by Greg Tesser
So back to the big day itself – 9 April 1955. There were 75,000-plus crammed into Stamford Bridge and many thousands locked out. Flat caps covering Brylcreemed bonces and fags everywhere. Just a shame the game itself was as dour as a Sunday afternoon in January in an English country town, but it didn’t matter a jot because Chelsea won 1–0, courtesy of a Peter Sillett penalty. Champions Wolves were but a pale shadow of the side that had advanced so imperiously to the title the previous season.
The 1955 Championship-winning celebration party at that Art Deco monument to good taste, the Dorchester hotel on Park Lane, was indeed a glittering occasion. As former boss Tommy Docherty so aptly put it many years later, ‘Chelsea has always been a showbiz club’. On that spring night nearly sixty years ago, the gathered players, wives, girlfriends and club directors and officials danced until the wee small hours to the music of the suave Victor ‘Slow-Slow-Quick-Quick-Slow’ Sylvester, a diehard Chelsea fan since boyhood.
As an aside to this, many years later I found myself discussing the fortunes of Chelsea during the immediate post-war years with scriptwriter extraordinaire Alan Simpson, he of Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe and Son fame.
In a twist of fate that had serious It’s a Wonderful Life overtones, he told me how if in his youth he hadn’t been dealt a particularly dud card, it could well have been Simpson between the sticks during that title-winning season and not the Scottish goalkeeper Bill Robertson.
Simpson’s story is one that, in terms of cinematic licence, would be deemed too ‘far-fetched’. It all starts on a bleak Boxing Day in 1946. Alan is in goal for crack amateur outfit Dulwich Hamlet at their – by the standards of the time – palatial home of Champion Hill. A senior Chelsea scout was in attendance, his brief being to check on this young up-and-coming ’keeper.
Let Alan himself tell the story: ‘My first touch of the ball was to retrieve it from the back of the net. But we did win the game 8–3, and the scout must have been impressed because before I knew it I’d received a letter offering me a trial at Stamford Bridge in June 1947.’
His idol was Blues custodian Vic Woodley, a member of the hellraising team of the 1930s that included the pocket dynamo Hughie Gallacher, known for his size 6 boots, white spats and forty-a-day Woodbines habit, who later tragically committed suicide. Another member was the elegant Scottish international winger, Alex Jackson, who soon immersed himself in the nightlife of London’s West End.
‘I wanted to be another Vic Woodley,’ he admitted to me. ‘So, when the opportunity arose to actually play in a game, you can imagine how excited I felt.’
But fate took a hand for the young Simpson in the shape of tuberculosis, a disease that spread its malignant tentacles throughout Western Europe during the aftermath of the Second World War.
Deprived of his Stamford Bridge trial, Alan found himself hospitalised in one form or another for three solid years, during which time he befriended Ray Galton and the legend that became Tony Hancock was created.
So, my Chelsea ‘debut’ had been and gone; a highly satisfactory one at that. Okay, so the Blues had clinched the Division One crown for the first time, with the lowest number of points ever accrued from 42 matches, but that didn’t bother me because by this time I was besotted with the team from Stamford Bridge, and there was still my boyhood idol Jimmy Greaves to come!
TWO
JIMMY GREAVES
AND THE NO.28 BUS
Golders Green station, London NW11, circa 1957. It’s autumn; the conker season is in full swing and a young boy is waiting by a bus stop, looking resplendent in his pink blazer and cap, both adorned with the black Maltese Cross.
He’s waiting for the No.28 bus, and despite his overt prep school uniform and its obvious class associations with the ruffians’ game played by gentlemen (otherwise known as rugby), he’s soon to be on his way to Stamford Bridge to cheer on Chelsea, and in particular their new seventeen-year-old wunderkind James Peter Greaves.
The first time I saw Jimmy Greaves was on television. It was a youth international involving England and Luxembourg in 1957, and the precocious Greaves and his equally intoxicating Chelsea sidekick winger Peter Brabrook were tormenting the Luxembourg defence in the manner of a cat with an unusually submissive mouse. Commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme – he of ‘They think it’s all over – well it is now!’ – was in raptures.
England netted seven goals with just one in reply. Jimmy helped himself to five of them – a unique star was indeed born.
Later, I regularly used to hop on a bus at Golders Green and make my way to West Hendon to watch the Chelsea youth team in action in the South East Counties League. These were the first occasions that I saw the precocious Greaves in the flesh, and he didn’t let me down. When he was around it was always backache time for opposition ’keepers!
So, there I was waiting for my bus. I got on, and the long trek to the Bridge began. West End Lane; Kilburn, and then through the sad streets of Westbourne Grove, where the newly arrived West Indian population had created this wondrous world of speciality shops, selling such food items as capsicums, chilli peppers and plantains.
As we drove through Westbourne Grove into Notting Hill Gate and then Kensington, the atmosphere changed. It was 1950s London again, not this new burgeoning cosmopolitan creation. Twelve months later the peace and tranquillity of this new part of the West Indies was going to be temporarily destroyed by yes, you’ve guessed it, the odious Oswald Mosley and his Union Movement organisation, founded in 1948, for the ignorant and warped, the bitter and twisted.
Preying on the disaffected youth of the time – mainly ill-educated Teddy Boys – Mosley and his cohorts cultivated a hatred of all human beings who were not white, to such an extent and with so much ‘success’ that eventually in August 1958, it all boiled over, and racial violence, previously unseen in Britain, took hold for at least a fortnight.
Arriving at Fulham Broadway tube station, my first duty was to buy a programme. Only 6d (under 3p nowadays), it was glossy and a good read. Despite being only eleven years old, and despite the fact that I was on my own, and despite the fact that it was a floodlit game, I paid my pennies – six of them, I think – to stand on the cavernous terrace on the halfway line. This was no place for the faint-hearted, as you seemed to spend the full ninety minutes being either buffeted or elbowed, in a constant surge of sweaty humanity shrouded in a fog of tobacco smoke.
Birmingham City visited that autumn evening, and little did I know that I was about to witness football’s equivalent to Mozart, in the slight shape of Jimmy Greaves, score one of the most flamboyant goals ever witnessed in London SW6.
Some forty-odd years later I asked Jimmy about this exquisite Birmingham goal – and indeed about his whole Chelsea experience. With modesty itself, and that characteristic little-boy twinkle in his eye, he took me back to that special era when the team epitomised inconsistency (along with often eccentric defending), and Stamford Bridge itself resembled some form of cathedral to post-war austerity with its peeling paint and tired wooden stands and chipped white mugs selling Bovril. It seemed already to be of a bygone age, like an aristocrat who has fallen on hard times.
Unfortunately, this Birmingham goal, despite being an individual effort in which he danced past defender after defender before teasing the ’keeper in the manner of a serial seducer, and then delicately – almost nonchalantly – slotting the ball home, was not one that had remained in Jimmy’s memory bank.
As he admitted, some goals he remembered, some he didn’t, but one thing he did explain to me was his basic ethos for finding the net.
‘I always felt you didn’t have to hammer the ball into the net,’ he told me. ‘After all, all the ball has to do is cross the line, and it’s a goal. Too many players these days seem to blast it without picking the spot.’
One encounter that has since gone down in Chelsea folklore was their 6–2 victory over League Champions Wolves in 1958. I was there in the stands, aged twelve-and-a-bit, to witnes
s this humbling of the mighty.
I was feeling pretty upbeat already, as I had just bought Cliff Richard’s first single ‘Move It’, and just couldn’t help myself as, sotto voce, I hummed along. It was actually the B Side to ‘Schoolboy Crush’, but it soon whizzed up the charts, and B became A, so to speak. It was the first English rock ’n’ roll song, according to John Lennon.
Anyway, let’s get back to the grinning Jimmy Greaves, almost purring like the proverbial Cheshire Cat, as he described how the embryonic stars of Chelsea had tormented their battle-hardened opponents on that humid August afternoon at Stamford Bridge in front of over 62,000 joyous supporters. The fact that I was there, cheering on my idol – albeit a drooling schoolboy fan looking out of place in my blazer and pink school cap, like William from Just William but without the mishaps and messy fingers – was not lost on this football icon. He made me somehow feel part of it all.
‘It was the first time I’d scored five goals in the First Division,’ he told me. ‘Wolves were the best team in England in those days, and many people said that this was the game that made Billy Wright decide to retire. I think he’d made up his mind before that, but yeah, it was a great day.’
He also became animated when describing how he perfected his skills in the back streets of 1950s austerity England, his whole face lighting up like a beacon.
‘We’d just get an old tennis ball out and play in the street,’ he explained. ‘Playing with a small ball was great. It could be 20-a-side, 30-a-side or even just 2-a-side, and your stomach told you when to finish – you just went in when you were hungry. But you learnt the skills. You certainly weren’t having it talked out of you by a coach – you just learnt it all yourself.’
I saw Jimmy’s final game for Chelsea on 29 April 1961, and the little man certainly knew how to write the script, scoring all four goals in their 4-3 win over Nottingham Forest. His fourth was his 41st goal of the season, and Chelsea’s 98th. Mind you, their defence was porous in the extreme, conceding 100!
Jimmy was off then – to Italy, Milan to be exact. However, the land of pasta and pinot grigio and Sophia Loren wasn’t to his taste, and, despite a fatter wallet, the lure of London proved too great. He wanted to return to the Bridge, but Spurs came up with a bigger offer – £99,999 – and so sadly my idol was now in the enemy camp. Also by the age of fifteen, I had ‘discovered’ James Dean and Jack Kerouac!
Little did I know then that a mere eight years later I would be discussing the merits of Kerouac, Fitzgerald and Hemingway with that footballer with the dancing feet, Charlie Cooke, who, quoting Kerouac himself, ‘dug’ all things from across the pond.
Despite being entranced by the performance of James Dean in East of Eden and wishing I could do a Dean Moriarty and go On The Road in America, I remained very much married to the Blues. Relegated to Division Two in 1962, with Tommy Docherty in charge, they regained top-flight status twelve months later in the only way possible for Chelsea, with the sort of Hitchcockian twists and turns and traumas that have been the London club’s norm since its inception in 1905.
THREE
SNOWDRIFTS AND
TOMMY’S STOMACH
Boxing Day 1962, and the first flakes are being blown crazily in the biting easterly wind. Chelsea are at Luton. Despite the arctic conditions, and with a frost as sharp as flint, the game goes ahead.
Docherty’s Chelsea boys are riding high at the summit of Division Two. It is a young side, with Barry Bridges, he of the cheetah-like speed, and penalty-area predator Bobby Tambling the shining lights.
The Blues prevail 2–0 at Luton and all is sweetness and light. A quick return to the top division as champions is a surely a given. But dear old Mother Nature had other ideas.
‘The snow will continue in London and the South East for several hours and then turn to rain,’ said the BBC Home Service Announcer just prior to the Boxing Day News. But unfortunately the Meteorological Office was way off beam with this forecast. Not only did the white stuff continue to fall from the sky; far from ‘turning to rain’, it regrouped and found a new lease of life. Two days of solid snow was enough to bring London to a standstill. Maybe it wasn’t quite a white Christmas, but never before had so much white been seen on the Feast of Stephen!
Now, having endured a winter which had so far thrown up snow in November and the last of the great London pea-souper fogs in December, complete with sub-zero temperatures and a bone-chilling hoar frost, little did the population of Greater London realise what was to come, in the huge white shape of a blizzard possessed of so much anger and viciousness and violence that even a mundane activity such as opening a front door became a task of Herculean proportions.
It was 29 December and the wind moaned like a soul in torment as the snow cascaded down crazily. It was Saturday night, not far off the witching hour, and I was at a family party, watching David Frost and his pals on the box in That Was The Week That Was. A few minutes after the programme came to a halt, guests started to leave, but we were unable to open our front door as snowdrifts as tall as the average child had formed themselves into grotesquely shaped igloos.
Chelsea were top-dogs at Christmas, but the big freeze not only pulled the plug on virtually all competitive football for months, it also put a big white dampener on the promotion aspirations of Docherty’s charges.
Despite taking his squad to Malta for some sunshine and match practice, Docherty’s young team seemed edgy and lacking in confidence when they eventually returned to competitive League football. In a contest that somehow managed to survive the conditions at Swansea on 9 February 1963, they went down 2–0 and looked a shadow of the pre-Freeze outfit.
At first the Swansea result was regarded as a minor aberration, but with continuity lost thanks to the arctic conditions, whenever Chelsea did manage to play, they somehow contrived to lose. As loss followed loss, the confidence, which with such a young team was based on the innate swagger of youth itself, evaporated to be replaced by jangling nerves and uncertainty. Certainly desperation was becoming the order of the day down at the Bridge, as long-term victory was turning into short-term defeat.
Come 11 May 1963, it looked all over for Docherty’s young bucks. It seemed that only a home victory over top-of-the-heap Stoke City, Sir Stanley Matthews and all, could keep their promotion aspirations alive. Defeat, and all the pre-Christmas euphoria would dissolve into one massive squelchy debacle amidst the springtime slush.
On that spring afternoon 66,000 were packed into Stamford Bridge. Stoke’s line-up included veterans Jimmy McIlroy, Jackie Mudie and the forty-eight-year-old Matthews. Seventeen-year-old Chelsea defender Ronnie Harris, in the days before he was christened ‘Chopper’, was briefed to mark the iconic Matthews. At one stage, the great man was poleaxed by the tough teenager, and despite his gentlemanly image, Sir Stan made his feelings known with a litany of ripe words.
A 1–0 defeat and Chelsea’s dreams seemed dashed. Only victory away at Sunderland – Roker Road and all – would realise Docherty’s dream, but this seemed about as unlikely as a Labour General Election victory. But as John Profumo’s affair with Christine Keeler had hijacked the fortunes of the Tory party, so Tommy Harmer’s groin – or his ‘third leg’ as Sunderland skipper Stan Anderson described it – put paid to their advance to the top division.
I actually spoke to Harmer on two occasions; once, when as a teenage fan in the stands I watched Chelsea take on Wimbledon one afternoon in the early 1960s at Stamford Bridge in the London Challenge Cup, and then much later, a year or two after I had teamed-up with Peter Osgood, and the Wizard was wowing them down the King’s Road.
As a callow youth I sat next to the little waif that was the impish Harmer. I plucked up the courage and asked him about his ‘fluke goal’ at Sunderland.
‘It went in off my groin,’ he said, ‘I didn’t really know much about it.’
Later – much later, when I was full of the joys of spring ‘doing deals’ for Peter Osgood – a journalist friend introduce
d me to Tommy at a game. He was just as polite as he had been seven or eight years before and once more the fluke Sunderland goal came into the conversation. ‘It was just one of those things,’ he admitted.
A little later, Chelsea pillaged Portsmouth 7–0 at the Bridge in front of 57,000 supporters high on rapture and relief, and there was a pitch invasion (a friendly one, no coming-together of drunken fans and over-enthusiastic stewards); and boss Docherty announced to the crowd that ‘promotion to Division One would be worth £100,000 to the club’.
So, the mini Ice Age had ended; 1963 was to become 1964, and the country was soon to rock to a social change that altered British society. However, it was an urban thing, and away from Carnaby Street and the Cavern Club, life was just an extension of the 1950s. People still ‘knew their place’, and law and order and respect for authority were king. Murder was still a hanging offence; children were regularly beaten at schools; abortion was punishable by incarceration and being gay risked confinement in one of Her Majesty’s prisons.
Harold Wilson’s Labour Party won the 1964 General Election by a squeak, with a mere four seats separating the overall majority. The Conservative Party, rocked by scandal, was at the crossroads. The grandees within the party had a dilemma – change or be damned; and since those early days of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, it has been ever thus.
As for Chelsea FC, one match in 1964 stands out above all others – the FA Cup third round replay at Stamford Bridge against Tottenham Hotspur. Some forty years later I asked Jimmy Greaves about this iconic encounter, but surprisingly his memory was hazy – in fact, he said he didn’t remember it at all. Jokingly, he quipped, ‘I was probably pissed at the time!’
The first contest ended in stalemate: 1–1 with Terry Dyson opening the scoring for Spurs. The second game was a headline writer’s dream.