George Eastham: The Reluctant Rebel
Former Gunner George Eastham passed away on December 20th, aged 88. Jon Spurling looks back on his career …
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Pitched in against Bolton Wanderers on his Arsenal debut, expensive new signing George Eastham scored twice during the Gunners’ 5-1 victory at Highbury in December 1960. The former Newcastle United forward, who’d cost a hefty £47,500, impressed the 30,818 crowd with his delicate touch and excellent positional sense. But then, in typical early ‘60s Arsenal fashion, George Swindin’s team lost their next match 5-2 against Burnley with Eastham, by his own admission, ‘playing a bit of a stinker.’
In an era when football tactics became more pragmatic, Eastham, a delicate and highly skilled forward, often appeared in mortal danger of being decapitated by football’s hatchet men, including Leeds United’s Bobby Collins. Eastham’s struggle for consistency came against a backdrop of disappointing mid table finishes, as Swindin and then Billy Wright failed to find the elusive winning formula. This was a barren spell for the club. Eastham was also in England’s 1966 World Cup winning squad, although he didn’t make any appearances during the tournament. Alf Ramsey never appeared convinced by Eastham, and some in the game labelled him as a ‘nearly man.’
Nonetheless, for much of his Arsenal career, Eastham was one of the most written about and controversial footballers in the country, due to his much publicised transfer to N5. When he arrived at Highbury, he was already a freedom fighter for players’ rights and, backed by the PFA, he pursued High Court Action which, in PFA Chairman Jimmy Hill’s words, ‘changed the whole landscape of football.’ Understated but self assured, Eastham was a man of strong conviction.
I was fortunate enough to have interviewed Eastham twice. On the first occasion in 2000, he crystallised the situation facing footballers in the early ‘60s, saying: “With the retain and transfer system, footballers were not free to change employers at the end of their contracts. In theory, we could be retained at the club’s pleasure and if we argued about it, we could be left to rot in the reserves. The club could also refuse to pay you in that situation. Effectively, our contract could bind us to a club for life. Most people called it the ‘slavery contract.’ We had virtually no rights at all. It was often the case that the guy on the terrace not only earned more than us – though there’s nothing wrong with that – but he had more freedom of movement than us. We couldn’t hand in our notice and move on. That was wrong.”
Eastham began the process of bringing this archaic structure crashing down by demanding a transfer from Newcastle in 1959. “They’d messed me about over a club house, which was frankly uninhabitable,” he recalled. In common with many other players of his era, who were bound by the £20 maximum wage, Eastham also had another job to supplement his wages. The job entailed him trawling around working men’s clubs in the North East, selling cut glass to punters. “It was no good for family life,” he said. So in 1959, with his contract about to expire, Eastham informed the club that he wanted out. For the next two years, Eastham was kept under virtual house arrest by Newcastle, with the club withholding his wages, and eventually opted to live in self-imposed exile in London, selling cork to make end meet.
Arsenal broke the deadlock by offering £47,500 for his services. Newcastle were reluctant to cave in, but simply couldn’t afford to turn down the offer, particularly as their asset was rapidly depreciating in value. The whole transfer was one of the first to be conducted through the tabloids. The left leaning Daily Mirror blasted the FA’s reluctance discard the ‘slavery contract.’ WHAT A WAY TO RUN A SPORT, ran the headline in early 1961.
The PFA, of which Eastham was now the most high-profile member, threatened a ‘soccer strike’, unless Newcastle and the FA backed down and released Eastham. Supported by other trade unions and broadsheets newspapers, they would have carried out their threat, but eventually the FA was forced into a humiliating climb down, and Eastham’s protracted transfer to Arsenal went through. Eastham may have won his battle, but until the system was officially abolished by a court of law there was a always a chance of a return to the Dark Ages.
“I knew that I had to take legal action against Newcastle to stop things going backwards,” he said. At around the same time, Jimmy Hill had led the campaign to abolish football’s maximum wage. Footballers could now enjoy, or suffer, the vagaries of market forces. Eastham had nothing to do with the campaign to abolish the maximum wage but he was symptomatic of a new breed of footballer. As he admitted: “According to which side of the fence you are on, I’ve become a martyr, a big-head, or a rebel….”
Initially, pockets of Arsenal fans made their scepticism about Eastham clear. A year after Tottenham had won the Double, and with the maximum wage formally abolished, Eastham turned down Arsenal’s £30 per week offer. A letter to the Islington Gazette suggested his form ‘hardly justifies such an inflated salary.’ As the Gunners’ most gifted and creative player, Eastham believed that he was simply fighting for his rights. His view was at odds with chairman Denis Hill-Wood’s egalitarian view that ‘A team of 11 is a team of 11. And that’s the way they’ll be treated.’
With the issue of his contract still unresolved, Eastham headed to the High Court. The PFA put up £15,000 of its own money to back him in the Eastham v Newcastle United case. With the ‘winds of change blowing across Britain’ (Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s words), Beatlemania about to get underway, and working class heroes like Richard Burton and Michael Caine starring on the big screen, there was no better time for George Eastham and the PFA to formally consign football’s feudal system to the dustbin of history.
Newcastle United stood accused of a) applying unlawful restraint of trade to George Eastham and b) unlawfully preventing Eastham from joining another club after his contract expired. Eastham showed few signs of nerves as he prepared for his moment in court. “I was lucky to have inherited my calmness from my father,” he said.
“I never got nervous on the big occasion.”
In the dock, Newcastle Chairman Alderman McKeag and his fellow directors frequently contradicted one another and were grilled mercilessly by Eastham’s legal team, headed by Gerald Gardiner QC. In contrast, Eastham was cool, calm and collected. On one occasion, as he recounted McKeag’s verbal threat: ‘We’ll put you out of football forever, Eastham,’ there were audible gasps in the public gallery. Justice Wilberforce’s opinion, and that of the jury, was clear: Newcastle United were guilty of restraint of trade. In failing to allow Eastham to leave the club at the end of his contract, they’d denied him rights granted to employees in other professions. This, along with the club’s option to extend players’ employment from year to year, would be abolished forthwith. ‘Soccer players may now consider themselves to have twentieth century rights, at last,’ Wilberforce argued.
“A weight was off my shoulders,” Eastham admitted. Initially dropped by new Gunners boss Billy Wright, Eastham was converted into an inside right, allowing Joe Baker to operate more freely up front, and with the ‘Highbury express’ Alan Skirton, providing the bullets, the stylish Baker/Eastham partnership flourished. His contract issue was resolved, and a brace of goals against Tottenham during a thrilling 4-4 draw in October 1963 went down especially well with Highbury regulars. Eastham left Arsenal after the ’66 World Cup for Stoke City, and after a period in America, returned to the Victoria Ground for a second spell, during which time he scored the winner in the 1972 League Cup Final against Chelsea. The thirty six year old Eastham, greying and sporting magnificent sideburns, was still as trim and as skilled as ever. After a brief spell managing Stoke, he emigrated to South Africa and, as a staunch opponent of apartheid, began coaching young black players. For his services to football, he was later awarded the OBE.
Engaging and perceptive in interview, he refused to criticise those who blocked his move to Arsenal all those years ago. “They were products from a different era,” he shrugged. “As for the court case and me being labelled a ‘freedom fighter,’ I never wanted that kind of fuss. I was just a guy who wanted to do his job.”
In the week I interviewed Eastham, Manchester United captain Roy Keane was awarded a £50,000 per week contract. “That’s a lotta money!”, he said, puffing out his cheeks. Today’s multi-millionaire players, who rarely see out the end of their contracts, take freedom of movement for granted. Thanks to his brave stance in the High Court, the ice cool George Eastham – football’s most unlikely rebel – secured that right for them in football’s black and white era. Rest easy, George.
George Eastham: 23 September 1936 – 20 December 2024.
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