In August 1955, Bill Haley headed the US charts with
‘Rock Around The Clock’. Sales were boosted by its inclusion in the
controversial teenage ‘delinquency’ movie 'Blackboard Jungle'. Bill hardly
fitted the image of a rebel rouser. He appeared potato faced, staid and ‘past
it’. Yet when his film 'Rock Around The Clock' was released here, a year later,
mayhem ensued.
Haley had given us advance notice. His 'Shake, Rattle and Roll' first broke into
our charts in the previous December. But this was the only a hint of the rock
’n’ roll explosion to come. Figure hugging jeans were about as challenging as it
got in August 1955. That is, if you discounted the publication of 'Lolita' and the first
showing of 'Waiting for Godot'. My concession to wildness was my replica Davy Crockett
coon skin cap. I had the record, too, 'The Ballad of Davy Crockett' sung by Tennessee
Ernie Ford. It even made number eight. That summed up the British Top Twenty; balm for the
embalmed. For how else could we tolerate Rosemary Clooney’s 'Where Will The
Baby’s Dimple Be?' As for C&W singer Slim Whitman, he was then simply
unstoppable. His 'Rose Marie', taken from the 1925 musical, topped the pile for eleven
successive weeks. It would take over thirty years for this record to be broken (by Brian
Adams).
On 20th August, the new football season started. Chelsea were the
current League champions while Jackie Milburn’s Newcastle held the FA Cup. Arguably,
Wolves were our strongest side, though. That is, until the ‘Busby Babes’ started
to carry all before them. Successive championships were secured in 1956 and ’57.
Under Alan Brown, Burnley were steadily establishing themselves as a leading First
Division side. Their opening game was at Tottenham and London Claret George
Wood was among the 33,000 crowd.
"This was my first game since returning from Australia some months earlier.
At 2d the programme was cheap enough. It was only one folded foolscap sheet. I can’t
afford programmes these days!
The programme notes included a good luck message to former Spurs players Ron
Burgess, who had become manager at Swansea and Alf Ramsey, who had returned from coaching
in Rhodesia to become manager at Ipswich. Burnley won the match 1-0 thanks to a cracking
goal by Brian Pilkington."
The Burnley team comprised McDonald, Rudman, Winton, Adamson, Cummings, Shannon,
Gray, McIlroy, Holden, Walton and Pilkington.
Peter Pike MP has a recollection
from that season, too. It concerned the abandoned FA Cup Third Round tie at Bury, which
was finally decided on January 10th 1956.
"That January Cup tie was the weekend before I had to start my National
Service in the Royal Marines. So on what was to be effectively my last free weekend as a
civilian, I had to go North to see the Cup tie. On that occasion I travelled by rail. In
those days it was still steam and we had a direct trains to Burnley from Euston. There was
one early evening that used to in theory arrive about midnight. I can remember on this
occasion it was very late due to fog. We finally made Burnley Central about 7am to be met
by my uncle who had spent most of the night at the station. In the afternoon we caught a
football special at Burnley Central. It was bitterly cold and foggy. I know somebody tried
to shut the door with my finger in it and my hand was so cold I could not feel it at
first.
At Gigg Lane, it was quite foggy and the players at times were shadows. Most of
the people where I was standing did not know the score when it was finally called a day.
Other than for muted shouting in the fog, I did not know Bury had scored. On reflection,
it should never have been started, as it was too foggy for a game. I couldn’t, of
course, see the fixture when it was played (Burnley won 1-0 with a goal from Billy Gray).
By then I was a number RM132126 and my chances to see Burnley for the next two years were
almost non-existent. The next round was a milestone as we played Chelsea and we seemed to
have replay after replay."
It took the reigning League champions four replays before finally defeating
Burnley 2-0 at White Hart Lane. Over 160,000 people watched the five games. Not that this
victory did Chelsea much good, for they then had to play ten games in four weeks. That
huge backlog caused their form to collapse completely. They went out to Everton in the
next round and then slumped to sixteenth in the table. As for Burnley, they continued
their upward momentum, finally achieving seventh position. Peter McKay was our sure shot
that year, netting twenty five league goals from thirty four appearances. Future England
keeper Colin McDonald was our only ever present, playing in all 48 league and cup games.
1956 was a momentous year. Suez put paid to our illusions of national power. The
Soviets put paid to Hungarian ambitions of freedom, decimating a damn fine football team
in the process. Elvis Presley turned on a teenage generation with his pelvic gyrations and
grunts and James Dean’s untimely death propelled him towards icon status. It was a
year in which to pass scorn. For this was the year of the ‘angry young man’; the
sneering, disaffected intellectual as typified by Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger. But
the Jimmy Porters, ‘the outsiders’ and the Lucky Jims hadn’t cornered the
market in rebellion. Working class Teddy Boys saw to that. Increased wealth and expanding
leisure opportunities would create new social divides, which would be based on age and
culture as well as class. The rock’n’roll years were about to begin.
