Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London (27 page)

Now, these were the days before cheap flights and before big money had been lavished on football; they were also the days of the Cold War and restrictions on travel. The Bulgarians took the view that rather than go to the aggravation and expense of rearranging the fixture, they might as well stay over and play the game the next afternoon in the light. Presumably they had been assured that even in the degenerate capitalist West, with their crap stadiums and unreliable power supply, the sun would still rise the next day.

Rise it did and bathed west London in its golden rays, or so it seemed to me. Sofia and Chelsea agreed to play the game on Thursday lunchtime during school hours. My school, Park Walk, was within earshot of the ground and, what’s more, easy walking distance for an eight-year-old boy. The news of the rearranged fixture spread around the neighbourhood quicker than a winter vomiting bug. As I gambolled merrily to school, innocent as a lamb, I was plotting how I would bunk off undetected. What would be the path of least resistance? How best could we avoid detection? By the time I caught up with my mates, I had already planned an escape route to the ground at lunchtime. The brainpower I was applying to this project was considerable. I was rigorous, I was obsessive, I was precise. I now realise that if I had applied a modicum of this brainpower to my schoolwork I could have been running the country by the age of 18.

Unfortunately, my headmaster had also learnt of the fixture rearrangement. I say ‘unfortunately’ because, quite contrary to all logic and reason, he took an entirely different view of the matter from us boys. He announced at assembly, to those of us who had not had the wit to have feigned illness and so absent themselves from his unjust realm, that no one was to leave the school premises during the lunch hour. Why the old stinker hadn’t given us the afternoon off was incomprehensible.

Lunchtime duly came and a phalanx of boys charged at the school gates only to find them firmly bolted. Much clambering and scrambling followed, and some unlucky souls got pulled down off the gates and never even left the school premises. We had taken our first casualties, but about 30 of us had got out. Off we ran up Park Walk, heading for the Fulham Road. As we passed side streets we were joined by groups of other boys, of all ages and sizes, escapees like ourselves, on the run and with one destination in mind - not the neutrality of Switzerland, but the partisan terraces of Stamford Bridge. We were careering up the middle of the road now, drunk with our success and feeling safety in numbers, turning and whirling in the air like salmon, but then we turned into the Fulham Road and pretty much stopped in our tracks. There they were: a squadron of school inspectors, strung across the street in their battle dress of belted blue rain macs. They all looked the same, like identikit Blakeys from
On the Buses
.

We advanced at walking pace and, almost as if in response, the inspectors stretched their arms out, creating a blue wall across the road. We could have been back in the playground playing a rather one-sided version of British Bulldog. Just as we were about to have a face-off in the Fulham Road, we heard a great clamour from behind us and we turned to see our Head and assorted teachers, well worked up, running towards us. We faced assault on all sides. It seemed like we were well and truly stuffed. There was no chance of getting away with anything now, but we might as well go down with honour, so into the valley of detention rode the 40-odd of us and onwards we charged.

We took further casualties in the ensuing melee. I remember some kids being brought down with rugby tackles that would have graced Twickenham. But me, I was one of the smallest, and dived under the outstretched arms of a school inspector and just ran and ran. I got to the corner of Edith Grove, lungs bursting, stopped to take a breath, looked up and there she blew: Stamford Bridge. I looked around me; about ten of us had made it, all the little ones. The high five had not been invented then and I can’t recall quite what we did to congratulate each other, but our joy was unbounded. At that moment I thought I could hear angels playing their trumpets, a beam of white light shone down from the heavens and I swear that God, with a great blue-and-white beard, parted the clouds and sang, ‘Zigga, zagga, zigga, zagga, oi, oi, oi’ in approval. After all that effort I had faith. I knew God couldn’t let us down. My first experience of European football at Chelsea ended in victory, and, believe me, this was not something I was going to get used to in the following 20-odd seasons.

When I began my enquiries into London’s fast-vanishing football history, I must admit to being less than thrilled to learn that Chelsea’s formation and location was strangely linked with two London rivals. As with all family trees, when you start poking about you always turn up something a bit unexpected, like the fact that Auntie May served time for racketeering in boot polish during the Boer War. Well, when I started testing my own knowledge of football in the capital, I was more than a little alarmed to learn about the links between Chelsea and Fulham, and via Fulham, Arsenal. Yes, ARSENAL!

Arsenal are now a north London team, but they were originally a ‘works team’ from the royal armaments factory and took their first name, Dial Square, from the specific workshop within the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich where they all worked. Chelsea’s near neighbours, Fulham FC, were originally a church team called St Andrews Church Sunday School FC of West Kensington, to be exact. Both were teams rooted in the life of their local community. I almost want to convince you that Chelsea are the original team of the famous Chelsea bun bakery, The Old Chelsea Bun House (well, Millwall originated at a jam factory on the Isle of Dogs, so why not?). Or perhaps that we were a team made up of orderlies and recovering patients from the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Unfortunately, neither would be true. So, what are the origins of Chelsea FC? I hear you ask.

There’s a long and a short answer; it’s a bit like a question on the origins of the First World War. You might say that the 1914-18 war kicked off after the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. While that short answer is true in part, this assassination was really only a further expression of the crisis in the Balkans. Similarly, you could say that Chelsea were a team invented by property speculators with a spare stadium, but again, it’s more complicated than that. A more complete answer is that Chelsea were really a product of the turmoil and change taking place in football at the turn of the century, as teams struggled to get established and secure a fanbase.

So the answer is a bit of a saga, but in telling it I’ll also take you on my own personal safari through London’s football past. Looking more closely at Chelsea, Fulham and Arsenal, because they are connected, it becomes apparent that the origins and early history of these three clubs collectively shed a bit of light on the history of football in the capital.

My search for landmarks of a bygone era doesn’t quite begin with Chelsea, given their somewhat mysterious appearance out of the west London mists. But, in pursuit of football’s early days in London as seen through the blue-tinted lenses of a Chelsea supporter, I can take you to one of London’s less fashionable quarters.

You need to travel south-east out of London, beyond the Thames flood barrier in Woolwich, heading out to the North Sea. On the south bank of the estuary is Plumstead. It is not a very accessible suburb of the capital, which is probably why Her Majesty’s Government have built Belmarsh prison there.

In addition to a prison, this part of London also contains a few obscure venues and landmarks of football’s history in the capital. Forget the now dearly departed twin towers of Wembley, there are lost treasures of ye olden days of football to be found south of the river, and I don’t mean Bobby Charlton’s comb.

Plumstead - yes, Plumstead, not the rather grander-sounding Woolwich - was the former home of a club that claims to be one of the London big boys and one of the greats of the British game - it’s the true home of Arsenal, who were born here in 1886. Spurs fans good-heartedly josh their north London neighbours with a chorus or two of their take on ‘Abide With Me’: ‘F**k off back to south London’. So I wondered just what Arsenal’s original home turf was like and what traces of Arsenal’s early days are still around. Now, as you’ve gathered if you don’t live in Plumstead, you’ve got to really want to come here because it is not somewhere you are likely to chance upon. There is only one train line and no tube. Alighting at the station, I confess the world is not exactly your oyster - if anything it is more your burger or your KFC. I am looking for traces of Royal Arsenal or, as they soon became, Woolwich Arsenal.

I shouldn’t be starting here at all. As football aficionados know, football really kicked off in an organised way in the North and Midlands, not down here in London. Though the FA had their cup competition going by 1871, it was being contested by the public schools’ old boys’ teams and regimental sides. It was Aston Villa, Accrington, Derby, Notts County, Stoke, West Brom, Wolves, Bolton, Blackburn, Burnley and Everton that were the first teams among the founding group of 12 to contest a league title, and the runaway winners of the first football league championship were the twelfth club to complete the hallowed dozen: Preston. It wasn’t till 1894 that the southern league got going.

Take Woolwich Arsenal for example. Many of their first players were exiles from up north - in fact, north of up north. Among their founders was a Scot, David Danskin, formerly of Kirkcaldy Wanderers, along with ex-Notts Forest player Fred Beardsley, a goalie rather than a striker like Peter. Arsenal’s first kit was a kind of homage to Nottingham Forest Football Club, Beardsley having prevailed upon them to send a full set of their old shirts for his new, soft, southern team. All very practical and utilitarian and so very different from the disposable kits of today, with the Premier League teams churning out half a dozen variants on their kit a year.

Arsenal flitted about a bit down here. Their first ground and their real home was Manor Field, which sounds rather grander than Plumstead Common, where they also had a kick-about in the earliest days and which remains a fine piece of open land. Arsenal fans can still run around on Plumstead Common pretending to be Jack Humble or David Danskin. Yes, there really was an Arsenal player called Humble - it’s hard to imagine a more unsuitable name for a Premiership footballer now. Looking back at the names of players from that era tells a story too - they are all called Fred or Bill or Jack, not a single Wayne or Steve, and you can forget your Didiers or Cristianos.

Manor Field, near the railway station, had been part of an old pig farm, and when Arsenal started playing there was not much more than an enclosed field, though it was renamed the Manor Ground by its footballing tenants. Now what sort of cold-hearted cad would want to picture Arsenal’s origins as a team of Forest has-beens playing on a pig farm in south London? The Manor Ground was a bit of a dead loss because, despite being enclosed, the best view in the early days was from outside the ground standing on a sewer. Mmm, I’ll say no more.

Step in local entrepreneur George Weaver, who had made a fortune selling mineral water. Now there’s a chap ahead of his time. Seeing the growing popularity of the game, he built a stadium called the Invicta Ground with stands and terracing which could take crowds of up to 20,000. Arsenal went to play there in 1890, but as soon as they’d had a couple of successful seasons, the owner of the Invicta Ground got greedy and hiked up the rent. Not an unfamiliar story over the past 100 years of football. Arsenal, who had just turned into a professional club, could not afford the increase and so, after three years, they decided to go back to the Manor Ground.

The Invicta Ground was demolished by the mineral-water tycoon, who made more money by building houses on the land. Arsenal fans can still mark the spot with a mooch up Mineral Street, named after the source of his fortune, which runs behind Plumstead High Street and along Hector Street where, according to official Arsenal historian Phil Soar, some of the gardens still retain the concrete terracing from the 1890s.

To complete this part of the story, Arsenal - now known as Woolwich Arsenal, and the first London club paying its players and playing in the football league proper - ended up buying the Manor Ground and building a terrace in front of the sewer, presumably in an attempt to force more punters to pay to watch. The Manor Ground did not prove to be a happy home for the club and the pitch is now buried under the Woolwich industrial estate. There’s no obvious sign of their former presence; it’s a rather utilitarian and bleak urban landscape.

If you have sloped around the streets of Plumstead, you have earned a drink. You can find one of those on Plumstead High Street by visiting number 67, formerly the Green Man and a quite fine-looking Victorian pub. Now it’s one of those chain Irish theme pubs, O’Dowds. The reason for going in here in particular is because this is one of the pubs where, just over 100 years ago, the Arsenal team used to change. They had a choice of either here or the Railway Tavern at 131 Plumstead Road, which is now the site of the Greenwich Islamic Centre, so still worth a visit but not perhaps for a Guinness.

The world of football has changed dramatically since those days. When I see the wonderful Chelsea Pensioners watching a match at the Bridge it leads me to think about what the game was like when they first went to see a ball being kicked. Players have gone from changing in a pub and knocking a ball against a brick wall as part of their warm-up to earning £125,000 a week and driving their Ferraris into them! It is an extraordinary transformation.

At this point, let’s hop on the train away from the marshes of south-east London back to terra firma in Fulham to pick up the Chelsea/Fulham story. At the end of the 1890s football was booming in the north-west and Londoners were getting the football bug. Two brothers called Gus and Joseph Mears owned a building firm in west London, and in about 1896 were asked to do some work for Fulham Football Club laying out the ground at a new site, overgrown and neglected, running along the banks of the river. The land has a romantic past: it was part of hunting grounds once owned by Anne Boleyn, Henry ‘who ate all the pies’ the Eighth’s second wife. It’s known as Craven Cottage because a later owner, Baron Craven, built a cottage in this beautiful riverside setting. But forget the rural idyll - as far as Fulham were concerned, it was land suitable for football. The club were keen to have a home of their own. They’d had their fill of moving around and, like Arsenal, changing in pubs, in their case the Eight Bells on Fulham High Street. They were ground-sharing with Wasps Rugby Football Club in 1894, when the club purchased the scrubby bit of wasteland, Craven Cottage, on which they would build their permanent home. It looks like the Mears brothers liked the sport and saw the potential to make some ready money from it, just like George Weaver. After all, there were all these people turning up to stand in the cold and shout themselves hoarse while paying for the pleasure, and you didn’t even have to provide any real facilities.