Alf Ramsey

Southampton

The regular Football League restarted in time for the 1946–47 season. Ramsey moved into club-owned lodgings in Southampton with a close friend from the army, Alf Freeman, an inside-forward who had also signed for the club. Ramsey started the season in the reserve team, selected at centre-forward, and scored in each of the first three games. After five matches, Dodgin and the club trainer Sydney Cann made a decision that changed the course of Ramsey's professional playing career: deciding that neither centre-half nor centre-forward truly suited him, they moved him to right-back. McKinstry calls this "exactly the right place for Alf", citing Ramsey's tactical knowledge and fine passing. A close master-and-pupil relationship developed between Ramsey and Cann, who had played at full-back for Torquay United, Manchester City and Charlton Athletic. During training sessions, the two had long discussions about tactics and individual techniques. "[Alf] wanted to learn about the game from top to bottom", Cann recalled; "I have never known anyone with the same quickness of learning as Alf Ramsey. He would never accept anything on its face value ... He was the type of player who was a manager's dream because you could talk about a decision and he would accept it and there it was, in his game." Ramsey made his full league debut on 26 October 1946, in a Second Division match against Plymouth Argyle at the Dell, replacing the injured regular right-back Bill Ellerington.…

Ipswich Town

Ramsey had made up his mind that he wanted to remain in football as a coach, but he had no relevant qualifications or managerial experience, bar a part-time coaching spell at London League club Eton Manor. While he spent the 1955 off-season coaching in Southern Rhodesia, Ipswich Town of the Third Division South received permission from Anderson to speak to Ramsey about signing him as player-manager. When Ramsey met the Ipswich hierarchy on his return from Africa, he refused to combine management with playing. "I told them I would only concentrate on one job", Ramsey later said; "it would be impossible to play with the players I would be coaching." This settled, Ipswich announced Ramsey's appointment as manager on 9 August 1955. Some of those who knew Ramsey had strong opinions about how he would manage. Wilf Grant, a former Southampton teammate of Ramsey's who was now on the training staff at Ipswich, commented: "He'll be good, but he will be the boss." Billy Wright, Ramsey's England teammate commented, "In appointing Alf to become their manager Ipswich Town paid a tremendous tribute to intelligent football—and footballers who think!" Ramsey joined Ipswich just after the club's relegation from the Second Division at the end of the 1954–55 season, the team's only year above the third tier up to that point. To quote McKinstry, Ipswich had neither "glittering pedigree or status" nor "strong footballing tradition". The club had joined the Football League…

Dagenham

Alfred Ernest Ramsey was born on 22 January 1920 at 6 Parrish Cottages, Halbutt Street in Dagenham, which was then an agrarian village in Essex, about 10 miles (16 km) east of central London. He was the third of five children, four boys and a girl, born to Herbert Ramsey, a manual labourer who worked a smallholding, kept pigs and drove a horse-drawn dustcart, and his wife Florence (née Bixby). Parrish Cottages lacked hot running water and electricity, and the only toilet was outside. Such conditions were typical of Dagenham during this period, although Ramsey's street gradually became something of an anachronism as he grew up. From 1921, London County Council transformed the area into the Becontree estate, a vast urban community that by 1934 was home to 120,000 people and the Ford Dagenham automobile factory. Parrish Cottages remained largely untouched: electricity was not installed until the 1950s, and even then, only with the reluctant approval of Ramsey's mother, who, according to a neighbour, was frightened of it. In the recollection of a childhood contemporary, Phil Cairns, the Ramsey house was "little more than a wooden hut". The young Alf Ramsey was described by his friend Fred Tibble as "a very quiet boy who really loved sport". In his 1952 autobiography Talking Football, Ramsey described "liv[ing] for the open air from the moment I could toddle", spending hours each day in the meadow behind the family cottage, playing ball games with his brothers.…

Ramsey was very sensitive about his personal background. He strove to mask his working-class Essex origins and to present himself as erudite and worldly, going so far as to adopt an accent that the journalist Brian Glanville called "sergeant-major posh". A widely held perception that Ramsey's accent had become more upper-class during his time as England manager fuelled speculation that he had received elocution lessons, and prompted constant joking from members of the England team who came from similar Essex or East London backgrounds, such as Bobby Moore and Jimmy Greaves. Rodney Marsh, a forward from the East End who played in Ramsey's England team from 1971 to 1973, later said:

Alf tended to speak in a very poncey plum-in-the-mouth way. It was all "Oh hello Rodney and how are you?". To me it was all complete bollocks. It was rumoured that Ramsey had Romany (or "gypsy") ancestors. Ramsey was sensitive about the suggestion and, according to one anecdote, seethed with fury when Moore saw some Romany caravans and joked that the manager should "drop in to see his relatives". The football journalist Ken Jones related that on one occasion, when Ramsey perceived Moore and Greaves to be mocking his accent on the team bus, he said he would "win the World Cup without those two bastards". Throughout his career as a professional footballer and for years afterwards, Ramsey claimed to be two years younger than he actually was, including in his ghosted autobiography, Talking Football,…