My dad John White, the Spurs legend
Footballer John White was killed by lightning in 1964, aged 27, leaving behind a widow, two children and a legacy of match moments. His son Rob has been trying to build a sense of the father he knew only from other people's memories
In search of the Ghost of White Hart Lane ... Rob White with his mother, Sandra and sister Mandy. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
There's an old black and white photograph on my wall at home of several players of the 1962
Tottenham Hotspur team holding up the FA Cup at Wembley. It's signed by all the players except one, and it's one of my most precious pieces of football memorabilia. There are similar photos in Rob White's home. His, too, are unsigned by the same player. Only it's rather more poignant for him, because the player in the photograph is his father.
John White was a Spurs and Scotland legend. He was a key member of the Spurs team that won the league and FA Cup double in 1961, the FA Cup the following year, the European Cup Winners cup the year after and was capped 22 times for Scotland. Yet in many ways all these achievements have been overshadowed by the suddenness of his death. At the age of 27, with much of his career still ahead of him, he was killed by lightning while out playing golf in July 1964. He left a widow, Sandra, a two-year-old daughter, Mandy, and Rob, aged six months.
If you are old enough, John's death is a footballing JFK moment: you can still remember exactly what you were doing when you heard the news. Rob and Mandy were far too young for any such memories; their only experience of their father is his absence. And by the time they were old enough to understand who he was, they had learned not to talk about him. "We both intuitively felt it would be too upsetting for Mum," says Rob.
Sandra went into shock and closed down when John died. "I was a 22-year-old widow with two kids," she says. "I didn't really know what had hit me. I just felt completely on my own. In the early 1960s, footballers didn't really show how they felt; Bill Nicholson [the manager] came round once, and that was it. It was as if John's death was an embarrassment."
Rob and Mandy remember the few weeks they spent each year with John's
family in Scotland as their happiest. "There was no pressure on us there," Mandy says. "I don't know if Mum felt in some way closer to Dad when she was around his brothers or if it was just the release of being far away from London; whichever it was, it was the only time we really relaxed together."
Back home in London, the children retreated into themselves. For Mandy, that journey was rather more straightforward. "None of Dad's friends paid me too much attention, so I was left to grieve in my own way in private," she says. "I was a girl and no one had any expectations of me as my father's daughter. No one ever thought of taking me to matches, and I grew up thinking football was a stupid game. It's only comparatively recently that I've come to enjoy it."
Things were more complicated for Rob. If it's bad enough for a child to lose a father so young, it's even worse when your father is someone so well-known and loved by others. "I grew up with a strange emptiness," he says. "There were all these thousands of people out there who seemed to have much more of a relationship with Dad than I did.
"I can clearly remember the first time I actually saw my Dad moving. It was a fleeting piece of newsreel footage from the Spurs v Leicester 1961 cup final shown during the build-up to the 1973 cup final. I felt an instant connection and it was just about the first time I really felt he was part of me and I was part of him."
Mostly, though, Rob had to live with the legend rather than the father. From time to time, friends – and sometimes strangers – would tell him how brilliant his father was and how proud he must be of this man he had never met, but even when people said nothing he felt under scrutiny. There was never any getting away from the fact that he was the son of the footballer who was killed by lightning.
His response was to keep a low profile by never mentioning his father in public, but he couldn't avoid the insecurity. When his school sent him to try out for the Middlesex Under-15s team, he wasn't sure if he had been chosen because he was good at football or because his father had been. Even as an adult he generally chose anonymity, pursuing a career in photography: when the club recently asked him to represent his father as one of the double winners by coming on to the pitch at White Hart Lane during the half-time interval, the season ticket holders who had been sitting next to him for years were amazed. They didn't know who he was.
They do now, and so will everyone else, for Rob has chosen to go public in his search of his father in
The Ghost of White Hart Lane – John's nickname was The Ghost, a reference to his football skills. "It's something I've wanted to do for a while," he says. "It was partly to make sure my father's genius was properly remembered, but mostly because I wanted to understand what kind of man he really was. I'd had enough of the Goldenballs legend – the man against whom no one could say a word because of the way and age at which he died. I wanted a sense of the real him.
"I've got two daughters – Elsie and Martha – and it's sometimes hard to know what a father is supposed to do, because I've never really had one. All I'm aware of is what I've missed out on: the man who could have shown me how to be a man, the man I could have loved, the man with whom I could have got angry, the man who would have forgiven me. So I needed to wait until I was secure enough in myself, so that I could cope with whatever I found out."
Often the search was elusive. There was precious little left of John's physical presence after his death. "Everyone wanted something to remember John by," says Sandra, "and it felt as if the house had been cleaned out by the time the last person had left after the funeral. Even his tools had gone from the garage. It was as though the place had been burgled."
Some items have come back. Rob has a pair of his father's old size seven boots and one of his Scotland shirts. Handling them makes me feel guilty for the pleasure they give me to touch. For, instantly, I feel a strong physical connection with the unsigned figure in my own photo, a sense of reclaiming Rob's past for my own: the very thing he's spent a lifetime trying to get away from. "Don't worry," he says, laughing. "I can cope now."
Besides, it's the memories that count, often those of other people, though these too are up for grabs. "One of the loveliest things in the course of writing the book was going to see one of my dad's old team mates, Terry Medwin," says Rob. He started crying when he saw me. He said it was like looking at John."
There were other gold-dust moments. "It's odd but the things that made me feel closest to him were those where he was less than perfect," Rob says. "The fact that he once drove home completely drunk. The fact that he might have got another girl in Scotland pregnant before he met my mum. It's weird to think I might have a half-brother somewhere, but it's kind of nice to think Dad was capable of fucking things up as well. It makes me feel a lot less guilty about the things I've messed up in my own life."
One thing that Rob never did discover was what had happened to his father's body. For years, the family version had been that John's ashes had been scattered at White Hart Lane immediately after the cremation. But then Rob realised no one is given the deceased's ashes straight away. Sandra can't remember what happened to them – she seems almost embarrassed that she was in such shock that she she has blanked out all memories. But these things happen. For a while the destination of John's physical remains threatened to become all-consuming.
"Then something clicked," he says. "I realised it didn't really matter where he was; the uncertainty was part of his story. I'd found enough of him. Because in looking for him, I had refound our family.
"For almost the first time ever, Mum, Mandy and I were able to talk honestly to one another about how we felt and what he meant to us. We're closer now than we've ever been."
RIP