Two Rooms And A View: 35 - A Notorious Year
...The terrible winter also extended the football season until June and I recall that it ended with the so-called 'Match of the Century'. This was a special Great Britain versus Rest of Europe match at Hampden Park to celebrate the return of international peace-time football. The home team won 6 -1. Just before the game, Wilf Mannion, the Middlesborough and England inside forward, went on strike as a protest at the low fees footballers received for international matches. (The previous year all footballers had threatened to strike for a minimum wage of £7 per week.) He lost his lonely protest...
Robert Owen recalls the winter of 1947, the worst of the century.
To read earlier chapters of Robert's vividly recounted life story please click on Two Rooms And A View in the menu on this page.
I remember 1947 as a notorious year, with its hot, dry summer and long, cold winter. Records indicate that snow fell somewhere in Britain every day from 22nd January to 17th March. This, with a long freeze, caused major transport problems and an extreme shortage of coal. At Reed Street the snow literally came up the front stairs and I got the blame. The problem was a defective lock on the front door. We could never be sure when it was locked and on this occasion, it wasn't. During the night a gale blew the door open and the snow up the stairs. The first we knew of it was when some kind docker, on the way to work next morning, knocked us up to tell us the good news. As I was the last person to close the door, I got the blame and the job of clearing the snow.
About the same time, another part of our house literally fell down. Ever since moving into our Reed Street flat, the top half of the nine-foot wall at the bottom of the back stairs had always leaned outwards. This had been reported to the landlord via the estate agent who collected the rent, but no action was ever taken. The rough winter of 1947 convinced the wall it was time to fall. Anybody using the tap in the back yard at the time could have been killed. We lived with open access to all the elements before the wall was urgently rebuilt a few days later.
The yard water tap was continually frozen during the early months of 1947. Every day we used to attempt to de-freeze the tap with boiling water, at the same time being careful not to burst the supply pipe. Once it was working, every receptacle in the house was filled with water to keep us going to the following day. On one occasion, we couldn't get the frozen tap to work and Mrs Willey, who had the luxury of an indoor tap in her kitchen, came to our rescue. On another occasion, we burst the tap, had too much water and a frozen yard.
The terrible winter also extended the football season until June and I recall that it ended with the so-called 'Match of the Century'. This was a special Great Britain versus Rest of Europe match at Hampden Park to celebrate the return of international peace-time football. The home team won 6 -1. Just before the game, Wilf Mannion, the Middlesborough and England inside forward, went on strike as a protest at the low fees footballers received for international matches. (The previous year all footballers had threatened to strike for a minimum wage of £7 per week.) He lost his lonely protest. Fifteen years later, most footballers in the country took up Mannion's stance via the historic High Court case – Eastham v Newcastle United. This freed the players from the so-called 'slavery' system of contract and a maximum wage of £20 per week.
