‘Bobby lived his life by this motto: win or lose, on the booze’

No one ever knew where Moore found that cap, simply that it came in handy. If he was out on the beers and driving, he would wear the chauffeur’s garb as he steered his red Jaguar XJ6 through the streets. He reasoned that the police were far less likely to pull over someone who looked like they drove for a living. Sometimes he would give the lads a lift home, hiding under his hat. England’s impeccable hero concealing his identity to pull a fast one over the police? The West Ham players found that very amusing.

Knowing his way home to Chigwell was never a problem, however much Moore had drunk. According to Brian Dear, “Bobby knew the West End better than a sewer rat.” Even if Moore was stopped after a heavy night, his reputation would often save him, with a friendly policeman ushering England’s hero on his way or even offering to escort him back to Essex. Once when a policeman tried to flag him down out in the countryside, Moore simply sped off.

That Jaguar finally met a sticky end in 1969, when Moore agreed to take a group of the West Ham lads down to Margate for a midweek charity match organised by Jimmy Tarbuck. No one recalls if they had Ron Greenwood’s permission for half the first team to play a friendly kickaround in the middle of the season. They would probably have gone even if Greenwood had tried to block them.

Along with Tarbuck and Tommy Steele and other celebrities, they faced a Mayor’s XI made up of amateurs from Ramsgate FC, Margate FC and the Kent Police. Then it was on to watch Tarby perform on the seafront and to celebrate a brilliant day out.

One beer became half a dozen, and then it was time to drive home. Harry Redknapp remembers being in the car in front when he heard a mighty bang behind. Redknapp’s car had taken the conventional route around a roundabout; a drunken Moore had gone straight across. “There was a bit of a mess,” Redknapp recalls. “Bobby ended up leaving his car on top of the roundabout. Someone had to come back and fetch it the next day. I think it was a write-off.”

Redknapp chuckles as he recalls those days when England’s revered captain was king of the boozers, though it was not just Moore but half the West Ham team. Every football club had its drinking school but West Ham’s would have been top of the table.

“When I look back now at some of the things we used to get away with, I think we all took advantage of Ron’s [Greenwood] nature,” Redknapp says. “We’d get beat 4-0 at somewhere like Newcastle and we’d be on a train coming home when Mooro would order half a dozen cases of lager. The rest of us would be losing a week’s wages on the cards.”

Jimmy Greaves was a latecomer to the Upton Park drinking club. Even as an experienced boozer, he was shocked at the insouciant attitude to alcohol he found when he arrived from Spurs in 1970. For a man fighting a worsening addiction, he said that he “could not have gone to a worse club than West Ham”. And “king of the bar stool” was the upstanding captain.

The tale is told of a young player who is about to sign for West Ham but is fretful about a lingering injury and whether he will fail the medical. In between negotiations, and as he awaits the results, he is taken down to the Black Lion pub, the regular hang-out for the West Ham players, where some of the senior pros are quenching their thirst. Moore is at the bar.

“What’s up?” he asks the worried player.

“It’s my injury,” he says. “I don’t think they’ll take me.”

“Can you put your foot on that rail?” Moore asks.

“Er, yes.”

“Can you put your elbow on this bar?”

“Can do,” says the mystified footballer.

“Can you lift that drink?” Moore persists.

The player takes a gulp of lager.

“So what’s the problem?” Moore concludes. “You’ve passed. Welcome to West Ham.”

Between the beginning of the Sixties and the middle of that swinging decade, lager sales soared from a mere 3 per cent of the British beer market to almost 20 per cent. Moore cannot have been single-handedly responsible for that surge, though listening to the stories of his heroic drinking it sometimes sounds like he tried. He would explain his thirst with the analogy that “a car needs petrol”.

Moore’s motto was “win or lose, on the booze”, according to Redknapp. “Bobby would have been captain of the England drinking team,” he says. “He’d love to drink, could drink for England, swallow it like he had no tonsils. If you had a night out with Bobby, you knew you’d had a night out.”

“I think he might just have been world champion lager drinker,” Tarbuck adds.

Even George Best was inspired to praise Moore’s prodigious drinking, noting that the England captain would down vast quantities yet always look fresh and immaculate the following morning.

Typically, even when he was sinking lager and gin and tonics by the gallon, Moore was the world’s smartest, neatest, tidiest drunk. Even when he staggered home barely capable of standing, he would remember to brush down his suit and fold his underpants.

His biggest excesses were saved for those evenings when he was away from prying eyes, surrounded by trustworthy friends like Alan Mullery, who, after one England international in Vienna, gave the captain a fireman’s lift up to bed when he was legless. At public gatherings, Moore would never be dishevelled. He had his own rules; drink in half-pints so it appears you are consuming less; never loosen your tie; always hide the empties under the table. Even when Moore was on a session, it paid to give the impression of looking immaculate. There are endless tales of extraordinary consumption, and odd occasions of disreputable behaviour, like urinating all over a garage forecourt, but his party piece sums up Moore’s gentle humour. He would remove his trousers — folding them neatly over his arm — and walk into a pub or stand at the bar in his pants. Not exactly a prank to make Gazza blush.

Moore never saw his drinking as a problem because, unlike Best and Greaves, he was certain that he had the discipline and restraint to pick his moments. He was sure that it did not undermine his game.

He had the wit to recognise that there was a price to be paid for a night of boozing, and he would pay his dues on a Sunday morning. On a day when only the injured players would be expected to report for treatment at Upton Park, Moore would be there for his Sunday morning penance, a regular 10am appointment with his conscience.

“Sometimes he’d come in with his bow-tie and dinner suit on where he’d come straight back from a function, been out all night somewhere,” Redknapp says.

Off came the tuxedo, on would go a boiler suit, sweatshirt, bin liner. Moore would come out looking like the Michelin Man and start a long jog around Upton Park. Around the pitch was a perimeter track of red tarmac. Moore would trudge around for three quarters of an hour, the booze seeping out.

The long run was not just for sobering up but for weight control, too. Conscious of his waistline to an obsessive degree, Moore would often spurn food completely on a night out. He very rarely ate breakfast before training. Particularly as he grew older, he could go a couple of days just on snacks.

After his run, he would have a bath, a shave, put on a smart shirt and nice jumper. Then he would head to the pub.

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As captain, it was Moore’s job to walk down the line to introduce the England XI to some foreign ambassador or suited administrator. The players were never sure about what was to come next, but the uncertainty was part of the fun.

As he approached with the VIPs, Moore, their straight-laced captain, might pretend to forget a player’s name. “This is, er . . .” he would stutter, feigning absent-mindedness. Alternatively, if he was introducing Jimmy Greaves, he might suddenly christen him Roger Hunt. Alan Ball would become Martin Peters. The names would come out jumbled up.

If the bigwigs ever spotted the joke, they never said. Down the line Moore would go, players smirking. Even in the moments before a big game, Moore could ease the tension with his dry wit and unnatural calm.

David Beckham has spoken about his obsessive need for neatness and order, but he was not the only England captain to display these traits

Bobby Moore had not just a desire for order, but a need. Shoes had to be lined up like soldiers on parade. He would turn all the pans in the kitchen so that they were neatly stacked a particular way in the cupboards. The labels on cans must all face out. He would fiddle with the towels so that they were all folded in a certain manner.

“Bobby didn’t like the edge of the towel to show,” Tina [Moore’s first wife] recalls. “He preferred them folded in three so you didn’t see each end. If I didn’t do it right, he would come behind and get it right. I still do it now.”

OCD? “Oh yes, I’d say so. He compartmentalised everything. He couldn’t cope with disorder and disarray.”

This was no longer just about his clothes being colour co-ordinated, hung from light to dark, as they had been since he was a child. Tina has described how “it was almost an aesthetic pleasure to open the wardrobe”. The whole house had to be neat. Cushions would have to be plumped so that when he came down in the morning it was as though no one had been there the previous day. When guests came round and lit up a cigarette, Moore would all but follow them around checking no ash was being carelessly flicked on to the carpet.

On trips, he took his own travel iron. There are tales of him pressing his money. The stories are almost hackneyed about Moore stacking loose change by the side of his bed every night, different denominations in separate and perfect pillars; how he always folded his dirty kit after training and placed it in a neat pile while team-mates hurled theirs into a filthy heap; how he wiped the mud off his boots with his socks while others just chucked them straight into a kit skip.

“He’s the only person I’ve ever met who gets out of the bath dry,” Mike Summerbee said.

Moore had developed a technique for preventing a drop of water falling on to the floor when climbing out of the bath.

He would flick the water off one leg, dry it with a towel and then step out on that dry leg, continuing the process with the rest of his body.

Psychiatrists call it an anankastic personality — neatness, perfectionism, a need for order often accompanied by a highly developed sense of conscientiousness. It can be a strength, as it certainly was for Moore and Beckham, in driving them to perfect their skills. Practice, practice, practice.

As manager of Southend United, Bobby Moore still enjoyed a drink, especially when he recruited his old friend Malcolm Allison as assistant coach

Southend were preparing to face Newport County in an evening fixture, but the manager had gone AWOL. Moore was missing and he hadn’t left a team sheet. Pressed by the referee to submit a starting XI, Buster Footman, Southend’s long-serving physio, had told the players to go with the same side as the previous week.

While the team wondered where on earth the manager had got to, Moore and Allison were boozing in the pub. Time slipped by. Kick-off got closer. Finally realising how late they were, the p***ed duo screeched up to Roots Hall in a taxi with less than half an hour to kick-off.

The dressing-room door burst open and Moore walked in. It was obvious he was sozzled even before he slipped and almost fell into the team bath. As Allison leant against the wall in the shower room, eyes closed, head nodding, Moore tried to give a cohesive team talk through the alcoholic fog. The players say he was unusually exuberant that night.

© Matt Dickinson 2014. Extracted from Bobby Moore: the man in full by Matt Dickinson, published by Yellow Jersey Press at £20 on September 11. To order your copy at the offer price of £17 (free p&p) call The Times Bookshop on 0845 2712134; timesbooks.co.uk

The beautiful game at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival

Matt Dickinson, Sir Trevor Brooking and Duncan Hamilton, author of Immortal, the approved biography of George Best, will be in conversation with Times journalist Richard Whitehead at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on Monday October 6.

Tickets are £10 from 0844 880 8094 or cheltenhamfestivals.com/literature