SAMMY: You put a nice dinner jacket on. You’ve got a few associates with you. You’re doing business; a nice meal, a bottle of brandy on the table. You’ve spent a few bob, put yourself out. You don’t want to see a nigger knock the shit out of a nice white boy, do you? Other way round it’s different. It’s nothing to do with prejudice.
Dinner at The Sporting Club (Leon Griffiths;
BBC TV, 1978)
SATURDAY, 30 October 1971, was already memorable for 17-year-old Ade Coker. Given the chance to ride with the West Ham United first team to Selhurst Park, home of Crystal Palace, the apprentice from Lagos, Nigeria, was happy to help unload the skip containing his club’s stylish change kit of light blue shirts with two claret hoops. Coker laid out the white-numbered jerseys and was wondering to whom he should hand the 12th when Ron Greenwood entered the changing-room and told everyone to sit down. ‘Geoff Hurst’s back injury means he can’t play today,’ the manager began. ‘We have to bring in a new face. Get changed, Ade.’
Hurst handed his No.9 shirt to the stunned-looking teenager, who sat with eyes wide and head spinning. ‘The shock was so great my legs turned to jelly,’ he admitted. ‘I could hardly speak.’ Skipper Bobby Moore, who remembered making his West Ham debut in similar circumstances, made a point of speaking quietly into Coker’s ear as they headed to the field. ‘Don’t worry about a thing. Just get a goal in the first couple of minutes and everything will be fine.’
It took longer than that – but not much. Seven minutes had elapsed when Harry Redknapp’s right-wing corner drifted beyond the granite figure of Palace centre-half John McCormick, before thumping off the thigh of defender Mel Blyth and bouncing across goal towards Coker’s left foot. ‘I’ll never forget that moment,’ he said. ‘I hit it instinctively and it went into the net like a bullet.’ Coker celebrated with the broadest of grins. ‘What a smile,’ London’s television viewers heard commentator Brian Moore chuckle as the moment lit up their screens the following afternoon. Coker, of course, was among those watching. ‘It took the television replay to prove to me that it was real,’ he said. West Ham went on to win 3-0, Bermudan striker Clyde Best netting the third. Coker attracted further approval by using the sole of his boot to twice leave McCormick floundering, a show of skill that had Jimmy Hill ‘thinking how coloured lads like Ade, with their negro athleticism and grace, could change the face of English League football’.621
Coker had moved to England with his parents at the age of 11, leaving behind two brothers and a sister. Because of that, the attention his goal attracted was undoubtedly greater than had it been scored by David Llewellyn, the other Hammers teenager who’d travelled to Palace. Coker was not just a young debutant, he enjoyed novelty status; a black player in the days when very few existed in the Football League.
Best, whose congratulatory hug after Coker’s goal had been the tightest and longest, had been a regular in the Hammers squad since the 1969-70 season, while full-back John Charles, born in Canning Town and whose father was a merchant seaman from Grenada, had been a sporadic presence in the first team since 1963. Charles’s younger brother, Clive, was now also in the squad. ‘I’ve never felt conscious of my colour at Upton Park,’ said Coker as reporters gathered around this curiosity. ‘Perhaps having Clyde Best paving the way ahead of me has helped. We get along well because we’ve both had to work hard to adjust to English conditions.’
Best, who’d played football by the docks with visiting sailors and represented his country at the age of 15, had been recommended by national coach Graham Adams. West Ham paid the airfare to fly the 18-year-old from Bermuda without ever having seen him play, and then forgot to meet him at the airport. Instead, he made his way to Upton Park, where – it being a Sunday – there was no one around. Fortunately a passer-by knew where the Charles brothers lived and directed him to their house.
Aged 20 in the early stages of 1971-72, Best had never been more important to his team, leading the attack when Hurst was dropped after the Hammers failed to score in their opening two games. Hurst, who had bet Malcolm Allison £100 that he would score 15 goals during the season, was recalled after one game, but was initially condemned to playing in a deeper and wider position behind Best and Bryan ‘Pop’ Robson, the prolific scorer signed from Newcastle United.
Best’s goal against Palace was his ninth in 11 games, with Greenwood prophesying, ‘Clyde could make as big an impact on the game as other coloured players like Pelé and Eusébio.’ It was a sign of less enlightened times that any achievement Best might enjoy was contextualised in terms of skin pigmentation. ‘The colourful tale of the few who did make it,’ was a typical headline in Football League Review above an article that said black players were ‘bringing their own colourful characteristics to the game’.622 It was a rare occurrence when, in February 1972, Goal ran a feature on Best without once specifically mentioning that he was black, although it did reference a fan who described him looking like a cross between Pelé and former heavyweight champion Sonny Liston.
That same week, both Goal and Shoot! published pieces about Ipswich Town winger John Miller, whose family were from Jamaica. Asked by the former about the possibility of being the first ‘coloured’ England player, he replied, ‘There could be a lot playing for England in years to come.’623 The article was indicative of the media’s obsession with the narrative of a black player representing England. With due respect to Miller, had he been white he would not have figured in any conversation about national selection. He played little more than 50 games over six years at Ipswich before moving to Norwich City and into the lower divisions.
Greenwood’s boast about Best had been evidence of him getting similarly carried away. For all Best’s honesty and bravery, along with a sharp turn of speed for a six-footer with a broad backside, even the most committed West Ham fan would have struggled to make a convincing case for him being bracketed with the Brazilian and Portuguese legends. Greenwood also sounded somewhat patronising when he explained that the club put any money Best made outside of football into an account to pay for flights home. Yet Best welcomed the care, referring to his manager as a father figure.
Apocryphally, Best had been tempted to return home for good after his first game in West Ham’s claret and blue, a reserve match in which the presence of Moore and Hurst created an attendance of 5,000 and which was played in snow and ice. Even he could not ignore the fact that his geographical background was newsworthy, saying in an early interview, ‘I really miss the sun and I find it hard to get used to the cold. I had never seen snow before I arrived here, and I had never encountered the muddy conditions.’624
A small number of black players had performed in England before. They included West African Arthur Wharton, who played in goal for Preston North End and Rotherham United in the 1880s, and Walter Tull, who represented Tottenham Hotspur and Northampton Town before being killed in the First World War. Jack Leslie’s Plymouth Argyle career spanned the 1920s and 1930s* and there were a few more around the lower divisions in the 1950s, including Middlesbrough’s Jamaican forward Lindy Delapenha, frequently referred to as ‘the coffee-coloured king of the wing’, and future TV comedian Charlie Williams at Doncaster Rovers. South African winger Albert Johanneson became the first black player to feature in the FA Cup Final when he played in 1965 for Leeds United, who had also featured fellow-countryman Gerry Francis earlier in the decade.
Yet the new generation, led by Best, were the first group to be seen regularly by the nation. ‘Before televised games started, nobody except those who went to games knew that black players were involved,’ he said. ‘Once television coverage exploded, people like myself were given exposure. A lot of players over the years have come up to me and thanked me for making it possible for them to get somewhere.’625 One such player was Viv Anderson, who Greenwood would make the first black player to win a full England cap before the decade was out. He remembered Best as ‘the first black person I ever saw on TV’.626
Greenwood also created history on Easter Saturday in 1972, when Best, Coker and Clive Charles lined up against Tottenham; the first time three black players had appeared together in the First Division. According to Charles, ‘I am not even sure we noticed it. Looking back, you think you must have done but I certainly don’t remember thinking, “Oh there are three black blokes in our team.” It was never really like that. I was just glad I was playing.’627
By 1972-73, the Wonderful World of Soccer Stars football stickers – featuring the First Division squad members – still numbered only two black faces in its collection, Coker and Best, with the former unable to get on the field in a top-flight game beyond the first four matches of the season. They were still part of a rare enough breed that any racist abuse directed at them was too isolated to attract national attention or to feel like part of a concerted movement. So much so that Jimmy Hill was able to blithely state in 1970, ‘At a time when so much racial discrimination exists within sport, how good it is to see coloured players accepted within our own sport of football.’628
It was a picture of football that Best might not have recognised. Early in the 1970-71 season, he received an anonymous letter. ‘[It] made my blood run cold,’ he remembered. ‘It warned me that as soon as I emerged from the tunnel and took the field the next day, I would have acid thrown in my face.’ What made it more frightening was that Best had felt safe in the warm, respectful environment of West Ham. ‘I couldn’t imagine anyone could be so prejudiced as to threaten me in that way,’ he said.629 Yet Harry Redknapp recalled, ‘Everywhere he went, he took abuse. What he had to go through was hurtful to all of us because he was such a special, special fellow, a laid-back guy who didn’t have a bad bone in him.’630
Miller, meanwhile, admitted having been racially abused by ‘one player from a Midlands club’, but shrugged it off by explaining that his opponent apologised later.631 After all, there was not much to be gained by going to the tabloids with the story. They would have thought little of it in an age where Alf Garnett was regularly abusing ‘coons’ on BBC television in Till Death Us Do Part.
It was clear that the potential for more displays of hatred would grow as second-generation British immigrants followed the trail blazed by the West Ham players. ‘Boys who come here are bound to make a place for themselves in our game,’ said Greenwood in 1971. ‘Schoolboy football in London already has a lot of youngsters from immigrant families, sons of West Indians and Nigerians. We have seven or eight coloured boys training with us at schoolboy level. They have tremendous natural aptitude.’ Once again, the racial stereotype that frequently populated such conversation was never far away, with Greenwood adding, ‘They are loose-limbed players that I describe as athletic gymnasts.’
Arsenal manager Bertie Mee, who had black defender Brendon Batson in his squad, said at that time, ‘Five years ago, out of a hundred boys we invited to Highbury for a trial only one would be coloured. Today, five out of a hundred are coloured and the number is growing. I can visualise a situation by the end of the Seventies when clubs from the big industrial centres of England are fielding teams that are 50 per cent coloured.’
Mee, an eminent NHS physiotherapist, knew enough about life beyond football to have been correct in the gist of his message, if somewhat premature in his timeline. At the end of the decade there would be approximately 50 black professional footballers in a total of 2,000, but in 1975-76, with both Best and Coker’s Hammers careers having petered out, there was not a single black player being swapped by schoolboys in the nation’s playgrounds.†
It reflected the general condition of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain at that time. Identifiable heroes were scarce, which was why the visits of the West Indies cricketers to England in 1973, 1975 and 1976 were seized upon as opportunities for an unabashed celebration of the Caribbean experience. Whether it was cheering their team’s World Cup triumph of 1975 or banging out a victory rhythm on beer cans as Viv Richards and Michael Holding made England captain Tony Greig choke on the ‘make them grovel’ declaration he’d made before the Test series a year later, here was a chance for West Indians to celebrate the roots from which they were becoming increasingly disconnected; in a country in which they had yet to establish their own identity.
The converted troopship, HMT Empire Windrush, had docked at Tilbury in 1948 to signal the real beginning of the post-war migration of large numbers of Caribbean citizens to the British Isles. A decade later the number of West Indians in Britain had grown to approach 200,000. As Britain headed into economic recession in the late 1950s, racial tension was exacerbated, leading to discrimination when it came to finding jobs and housing and escalating into the Nottingham and Notting Hill riots of 1958.
The imminent Commonwealth Immigrants Act, introduced in 1962 to limit the rights of citizens of Commonwealth countries to permanent entry into the United Kingdom, meant a rush of new arrivals before the barriers came down. When Harold Wilson became Prime Minister for the first time in 1964 it was at the end of an election campaign in which both major parties had made the limitation of immigration a major issue, a reversal of Labour’s earlier policy of opposing such controls. Even though annual immigration from Commonwealth countries plummeted from around 75,000 in 1963 to fewer than 4,000 in 1967, the Caribbean and Asian communities continued to find themselves blamed for all manner of the country’s problems, including unemployment and increased crime rates.
Yet it was the immigrant population that suffered more than any, with government figures in 1975 showing unemployment running at twice the national average. Meanwhile, black Londoners were shown to be 15 times more likely to be arrested for petty theft, even though, as Dominic Sandbrook noted, ‘few people seriously thought they were 15 times more likely to commit them’.632
And there had been the Saturday lunchtime in Birmingham in 1968 when Enoch Powell, then MP for Wolverhampton South West and considered a viable Conservative Party leadership candidate, made a speech prompted by the potential of an influx of Kenyan Asians. With a new Race Relations Bill intended to end discrimination in housing and employment about to be debated, he told his audience that a constituent had expressed a fear that ‘in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’. A classical scholar, he delivered in Latin the line, ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’ The press translation was a prediction of seeing ‘rivers of blood’ because of racial conflict.
Edward Heath promptly sacked him from the Conservative front bench, but Powell had given a voice to many. When Heath’s party won the 1970 election, Powell doubled his own majority and ‘Powellism’ was forecast to be a prominent feature of the country’s politics. On election night, the BBC’s Desmond Wilcox, who found revellers standing in the Trafalgar Square fountains chanting Powell’s name, tentatively asked an observer, ‘Can I have a word with you, sir? You’re an immigrant. How did you feel about the increased majority?’ The middle-aged Asian interviewee replied, ‘I hope it’s not a national trend throughout the country. But it’s just clear, indicative of one fact: that the people’s attitudes have changed over this period and it’s a very dangerous sign.’633
Trevor Nelson, a future broadcaster who had emigrated from St Lucia, recalled, ‘Even at a young age, we were aware of people like Enoch Powell. Our parents would tell us that we had been invited to come to Britain, but in the news we heard that people wanted the blacks out. It was very unnerving and strange.’634 It was cricket, therefore, that offered Britain’s Caribbean community a haven from such an environment.
Remembering England’s Test match against the West Indies at The Oval in 1976, Nelson continued, ‘I hadn’t ever been to Notting Hill Carnival, but it was how I expected it to be, noisy and raucous. And I had probably never seen that number of black faces in one place. I was amazed by the feeling of pride from my dad and his friends. They were dancing and shouting. I had never seen them act like that before. They weren’t behaving the way I had been brought up to behave; it was like they were back in the Caribbean. You can’t understate how tough it must have been for a lot of them at that time.’635
At a time when youngsters from immigrant families needed their own heroes alongside those of their parents, football, along with the wider culture of British life, was taking its time in providing them. ‘When a black person appeared on television it caused a flurry of excitement in our flat,’ author Colin Babb remembered. ‘Whoever was at home would scamper to get to the living room in time.’636 Television’s tea-time soap opera, Crossroads, introduced a recurring black character in 1974, the garage mechanic Mac; and the same year saw Don Warrington’s character of Phil, a student of African descent, first get the better of Leonard Rossiter’s Rigsby in Rising Damp. A teenaged Lenny Henry won the New Faces talent show in 1975 with impressions that he introduced by saying, ‘You’ve seen them before, but not in colour.’ And The Fosters, also featuring Henry, would become Britain’s first sitcom to focus solely on a black family in 1976. But these were not exactly revolutionary times. In 1978, the BBC ran the first of two series of Empire Road, a drama series set in the Handsworth district of Birmingham and the first to be written, acted and directed predominantly by black artists. Yet in the same year, the corporation was still airing The Black and White Minstrel Show, featuring male singers in caricature blackface make-up, to millions of viewers. And BBC switchboards remained undisturbed when dialogue such as that at the head of this chapter made it to the screen.
Launched on ITV in 1972, Love Thy Neighbour – which at least gave leading roles to black actors – presented schoolchildren and factory workers with a new lexicon of racial insults. And, of course, Garnett had been spitting them out on Till Death Us Do Part since 1965. Any nuance in which the bigoted characters of Garnett and Love Thy Neighbour’s Eddie Booth were intended as the butt of the joke went over the heads of the average terrace bigot, who was about to develop a much louder voice as more black players emerged in the later years of the decade to unsettle his environment of white supremacy.
Meanwhile, very few of the black artists occupying the highest places in the UK music charts were likely to excite young British black males. For example, it was left to The Three Degrees, The Drifters, The Stylistics and George McCrae (all American) and Ken Boothe (Jamaican) to fill slots in the 20 best-selling singles of 1974. The only black British singers in the top 100 of the year were Sweet Sensation, a Manchester-based soul band, and Hot Chocolate, a multi-racial group who featured Errol Brown, a Jamaican immigrant, as lead singer.
It was 1974 that saw the senior football debut of a London teenager who would become a key cultural figure of the second half of the decade. On 3 August, with McCrae at No.1 with ‘Rock Your Baby’, 18-year-old Laurie Cunningham was included in the Orient team to face West Ham in the Texaco Cup. Two months later, he was given a first League game against Nottingham Forest, whose team on occasions in that season included Viv Anderson, a locally-born full-back previously discarded by Manchester United.
Cunningham, raised in Finsbury Park by parents who arrived from Jamaica in the 1950s, had also suffered rejection by a big club. He had signed as an apprentice for Orient in 1972 after two years of training with Arsenal. Robert Johnson, a young team-mate who also tried his luck at Highbury, told biographer Dermot Kavanagh, ‘I didn’t like how they treated us. You had the white and the black separate.’ Johnson also recalled hearing comments such as, ‘Those niggers are showing off again.’637
A winger with pace, skill and an attitude that valued the beating of three or four defenders over the placement of a well-timed pass, Cunningham’s swagger did not exactly fit the mould of a typical Arsenal player in the Mee era, regardless of skin colour. He was not around, therefore, to witness the ten appearances Batson would make as Highbury’s first black player, although their paths would cross soon enough.
At Orient, Cunningham found a manager in George Petchey who saw what his individual talent could bring to a team capable of flirting with either end of the Second Division. ‘He did a lot of things that you wouldn’t expect a kid to do,’ Petchey said of Cunningham’s trial.638 Petchey was also colour blind. Mixed race full-back Bobby Fisher and Indian-born midfielder Ricky Heppolette were already at Brisbane Road, and Nigerian winger John Chiedoze would soon join them. There was even an occasion when a local newspaper reporter clashed with Petchey, telling him he was signing too many black players.
It was a view that opposing fans were eager to express. One of Cunningham’s earliest games was at Millwall, where bananas and verbal abuse were hurled at Orient’s players. After Cunningham scored a late equaliser, he and Fisher left the field giving the Black Power salute to the crowd, an action for which they were castigated by the police. ‘Some of the crowds we went to were diabolical in those days,’ Petchey recalled. ‘If you were black, you didn’t half get some stick.’639
In his first two seasons in the Orient team, Cunningham played 51 League games and scored nine goals. At one point he even inspired Arthur Mitchell, founder of The Dance Theatre of Harlem, to write a letter to Orient describing him as ‘the best athletic mover I have seen in ten to 15 years teaching dance’. Cunningham, a fan of the golden age of Hollywood musicals, would have been prouder of that comment than the rave reviews coming his way for his on-field achievements.
During 1976, while London’s sport-mad black population was cheering on Clive Lloyd’s West Indies team, Cunningham was emerging as an icon for a new generation. His play captured the imagination in a way that was impossible for Clyde Best, a battering ram of a forward in the traditional English style. ‘Laurie played how we saw black guys playing football, anywhere, on any level: Sunday morning, at school, in a scrimmage game, down on the rec,’ future England striker Ian Wright would write in the foreword to Kavanagh’s biography of Cunningham. ‘He had the skills, but most importantly he had that swagger, he had that “vibe”.’ According to Wright, 11 when Cunningham made his League debut, he was ‘the guy we all wanted to be like; a proper representation of how a London black guy is and how he should be playing football’.640
In March, The Sunday Times Magazine made Cunningham its cover star, pictured in Orient’s second kit of yellow and green next to the heading, ‘THE BLACK GOAL: Will Laurie Cunningham be the first coloured footballer to play for England?’ The estimable Brian Glanville wrote the piece inside, although he had to be content with talking to Cunningham’s mother after the absent-minded subject failed to show for the interview – just as he could often be late for, or even miss, training.
Glanville was a clear convert to the ‘cause’ of black players. Noting his conversation with Millwall duo Trevor Lee and Phil Walker, he wrote, ‘Our football today is pathetically plodding, full of sweat and effort and predictability. Millwall’s two young black players, Lee and Walker, say they can’t even bear to watch it when they’re not playing in it. For them, the way to play is the Brazilian way, with its jaguar jumps and bursts.’
The writer believed that the ‘revolution’ had been retarded by prejudice rather than performance. ‘A few years ago, when a club like West Ham United seemed to swarm with exotic names and black faces, it appeared to be imminent; and why not? West Indian children were here in large number … they seemed to peer out in droves from photographs of junior school teams all over the country.’ He continued, ‘There was, meanwhile, a groundswell of dissent.’641
It was a view supported by Cyrille Regis, who was in non-League football around this time. ‘There was a whole generation of black guys who came up in the early Seventies and who never made it into the game,’ he said. ‘Why? It was because of racism and the idea that they lacked bottle or couldn’t stand the cold.’642
When ITV children’s show Magpie profiled Cunningham, viewers heard him complain, ‘The attitude managers have is that black kids are dainty on the ball and tend not to be physical.’ Petchey addressed this by suggesting, ‘I think why some of the coloured players tend to be timid is they’re apprehensive of football in this country.’ He believed that Cunningham’s refusal to be intimidated – along with his natural ability, of course – was what differentiated him. ‘If everyone called him a black bastard we’d be all right,’ he said. ‘The spark comes into his eyes and it makes him play.’643
Early in the 1976-77 season, Petchey challenged the News of the World to ‘name me a better right-winger’. There was a growing clamour for Cunningham to be named as the ‘first’ black player to represent England at any level. Most media seemed to have overlooked that both John and Clive Charles played for the England Youth team and Nigerian-born Ben Odeje had represented England at schoolboy level at the age of 15 in 1971, thanks to FIFA basing qualification on the country in which the player studied rather than strict nationality. And there were others who had played England representative football before Cunningham, such as Wolves’ Bob Hazell and Luton Town’s Ricky Hill in the youth team and Godfrey Ingram, a future Luton forward, in the schoolboys’ side. After Ingram scored twice in a victory in Dortmund, West German manager Helmut Schoen – being complimentary and sadly predictable at the same time – called him ‘the next Pelé’, and German club Schalke 04 offered him a contract.
That group were overlooked in the narrative of Cunningham, who would eventually become the first black England player at professional level. Odeje, incidentally, might have found himself in opposition to Cunningham had he managed to progress from Charlton Athletic’s youth team. Instead, he ended up in the non-League game and would become an overlooked character in English football, his place in history needing reaffirmation by the FA in 2013 when they officially acknowledged him as the first black player to represent England, a well-intentioned act that managed to forget about John Charles.
It was clear how challenged Cunningham and others would be in reaching the very top. Not long before resigning as England manager, Don Revie had demonstrated his own blinkered view that black players found it hard to break through because ‘they would be happier on dry, hard grounds’. No wonder they felt they were victims of institutional racism when the man at the pinnacle of the English game could subscribe to such a lazy stereotype. Cunningham admitted that he ‘believed to be a black in this country was to be a loser’.644
Or, as film and music maker Don Letts put it, ‘To most we were black bastards. We were like a lost tribe. It was something new in the Seventies and we were struggling to work out what this was.’645
There were by now a few more black faces in the Football League, among the most notable being Lee and Walker; Anderson and Chiedozie; Hill and the emerging Ingram at Luton; Notts County defender Pedro Richards; and young Stoke City forward Garth Crooks. Shoot! insisted on asking, ‘How did Garth develop his skills?’ as if it expected an exotic, other-worldly answer from a boy born and raised in Stoke-on-Trent simply because he had dark skin.
But it was Cunningham who remained the chief flag-bearer. And as his elevation to an England shirt became inevitable, so did a transfer to the First Division. With Orient in debt and battling relegation, Cunningham was sold to West Bromwich Albion for £110,000 in March 1977, two days before his 21st birthday. ‘I don’t give a damn whether a boy is black, red or green,’ said manager Johnny Giles. ‘If he can play then I am interested.’ After helping his team to a 2-0 win at Tottenham on his top-flight debut, Cunningham said he thought the pace ‘would be much quicker’. The following month he played his historic first game for England Under-21s, heading the only goal against Scotland at Bramall Lane.
Yes, this is the year; To open up your mind
‘Year of Decision’ , The Three Degrees
(Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff; Gamble-Huff Music, 1973)
Tottenham’s defeat on Cunningham’s West Brom debut hastened them towards relegation from the First Division. Heading the other way were Nottingham Forest, whose elevation brought the long-limbed Anderson to national prominence. By now an established first-team member, he’d been given an early introduction to the reality ahead when, in his second Forest game, he went in front of Newcastle United’s hostile crowd. ‘What I experienced that night went way beyond the boundaries of acceptable behaviour,’ he recalled.646
It was a pattern familiar to abuse victims such as Anderson, but still scattered too sparsely to attract the attention of anyone who might have been able to do anything about it. His manager at the time, Dave Mackay, told that him in order to be a professional footballer his only option was to put up with it. With supportive team-mates, Anderson felt he was able to use it as a motivating force. He had little choice. Any black player who had dared to speak up against his treatment would have been considered a trouble-maker and made himself even more of a target. Anderson said his experience at Newcastle was typical of most grounds – if louder than most.647
After Forest swept to an unlikely championship triumph in their first season after promotion, it was Anderson who claimed the achievement most had assumed would be Cunningham’s; the first black player to win a full England cap. And when Greenwood named him for the friendly against Switzerland at Wembley in November 1978, it was no mere tokenism. Anderson had been a vibrant influence on Brian Clough’s side, his careering runs forward a key part of their identity. There was no more valid candidate to challenge Liverpool’s Phil Neal for the right-back position he’d held since the last matches of Don Revie’s reign.
Kevin Keegan attempted to settle Anderson’s nerves by reminding him, ‘You wouldn’t be playing if you weren’t good enough,’648 and as if to test the old theory of black players being unable to perform in extremes of weather, England’s new cap ran out on to a field dusted with snow. It was Forest team-mate Peter Shilton to whom the home team owed a clean sheet in a 1-0 win, although The Times noted that Anderson was ‘confident and safe’ and observed, ‘One’s attention was drawn to the fact that only Anderson was displaying true club form at international level – the criterion of a good player in Mr Greenwood’s mind.’
Anderson would play only two more England games before the end of the decade, but that did not mean that momentum had been lost. The year of his international debut, 1978-79, was among the most significant in the journey of the black player in English football. The season’s Football 79 sticker collection by Panini still only featured five black faces among the sweep of players from England and Scotland’s top flights, but while West Brom’s Batson was a journeyman and Hazell a young Wolves hopeful, Anderson and West Brom duo Cunningham and Regis were all contending for representative honours. And the fact that Albion always picked all three of their black players and made a stylish challenge for the League title meant that there was more for the bigots to feel uncomfortable about. ‘Three black players in one team was just too much for some supporters,’ Regis recalled. ‘Nothing was being done by clubs, police or the football authorities to curb this behaviour, which had frankly been going on far too long to be dismissed as a passing fad. The racism spread to most grounds after Brendon came on board.’649
The rise of the black player now felt, unintentionally, like a movement, especially when set against the backdrop of events in Britain’s wider society. West Brom’s signing of Regis, born in French Guiana and brought to England aged five, advanced the story of England’s black footballers considerably. It was chief scout Ronnie Allen who recommended that Albion pay £5,000 – doubling after 20 first-team appearances – to Isthmian League side Hayes for their 19-year-old centre-forward in May 1977. And it was Regis’s good fortune that by the time the new season began Allen would be in charge following the resignation of Giles. Regis, a chiselled specimen with thighs like oversized hams, had to wait only until the end of August to make his debut in a League Cup tie against Gillingham, scoring twice in a 4-0 win. His first goal came when regular penalty-taker Tony Brown stepped aside to satisfy the crowd’s chants for the debutant.
Regis, like Anderson, remembered Newcastle as the first League ground on which he heard racial abuse, although it was a quirk of the fixture list rather than evidence of a trait unique to that club. The first fans from whom he heard the particularly distasteful ‘nigger, nigger, lick my boots’ were those of local rivals Wolves after they’d occupied the Smethwick End of Albion’s home ground. Author Dave Bowler recalled, ‘At the back of terraces are corrugated iron sheets. Throughout the game, the Wolves supporters drum on these in jungle rhythm, and thousands of voices chant, “Nigger, nigger, lick my boots” or “Pull that trigger, shoot that nigger.”’650 The logic of such action was lost on Hazell, soon to earn a place in the Wolves defence alongside the luxurious Afro haircut of George Berry. Throughout a career that took him to QPR, Leicester and Port Vale he wondered how fans of his team could chant abuse at opposition black players one moment and sing his name the next. Berry would remember Albion fans screaming ‘golliwog’ at him while he was standing next to Regis at a corner.
Regis was a fixture in West Brom’s team by the time Allen left the club in December 1977 – with Albion fourth in the table – to oversee the Saudi Arabian national side. In his place came Ron Atkinson, whose managerial style had all the flamboyance lacking in his unspectacular career as a wing-half for Oxford United, where he’d been known as ‘The Tank’. On his way to reinvention as ‘Big Ron’ he had progressed from player-manager of Kettering Town to a successful spell at Cambridge United, leading the Football League newcomers to the Fourth Division title and putting them in a challenging position for promotion to the Second Division. The West Brom players got an idea of what to expect when he turned up for his first day wearing a full-length black leather coat. ‘A flash bugger’ was how he was described by winger Willie Johnston, who would soon be supplying Atkinson with showy pieces of jewellery through a dealer friend.651
The new manager urged a high-tempo game in which the ball reached the front men as soon as possible, a tactic that saw Regis score a goal that brought him further to the nation’s attention. Having eliminated holders Manchester United in the fourth round of the FA Cup – Regis scoring twice in a replay – West Brom went on to host League leaders Forest in the quarter-finals. With the home side one up but under pressure in the early moments of the second half, a hoofed clearance by Paddy Mulligan found Regis sprinting behind the Forest backline. As the ball dropped, he drove it past Shilton’s right hand with a low half-volley that almost scorched the ground as it left his right foot.
Regis was denied an appearance in the final when Ipswich beat West Brom 3-1 at Highbury. Embarrassingly, Atkinson had allowed himself to be filmed walking up the Wembley steps to pick up the trophy, believing that Bobby Robson had agreed to do the same. Albion finished sixth in the First Division, qualifying for Europe, and after a ground-breaking and eye-opening summer trip to China they were ready to embark on a season that would combine, according to Regis, ‘sublime football with rancid racism’.652
A few weeks after arriving at The Hawthorns, Atkinson had paid £30,000 for Batson, his skipper at Cambridge United, believing he was better than the player he had in the right-back position, Republic of Ireland international Mulligan. ‘I didn’t like Ron,’ said Mulligan years later. ‘He tended to look down his nose at you and assumed he knew all there was to know about football.’653
Batson, born on Grenada and raised in Trinidad, arrived in England in 1962, sent by his parents to live with family in Tilbury in Essex. By the beginning of 1978-79, Batson was a first choice; Cunningham was ready to start every week after spells on the substitute’s bench; and Regis was, well, bloody frightening. ‘He was an absolute beast,’ said Anderson. ‘Challenging him was like hitting a brick wall. He was so powerful: great in the air, very quick, with two good feet and an eye for goal.’654 Atkinson told author Paul Rees that only one Albion player had ever voiced any concern about the team’s composition, complaining that ‘you had to be black to get in’ – to which Atkinson replied, ‘Well it makes a change from being Scottish and Irish.’655
The idea of Regis, Cunningham and Batson as football’s ‘Three Degrees’ became fixed in the nation’s consciousness when Atkinson, discovering that the American soul-singing trio of that name were performing in Birmingham, invited the ladies to the club for a photoshoot, explaining to the press that Albion had ‘our own Three Degrees’. The pictures of the singers in the club’s striped shirts and the boys wrapped in the girls’ fur coats appeared everywhere. It was intended as a harmless piece of fun and generally accepted as such, although Derrick Campbell, a local civil-rights activist, told Ross, ‘I suppose there was a perverse sense that the “Three Degrees” was used as a term of endearment. But in the black community, we saw it as an act of ridicule.’656 Batson would quickly come to see it as contrived and a potential source of resentment among the other players. When Cunningham and Regis accepted an invitation to join the group at a nightclub after they had been to a West Brom game, Batson opted to go home to his wife.
Whatever the appropriateness of the stunt – especially when viewed through a 21st-century lens – it was indicative of the increased presence of the black footballer. According to Regis, his concern was keeping his place in the team and ‘the thought of being a role model for other black players didn’t enter my head’.657 Cunningham reluctantly accepted that he was a symbol of hope when Shoot! proposed that ‘success for Laurie Cunningham could inspire countless other black youngsters to reach the top’. His response was ‘I suppose that’s true’ and ‘I know there are responsibilities on me’.658
It is impossible to reflect now without seeing the significance of the moment. It was no overstatement when Rees wrote of West Brom’s black players, ‘They empowered a generation of disenfranchised black youths, bringing to it a sense of hope and inspiration. They were agents of change as well and helped set in motion a domino effect that would allow a new order to assert itself in the British game.’659
Anderson would come to acknowledge as much, writing in 2010, ‘I can say now that I am proud of the role I played. It helped pave the way for the huge improvements in football that have occurred since then. I’m also pleased to have helped the game move away from the prejudices that stood in the way of black footballers when I started.’660
The fact that much of this was happening a few miles up the road from Birmingham made it more poignant. Not only had England’s second city been the scene of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, it had also, in effect, given birth to the Rock Against Racism movement when Eric Clapton, in a state of drunkenness, made a no less infamous declaration during a 1976 concert at Birmingham Odeon. Stating that Britain was ‘overcrowded’, he called for people to vote for Powell in order to prevent the formation of a ‘black colony’. And then he became even more offensive. ‘This is England, this is a white country,’ he said. ‘Throw the wogs out.’ Clapton, a supposed champion of black music who’d had a hit with Bob Marley’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’, would apologise in later years, saying he was ‘ashamed’ of the person he’d become at that time through drink and drugs.‡
Clapton’s incendiary outburst no doubt excited the likes of National Front chairman John Tyndall and his growing number of followers. But it was also enough to inspire a group led by photographer Red Saunders to go ahead with their idea of forming Rock Against Racism. It was, in effect, launched via an open letter of disapproval to Clapton that appeared in the major music papers and the Socialist Worker. Its founding members were closely aligned to the Socialist Workers Party, which had launched the Anti-Nazi League. Before long, no self-respecting sixth-former or college student would be seen without a Rock Against Racism or Anti-Nazi League lapel badge, although journalist Paul Foot was among those who noted that few young blacks or Asians joined because of the left-wing intellectual overtones of the organisations.
RAR and ANL stood alongside each other to protest against racism in general and the growth of the National Front in particular. One year after the NF had achieved more than 120,000 votes in the 1977 Greater London Election – surpassing its nationwide total in the previous general election – more than 80,000 turned up in Victoria Park in Hackney for an RAR concert headlined by The Clash, Steel Pulse and the Tom Robinson Band. ‘That was the first time I felt something had changed in Britain forever,’ said an Asian fan, Gurinder Chadha.661 David Hinds of Steel Pulse, one of a group of multi-racial bands emerging from the same Midlands environment as Regis and company,§ reflected, ‘The show galvanized all the cultures that were happening in Britain at the time. It turned on the head the idea that Britain was racially divided.’662 Yet such views were easily formed from within the bubble of such events. Less harmonic had been the ‘Battle of Lewisham’ in August 1977 when National Front supporters – reportedly bolstered by Millwall fans – clashed with SWP followers in south London, where 134 people needed hospital treatment and 214 were arrested.
Historians suggest that the National Front could have grown more quickly had it not been for Margaret Thatcher’s own stance against immigration, which offered a mainstream voice to those who might otherwise have gravitated towards the NF. Appearing on ITV’s World in Action in January 1978, the Leader of the Opposition said, ‘People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture.’
Later that month, Hazell was subjected to a particularly nasty outburst from the Highbury crowd. Wolves were holding Arsenal 1-1 in the fourth round of the FA Cup when, late in the game, Hazell struck out at Graham Rix within touching distance of fans in the corner of the North Bank. Duly sent off, Hazell was virtually pushed from the field by the referee while spectators close to the incident screamed for blood. Within seconds, Malcolm Macdonald, who had been marked by Hazell, scored a winning goal for the home team. ‘The letters came from everywhere, all over England, and it was really horrible stuff,’ Hazell recalled of this period of his career. ‘“Go home, nigger. Get out of our country.” My wife, bless her, kept a lot of them, and many that I never saw.’663 It hardly helped Hazell and his peers when Labour’s Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, was asked on television that year, ‘What you really mean is that immigration control is a device to keep out coloured people?’ and he responded, ‘That is what it is.’664
This was the environment in which Anderson was making his England debut and Regis, Cunningham and Batson were helping West Brom challenge for the First Division title. Albion might have got closer than third had they not run out of steam in April, failing to win in six tightly-packed games after winter snow wreaked havoc on the fixture list. They beat Valencia on their way to the last eight of the UEFA Cup, but their most memorable performance of the season came at Manchester United in the final match of 1978, winning 5-3 to maintain their place at the top of the table. Batson would describe it as a ‘seminal game’. During a thrilling first half that ended 3-3, the dancer’s footwork of Cunningham and a back heel by Regis set up a fierce Len Cantello drive for one of West Brom’s goals. In the second half, Cunningham ran on to Regis’s header to score a fourth, and Regis completed the scoring with a sweeping finish after Cunningham launched an attack by running from deep inside his own half.
At the final whistle, Granada TV commentator Gerald Sinstadt’s summary was, ‘The magic that black footballers are bringing to the League [was] completely in evidence.’ More pointedly, he had earlier called out the ‘unsavoury barracking of the black players from certain sections of the crowd, which says nothing for their sportsmanship at all’. Despite the unavoidable racial tension that existed in the country, it was uncommon for it to be mentioned in relation to football, however audible the monkey chants from the terraces. The media were quick enough to refer to skin colour when reporting the action, but reluctant to dig any deeper. Regis generously suggested that perhaps there was a hope that ‘if racist jeers weren’t mentioned the idiots doing this kind of thing wouldn’t be given any attention and it would wither away. But how can you fail to see bananas being thrown on to the pitch?’665 What enabled him to grit his teeth and carry on was that ‘it was confined to the arena’. He said, ‘If it had spilt out on to my children at school, my wife walking down the street, bricks through the window, it would have been a totally different ball game.’666 Clyde Best made the same relieved observation.
Atkinson counselled quiet pragmatism to his players, believing that the abuse was ‘an issue that should be approached with mellowed understanding and humour’.667 Perhaps not the kind of humour proposed by Millwall manager Gordon Jago when he said of Trevor Lee, ‘He has his own way of dealing with opponents who give him abuse because of his colour – he threatens to move in next door to them.’668
Albion defender Ally Robertson encouraged Regis and the others to shrug off the abuse. ‘If people call you a black so and so, then so what? How many times have I been told I’m a Scottish twat?’ But even he saw a line that should not be crossed. ‘We never allowed anyone to call them “nigger”. That’s derogative. Anyone did that, I’d be the first to punch them.’669
Yet Hazell admitted, ‘I wanted to make a stand, but nobody would listen. Instead I was told to say stupid things about the abuse, like it did not worry me. The clubs just did not want to talk about it. Those in charge of football then, the real power brokers, they didn’t care one jot.’670
As with hooliganism, football apparently preferred to disassociate itself from the issue. Rather than creating a need to protect anyone, black meant novelty value. And nowhere was that more evident than in the testimonial match staged for West Brom midfielder Cantello at the end of the season. Billed as a West Brom XI versus a Cyrille Regis and Laurie Cunningham XI it was, in fact, whites versus blacks. The latter side’s starting line-up was: Derek Richardson (QPR); Batson, Berry, Larry May (Leicester), Hazell; Winston White (Hereford United), Vernon Hodgson (West Brom), Remi Moses (West Brom); Regis, Crooks, Cunningham.
The concept of the match is unthinkable to a modern audience, and even then community leaders opposed it because they feared it could be a vehicle for crowd trouble and racial abuse. Yet Batson recalled, ‘We thought it was a great idea and we never once thought about the social aspects of it. We didn’t hear any dissenting voices.’671 In the end, a modest crowd of 7,000 watched a game that passed off without incident. Few can recall without recourse to the record books that Cunningham’s team won 3-2.
As the new decade dawned, a far more significant date was approaching for Regis. Many were surprised that it was not until February 1982 that Ron Greenwood gave him an England debut against Northern Ireland, perhaps three years after he had been at his raw and frightening best. Yet there were some who would rather the day had not come at all. Regis received a bullet in the post, with an accompanying note that said, ‘If you put your foot on our Wembley turf, you’ll get one of these for your knees.’
Cunningham was gone from West Brom shortly after the Cantello testimonial, sold for £900,000 to Real Madrid, becoming the first British player to play for the famous Spanish club. At West Brom, the promotion of Moses to the first team kept the ‘Three Degrees’ motif alive, while Cunningham helped Real to a league and cup double in his first season and played in the 1981 European Cup Final defeat by Liverpool.¶
By then it was almost a decade since Best, Coker and Clive Charles had become English football’s first triple act. Things had changed more slowly than they might have hoped but a foundation for the modern multi-racial game had been laid. At the time of writing it is brutally clear that not all elements of prejudice within football have been eradicated, but no one can fail to recognise some progress. For that, the modern player owes a debt to the pioneers of the 1970s who faced – uncomplaining and unacknowledged by authority – levels of abuse and opposition that only their peers can truly appreciate. Some have never forgiven. ‘I am bitter and angry when we talk about the past racist things we had to go through,’ concluded Hazell, ‘in what was the best time of my life.’672