Eddie Hapgood Footballer

Lynne Hapgood

Description

Eddie Hapgood, Footballer is the extraordinary story of a young unknown from Bristol who became Arsenal and England captain and a national hero, in the dark days of the 1930s. His impact is so enduring that when the millennium dawned, the public voted him one of the greatest sportsmen of the century. That glorious legacy was painfully achieved. Hapgood considered football an art and played it joyously as part of a team, but he struggled when politics, class and money threatened to undermine him and corrupt football. By the late 1930s, the ugly shadows of fascism, Nazism and looming war were bearing down on the beautiful game. Hapgood found himself in a public fight for justice and respect, while behind the scenes he protected his family with dedication, love and humour. In this gripping memoir, his daughter Lynne Hapgood pulls together the various threads - success, celebrity, tragedy and vindication - to reveal the real Eddie Hapgood. She examines the nature of sporting greatness and its impact on fans and family.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 17 janvier 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781801502122
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2022
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Lynne Hapgood, 2022
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Print ISBN 9781801500494
eBook ISBN 9781801502122
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Contents
Introduction
Preface
1. A Suitcase of Stories
2. Beginning with Bristol
3. Blue Skies and Red Horizons
4. Becoming Eddie Hapgood
5. England v Italy 1933 and 1934
6. Changes at Arsenal 1933-1935
7. Highs and Lows at Arsenal 1935-1937
8. England v Germany 1935 and 1938
9. And Then There s Eddie Hapgood
10. War-Torn Lives
11. The Ghost of Eddie Hapgood
12. Becoming a Football Manager
13. Dreaming of Bath
14. A Case of Libel and Slander
15. The Arsenal Was My Heritage
16. Weymouth and Elsewhere
Acknowledgements
Selected Bibliography
Photos
In memory of our parents
Eddie and Maggie Hapgood
who gave all their children the
great gift of loving security
What does it feel like seeing your dad
up there? Samir Singh, the Arsenal
community officer, asked me, gesturing
upwards to the vast mural of Arsenal
legends embracing the Emirates
Stadium. I hesitated. I m not sure; it s
very hard to understand.
Introduction
Perhaps because I was born after he had finished playing, I could never quite grasp the simple fact that Eddie Hapgood, captain of Arsenal and England in the 1930s and whose name is indelibly recorded in football history, was my father. I always knew he was special but I also knew that I shared him with many unknown people who also thought he was special. As I grew up, the stories he told, the discussions I half heard and intriguing family conversations filtered through to me. Even so, for a long time the life of my parents remained a multi-piece jigsaw puzzle without a picture. As an adult, when I decided to try and make sense of it, I had to start at the beginning. I collected together the fragments I knew, I researched history books and club records, I read tales and recollections of fans from the past, autobiographies and comments of team-mates. I trawled through journalists accounts and opinions, football programmes, contemporary football biographies and the almost infinite resource of the press past and present. I hunted for anything and everything that would bring what was special about my father into the present.
I was anxious that such piecemeal information should not end up simply as a collection of random anecdotes. What happened was quite the opposite. From the heap of loosely connected bits and pieces emerged a personality whose consistency and integrity were remarkably sustained through a period of profound personal and social change and whose values are just as relevant to sport today. As I read and listened to what everyone else had to say and what had happened during the tumultuous years of the 1930s and 40s, the famous footballer began to connect with the father I remembered. The defender so often applauded for his passion and commitment on the pitch brought into focus the equally passionate and committed defender of his personal and family values. For him, the two worlds were one and the same.
It can seem that his public story stopped when the football stopped. That isn t true. When Arsenal moved into their new stadium in 2006, it was to the images and words of my father and to those of the great players of the past that the club turned to revitalise its identity. In a very different present, the whole story is now held only in my younger brother s memory and mine. My older brother Tony and my older sister Margot died before they could share this project with us. I have done my best to keep faith with them. As I wrote, they were always in my mind jostling to insert what we talked about, the memories we shared, what I imagined or sensed were their points of view.
Too often the story of great sportsmen and women of the past is reduced to their sporting record while the identity of those who embodied it is forgotten. I want to share Eddie Hapgood s whole story with you: footballer, father - and defender.
Lynne Hapgood
Preface
One morning my father woke to find the world bathed in a yellowish glow. He also found he couldn t speak, or rather what he tried to say emerged as incoherent, unformed sounds. I don t know what other difficulties he may have encountered; he told me only fragments of that morning encased in amber. Somehow he got dressed and went downstairs. He said nothing to my mother but, knowing that something was wrong, he took himself off to the nearest doctor. Did he walk, did he drive? I don t know how he managed it, but he somehow found himself in the consulting room of a doctor he had never met before.
Whatever the doctor s initial question was, the answer was only stumbling noises and ugly guttural sounds.
The next question was, Are you drunk? At which point he was able to form a word that encapsulated a life, a belief and a way of being, and was pronounced - completely and audibly.
Footballer.
Maybe for the doctor the word was enough. Maybe he would have been surprised to find that his patient, who couldn t speak, had indeed spoken, but he wouldn t have understood the significance of the word as a word. He would merely have heard three surprisingly clear syllables, that should not have been possible to pronounce, but were. Foot-ball-er, a word brought up from some deeply internalised realm of identity and spoken.
Footballer. Colours returned to normal, speech returned, and indeed, for a time, it seemed as if life reverted to normal, nearly normal. It was 1968. He was 60 years old.
On the stone that marks his grave, and which is now also our mother s, is inscribed one word: Footballer.
1
A Suitcase of Stories
The whole of our father s history, it seemed to us children, was held in two large leather suitcases, his informal archive. It never occurred to us to ask how a life lived for many years in the public eye could settle so easily into just two suitcases because then, in the 1950s, we had no idea our father was famous, let alone how famous or for how long. To us, the suitcases simply contained his props and, like a magician, he spun stories, fables, and dreams out of them.
The suitcases were extraordinary in themselves. Heavy brown leather with brass clip-snap closings, their corners damaged, their handles loose, the stitching unravelling. Faded travel labels hinting at exotic destinations had been scraped and torn leaving blue fragments which we tried to decipher, following the lines with curious fingers. Only Dad was strong enough to carry them.
Occasionally, on a winter evening, one or other of the suitcases would be retrieved from our mysterious spare room and opened on to the sitting room floor, spilling out photographs, scrapbooks, papers, and a glorious muddle of souvenirs, letters and newspapers. This usually happened in response to a request from somebody - a journalist, a fan or football historian as we later realised - for information or a particular photograph but it was also our opportunity to explore among the papers and to ask questions which we knew would trigger Dad s reminiscences. We children would settle down to listen expectantly to stories we had heard many times before, always familiar but always different. Dad was a sparkling raconteur. We were smiling before he even began to reminisce and we were helpless with laughter by the time the performance was under way. The more we laughed, the more he added to his stories so that we were always surprised by new details, a change of tone, the introduction of a new character energetically imitated, spellbound as our familiar room was transformed into a circus of wonderful events. Over the years, the stories seemed to expand - one story into another - until we believed we must surely have the whole story.
The time I am describing began when we moved to Bath in 1950. It seemed that in our confusing family history there were four of everything; four towns, four houses, four football clubs, four children. In fact, by the time we moved to Bath from Blackburn via Kettering and Watford there were only three. The fourth one was the oldest, our brother Tony, already 20 and out in the world, building his life and career in Burnley. Only Margot who was ten, my brother Mike who was three and me at seven moved into the house which was the nearest we ever got to a home. For us younger children it seemed that our life started right there in that house, there in Bath. We were too young to have a remembered past, just a few fragments that barely added up to memories. We didn t anticipate a future either, or at least nothing had been mentioned. Whatever the future held, it was somehow anchored here in this house, in Bath. Our parents moved in and organised their possessions, and we spilled out behind the removal men, happily flowing like water into every room, through doors and into the large garden with fields beyond. We flourished in the deep breath of relief our parents took. We felt them gather us close and for the first time in 11 years allow themselves to feel safe. They fostered that feeling and we enjoyed it for