by Paul Rees
‘There were a couple of Asian lads and two or three West Indians who’d just then started to come to games,’ says John Homer, chairman of West Brom’s supporters’ club. ‘I can recall one Jamaican lad called Bowie. He and a couple of his mates used to come on the coach with us to away games. They took a hell of a lot of stick wherever they went, but they were big blokes and could look after themselves.’
The increased presence of the National Front at English football grounds hardly encouraged ethnic supporters to games, the far-right organisation having targeted the sport’s white working-class fan base as a potentially fertile recruiting ground. NF activists became a common sight outside stadia on a Saturday afternoon, particularly in London and the northern cities, handing out their poisonous pamphlets and literature.
In May 1973, one of the National Front’s most senior figures, Martin Webster, had contested a by-election in West Bromwich. He polled 16 per cent of the vote, then a record for the party. Three years later, the NF fared even better in local elections in the area, on average picking up a 17 per cent share of the vote, a markedly higher figure than it achieved in most other areas of the country.
For young blacks growing up in places such as Birmingham and the West Midlands as a whole, there was an acute sense of having been cut off both from the rest of society and from their own culture. Their parents, who’d emigrated from the Caribbean in the fifties and sixties, had been brought up to regard Britain as the mother country and a land of milk and honey. The reality they experienced upon arriving on these new shores proved to be very different.
‘My parents came to Birmingham from Jamaica in 1959 expecting to be welcomed with open arms and instead walked into a country that hated them,’ says Derrick Campbell, a civil rights activist who spent his childhood in Handsworth. ‘My mother can remember being stood at the bus stop and white women coming up to her and touching her face, asking her if she was the same colour all over.
‘Because our parents suffered such oppression and discrimination, we were taught at home to believe that white people were to be feared and not to trust them. As a youngster, I can recall being chased through the streets by police vans, which we used to call Black Marias. The police would regularly beat black kids with truncheons, or turn their dogs on us.’
‘More than anything, my memories of growing up are of the isolation we felt,’ says David Hinds, who was also born in Handsworth and later formed the British reggae band, Steel Pulse. ‘We saw it through the state of our housing and in our schools. Every now and then, the National Front would march through the community and put bricks through the windows. It was extremely hard to get a job in the area, because of the racial divide.’
The first signs of protest were seen in Birmingham in the late sixties and early seventies with the emergence of a group of young black men calling themselves the Natty Bongos. The Bongos based their dreadlocked hair and idealism on the Rastafarian movement, which had developed among working-class blacks in Jamaica in the 1930s in response to oppression from the island’s white landowners. The Rastafarians took the Bible as their sacred text and advocated a return to their ancestral homelands in Africa, believing that the slave trade had robbed them of their heritage. In the minds of the Bongos, their fight was with white Britain.
‘There was a reggae club called the Santa Rosa, which was on the main Soho Road that ran from Handsworth to West Bromwich, and that was on the front line,’ says Hinds. ‘A lot of Rasta-looking guys used to hang out there. These guys had wild-looking hair and they wore their pants halfway up their ankles. They began burning Bibles because they didn’t believe the King James translation could be trusted, since it was written by a white man. And they went to the extreme in their beliefs, refusing to eat white flour or sugar. But they could also be intimidating. Even for a black kid like me, it was a scary experience having to walk past them on the street.’
On 19 March 1977, West Bromwich Albion travelled to the North East to play high-flying Newcastle United at St James’ Park. For the first time in an Albion shirt, Laurie Cunningham was subjected to a diatribe from the Newcastle supporters on each occasion he touched the ball. One particularly ugly chant rose up and followed him along the touchline: ‘Pull the trigger, shoot the nigger.’ It was repeated over and again in a menacing monotone.
Cunningham appeared unruffled and was outstanding that afternoon, as if driven to greater heights by the continual abuse he was being subjected to. He scored Albion’s equalising goal, a header, in a 1-1 draw, further enraging his would-be tormentors. It was through performances such as these, facing down the mob and putting one over on them, that Cunningham became a figurehead for the nascent black pride that was fermenting in the country, especially in the West Midlands.
‘Laurie Cunningham was part of the process of black kids starting to find themselves,’ says Brian Travers, who grew up in Balsall Heath and is a founding member of the reggae band UB40. ‘He came through just as black culture was starting to emerge, and as a white guy, I could see how much he meant to my black pals. He gave them a sense of recognition and I’d guess that it helped them to stop feeling as if they were second-class citizens.’
Muhammad Ali’s triumph in retaining his world heavyweight boxing title in the epic ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ contest of 1974 with George Foreman was instrumental in awakening this new black consciousness in Britain. Before it, tremors were also set off by the emergence of such black-centric American record labels as Motown and Stax. Just three weeks after Cunningham’s ordeal in Newcastle, the BBC screened the smash-hit American TV series Roots, a pivotal moment for black Britons. Telling the true-life story of an African-born slave, Kunta Kinte, Roots was the first instance in which a drama told from a black perspective, and with a black man in the leading role, had been seen on British television.
Such things doubtless resonated, but what they didn’t or couldn’t do was articulate the experience of black kids growing up in Britain at the time, or suggest anything that might be attainable to them. For that, they would have to look to role models such as Cunningham and also to emerging British reggae bands such as Aswad from London and Handsworth’s Steel Pulse.
Reggae had been born in Jamaica, its bass-heavy sound evolving from the ‘bluebeat’ and ska scenes that had risen up on the Caribbean island in the fifties and sixties. These had generated such international hits as Millie Small’s 1964 single ‘My Boy Lollipop’ and Desmond Dekker’s ‘Israelites’ from 1968, and also heralded the emergence of a group called the Wailers that was fronted by a young Bob Marley. It was another band, Toots and the Maytals, that gave reggae its name with their 1968 song, ‘Do the Reggay’. But it was Marley who popularised the music through such defining anthems as 1973’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ and ‘No Woman, No Cry’ from the following year.
In the spring of 1977, reggae was still very much an underground music in Britain. It was barely heard on local radio stations, let alone the national broadcaster, the BBC’s Radio 1. Its impact was being felt instead on the streets of places such as Brixton in south London, and Birmingham’s Handsworth and Balsall Heath, among strong and growing black communities and where specialist reggae clubs and record shops had been founded. Following Marley’s lead, the new young British reggae bands used their music as a platform from which to sing about their own lives and experiences.
‘Reggae music was of the utmost importance to us, because it was like the tale that was never being told,’ says David Hinds. ‘As kids, we didn’t know the historical events that took place to bring us here, and the music started to connect the dots for us. Reggae was what we used to learn the history of ourselves as a people.’
‘Every second kid in my class at school was West Indian or Asian, and reggae was all that was played in the youth clubs or at the church-hall discos on a Friday night,’ recalls Brian Travers. ‘You could dance with girls to it and it was sexier [than white pop music]. When all the black kids began finding their own identity and started to become
Rasta, I can remember feeling distinctly left out as a white kid, but reggae in general worked wonders.’
Soon, Cunningham and Nicky Brown found their way to the heaving reggae clubs in Handsworth and elsewhere in Birmingham. There they resumed their London lifestyle, dancing through the night and into the next morning. As at Orient, Cunningham began to turn up late to training. This brought him into conflict with not just his disciplinarian manager, but also with the club’s captain, John Wile, a domineering figure in the dressing room.
‘Johnny Giles had instilled in us the ethos that the team was the most important thing and there’s no doubt about it, Laurie lacked discipline,’ says Wile. ‘You couldn’t have a player behaving as he did, although later on he was given a fair bit of latitude. But if someone came into the club at that time and felt they could take liberties, a little bit of glory seeking, it was stamped on straight away. And this didn’t always go down well.’
‘Laurie didn’t hit it off with some of the older players,’ admits Derek Statham. ‘He was forever parading in front of the dressing room mirror, combing his hair and wouldn’t accept friends too easily. You had to win his trust and then he’d take you in a little bit. I went out with him socially a couple of times and got to see the other side of him. He loved showing off with his dancing and he knew how to have a right good laugh. He was a lovely guy really, but unfortunately not everybody was able to see that.’
Cunningham found an unlikely ally in one of the West Brom directors, John Gordon. A flamboyant character, Gordon was a self-made millionaire who’d grown up friends with the media impresario Lew Grade in the thriving London East End Jewish community of the 1920s. He owned the Adelphi Ballroom in West Bromwich and had brought the Beatles to the Black Country to perform at the venue in November 1962.
Perhaps empathising with the prejudice Cunningham was encountering on the football pitch, having himself been subjected to anti-Semitism, Gordon took the young player under his wing. He offered Cunningham financial advice and entertained him and Brown at his penthouse apartment in Birmingham, whisking them off there in his Jaguar car. The football club had lodged the couple at the Europa Hotel, just down the road from the Hawthorns. When they were asked to leave following complaints about noise, Gordon found them a place to live.
‘John Gordon liked our naughtiness and daring, but he felt protective towards us as well,’ says Nicky Brown. ‘From his own youth, he understood what Laurie was dealing with, and doing so with dignity, and he treated him as if he were his own grandson.
‘There was one time when we went to Scotland with him on a private plane. Laurie and I did one of our things that day. We got all dressed up and pretended to be Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers. We made out that we didn’t know each other and sat on opposite sides of the aisle on the plane. When we took off, Laurie came over and started talking to me as if we’d just met. I don’t know if John had ever had children, but I think he liked that kind of innocent life in us.’
At the end of that April, Cunningham’s rise through the game was further accelerated when he was selected for the England Under-21 team. He wouldn’t quite be the first black footballer to represent his country, as the Birmingham Post claimed when announcing the news, since that honour had gone to another Londoner, Benjamin Odeje, who’d turned out for the England Schoolboys side six years earlier. Cunningham’s ascension was nonetheless a hugely significant milestone for both the game in England and for the burgeoning ideal of an empowered black Britain.
He re-enforced this when making his international debut against Scotland at Sheffield United’s Bramall Lane ground on 27 April. In a tightly contested match, he scored the only goal of the game, a diving header just after half-time. After the match, the U21s boss, Les Cocker, told waiting reporters: ‘This boy can certainly play and I was very pleased for him, because he was under a lot of pressure before the match and had something to prove.’
‘Laurie was very much aware of the significance of his playing in that game,’ says Brown. ‘He was a British boy. He loved his bacon sandwiches and his roast dinner on a Sunday.’
A week previous to the international fixture, Johnny Giles announced his intention to quit as West Bromwich Albion manager at the end of the season, having taken issue with the club’s failure to offer him an improved contract. His shell-shocked team won their next two games, beating Leicester City 5-0 and Stoke City 3-1, results that secured them a seventh-place finish in the First Division. Giles’ final game was a local derby at Aston Villa, a couple of miles up the road in Birmingham. Yet there would be no glorious send-off for him, with Albion losing 4-0 and doing so without Laurie Cunningham. On the evening of the game, he’d had the last of his run-ins with the manager.
‘We’d come in to have a warm-up that morning and Laurie hadn’t turned up,’ says Tony Brown. ‘He didn’t actually show up till teatime, when we were all on the coach and ready to go to the game. John asked him where he’d been all day and I forget his excuse, but his usual one was that he’d not heard his alarm clock. John ordered him off the coach and sent him home.’
‘I doubt very much whether that attitude of Laurie’s would’ve continued had John stayed on,’ says Wile. ‘He’d have been told to toe the line regardless of how good a player he might have been. But after John left, people tended to put their arm around Laurie, pamper to him if you like, and other players perhaps didn’t get the same sort of attention.’
One of Giles’ other last acts as manager of West Brom would have a deeper meaning for not just the football club, but on a much greater scale, though he couldn’t possibly have known it at the time. In the first week of May 1977, Giles sanctioned the signing of another young black player scouted by Ronnie Allen, this time from non-league football in London. He was a strapping centre-forward named Cyrille Regis.
Chapter Three: Smokin’ Joe
The mass migration to Britain from its Caribbean colonies was instigated by the 1948 British Nationality Act, which permitted islanders holding a British passport to legally reside in the UK. On 22 June that year, the SS Empire Windrush sailed into Tilbury Docks in Essex, delivering the first 492 of the 80,000 migrants that would arrive from the Caribbean by 1957.
There was the general sense among the islanders that Britain was a land of boundless opportunity. However, harsher realities also drove them to leave their homelands. The British West Indies had long suffered from the neglect of its colonial master, and as a result poor wages, poverty and squalor were facts of life on the islands. The British government had also not shied from using an iron fist to keep its colonial subjects in check. During the 1930s, a series of workers’ revolts had occurred across the region. These protested pay and conditions at various subsidiary companies of the British sugar giant, Tate & Lyle. The British army was sent in to crush one such uprising in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1938, with forty-six protestors being killed.
Decamping to Britain’s urban areas, the new arrivals were grouped together in run-down inner-city housing and ushered into low-skilled manual work. Most often they were paid less than their white counterparts, despite a mere 9 per cent of them being classed as unskilled. A common sight at this time were hand-made signs displayed in the windows of lodging houses that read ‘No blacks, no Irish, no dogs’. The Irish had made up the greater number of migrants to Britain in the pre-war era. The frigidity of this welcome took on a hostile edge in 1958 when white gangs spilled onto the streets of London’s Notting Hill and the East Midlands city of Nottingham in the country’s first race riots for a generation.
In 1963, Cyrille Regis left the Caribbean island of St Lucia for Britain with his mother and two siblings, a sister and brother. Regis was born four years earlier in French Guiana, a protectorate of France on the north Atlantic coast of South America. His father, Robert, was a fisherman by trade but had come to the mountain town of Maripasoula from the Caribbean to prospect for gold. He’d had little success and in 1962 had gone on to England ahead of his family to look for work.
His wife, Mathilde, took the children to stay with relatives on St Lucia. From there they were able to pick up British passports.
The remaining Regis family members sailed into Southampton as the British winter was biting. They took a train from the coast to London, where Robert had got a job working as a labourer. He was renting a room on Portobello Road and to begin with the four of them crammed into it. The family subsequently moved to a two-bedroom lodging house in Kensal Rise to the north-west of the city, where the three children attended the local primary school.
‘I can remember that it always seemed to be cold,’ says Regis. ‘But I was a kid, so England was new and fun to me. For my parents, it was tough and there was a constant struggle with housing. The house in Kensal Rise was two-up, two-down with an outside toilet and no bathroom. We used to have to go to a place in Paddington once a week to get a bath.
‘Later on, my parents made us aware of the prejudice they’d encountered. They told us about things like the “No Irish, no blacks . . .” signs. That’s when I came to understand why there were only ever Irish and black people living where we lived. But I personally never experienced anything of the sort growing up, or at least nothing that affected me too much or stayed with me.’
In 1969, the family was broken up again, driven out of Kensal Rise by a steep increase in rent. Robert, Mathilde and their daughter moved into a nearby hostel, while Cyrille and his brother were sent off to board at a convent school in the Hampshire town of Aldershot for nine months. The five of them were reunited the following year and settled down in north London. They found a council house on a new housing estate in Stonebridge, near Wembley, a neat maisonette over which loomed six concrete tower blocks.
Brought up a Roman Catholic, Regis was sent to the Cardinal Hinsley secondary school in Harlesden. A big lad even then, he soon proved to be an adept sportsman. He was naturally broad and muscular, but quick-footed too, and he regularly picked up certificates for winning the 100-metre and 200-metre sprint races on the school’s sports days. However, cricket was his first love, and he was selected to represent both the school and the borough of Brent at the game.