In 1956, a 22-year-old Tony Book was playing at the top of my road for Frome Town in the old Western League. I never got to see him play in that unforgettably Somerset-muddied red and white kit because he moved up that year to the dizzy heights of his home town club Bath City. He was still at Bath in 1964 (aged 30!) by the time I was old enough to join The Badger’s Hill crowd. The crowd remembered him though. Then, as if by magic, in 1968 – one of so many other real-life British rags-to-riches fairy stories from those years - he was a star in the pages of my football annual as captain of a Manchester City team that had won the English football league and qualified for the European Cup. What’s more, his younger brother Kim had also risen significantly from Frome Town to be a football league goalkeeper at Bournemouth and Northampton.
This was an age of miracles – free school milk, full student grants, no tuition fees, workers’ rights; a functioning national health service, public ownership of major industries; full public transport; Richard Burton, the son of a miner and a barmaid, playing Hamlet at the RSC; Glenda Jackson, the Birkenhead daughter of a bricklayer and a cleaner, getting to RADA and the RSC. Not to mention John, Paul, George, Ringo, (Harry, Harold, Alfie, Vic, Joe, Frank, Billy, Glenda, Mary Q, Cilla, Lulu, Sandy, Twiggy…) When you get all that in your first twenty years, along with a World Cup and George Best, it’s a hard act to follow.
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