Tommy Banks, who played for Bolton Wanderers and England in the 1950s, did both - but says he could have made a lot more money mining.
At a time when English football was very narrowly defined – rooted firmly in working-class communities and almost purely domestic in terms of its labour force – coal-mining was an industrial powerhouse that churned out black gold and fit young men by the score.
Numerous collieries had football teams and it followed that men whose day jobs involved great physical toil should take with them onto the pitch the same muscular approach that was part of their everday lives underground.
In the 1930s and immediately after the war professional football was chock full of former miners. As an alternative to working deep down in cramped conditions, making a living above ground playing a game they loved and that still allowed them, encouraged them even, to celebrate their manly strength must have seemed too good to be true.
The fact that hundreds of them went back to mining once they were no longer fit to kick, chase and head a ball is an indication of quite how little they prospered financially from football (no more than a rigidly enforced maximum wage of £20 a week up until 1961).
Tommy Banks, Bolton Wanderers’ left back for much of the 1950s, even suggests he would have been better off had he not left his job at Mosley Common Colliery on the Lancashire Coalfield to play professional football.
Banks says: ‘If I’d have stayed in the pit I’d have been on a lot more money once I’d have come up to the [coal]face. Footballers’ pay didn’t keep up with the times.’
Typically, but not exclusively, the miners made excellent defenders. They might have had a reputation for possessing the nimbleness and turning circle of a horse-drawn dustcart – a description that Banks, noted for his speed, objects to in his case – but were mightily effective at stopping opposition forwards.
Gradually, a shift took place. The ethos of the mining community and its approach to playing football survived for some time. But fathers, particularly those who knew the realities of working down a mine, steered sons who might have a future as a professional footballer towards the less hazardous opportunities provided by the expanding jobs market.
‘My dad worked as a miner,’ Bill Leivers, a Manchester City player for 11 years from 1953, says. ‘The mine was two-foot high where he lay on his stomach getting coal. From where I come from most of the people in work there at that time were miners, but my dad threatened me if I ever showed any inclination to join them.’
Not all heeded such warnings, though. Banks, for example. He still saw going down a pit as part of his heritage.
Old man Banks had not wanted Tommy, the youngest of his seven children, to be a ‘pitmon’. But on a bright summer’s morning sitting in his front room in Farnworth, Banks tells me fondly about his time underground.
At 88, Banks, who played six times for England, remains a cult figure, and not just in the Bolton area. His wife, Rita, points out two envelopes on the table beside his armchair. Both contain requests for his autograph, one is from Germany. His appeal is conveyed in the answer he gives to my question about what it was like to be a miner. ‘Just normal,’ he says.
As a hard but fair defender, Banks’s manifest enjoyment of the physical life endeared him to those from the same background who watched him play. He had all the banter, too. He used it to turn a stern rebuke from a ref or a glare from a victim of one of his heavy tackles into a moment of shared laughter. ‘Every time I see Tommy I try to think of something funny to say,’ Bobby Charlton once said, ‘but he always beats me to it.’
Banks gives a glimpse of his ‘just normal’ life underground when he describes how each working day began: ‘You had to be there at the seven o’clock sharp. If you missed the cage they wouldn’t let you go down and you’d be docked a day’s wages.
‘And when you did get down there very quickly you couldn’t see a thing. It was all the dust thrown up by the men breaking up the slabs that had been cut overnight from the coalface.’
‘It sounds a hellish existence to me,’ I say.
‘Not for people from around here it weren’t,’ he says, grinning.
This is an edited extract from When Footballers Were Skint by Jon Henderson / @hendojon published by Biteback.