Cup is similarly flecked with a 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 brick and scurrying wind and workers faces clenched tight against the adversity of short-time

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working and the memory of last months narrow miss on the pools; our best football is not played in the bland England, that Camelot of the advertisements in overseas magazines. The World Cup was carnival. Here was the apotheosis of the game which lives like 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 the Manchester boys supposed to be pretty good? That very tall chap had a brother in the side, hadnt he? They were there in their rugby-club blazers, and with their Home Counties accents and obsolete prejudices, to see the successors of the Battle of Britain pilots whack the Hun again it has always nagged at my fond recollection of that day that a lot of my companions might have as well been at Wimbledon. 46

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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 Youngs Football Year had 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, literature 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 event thousands 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 people as 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 specialist, 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 of talent 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) commitment to 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 be read 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 celebration 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 the south, Hopcrafts football men speak very much in northern accents. No featured player was southern-born or based. Draft material suggests that Chelsea centreforward, 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 planning in 1966 and writing in 196768 made him an inevitable and irresistible replacement.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 a railway 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 northern 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 occupation 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 the Economists anonymous contributor, were not entirely happy that 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 relative ease of travel from his Stockport home: after his mammoth journeys for Born to Hunger, this would hardly be surprising. Again, his Observer match reports were almost exclusively northern in location and this was probably the football world he knew 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 in Staffordshire, a county which often falls outside the English north as constructed in many definitional exercises, he appears to have seen himself as a northerner one colleague 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 The Mosedale Horseshoe, about a group of Lake District walkers, The Panel (1971), dealing with professional crown green bowling, and Said 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 a cultural 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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World Cup. While it is unhelpful to push for too exalted a place for The Football Man, it can and should be seen as belonging to a set of works usually situated at various points 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 book form, A.L. Lloyds Folk Song in England and 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 weight and 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 perceptively 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 but earthy sensuality of the terraces.62 They also identify a willingness to use ethnographic insights from football to provide a moral commentary on working-class culture, again in the manner of Hoggart.63 As they argue, Hopcrafts disappointment that 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 Denis Hill-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 life like 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.65 The Football Man 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 from 1957, 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 northern moment. 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, timebound cultural context arguably constrained its compass and to some extent bound it forever to the period of its composition. Critical reception However modest the books commercial success, it was undoubtedly a critical one. It was 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 football 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 pleasure of 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 Observer colleague, 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 international, 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, described by 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 as one 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 ever been 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 tensions within 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 was far from universally critical and the reasoning attributed to it were, in fact, inaccurate. 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 professional rivalry may have fuelled the criticism, it is quite tempting to see it as the product of a meeting between two writers who represented antithetical cultural positions within 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 scholarship boy with strong sympathies for the northern working-class fan.74 This interpretation 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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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 selfconscious prose the best popular journalists, like Roland Allen, were writing twenty years ago in books like All 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 interviews which actually underline his lack of innate understanding for, and intimate knowledge 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 interviewing 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 anthropology and it was here that Hopcraft received his most severe and arguably most justifiable criticism. There was undoubtedly plentiful recognition of his efforts, with John Arlott finding echoes of Beyond 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 shortcomings in this direction while, more explicitly, Ian Hamilton commented unfavourably on the books vague speculative lunges and sociological romanticising.77 The most trenchant remarks were Charlie Gilletts in New 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 of football, or even simply to enclose those responses within a discussion of the economic context which controls the art. This is the time of the amateur sociologist, and here he comes again.78

For Gillett, the weaknesses of this particular amateur were most apparent in his chapter 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 strongly with it, yet is himself irretrievably middle class. So his apologia for crowd violence is reminiscent of a communist belief in the essential goodness of the working class; his admiration for their stoic endurance of intolerable discomfort in the stands leads him to oppose a design for stadia which would give everybody a seat.

To the charge of middle-class intellectual romanticization and idealization of working-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 which Matthews, 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 criticisms, 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 distinguishing 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 claimed by 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 culture of the northern working-class. As a result, Hopcraft offered many large, undefended and unquestioned generalizations which have weathered badly. His claim in the opening paragraph that footballs sudden withdrawal from the people would bring deeper disconsolation than to 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, professional 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 the passage 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 Barclay could 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 definitional 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 in various 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 far less 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 illustrating the authors similar view of the games social dynamics. However, as fellow football historian Tony Mason pointed out, for all the pioneering value of Walvins work, 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 exercise control. 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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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 disciplines within 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. They were 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 of The Football Man, stressing in particular the need to place class at the centre of discussion. A revised version was eventually to appear in the Journal 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 the limits 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 following 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) and Sportsworld 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 within working-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 Critchers case 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 the latters 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

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physical appearance and cultural aspirations Stanley Matthews, with the sadly impassive face a representative of his age and class, brought up among thrift and the 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 scholarly 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 distinctive 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 both precursor 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 are disenchanted 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 no Fever Pitch, no publishing 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 Glory Game (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 British 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 within the 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 an especially astute and sympathetic observer of a game at a critical moment in the reshaping 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.

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Notes
1. 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

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

in conjunction with the Sports Literature Association, in September 2008. I am grateful to delegates for comments. I am also especially grateful to Richard Holt for loan of materials and 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 and championing of those papers. A Sportsmans Book Club edition appeared in 1970, followed by a slightly revised edition for Penguin in 1971. The 1968 text was reproduced by Sportspages in 1988 and Aurum Press in 2006. The Guardian, November 26, 2004; The Independent, November 26, 2004; The Times, November 27, 2004. Letter to Hopcraft, August 5, 1968, AHP 2/2. Letter from Walter Collins to Hopcraft, December 16, 1968, AHP 2/2. 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 June 1977, which, given that only 2,000 were in stock seven years earlier, perhaps suggests a very limited later print run. Royalty statements, AHP 2/2. 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 other than respectable levels. See, for example, royalty statement for 1988 edition, AHP 2/3. The book sold just 220 copies in 1992, the year of Fever Pitch. Glanville, Football Memories, 55; Russell, Interesting and Instructive Reading?, 246. Hopcraft, Apple Raid, 311. Foreword to Hopcraft, Football Man (London: Aurum edition, 2006). Hopcraft, Born to Hunger, x. The Guardian, November 26, 2004. On football literature more widely, Russell, Interesting and Instructive Reading?; Woolridge, These Sporting Lives. The best tool for approaching this writing is the indispensable Seddon, Football Compendium. On Gerry Logan, see Hill, Sport and the Literary Imagination. Eric Todd, The Guardian, November 29, 1968. The Guardian, July 12, 1966. See AHP 2/2. This paragraph draws largely on Hopcrafts typescript working notes dated October 31, 1966, AHP 2/2. Ibid. Russell, Football and the English, 197. Coverage of the game in the broadsheets had been growing since at least the late 1950s, however. 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 Denis Hill-Wood. The papers magazine featured extensive extracts from the book on November 17, 1968, the day before publication. Hopcraft, Football Man, 10. King, End of the Terraces, 186. Hopcraft, Football Man, 227. Hopcraft, Football Man, 408. Ibid., 30, 25, 86. Ibid., 103, 143, 152. The Guardian, November 26, 2004. Hopcraft, Football Man, 26, 84. Ibid., 189. 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. Hopcraft, Football Man, 200, 140. 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 the second edition. Hopcraft, Football Man, 18. Hopcraft, Football Man (1971 ed.), 202. Hopcraft, Football Man (1968 ed.), 141, 165, 23943.

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37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

693

57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

Ibid., 180. Ibid., 187, 189. Ibid., 18990. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 201, Ibid., 120, 57, 90. Ibid., 197. Ibid., 223. Ibid., 219. Ibid., 222. Young, Football Year, back jacket. Hopcraft, Football Man, 910. Ibid., 219. Ibid., 221. See also, for example, p. 22, where football is described as the peoples art, Ibid., 51. Hopcraft, Football Man (1971 ed.) 14952. Another was Alan Ball. Hopcrafts typescript working notes dated October 31, 1966, Hopcraft papers, AHP 2/2. Hopcraft, Football Man, 199. Russell, Looking North. 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 and The Observer, November 24, 1968, in which Ian Hamilton detected a particular Sheffield Wednesday bias. On definition, Russell, Looking North, 1418; The Guardian, November 26, 2004. 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, 1963 on whippet racing. Scripts, working papers and critical reviews for all of Hopcrafts plays are to be found in the University of Salford Archive. Laing, Representations of Working-class Life. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 13. Hughson, Inglis, and Free, Uses of Sport, 1605. Ibid., 161. Ibid., 162. Ibid., 162; Hopcraft, Football Man, 184. Hopcraft, Football Man, 153. Russell, Looking North, 28. Interview in Lancashire Evening Telegraph, March 31, 1972. 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. The Observer, November 24, 1968; Hopcraft, Football Man, 7481. The Sunday Times, December 22, 1968. The comment was made in reference to The Mosedale Horseshoe. The Guardian, March 24, 1971. Undated and unreferenced cutting in AHP/2/2; The Times, November 14, 1968; The Economist, December 21, 1968. Letter from Richard Johnson to Hopcraft, February 19, 1969, AHP 2/2. For his rich autobiography, Glanville, Football Memories. The Sunday Times, December 22, 1968. Undated and unreferenced cutting in AHP/2/2. The Observer, November 24, 1968. New Society, November 28, 1968. Hopcraft, Football Man, 1914 Ibid., 9. Independent, December 1, 1988. Mason, Football and the Historians, 1378. Letter from Chick Korr to Hopcraft, December 2, 1975, AHP2/3. Korr, West Ham United. Letter from Chuck Korr to Arthur Hopcraft, November 12, 1986, AHP2/3. Critcher, Football Since the War.

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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.

References
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Bose, M. The Sporting Alien. English Sports Lost Camelot. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1996. Critcher, C. Football Since the War. In Working Class Culture. Studies in History and Theory, 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 28, 4 (2008): 62040. Young, P. Football Year. London: Phoenix Sports Books, 1956.