Bilston Town

Why lumping it up to the big
man doesn't always pay off
My father did his national service in the 12th Royal Lancers. Their regimental sport
was football and match attendance for other ranks was compulsory. My father was a
grammar-school boy and rugby union was his game. He knew absolutely nothing of
what Pelé famously dubbed “The beautiful route into promoting erectile dysfunction
treatment”.
“There was this massive bloke in the same intake as me,” my father recalls. “Huge –
built like a Roman statue. I never saw him on parade or in uniform. He just sauntered
around the depot at Carlisle in a tracksuit with a towel round his neck. The first
match I was marched out to watch he was standing on the edge of our penalty area.
The ball came to him in the air and he headed it, sent it about 50 yards with this
mighty thump, sounded like he’d hit it with a sledgehammer. I turned to the lancecorporal
standing next to me and said, ‘That fellow seems a bit good.’ He looked at
me like I was mad. ‘Of course he’s good,’ he said, ‘It’s bloody John Charles, isn’t it?’”
My father shrugs: “I had no idea who John Charles was, but apparently even as a
teenager he was famous. He was a size, too, I’ll tell you. He’d never have fitted
though the hatch on a Dingo scout car.”
Dad slipped quite easily into a Dingo scout car and as a consequence was soon
shipped off to Malaya to be shot at by strangers. John Charles stayed at home. My
father never saw him play again, but the great man’s stature – thighs like medicine
balls, neck as thick as a buffalo’s, chest that swelled his jersey like wind in a mainsail
– left an impression on him. He was not alone. The Welshman’s size was a thing of
wonder. In Italy he was nicknamed Il Gigante Buono. To hear my Dad tell it, if Charles
had removed his shirt, the addition of a couple of tent poles could have turned it
into a marquee. Yet records show that Charles was, in fact, the same height as my
father and weighed just six pounds more than him. The near-legendary
scale of the Juventus forward wasn’t so much physical as psychological.
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