Flight to Bogata: England's Football Rebel, Neil Franklin

By John Harding

Flight to Bogot tells the incredible story of one of the most infamous episodes in English sporting history, when a group of British footballers turned their backs on club and country before the 1950 World Cup for a sporting El Dorado in Colombia. It was a rebellion led by first-choice England centre-half Neil Franklin. The book charts how the players were secretly lured away from Britain, amid Franklin's strident complaints of 'serfdom' in English football, their brief struggles to adapt to Colombian life and the fallout once they humiliatingly returned home to face the wrath of club and country. This escapade was a personal failure for Franklin and left his career in tatters. But the players' vociferous defence of their behaviour enlightened a shocked nation about how clubs mistreated footballers. Ultimately, it led to reforms that would financially benefit future footballing generations, but these financial rewards were never enjoyed by Franklin and his fellow 'football bandits' who embarked on that fateful 'Flight to Bogot'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Sep 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785317491

John Harding

John Harding is one of Britain’s most versatile contemporary novelists. He is the author of five novels. Born in a small village in the Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire, he was educated at the village school and read English at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. His latest novel, The Girl Who Couldn’t Read (2014) is a sequel to Florence and Giles that can be read as a standalone novel by those who haven’t read the earlier book.

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INTRODUCTION

ON a grey May morning, a couple of families sat quietly and anxiously waiting for their train. They attracted mild curiosity from those others gathered on the platform, both men in the party recognisable to their fellow passengers. The porter was more than delighted to help these celebrities with their luggage. As far as he was concerned, their destination was London.

One of the men boarding the train was Stoke City footballer, George Mountford. The other was an even more feted player, Stoke City and England star, Neil Franklin. As he helped the footballers’ families load their bags on to the train, the porter would have naturally assumed they were off for a brief city break in the capital. So did everyone else gathering on the platform. It turned out they were wrong.

The station porters blew their whistles. The steam train burst back into life, next and final stop, London Euston. But, for Neil Franklin, George Mountford and their families there were to be quite a few more stops on their journey. London was by no means their final destination. It was the beginning of a more exotic journey. They were off, in their mind’s eye, to El Dorado, destined to board a flight to Bogotá.

It was 1950. No English football lover back then questioned the patriotic statement of the nation being without question the greatest football power on the planet. Logic dictated to every English supporter that the country which gave birth to the beautiful game of association football was without equal.

Yes, there had been the odd glitch, defeats here and there to Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Much to their horror there was a loss at home to Éire, the first ‘foreign’ team to achieve such a feat. For English fans, it was a mere aberration to be ignored. The English FA now grasped the opportunity to confirm England’s formal status as the rulers of the biggest team sport on the planet. Its players were off to Brazil for their first World Cup. But they were in for a shock, several shocks.

Much to the horror of the FA’s rulers the first came even before they sent out their players to Brazil. Recognised as the greatest player in the land, destined for legendary status, the very first name to be put on the England team sheet, there was a talisman to help lead his country to World Cup glory. Yet to the dismay, indeed disbelief, of fans he chose to turn his back on his country, informing the Football Association he was unavailable for selection.

In the modern era of football, this seems to be an unthinkable scenario. Yet for England’s first ill-fated World Cup finals campaign in 1950, this is exactly what happened. Indeed, he went further than turning his back on his country. As the season closed, he chose to turn his back on his club too, the one he supported from boyhood. Neil Franklin was destined to become the ultimate football rebel.

His decision to desert club and country ahead of the 1950 World Cup naturally shocked the nation. In an era when sports news rarely made the front pages, the antics of England’s centre-half did so. A degree of mystery had surrounded his decision to make himself unavailable to the England team for ostensibly ‘personal and family reasons’. It turned to bafflement once word got out. He was on his way to Colombia.

Franklin’s flight to Bogotá, along, at first, with his Stoke City team-mate George Mountford and their families, both seeking their fortunes as footballing mercenaries, was tracked with stunned amazement. They were audacious footballing rebels, committing, for the English sport purists, an unthinkable act of treachery.

Franklin and Mountford turned up in South America, but not in Brazil to play in the World Cup, their sport’s biggest team tournament, but in Colombia to take up contracts with a league outside the jurisdiction of football’s world governing body, FIFA. Other top-class British footballers followed them – three other English and Scottish players – Bobby Flavell of Hearts, Billy Higgins of Everton, and Charlie Mitten from Manchester United. Swansea Town’s Roy Paul, later to captain Manchester City to FA Cup Final victory, and Everton’s Jack Hedley also travelled out to Colombia but, to be polite, demurred from taking up contracts.

Their act of rebellion, the flight of men quickly dubbed the ‘Bogotá Bad Boys’ by some, ‘Bogotá Bandits’ by others, arguably gave impetus to the inexorable push for changes to footballers’ stifling pay and conditions, the hated maximum wage and the ‘retain and transfer’ system of contracts. As a result, far from the Football Association’s bosses going out to Brazil with an England team to confirm the nation’s self-appointed status as the greatest footballing power on the planet, they were worried men in turmoil.

Yet remarkably, as much as the actions of Franklin’s ‘Bogotá Bad Boys’ brought opprobrium from the football establishment, there was a large degree of sympathy from a section of English fans. They acknowledged their heroes’ moans and groans about the maximum wage and the despised retain and transfer system of players. It was a time when, as Franklin controversially commented from his bolthole in Bogotá, footballers believed they were being treated as ‘slaves’ by corrupt managers and owners.

Ultimately, for Franklin in particular, this act of rebellion ended in personal humiliation and failure. Colombia turned out to be no El Dorado for them. There was no crock of gold. Promises of being lavished with riches were broken. One by one they meekly scurried home to Britain, swallowing their pride, pleading for the chance to rebuild their careers. All succeeded apart from one – the rebel Neil Franklin; a man never to be forgiven by the men in blazers at the FA.

Franklin came home to England, back to the Potteries humiliated, facing the wrath of his bosses with club and country. Still in his mid-twenties, his career ended up in tatters. A man who many fans hoped would scale even greater heights than his legendary former Stoke City team-mate Stanley Matthews was temporarily banned from playing the game he loved. Once he was allowed back, it was in Second Division football, with no prospect of a return to the England fold.

Franklin, though a villain to his shocked critics, was arguably a pioneer of the modern game. As a campaigner for justice, he was a man anxious in trying to justify the infamous flight of top-class British players to Bogotá, to concentrate hearts and minds on the fight for footballers’ employment rights. On the pitch, as a wonderful footballer, he barely fitted the mould of the chiselled centre-half so common in his era. Franklin was a skilful player, full of artistry. Off the pitch, he was a visionary, an angry young man ready to take on the stern patricians running the English game.

How much the infamous rebel tour of Colombia by top British footballers hampered or helped the campaign for reform in the sport is open to question. The Players’ Union, the forerunner to the modern-day Professional Footballers’ Association, conducted a fierce battle, constantly threatening strike action throughout the late forties. As I will explain, those threats turned out to be hollow but the behaviour of the Bogotá Bad Boys appeared to reinvigorate their campaign.

It began with Franklin and company, and led to a series of government inquiries held in secret into footballers’ pay and conditions, the first held just a year after they returned from Colombia. The inquiries came to nothing. Quite why, we can now deduce from the transcripts of the frosty exchanges I detail, between the unions’ lawyers and English football bosses.

Remarkably, Franklin and his fellow rebels never received a mention – early attempts made to wipe them from football history.

This tortured campaign ended at first in the sixties, with the England footballer George Eastham and the Professional Footballers’ Association chairman Jimmy Hill successfully going to the English High Court to make their case to scrap the retain and transfer system of contracts, then with a legal battle fought in the European courts by an obscure Belgian journeyman footballer by the name of Jean-Marc Bosman. Far from, as Franklin might term it, professional footballers being ‘slaves’ or ‘serfs’, they were the masters.

The Bogotá Bad Boys’ role in focusing national and international scrutiny on the treatment of professional footballers prior to the campaigns fought by the likes of Eastham and Hill is often ignored. In a sense this is understandable. Franklin and Mitten appeared to mellow in later life, contradictory figures turning from rebels to pillars of the establishment. In Mitten’s case, as manager of Newcastle United, his spat with George Eastham led to the PFA taking out the landmark court case to abolish the antiquated system of players’ contracts.

Franklin is so often portrayed as the leader of a misguided band of football rebels. A man rated in the post-war years as the best player in the land seemingly betrayed his country by refusing to go to the World Cup, instead chancing his luck with a bunch of murky South American businessmen. Yet the outcry focused hearts and minds on the medieval treatment of professional footballers in the mid-20th century. Modern footballers, the instant millionaires, arguably owe Franklin and his fellow rebels a debt of gratitude.

Any footballer turning his back on club and country would these days be thrown to mainstream and social media wolves. Yet remarkably in 1950, as detailed in this outline of one of the most infamous episodes in English football history, there was shock expressed by sports writers on the back pages of national newspapers but with a degree of understanding.

The World Cup was not taken as seriously as it is now, remarkably treated by some observers as nothing more than a glorified close-season tour. They were content that in their view British football was vastly superior to any form of the game played elsewhere on the planet. There was no outcry over Franklin’s original decision to pull out of the World Cup, citing ‘family reasons’, instead simple acknowledgement and mere disappointment. For many of them, bringing home the Jules Rimet Trophy was not in doubt. Naturally, they were wrong.

Once Franklin and his mates turned up in Colombia, anger was largely confined to the corridors of power at the FA and the boardrooms of their football clubs, Stoke City’s directors expressing the most anger. But for those complacently running the FA, ill-feeling grew, severe punishment needed to be meted out. Their mood was no doubt darkened by the humiliation suffered by the England team, going out of the World Cup after defeat to the part-timers of the United States, the latest shock to those running English football in the summer of 1950. Curiously, Franklin’s rebel gang’s antics garnered as much publicity as his hapless former international team-mates.

Franklin and his fellow rebels had focused the nation’s attention on the treatment of men being worshipped by the paying public in their tens of thousands on a Saturday afternoon. It arguably proved the catalyst for hard-fought reform, turning a future generation of footballers into, in some cases, multi-millionaires. These were riches the Bogotá Bad Boys failed to even dream of as they set out for their mystical El Dorado in Colombia.

Franklin, for one, found fame but not his fortune as a footballer. He was eventually forced out of the game altogether, left to the stereotypical role of a retired footballer by running a pub. He was landlord of the Dog and Doublet in rural Staffordshire where I met him in the seventies. Even as a sports-mad teenager I had barely heard of Neil Franklin – just another name in the annals of Potteries football, nowhere near the level of legends such as Stanley Matthews. Yet he was a legend.

As I walked through the door of the pub with my parents and grandparents, a clue to the greatness of the genial man behind the bar was pinned to the wall: a framed England shirt, the three lions and crown logo, and an international cap. It was the only, but striking, nod to his old career. The convivial landlord had quite a story to tell. This is the story of a fallen idol, his fellow football rebels, of how and why they took their infamous flight to Bogotá.

BIRTH OF A REBEL LEADER

ANY football team needs its talisman, needs its leader. Decades even before ecstatic England fans celebrated as the consummate, calm, classy, professional leader Bobby Moore lifted the World Cup, they thought such a leader was already born. In the aftermath of war, Stoke City and England fans’ appetite for the return of competitive football had been whetted by the emergence of a rising star, a young defender holding his own with the legendary figure of Stanley Matthews. Neil Franklin was identified as England’s future talisman, a stylish leader to help guarantee international football glory for years to come.

Instead, Neil Franklin ended up as the de facto leader of a bunch of British football rebels prepared to turn their backs on club and country, angry young men apparently going to desperate lengths to secure their financial future. Of these, Franklin, the most high-profile star to rebel, also turned out to be the most vocal and the angriest.

From an amateur hopeful in the mid-thirties, Franklin had broken into the professional ranks at Stoke City during the wartime years, then eventually came to the attention of England selectors when playing in wartime internationals. He looked forward to competitive action with relish. In the opinion of many, Neil Franklin could look forward to a long and fruitful career with club and country. To their horror, he turned out to be the leader of a gang of mercenary football rebels, unlawfully plying their trade in Colombia.

So just who was this emerging superstar, a young man destined to become one of English football’s most infamous rebels? Cornelius Franklin was born in Stoke-on-Trent on 24 January 1922, one of eight children growing up in the Shelton district of the city. His father worked in the local gasworks, his mother staying at home to look after her large family. Neither parent was particularly interested in sport, doing little to encourage their children as they enjoyed kickabouts with their friends using tin cans, rag balls and just from time to time a proper football. He described his young self in his autobiography, Soccer at Home and Abroad, as a ‘healthy kid, who liked to play’. But he didn’t think he was anything special.

All that changed, as with so many sports stars, with the intervention of his games master at school. Neil Franklin went to the Cannon Street School in the largest of the Potteries’ six towns, Hanley. He left, aged 14, with few qualifications but, thanks to the guidance of his teacher, Arthur Tams, with a reputation as one of the most promising young footballers in Staffordshire. He had played for both Hanley schools and Stoke-on-Trent schools, but curiously neither of the local professional clubs, Stoke City or Port Vale, came calling at the Franklin household in Shelton.

As far as his mentor Arthur Tams was concerned this was a clear oversight. He encouraged his protégé to approach Stoke City directly, asking for a place on the club’s ground staff. Stoke’s manager, Bob McGrory, turned him down, the first blow in what would eventually develop into a fractious relationship between the two men. McGrory explained he had enough young players on his ground staff. Neil Franklin, a future England international, was deemed surplus to requirements.

Reflecting on his initial rejection, Franklin had no complaints. ‘There can be no criticism of Stoke’s decision not to engage me on their ground staff, and my future rise to fame does not affect the case,’ he wrote. ‘It was impossible to take any more lads on the payroll, so the club had to turn me down.’

Thanks to the persistence of Tams, McGrory did partially relent by offering an amateur contract. Franklin accepted. It meant he still had to find a job. Once again, his old teacher proved to be his guardian angel.

Tams went behind the back of McGrory to approach one of the Stoke City directors, David Duddell, the owner of a brickworks in the Potteries. Duddell, whose son would later become the Stoke chairman, offered the aspiring footballer an office job, little knowing at the time it was to prove to be the best but most troubled signing either ever made.

Franklin commented, ‘This was a wonderful arrangement for me because Mr Duddell was a great Stoke fanatic. In fact, the entire Duddell family was, so I was able to work hard in a footballing atmosphere and carry on my soccer playing as a Stoke City amateur.’

Initially, he was confined to playing with the third team, and did so with a string of promising other players from the Stoke schools programme run by Arthur Tams. Many would become first-team regulars in the post-war years, players capable of challenging for the league title. As Franklin put it, in tribute to the club’s recruitment of teenage players, ‘a player who signed for a transfer fee was a rarity at Stoke’.

Meantime they all buckled down hoping for a breakthrough, Franklin praying the club’s manager Bob McGrory would relent and offer him a professional contract. As he had impressed his coaches, Harry Cooper and Stan Clough, a member of Stoke City’s staff killed during the Second World War, the offer of a professional contract was eventually forthcoming. On his 17th birthday in January 1939 he was summoned to McGrory’s office and offered a professional contract.

Bizarrely, Franklin wanted to accept a part-time contract. He was intent on keeping his job with the Duddell family, a fall-back position just in case a career in professional football failed to work out for him. McGrory turned him down flat. ‘Neil, we want you to become a professional player, and as far as we are concerned it is full time or nothing,’ McGrory told him. On this occasion Franklin did not argue. The disputes would come later.

He looked forward to a professional football career. Along with the rest of the nation, he knew war was looming. ‘I realised that I was on the threshold of a career that would crash any day,’ he mournfully reflected. He also realised he was lucky. He was young enough to enjoy a fruitful career once the war was over. On being called up to join the services, in his case the Royal Air Force, he did not see combat, and was still encouraged to play football. It was the policy of the War Office to encourage professional footballers to carry on playing, to do what they did best, thereby providing entertainment for the mass ranks of troops and the civilian population.

Though remaining on the books of Stoke City, Franklin found himself in Blackpool, stationed with the RAF. Among his fellow recruits there was Stanley Matthews. As a consequence, they were seconded to playing for the seaside town’s club, Matthews a guaranteed box office draw even in wartime. Franklin, a raw and inexperienced player, struggled to get a game for them.

Once again he was grateful to a mentor. On leaving school, it was his PE teacher. This time he was grateful to an RAF Physical Training Instructor for taking him under his metaphorical wing. Willie MacFadyen, a centre-forward with Motherwell and Huddersfield, told him to go back to the Potteries to fetch his boots. He was to play in a Blackpool ‘services’ team, ostensibly the professional club’s reserve side, alongside him and Stanley Mortensen, another future England star.

Against the backdrop of war, Franklin’s career rapidly progressed. A switch from the RAF base outside Blackpool to a military garrison in Hereford gave him the opportunity to go back to Stoke for weekend games. Bob McGrory finally gave him his first-team chance, albeit in a side naturally shorn of its star players.

He also came to the attention of the RAF selectors. To supplement the wartime friendly leagues, there was a series of matches between representative sides: the army, the navy and the RAF. Young Franklin began to impress. Sports writers began to speculate that he might become the future England centre-half, something the player himself dismissed given that the international captain, Stan Cullis of Wolverhampton Wanderers, was firmly ensconced in the position.

His big break, in his words his ‘lucky break’, came courtesy of a Potteries derby between Stoke City and Port Vale on 18 November 1944. He lined up in a Stoke team, almost at full strength, to take on their local rivals. Matthews and the England centre-forward, Freddie Steele, both laced up their boots to make a rare wartime appearance together in the red and white stripes of Stoke City. An England selector turned up to watch them. Franklin, though, caught his eye in a 2-0 victory for the Potters. From the now defunct News Chronicle, correspondent Arthur Shrive wrote, ‘Franklin is undoubtedly the finest young centre-half-back in the country, and it cannot be long before the FA selectors recognise his merit.’

Recognition came in the form of a telegram to Stoke’s opponents Coventry City for a league game at Highfield Road on 2 December 1944. It read, ‘McGrory, Stoke manager, c/o Coventry City Football Club. Franklin selected play at Bradford next Saturday, kindly telephone me Sunday morning – Rous, Football Association.’

He was selected to play for an FA XI against an army team, packed full of internationals. To his surprise, with the first-choice England centre-half, Stan Cullis, unavailable because he had been posted abroad, he was not picked as centre-half. Instead, he played in midfield, a late call-up to cover for his Stoke City team-mate, Frank Soo, who had been given compassionate leave. Soo’s brother Ronald, who served in a Lancaster bomber squadron, had recently been killed in a bombing mission over Germany.

The circumstances of Franklin’s first call-up for representative honours were tragic. Franklin merely states he was a ‘last minute substitute’ for Soo. When it came to a replacement for Stoke’s mercurial midfielder, the first non-white player to pull on an England football jersey, Franklin dryly noted, ‘Happily enough they [the selectors] looked in my direction.’

Franklin, who as a schoolboy played in attack, was not bothered by being played out of position. He was just delighted to receive his first honour as a senior footballer. By calling up someone making his name as a defender and putting him in midfield it was also recognition by Sir Stanley Rous and his panel of international selectors of this promising young player’s all-round skills and cultured style of football.

Franklin described the game itself on Saturday, 9 December 1944 at Bradford Park Avenue’s ground as ‘disappointing’, a 1-1 draw contested on an icy pitch, which these days would be deemed unplayable. He acquitted himself reasonably well, viewed by some sports writers present as a star of the future. Another call-up for an FA XI came in the following January, this time in a 6-4 defeat to his companions from the RAF, Franklin among those on the scoresheet. Surely a full international call-up would be forthcoming?