He is the only player to have been knighted while still playing football. And Britain’s first global football superstar, Sir Stanley Matthews, is now being remembered by his daughter, who is writing a book about her famous dad as a political pioneer.
Jean Gough Matthews, now 85, wants to highlight her father’s achievements off the pitch as a social campaigner, using the sport he loved to bring people together.
Regarded as one of the greatest players of the English game, he was the first winner of both the European Footballer of the Year and the Football Writers’ Association Footballer of the Year awards.
He was capped 54 times for his country and, at 42, was the oldest person to play for England. Incredibly, he was still playing top-league football at the age of 50.
But the England, Stoke City and Blackpool player, nicknamed “The Wizard of Dribble”, also used his fame to break down political barriers across the world.
He gave up his summers every year between 1953 and 1978 to coach poor children in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda and Tanzania. In South Africa in 1975, he bravely ignored the brutal apartheid regime to form a team of black schoolboys in Soweto called “Stan’s Men”.
His charity also ran a tournament which helped to mend religious hatred in Belfast.
Jean recalled: “There is more to be told about Stanley than his on-the-pitch legend status. I’m writing the book to give unique insight into the life of my father as the first world-famous footballer but mainly about his coaching and mentoring of young people from the 1950s to the 1980s.
“People might not know Sir Stan was coaching in Africa and particularly in South Africa. During those dangerous apartheid years he went into Soweto coaching the Orlando Pirates.
“My Pop was known as ‘The Black Man with a White Face’ and although he was banned from going to South Africa in the 1980s by the United Nations, he sneaked in through Zimbabwe!”
He also took the very first black team to play outside South Africa and it was to Brazil where they met Pele.
“The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu said ‘Stan helped the black people to know there were some good white people’ and my father helped to bring down apartheid.”
His work also helped cross the divide in sectarian Northern Ireland.
Jean added: “We had a tournament take place in the Shankill Road area of Belfast, which is a loyalist British heartland.
“We managed to invite a team called Crumlin Star to play, who are from the Ardoyne, a mainly Catholic and Republican area, at the complete opposite end of the spectrum.
“For them to attend was remarkable and they not only came along but organised another friendly later that week with one of the Shankill teams.”
Jean is Sir Stanley’s eldest child from his first marriage to Betty Vallance, daughter of Stoke City trainer Jimmy, whom he first met on his 15th birthday in 1930 on his first day as an office boy at the Victoria Ground.
After Jean was born the couple went on to have Stanley Jr.
Jean married Robert Gough and in 1965 Sir Stanley became a grandfather after Jean gave birth to a son, Matthew, and later daughters Samantha and Amanda.
But in 1967, while on a tour of Czechoslovakia with Port Vale, Sir Stanley met 44-year-old Mila, the group’s interpreter. Still married to Betty, he was convinced he had found the true love of his life and he and Betty divorced.
He and Mila spent the ensuing years living in Malta, South Africa and Ontario.
Mila died in 1999 aged 76, and Sir Stanley a year later in North Staffordshire Nuffield Hospital aged 85, following a heart attack.
After his death, dozens of footballing legends paid tribute to him including Pelé who said he was “the man who taught us the way football should be played”.
