In mid-April a shared statue is to be unveiled outside the CBS Arena in Coventry, home of the city’s Championship football team, the Sky Blues. The statue will be of John Sillett and George Curtis, the duo of ex-CCFC defenders who were joint managers and masterminds of Coventry’s 1987 FA Cup triumph. John Sillett died relatively recently, but George Curtis passed away nearly five years ago. What follows is a longer version of a piece I wrote at the time of Curtis’s death for When Saturday Comes …
Which recently deceased footballer led his club from the Third to the First Division before masterminding its unexpected triumph in one of the great FA Cup finals – and in between ran a fish and chip shop? For the people of Coventry George Curtis was a giant, in every sense of the word. In another life he would have worked on the Kent coal field, marshalling the pit side and manning the picket line. Instead, he moved to the Midlands in the mid-fifties to play lower league football. At first Curtis appeared a journeyman centre-half, with work at the colliery merely on hold. Instead, he matured as a player, readily adapting to a succession of fresh challenges. Across the ’sixties Coventry City progressed to a place in the equivalent of today’s Premiership, with Curtis’s reliability and leadership key factors in the club’s success.
In 1961, when Jimmy Hill arrived at Coventry to initiate the ‘Sky Blue Revolution’, few saw George Curtis surviving long. Instead he became Hill’s company sergeant major, embracing the tyro manager’s revolutionary approach as to how football should be played – and how it should be enjoyed, both on and off the pitch. Hill changed the face of professional football in England, transforming Coventry as a club, and marketing football as a family-friendly sport watched in new or updated stadia. Hill’s showmanship disguised his tactical nous. As a revealing Pathé film from 1962 confirms, Curtis welcomed Hill’s new ideas, encouraging his team-mates to follow suit. An exception was veteran Scottish international Stewart Imlach: the newsreel cameraman catches the winger’s undisguised contempt for his bearded new boss. Imlach was soon gone as Jimmy Hill built a succession of teams around local talent and shrewd purchases; but always with Curtis at the heart of his back four.
Then suddenly, at the moment of triumph – a demolition of Derek Dougan’s Wolves having secured the 1967 Second Division Championship in front of more than fifty thousand fans – Hill was gone. The master of invented tradition, having single-handedly created a Sky Blue mythology, Jimmy Hill quit to join London Weekend. Hill now had a national audience, and an agenda for the further modernisation of professional football. Curtis was left with the job of raising team morale, his task not helped by breaking a leg during Coventry’s second match in the top tier. He returned a year later, but with a place in the team no longer guaranteed. In due course he was transferred to Aston Villa, helping transform a moribund side into Division Three champions.
Curtis retired in 1972, and in due course a commercial post was found for him back at Coventry’s former stadium, Highfield Road. What’s not included in his biography, and now his obituaries, is that he bought a fish and chip shop on the main road to Leicester. My parents’ house was no distance from the chippie, and when visiting them I felt a mixture of awe and astonishment that the mighty George Curtis was serving me two fish and a treble portion of chips (‘No salt or vinegar please, Mr Curtis’). Tradition has it that footballers of that generation became pub landlords, but in his masterly My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes Gary Imlach – son of Stewart – signals a variety of occupations for ex-pros of that era, few of whom made serious money after the abolition of the maximum wage in 1961 (Hill’s first great achievement, as chairman of the Professional Footballers Association).
In due course Mr Curtis hang up his apron and took a backroom role at Highfield Road. Perennial under-achievers, in due course Coventry appointed Curtis co-manager with former team-mate John Sillett. Against all the odds, in May 1987 the two men took their team to Wembley, and an epic confrontation with hot favourites Tottenham Hotspur. The Sky Blues, courtesy of Keith Houchen, scored a stunning goal in a stunning victory. For a further seven years Curtis was managing director. Thus, the man who narrowly escaped a life at the coalface, and who had no hesitation in swapping top flight football for serving fish and chips six days – and six nights – a week, played a quiet part in establishing the world’s most lucrative football league.
George Curtis helped create the Premiership, managed a cup-winning side, and skippered a total of three championship-winning teams. As the 2021 City of Culture, Coventry’s focus is rightly on the future, with scarcely a look backwards other than to acknowledge the legacy of Two Tone. Yet, amid the celebration and excitement, I hope that everyone in Coventry, not just football fans, can pause and mark the passing of an extraordinarily humble man. Someone who throughout the ’sixties, and then again twenty years later, brought enormous joy to the city – and yet still found time to run a really good chippie.
