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Those memories came back to me the other day as I sat down to watch ITV’ s Tina and Bobby, a three-part serialisation of Moore’ s life through the eyes of his first wife. Tina Green met her future husband at the Ilford Palais in Redbridge, London. She was 15 and he was 17. Tina was a typist for the Prudential and initially made more money than her football playing boyfriend.“ I wasn’ t overly impressed at first,” she recalls.“ He wasn’ t quite handsome, but he was good-looking, and charm personified.”
The series, commissioned on the 50th anniversary of that 1966 World Cup win, rattles through Moore’ s success on the pitch with little time on the ball( very un- Moore-like), preferring to concentrate on how Moore was let down by football and, in turn, how he went on to let down his wife. Praise has rightly been heaped on Michelle Keegan’ s portrayal of Tina Moore while Lorne MacFadyen, although clearly an impressive athlete, failed to capture Moore’ s innate modesty and humility. What the series did capture, though, was Moore’ s love of fashion. The man was as big a part of the Swinging Sixties as any Beatle. Style just oozed from every pore. They may look dated today, but it’ s virtually impossible to find a picture of Moore looking anything other than immaculate.
In the book on which the TV series is based, Tina Moore reveals that her husband was not only always well dressed but obsessively neat.“ The jumpers in his wardrobe were hung in sequence from dark colours to light,” she writes.“ You don ' t often hear a man described as beautiful but that ' s what Bobby was – he looked like a young god who happened to play football. He was a complicated young god.”
He was meticulous about how he looked, perhaps even obsessive – when he put on a pair of trousers in a football dressing room, he would stand on the bench – and his enthusiasm for fashion was one of the reasons behind his involvement in Harrison-Moore Ltd, a leather coat factory in east London which he co-owned and designed for in the late 1960s. One story, told by England team-mate Alan Mullery, reinforces Moore’ s swinging 60s persona – he took a portable record player to the European Championship in 1968 along with R
66 SAVILE ROW STYLE MAGAZINE