Salaam Stanley Matthews

by Subrata Dasgupta

Summary

The story of a unique encounter between England and India starts in 1950 when Subrata Dasgupta was six years old and his parents came to Britain from Calcutta. In his affectionate portrait of a Britain that seems as foreign to us now as it was to him then, he recalls what it was like growing up in Nottingham and Derby in the 1950s: holidays in Blackpool, the trials of the dreaded Eleven-Plus and the first stirrings of rock and roll. Above all it is the story of one small Indian boy's devotion to the greatest footballer of the day, Stanley Matthews—who to Subrata Dasgupta represented all that was best about his new country.