Hearts on Tour

Hearts OnTour

The 50s/60s Tours

Throughout the most successful decade in the Club’s history, manager Tommy Walker forged close bonds between his talented players by taking them on six post-season tours to destinations as far apart as the USA, South Africa and Australia. This season, I’m going to take a look at the memorabilia associated with Hearts’ tours of the 1950’s.

The players returned from Toronto on Saturday 6 June and, according to Billy Higgins report in one of the Scottish papers, they were all “dead beat”. As he noted, “to Canada and back in 48 hours for a match and a spot of training thrown in can be tiring and as I phone this copy I notice that most of the boys have already disappeared into their rooms. Higgins was still unsure whether his leg injury would keep him out of the following day’s game against Lanerossi of Italy.

He didn’t make it into the Hearts side which lined up before 10,831 at Randalls Island on Sunday 7 June. The temperature was in the high 20’s with 90% humidity and the temperature soon rose on the pitch as the fiery Italians lived up to the stereotype with a series of niggling fouls. But it was Hearts who dominated the game for the first hour with Italian keeper Luison making a number of great saves to keep Hearts out. But it was Hearts who finally made the breakthrough midway through the first half as Danny Ferguson crossed from the right to Willie Wallace. Wallace’s shot beat Luison and came back off the crossbar. Tommy White was following up to knock the ball into the empty net for his second goal of the tournament. Five minutes into the second half, Hearts were still in control when Brazilian-born centre forward de Menezes charged into the box and was tackled by David Holt. The American referee pointed to the spot and Jim Cruickshank was powerless to stop de Menezes stepping up to score from the spot. After that, it was one way traffic as the Italians poured forward and Hearts defence tried to hold firm. Lanerossi’s best player was the Portuguese-born Humberto Raggi who had played and scored against Hearts in the 1961 Fairs Cup for Inter Milan. David Holt wrote after the game that he had “an unwelcome souvenir from last Sunday’s match against Lanerossi – a bashed-in nose that may be broken … I wasn’t too pleased about taking second prize from that clash with Humberto’s elbow. He caught my nose a real wallop but at least he apologized in perfect English immediately after the incident. Humberto is the Portuguese forward who played for Internazionale Milan against us at Tynecastle. He is a qualified doctor and speaks the language like a native”. The Hearts defence held out and the match finished 1-1. For the Italian-Americans making up the vast majority of the crowd, however, it wasn’t the easy victory they’d expected and Hearts had

to be escorted into their dressing room by the NYC Police under a hail of coins, stones, sticks and anything else the irate Italians could lay their hands on.

After the game, Danny Ferguson, Johnny Hamilton and Tommy White were chosen to appear on local TV in New York demonstrating ball control and other techniques. Just what you’d need after a grueling match! The programme for the game was the standard International Soccer League issue with sixteen pages. Page 5 has short articles on each of the competing teams. The Lanerossi article, by chance, concentrates on the two players who would make the greatest impact in the game. De Menezes had played in New York before in a couple of exhibition matches for Napoli and had been transferred from Napoli to Lanerossi for a massive $125,000. Humberto Raggi had played for Portugal and was, according to Danny Ferguson, “one of the finest players I’ve seen”. Tommy White featured in the Hearts article which focused on his recovery from a serious car accident. There was also some discussion of the disappointing match against Blackburn Rovers. “We were lousy and sluggish”, Tommy White admitted, “but Blackburn didn’t play well either. They seemed to lack teamwork. One thing for sure, you’ll see a much better Hearts team today than the one you saw against Blackburn”. Johnny Hamilton was impressed with both Bahia and Werder Bremen saying that “we’ll have to go some to beat them”. Page 12 has a profile of Hearts captain Danny Ferguson, “a pretty slick Scot when he has his boot on the ball” has been playing soccer since he was 3 or 4. It had been his “keen field generalship that has kept Hearts in the forefront of the strong Scottish League”. In his spare time, Ferguson was a keen golfer playing off a handicap of 10 or 12. Ferguson then has his say on some of his team-mates. Jim Cruickshank is “greatly improved and is coming into his own”. Tommy White is a “strong, hard-hitting leader” whilst John Cumming “who can also work at wing, is a tricky dribbler with uncanny anticipation”. The back page of the programme has an advert for Schaefer beer which was sponsoring coverage of the tournament on the local WPIX TV station. The schedule for the hour-long shows that what I assume must have been highlights of this Lanerossi were shown on that station.

Finally this week, a very rare ticket for this match; although the ticket doesn’t provide specific details, it came inserted in a programme for this game and is almost certainly a ticket for the game. Notably, it shows the price as $1.50, the additional price to be paid on swapping the ticket I showed in an earlier article.

Gary Cowen is a member of Hearts heritage group and is currently writing a book about the Hearts postseason tours