Chelsea FC in the Swinging '60s

by Greg Tesser

  Despite my protestations to one Chelsea player in particular, and despite my ‘success’ in promoting Peter Osgood, Hudson never became one of ‘my players’. Ironically, many years later – during the mid-1990s – I did actually arrange a few things for him, but that’s another story.

  Moore’s World Cup-winning colleagues Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters were on my ‘special list’, and meeting Peters’ agent Jack Turner proved very fruitful for me. In many ways it was my first foray into the relatively new world of sports agents.

  Jack was a real salt-of-the-earth character. He was East End down to his bootlaces, and as straight as a dye. He was passionate in an almost pre-war, very English way. He and my father got on well – my dad’s East End roots were always a big plus – and to cut a long story short, Jack suggested I become Martin Peters’ ‘literary agent’. I jumped at the opportunity, but remained determined that this would just be a launch pad for bigger and better things in the future.

  But there was one player that I was convinced would give George Best a run for his money in the celebrity stakes, and it wasn’t Moore; it was, of course, Peter Osgood.

  Getting hold of Ossie via the football club was not the big deal it would be these days. Having left a message with the club secretary I waited with baited breath for Peter to return my call, which he did some twenty-four hours later. I explained what it was all about, the royalty cheques and all that, and soon we were back in West Hampstead for the photo shoot that was to change my life (and without sounding too full of myself, also changed the life of the twenty-one-year-old soccer starlet).

  Despite being essentially a ‘country boy’, Ossie clearly enjoyed the photo session and the whole Swinging London/hip David Bailey atmosphere that was generated in this West Hampstead apartment. He was obviously relaxed and lapped up the purring noises that emanated from the two snappers.

  Once it was all over, and I had confirmed how much money could be accrued from the sales of his poster, I deftly managed to slip the word agent into the conversation. I then went on to mention in passing that I had been publicity manager of The Yardbirds and Georgie Fame, threw in that in promoting The Yardbirds, I had also publicised Eric Clapton, and without any more tugging from me, Peter said: ‘Would you like to be my agent on a trial basis?”

  My eyes lit up when he uttered those words, and my next step was to suggest a meeting. He lived out in Windsor, so it was decided I would meet him and his wife Rosemary (they had married at the tender age of seventeen) at their house. We could have something to eat – Rose cooked a mean steak I was told – and we could plan our campaign.

  It was 1968, and the students had taken to the chic boulevards of Paris, marching to the beat of a middle-aged existentialist author and pseudo-Marxist Jean-Paul Sartre. Youth was a powerful weapon in 1968, powerful enough indeed to dislodge the old-order government of President de Gaulle.

  In London, Tariq Ali was leading a march in the environs of Grosvenor Square, demonstrating against the Vietnam War. It turned ugly, but it was yet another example of youth engaging itself with serious political and international issues.

  Also in London, the Marylebone Cricket Club was under massive pressure not to include Cape Town-born Basil D’Oliveira in its cricket squad for the tour of South Africa. Eventually, hoping to avoid incident, the MCC called off the tour – no engagement with what was morally reprehensible, just bucketloads of hypocrisy.

  On the football front, England lost 1–0 at the semi-final stage of the European Championships in Italy to Yugoslavia, before going on to claim third place with a 2–0 success over the Soviet Union.

  Back to my meeting with the Osgoods: it was a relaxed affair, with an excellent meal (yes, it was steak prepared to perfection by Rose), topped up with ice-cold lager, and it went down a treat. His wife was small in stature and almost cuddly. She was homely and sweet and so unassuming. I liked her, and I think she liked me. She was the same age as Ossie, but despite her apparent lack of sophistication, there was something different about her. On the surface she was the typical mother/wife figure so prevalent in 1950s British households, but in my view there was more to her than just that. One thing that could be said about her: she knew exactly how to behave, which is more than can be said of the wags of these more celebrity-centric and materialistic times.

  Peter explained that he had already formed a company, Peter Osgood Ltd, and that maybe it would be advisable to use this as a proper business vehicle for our project. Peter and his wife were the sole directors, and my name was added within a matter of days.

  I arranged for some classy headed paper to be printed. For some reason best known to myself, I chose an insipid yellow, but it was tasteful and it was trendy and very King’s Road.

  Next stop was Lloyds Bank on Fulham Broadway. The manager rolled out the red carpet, not for me of course, but for ‘The Wizard of Os’ – the star of the show. The manager, a spare man of indeterminate age in a demob-style suit and a wispy undernourished moustache, possessed a smile that was grotesquely cheesy. When he moved his pencil-thin lips upwards, some strands of his moustache became entangled in his mouth. He was also forever blowing his nose from a large white handkerchief that he kept secreted in his right sleeve.

  He revelled in the paperwork, handing sheets to us like some magician producing the proverbial rabbit from a hat. He was, he said, a Chelsea fan. Whether he was or not, or was just cashing in on the whole King’s Road thing, I couldn’t quite work out; but it made him happy, so who was I to be dismissive of him?

  This branch of Lloyds on the Fulham Road was typical of how banks used to be before the barrow boys and hustlers and spivs took over the reins of these conservative institutions and ran them like some kind of glorified Cash-and-Carry, depositing great chunks of the population’s cash down the lavatory pan in the process.

  Having said our goodbyes to what seemed like the entire staff, and drawn a few quid as, Ossie put it, ‘for our general expenses’, we made our way to a greasy spoon for a cup of tea and a wad and another chat about our future plans.

  The 1968–69 season was not one of Peter’s happiest periods as a player: he had been shifted to the midfield by manager Sexton where, in my view, he was like a duck out of water; subsequently much of his natural inborn talent appeared to be repressed and completely stifled. Prior to his broken leg he played the game in a cavalier, off-the-cuff manner that was both refreshing and overtly un-English. Now, he was performing more like a cog in a not-so-well-oiled machine.

  I was no Freudian psychiatrist, but for me it was all about confidence, or should I say, the lack of it. Like all great artists – and in sporting terms Osgood was a great artist – he needed ladles of flattery and reassurance to get him back on the right track and to begin drinking from that full glass once more.

  Later he told me that the medics at Stamford Bridge had prescribed him some form of tranquilliser. This was the era of such things. Valium, Librium and God-knows-what-else were being dished out to people like Smarties. These ‘happy pills’ became the norm for so many people that their lives started to take on an almost surreal guise, like some chemical-induced nirvana that would then burn itself out to such an extent that those very same anxieties and doubts and devils would eventually return in an even more virulent form.

  Thankfully this chemical hangover wasn’t affecting Ossie at all; he had already stopped swallowing the tiny pills. What he needed now was another form of fix: a regular ego-massage from me!

  Thankfully Ossie lapped up my boyish enthusiasm like a cat with the cream. He was fully aware from the outset that I was a mad Blues fan, and he also knew that, like Jimmy Greaves during my boyhood, he was my number one sportsman. This was, as they say, a ‘marriage made in heaven’.

  Having made a plan, I now started to get things moving by making a clutch of phone calls. As I said time after time to Osgood, I can push his name here there and everywhere, but he has to start performing on the pitch. I didn’t actually say any of this in suc
h a brusque, harsh tone – it was done with a more silky tongue, in the manner of a therapist. But Ossie got the point.

  Peter was born and raised in Windsor, and the nearest industrial centre to the famous castle town is, of course, Slough. During the embryonic years of my existence, in the late 1940s and early ’50s, we used to go on Sunday afternoon trips to the country in the summer in my father’s 1939 Standard Flying 12. Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire were our regular destinations, and very often we would have tea in Slough.

  In those days, to a boy of three or four or five, the town possessed a country feel to it, but maybe this was just ‘rose coloured spectacles’ because back in 1937, Sir John Betjeman, in his ten-stanza poem ‘Slough’ had, shall we say, been less than complimentary about the place: ‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for humans now. There isn’t grass to graze a cow. Swarm over, Death!’

  In 2006, on the centenary of his birth, his daughter, Candida Lycett-Green apologised for the poem, stating her father ‘regretted having ever written it’. So, despite my early impressions of the place, even by the late 1930s, it had already begun its decline from market town to ‘building and office site’.

  And as the 1950s became the 1960s, more and more internationally famous companies decamped to this area of Berkshire, so conveniently close to the environs of London itself.

  We therefore craved a company that would exploit the Chelsea man’s fast-growing status as a national celebrity, but at the same time utilise it subtly from a local perspective. And we found the right man in Tom Pink, a hard-working Ford agent, who, despite his name, was Chelsea Blue from his collar-and-tie down to his socks and polished black brogues.

  The idea was to plaster Peter Osgood’s face all over Slough, Windsor and adjoining towns promoting Ford cars, but in particular Pink’s thriving dealership in Slough. For this, we received a monthly retainer. Also, every time someone popped in to see Pink and ended up buying a motor after using Ossie’s name, a substantial bonus would be paid.

  I told Peter I would pay him the dosh each and every month in cash, making it a nice little tax-free income; in the words of Arthur Daley it was ‘a nice little earner’. A few months down the line, in 1970, during his time on World Cup duty in Mexico, I journeyed to Windsor via minicab armed with my Ford pound notes and handed the envelope containing the oncers to Ossie’s wife, Rosemary. She really appeared to appreciate my visits, and as it was summer, we always spent an hour or two in her garden drinking tea and eating biscuits and cake. She was, as I have already said, really homely, and I think she thought I was ‘a bit of a gent’.

  As for Pink, well, he was what you would call the archetypal salesman. They are a breed, these people: matching estate agents in their blandness and patter. Unfortunately, once or twice he got on my nerves and I remember one occasion in particular when his whole attitude to life got right up my nose. He had phoned me to discuss a particular aspect of Ossie’s Ford promotion, and after the usual insincere pleasantries, I lost my rag. Now, to be fair to the pugnacious Pink, I was living a very strange existence in those days; an existence that, had it carried on, would have tested my sanity to its extreme limits.

  It was now the back-end of the so-called ‘Swinging ’60s’. All hope of Wilson’s ‘white hot technology’ ethos was fast dissipating into just another balls-up by just another government. Rock stars were dying like flies as the drink and the drugs became serious and were no longer just a small part of this cultural and social revolution. Adopting this arrogant agent persona – a whippersnapper who took no prisoners and had essentially transferred all that was Andrew Loog Oldham into a football version of the man – meant that I was playing a part that was not truly me. So, to counteract this feeling of betraying my innate principles, I swallowed all kinds of pills.

  At the time of our Ford promotion, ‘my pill’ was an iniquitous white tablet called Mandrax or ‘Mandy’ to many addicts, some of whom later used it as a substitute for heroin. Now Mandrax could make a person feel like he was king of the world. It could, in the manner of LSD, make the colours come to life. But on the other side of the coin, it could also make a person stammer and stutter and feel incredibly lethargic, and when mixed with alcohol, it was a recipe for a bad trip. Too many ‘Mandies’ and you were potentially an undertaker’s client.

  So, back to this phone call with poor old Pink. I was having a particularly ‘bad Mandrax day’, and midway through our phone conversation I let him have it. Of course, he didn’t know a jot about my pill-popping, and just put it down to my being an arrogant, pushy young bastard. C’est la vie!

  Ossie loved the Ford deal, but from my standpoint it was just a start. I kept telling him that my goal was to make him London’s version of George Best. And of course, he had one major advantage over George and that was, that unlike Best, Peter was playing for a team based around the most iconic and hip thoroughfare in Europe – if not the world – the King’s Road.

  The early months of 1969 were all about setting the scene for Osgood’s resurgence. I learnt a great deal during my rock ’n’ roll period, the most important thing being that in order to promote something or somebody, the best way was to ‘flood the media’, or beat them into submission; not an easy task back in the days when even a fax machine was a thing of fantasy, to be found only in the works of science fiction writers such as Ray Bradbury.

  My one instrument was the phone, and when a journalist colleague told me about Striker magazine and its editor, a real whiz-kid of a guy called Tony Power, I immediately went out and bought a copy.

  Striker was a mixture of comic and football mag, and its obvious aspiration was to poach thousands of readers from Shoot, already the established paper in this comparatively new, and some would say, milieu for morons. This criticism was levelled at these publications by middle-aged journos and writers who simply did not get the new brand of culture in football that was beginning to take hold. Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly had led the way for nigh-on a generation with pretty dull, dry material, and then along came these brash newcomers full of comic strips and colour and columns by the stars, and with them the game changed forever.

  The main columnist in Striker was the elegant and naturally talented Manchester City and England midfielder Colin Bell. There was no doubt that Bell was a great player, but he was not really a ’60s’ man. Peter Osgood, however, was a product of the age, and ‘selling’ him to editor Tony Power was the proverbial piece of cake, for Tony, despite all his overt business acumen, was very much a young man of the era – and to top it all he was as Chelsea as I was!

  So, Striker now had two ‘star columnists’, and as Ossie’s ‘ghost’, it was up to me to make his column not only appealing to kids, but at the same time endeavour to add that extra morsel of spice to it; in other words, to reflect the Chelsea star’s natural flamboyance and flair.

  Power was what many people would term a poseur. He dressed foppishly, often sporting a bow tie. He had an RAF fighter pilot’s moustache, and I liked him. In fact we got on so well that we seemed to spend literally hours having lunch, often at Gerry’s Club in Soho, a drinking den and haunt of layabouts and luvvies – comedian Tony Hancock was a member – owned by actor Gerald Campion, who in the 1950s had become an early and unlikely TV star, thanks to his brilliant performances as Billy Bunter.

  He would also invite me to various ‘events’. One such was a charity do at which the VIP guest was Jimmy Savile. Now, Tony knew Savile, albeit only as a nodding acquaintance, but he was pushy (although not aggressively so), as he was always so friendly and polite. Tony was one of those people who wore a permanent smile of contentment. Whether he was or not I never quite discovered. Anyway, up to Savile he goes and starts chatting to the blond-haired DJ about the North and the South and Chelsea and Leeds. It was obvious that Savile was not completely out of his depth when it came to cultural differences, but it was also blatantly obvious that he was not a deep-thinker.

  Savile was fr
om Leeds. Waving one of his ostentatious cigars in my face, he said that the animosity between the two teams was a ‘North/South cultural thing’. His whole manner was insincere, and it was crystal clear from the outset that he didn’t really want to talk to us.

  By this time Tony, who enjoyed the odd chardonnay or three, was at his most ebullient. It was obvious to all that Savile, who didn’t drink, craved to get back to all the fawners and kowtowers, the people who sat at his feet purring at his every inane word and sentence.

  Ossie was as pleased as a child on Christmas morning with the column. Often we would chat on the phone to thrash out a few ideas that he had, but on other occasions when he was tied-up doing what he did best – playing for Chelsea – I just pretended to be him and imagined what he would say. Anyway, it worked like a dream. Tony, despite his incessant enthusiasm and over-the-top persona, was also a realist. He told me that sales were up and that much of this was down to the Osgood page.

  We would occasionally visit Stamford Bridge together, and it was during one of these trips that Tony saw first-hand how the world of showbiz had adopted Chelsea FC as its own.

  Tony loved life, and he loved women, and much later when the company publishing Striker was bought out, he swapped football for topless females and the world of soft porn publishing in the shape of Men Only magazine.

  Men Only at the end of the 1960s and into the very early years of the ’70s was, by modern standards, harmless fun. It was packed with all kinds of articles, some actually well-written. In most people’s eyes it was like a second-class Playboy. Only the likes of that puritanical disciple of chastity, Mary Whitehouse, could object to it. Its nudity was genteel and frankly lacking in sexual allure, and its popularity was on the wane, as Britain’s answer to Playboy – Penthouse – started to capture this booming market.