Cultivating an English National Identity Primary Title Remembrance and Reception of the 1966 FIFA World Cup through Photography Theo Karavolas Hamilton College, Class of 2022
On July 30, 1966, England defeated West Germany 4-2 in a thrilling extra time match at Wembley Stadium, winning their first and only FIFA World Cup. England overcame improbable odds on their road to victory, narrowly beating Argentina and Portugal in the quarter-final and semi-final, respectively. Members of the 1966 team emerged from the match as national heroes. English midfielder Martin Peters broke a match-long tie with a goal in the 78th minute, seemingly winning the World Cup for England. West Germany’s Wolfgang Weber, however, leveled the score in the 89th minute to send the match into extra time. Scoring arguably one of the most controversial goals in football history, Geoff Hurst’s shot hit the crossbar and bounced down onto the goal line to give England a 3-2 lead. Hurst later scored his second goal of extra time to secure the 4-2 victory for England. No photograph captures the essence of this victory more than John Varley’s color photograph of English captain Bobby Moore sitting on the shoulders of his teammates as he hoists the Jules Rimet Trophy into the air. (Figure 1) The jubilant facial expressions of Moore and his teammates convey the triumph of an entire nation in the face of the exceptional victory. This iconic image of Moore is ingrained in English popular memory, evoking a sense of nostalgia for a former glory that has since eluded the English national team. This essay will examine how Varley’s photograph of the triumphant Moore and his teammates, in dialogue with broader photography of the 1966 World Cup tournament, was interpreted in its own time and how the celebrated photograph became a replicated commodity of nostalgia. Firstly, this essay will focus on the present-day valorization of Moore. In agreement with Geoffrey Batchen’s argument, I reject historiographies that restrict discussion of the photograph to a singular, physical object, as I examine the effects of the continued dissemination of photographs as images with which viewers have a changing relationship over a span
Figure 1: John Varley, photographer. “The Boys of ‘66.” Photograph. London: 1966. From Varley Media: John Varley Signature Collection. of time.1 The British public’s understanding of Varley’s photograph of Moore evolved as the photograph became more reproducible; thus, remembrance tied to the photograph was subject to change from its original reception in 1966. The next section will then delve into the photography of England’s broader World Cup journey within the print media. Following James Ryan’s methodology of photography as a “complex cultural process,” it is necessary to strip Varley’s photograph of its privilege and to situate it in “broader discourses.”2 I will also borrow from Ryan the term “imaginative geography,” which I define as the construction of complex and contradictory images of nations other than England.3 The photography of the English team and other national teams, such as 1 Geoffrey Batchen, Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination (Sydney: NAMU & Power Publications, 2018), 6.
2 James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (University of Chicago Press, 1997), 19. 3 Ryan, Picturing Empire, 25-6. See also Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Pantheon Books, 1978).
