Nat Lofthouse was not a philosopher, but the trousers he wore at his workplace were, like those of all his workmates, ragged. It was as if in those day the club tailor took a pair of cheap, long flannel drawers and abbreviated them below the knees with a quick snip of scissors. These were the club shorts that exposed Nat’s racing oaken legs as they carried him at coal-train speed across the pitch.

On his shirted back a number to denote his current team position. No fancy advertisement for some manufacturer of microwave ovens. In those days, a footballer earned his wages with adroit boots and punting head. There was no call for him to double as a bouncing sandwich board.

I am talking of early post-war football, of which Nat Lofthouse was one of England’s greatest professional practitioners. Students of the game may have been watching old film clips of him in hunking, battering action. The younger viewers, so habituated to the chic male soccer ballerinas of today, may have marvelled that a lion and his team could have taken the field in such unglamorous gear and have tackled, often in flying mud, an unspotted brown leather ball that looked as heavy as a cannon ball.

These clips were being shown on television because, last Saturday, Nat Lofthouse, at 85, died. He was the Lion of Vienna, an OBE and, barely beyond contradiction, Bolton’s only worshipped living being.

The news of his death reached me just as I happened to be studying a group of photographs taken for Mass Observation, by the brilliant Humphrey Spender, at Burnden Park in 1937. It was clear from these that in that time working men would never have thought of turning out to watch Bolton Wanderers without putting on their best Sunday suits (pin-stripes, thick mufflers or knitted ties, compulsory bowler hats) and staying bright and lynx-eyed sober till after full-time. This was the football culture that Nat Lofthouse, the fourth youngest of a coal-bagger’s sons, grew up with. The pictures were taken only two years before he signed for Bolton Wanderers.

He signed the day after the declaration of the Second World War, and he was to do his apprentice training after working 10 underground shifts in Mosley Colliery as a Bevin Boy. All that coal-heaving, he was to say years ahead, made him strong.

Between the 1940s and 1960, Nat played 503 games for the Wanderers, scoring 235 times. He never joined another club. Occasionally, though, he did lend himself to the England team: to be precise, on 30 occasions. His aggregate scores, at these matches, added up to 33, until recently an England record.

The most spectacular of his exploits is commemorated to this day by a well-bred pub opposite Bolton School. It’s called The Lion of Vienna, the title accorded him for scoring the winning goal in a tight match against Austria in 1952. To the end of his days, he never could quite remember battering the ball into the net, for in the act of doing so he was knocked unconscious by the colliding Austrian goalkeeper and had to be carried off on a stretcher. It was only when, at the end of the match, he returned to the pitch on wobbly legs that he was given news of his success.

Did that experience give him an appetite for goalmouth crashes? Some incorrigible Manchester United fans say so, and they do not mean it as a compliment. At the 1958 cup final, Nat went at United’s goalkeeper Harry Gregg like a battering ram and drove him into the back of the net, making sure that the ball went to keep him company. It was a foul (Nat sportingly admitted that 10 years later), but the referee awarded a goal. This was only a few days after the Munich disaster. The triumphant Bolton coach was stoned half the way home through Manchester’s seething outer suburbs.

Regrettably, I cannot claim to have watched Nat Lofthouse in action—apart from on old film stock. But I do boast the privilege of having spent two pleasant hours with him in his unvarnished presidential Wanderers’ cubby hole a few years or so before his beloved Burnden was bulldozed down to make way for the space-age Reebok.

He told me that after a recurrent ankle injury forced him to hang up his boots in 1960, he pleaded for something to do at the old ground. Anything would do. Anything had to. The only job the Bolton Wanderers’ board would offer him at Burnden Park, he said, was as a toilet cleaner. He accepted it, going around with a mop and bucket for a couple of years until they promoted him to caretaker.

That’s what he claimed, anyway. Was he having me on? An old pal of his thinks so. But I think it unlikely. Nat was far too much of a gentleman to treat a conscientious reporter like a dilatory United goalkeeper.

The funeral will be on Wednesday noon, at Bolton parish church. The main streets will all be cleared of traffic for the cortege. And all of football’s present-day royalty will be there. I should damn well think so.

The answer to my prayers

I HAVE no personal objection to the Rev Anthony Delaney moving his afternoon pulpit from his Didsbury church into the Queen Of Hearts pub in Fallowfield, with an aim to accommodating boozers who are too overhung to quit the bar. I seldom drink in Fallowfield. But I would take a dim view if the landlord refused to serve me spiritual refreshment of choice while the parson was preaching.

My nearest local, The Church Inn, would never dare risk it.

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