Bill Slater won three Football League titles with Wolverhampton Wanderers, an FA Cup and played for England at the 1958 World Cup finals – but earned his living as a PE teacher.
Bill Slater’s route to becoming an indispensable member of the great Wolverhampton Wanderers sides of the 1950s will seem a strange one to the modern reader but English football did things very differently more than half a century ago.
In 1951 Slater, having completed a course at Carnegie Physical Training College in Leeds, started lecturing in PE at Birmingham University. At the same time he was playing as an amateur for Blackpool in the Football League and such was the limit on footballers’ earnings – they were then capped at £12 a week – that he preferred to carry on as an amateur.
In other words he was running parallel lives, lecturing in PE at Birmingham University while still turning out for Blackpool for no pay.
Something else happened to Slater in 1951. ‘I met my wife-to-be,’ he says, reminiscing at his home in Ealing. ‘She was teaching in London, she was from around here, and because I wanted to see her at weekends I decided to see if a London club would have me.’
With his future bride at his side Slater set out in search of a club in the capital who might sign him. First they went to Chelsea who gave him a frosty reception.
‘We don’t take on people like that. You have to be a good player,’ the man at the Stamford Bridge door said.
‘I think I am a good player,’ Slater replied, which was a fair point considering he played for Blackpool in the ’51 Cup Final alongside Stanley Matthews. ‘Will you speak to someone in the club for me?’
‘No – no, no. Don’t waste my time,’ the man said and closed the door.
‘So, a bit disappointed,’ Slater says, ‘we set off round to Brentford where they at least said they would have a look at me.’ Jackie Gibbons was the manager, took a look and liked what he saw.
Slater began playing in the Brentford reserves but was soon promoted to the first team. ‘Jimmy Hill was the other wing half and Ron Greenwood was the centre half, so I was in good company.’
When Slater made it into Brentford’s first team the club agreed to pay his travelling expenses, which was the only remuneration he received. He still did not want to commit himself as a pro having just landed his post as a lecturer.
A versatile player who is probably best remembered as a defensive midfielder, Slater played only one season at Brentford before, now as a married man, he moved with his wife to the Midlands to be close to his university job.
Wolverhampton Wanderers signed him and he became an indispensable member of the mighty Wolves sides who won three Football League titles in the 1950s and the FA Cup in 1960. ‘I played my first two years or so with Wolves as an amateur,’ he says. ‘I never became a full-time professional, but the club told me they were keen to pay me something.
‘I’d never really thought about it, I just didn’t think it would be possible, but I checked at the university with my head of department. I suggested that if I received payments from Wolves I would acknowledge in my contract that my teaching duties at the university had priority.’
Slater, who also had a successful international career, playing for England at the 1958 World Cup finals, gives an interesting picture of what it was like to be a First Division footballer in those days when huge crowds came to watch but with no live television coverage of their league matches the players’ stardom was restricted to Saturday afternoons. For the rest of the week many of them were largely anonymous.
He says: ‘I suppose I felt quite important in the sense that I was playing for a successful club but players weren’t recognised as they are today.
‘When playing for Wolves, even living a short distance away in Birmingham meant I wasn’t noticed, which I rather welcomed.
‘There was one occasion in Birmingham, after some small boys came running after me, I said to my wife it was the first time anyone had recognised me there. When I was in Wolverhampton young people mostly might come and ask for an autograph. It wasn’t something I resented. I was always quite polite. There was always a crowd of them waiting outside the ground after a match.’
This is an edited extract from When Footballers Were Skint by Jon Henderson / @hendojon published by Biteback Publishing.