Spent raindrops race one another down a carriage window as the train pulls out of Newcastle. Saturday has come again, and so I am travelling south. The rain shatters against the Angel of the North. From this angle she seems to be turning sideways to stop the front of her face getting wet, lest her slap runs. Passengers loiter in gangways and by the toilets whose system of buttons a German lady is struggling with. When the conductor arrives she requests ‘information on the relevant complaints procedure.’ Teesside skies and the Cleveland Hills mark our passing into Yorkshire, home sweet home.
The first sporting crowd I will be among today has congregated at York station. From beneath fascinators and bright dresses, or clad in finest suits and ties, Geordies, Mackems, Mancs, Scousers, Teessiders and Loiners merge on their way to the racecourse. There are thousands of them, their accents colliding into white noise. The sport of kings appears incredibly democratic on days like this, not least because the bookies will beat them all.
The train to Bradford careers by the village I grew up in, and I feel a little bad about the furore caused by a recent sarcastic article of mine about the place. ‘Mrs Denton has photocopied it and distributed it,’ said my mum on the phone, ‘and the Church Table Tennis Club are livid. Everyone went silent when I went in the Co-op.’ Still, these lands are my heritage, my family on both sides being miners-turned-bus drivers from Leeds. We curve out of their city and away from Elland Road, that intimidating house of prestige. Across from me a pair of teenagers absent-mindedly pursue different conversations. ‘It’s called a capo. It helps you play higher notes’ and ‘I keep forgetting words. I forgot “skirting board” the other day. And “oven glove.”’
The dark reds of outer Leeds brick turn to the striking yellows of inner Bradford. Even underneath a sky the colour of whale flesh these sandstone temples to Bradford’s glory days are cheerful. The city was built on civic confidence, its choice of stone reflecting optimism and a sunny alternative to dour satanic Leeds.
The sky gives way and makes drowning rats of us all. This is epic rain. Rain to stand in doorways and watch. It pingpongs on the roads and kerbs. Waiting on high for the weather to pass allows me to take in Bradford’s terrain. Whereas Burnley sits in the flat foot of a valley, Bradford seems to be a series of brows surrounded by larger hills. Everything is a climb and yet you never seem to reach the top. Miles of terraces file up hillsides, solid infantry regiments. Old mills and newer minarets are scattered among them, as is Valley Parade stadium, almost comically large for a fourth division home. ‘Bradford’s role in life is to make every place else in the world look better in comparison, and it does this well’, Bill Bryson wrote in Notes From a Small Island. He must have had his eyes closed.
Even if Bradford were unspeakably ugly, the history behind its look makes it an attractive proposition. They were weaving wool here even before they were in Burnley. John Leland wrote in 1536 how Bradford ‘standith much by clothing.’ In the English Civil War the city defended itself from Royalist invasion by hanging cumulus bales of wool from its towers to muffle cannon fire. The Royalists returned, 10,000 of them. When finally they took Bradford, there was no genocide as was the norm – a ghost had apparently told their commander, the Earl of Carlisle, to ‘pity poor Bradford’. Modern Bradford began in the eighteenth century when production switched from wool to worsted, giving it the clumsy nickname ‘Worstedopolis’. Mass industry means organised labour or, in the eyes of government, rebellious notions to be quashed. Bradfordians reacted to parliament’s 1726 Act forbidding combinations of weavers by forming a National Union of Hand Woolcombers. Mechanisation led to further agitation – those smashers and meshers of the Luddite movement familiar to the knitters of Hinckley. Nothing and no one could stop the Industrial Revolution, of course; Bradford people instead strived to make it work for them, first through graft, then through crusading for political reform.
Bradford linked to the same Leeds-Liverpool Canal that soups through Burnley, making Worstedopolis a world player via ports on the Mersey and Humber. Steam powered mills sprang up and squeezed out millions of cloth yards. Human toil paid for the mill-owner mansions that still straddle the city’s outskirts. Thirteen-hour days, teen labour, sooty air, no sewage, water or lighting – the charge sheet is familiar. Bradfordians did not just let things happen to them, however. They rebelled, gradually forcing the changes they knew governments or industrialists would not willingly enact. Strikes and strong support for Chartism helped shift the sands. After the mid-nineteenth century Bradford’s slums were pulled down and an infrastructure built. In the late Victorian years prosperity and consensus were threatened by deathly industrial decline. When working conditions were strangled and jobs made scarce, Bradfordians knew how to rebel. Troops were sent in to quell their more radical waverings, such as the Silk Street riots of 1891. Means of effecting change calmed, but desire for it did not.
The advances of homely English socialism thrived in Bradford’s Edwardian days. It was a place and a time that J. B. Priestley knew well. His words make him a vivacious guide to the city, past and present. Priestley crops up among mills, in the surrounding countryside or at the match. His is a Bradford of wonder in simple and golden days before world war changed it forever:
Consider what Bradford had to offer us – three daily papers and a weekly, the Subscription concerts on Fridays, the Bradford Permanent series on Saturdays and superb choral singing almost any night, two theatres, two music halls, two or three professional concert parties, an Arts Club, a Playgoers Society, one football club that had won the FA Cup not so long before, several fine old pubs from the George in Market Street to the Spotted House, easily reached from the band concerts in Lister Park.
It was, he said, ‘considered the most progressive place in the United Kingdom ...’ Exotic in-comers with their wool samples from the Andes, a rampant arts scene, radical politics and ideas – Bradford was doused in possibility. Campaigning won shorter working hours that could be spent enjoying it all. Outside the arts, first came the rugby clubs that would later be the backbone of the League game, then their football brothers. Cycling and rambling groups took Bradfordians into their beloved, surrounding moors. As Priestley wrote of the thinly veiled ‘Bruddersford’ in his Bright Day, no ‘man could be exiled from the uplands and the blue air; he always had one foot on the heather.’ The groups who helped locals ‘to hear the larks and curlews, to feel the old rocks warming in the sun’ were often run by the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Formed by the Bradford Labour Union in 1893, the ILP existed separately to the Labour Party for three decades, finding particular success in Scotland. The young Priestley’s family were first Bradford Labour Union members and then ILPers. Their contemporary socialists won high positions and oversaw changes with implications far beyond Bradford. School Board leader Margaret McMillan founded eight elementary schools that gave 24,000 children free meals, milk and health inspections. The pupils that made cloth did not have much of it to their name – when they arrived for lessons it was found that more than a hundred of them had not changed clothes for over six months. Their garments were burned, the children fumigated. Poverty was never far from the eye even if it lurked at ‘back o’t mill’ Other Bradford socialists pushed for and won a clean water supply, and influenced a progressive civic state that became the first town in England to supply electricity. In 1904 the city demonstrated its pooled wealth at the Bradford Exhibition, an extravaganza of stalls, rides and fireworks. Sadness sometimes grasps the coat-tails of glory in this town: most of the Africans imported to take part in the exhibition’s ‘Somali Village’ contracted influenza and died.
When the rain gods go on a tea break I make for Valley Parade. The terraced houses that descend towards it contain mostly Bangladeshi and Pakistani Bradfordians, ranging from those who came here to man the mills in the 1960s, to their great grandchildren. The stadium skulks among their streets, a castle over the village. Despite such ostentation it feels logical and as if this is exactly where a football ground should be. In the club shop a thirty-something son tries to buy his mother an Official Bradford City raincoat. ‘But it’s yer birthday, Mam. Come on. Let me buy it yer.’ ‘You’re not spending twenty quid on me.’ ‘Mam, I’ve got money now. Let me.’ He wins and she fondly watches him go and pay, her moneyed boy done good.
Outside my smile fades at the sight of golden names on black marble. I have reached a memorial plaque whose dedication is appropriately stark: ‘In memory of the 56 people who lost their lives as a result of the fire at this stadium on 11 May 1985’. I spend a couple of minutes reading their names. The youngest victims were eleven years old, four of them. Samuel Firth was the eldest at eighty-six, and a former chairman. He was born before Bradford City even existed. Eleven of the victims were women. The thing that sends me from quivering to crying is realising just how many dads and lads, and other family, died together. There went Jack and Leo Coxon, seventy-six and forty-four; there went Howard and Sarah Turner, forty-one and sixteen; there went three generations of the Fletchers (Andrew, Edmond, John and Peter, eleven, sixty-three, thirty-four and thirty-two); there went Felix, Peter and Rupert Greenwood, thirteen, forty-six, eleven; there went Gerald, Richard and Robert Ormondroyd, forty, twelve and twelve; there went Craig, Jane and Trevor Stockman, fourteen, sixteen and thirty-eight. Of course, the names of those that died alone strike hard too: did Herbert Bamford’s wife wait and wait at home? Did Edith and Fred Hindle, seventy-nine and seventy-six, have kids who survived or were elsewhere? Did Nellie Foster attend alone and die alone?
That May day, infamously, started as a day of celebration. Bradford had that season earned promotion to Division Two. Their upward trajectory began in 1981-82 when they finished as Division Four runners-up to Sheffield United. That season, player-boss Roy McFarland, a man schooled by Saint Brian of Ayresome, led the Bantams to nine early wins in a row. Things stalled and an arctic winter robbed a month of games. Come the end of March, 25,000 saw them fill their senses with a draw at Bramall Lane. Promotion was solidly back in the reckoning, and soon achieved. Bradford were spurred on by their dependably inspirational captain Ces Podd. Podd, a right-back, is something of a lost pioneer: he was one of the first black players to enjoy a long Football League career, and the earliest to receive a testimonial. Podd’s name brings smiles to Bradfordian faces: after retirement he coached deprived youths and even acted the lead in a Leeds Playhouse production.
After facing sudden liquidation in 1983, Bradford began their 1984-85 promotion season with a Don Revie man, Trevor Cherry, in charge. Their win at Burnden Park on 6 May ensured that five days later Valley Parade would be fuller than normal for the match with Lincoln City. It had been fifty-six years since sun had reflected off silverware at the old ground. Thousands that day saw steel girders in the car park as they arrived. These were the frame of the new main stand on which work would begin after the game. The extant one had been in use since 1911. That day the wind blew in a different direction to usual, away from the Kop. When ancient rubbish under the wooden stand caught fire, that bluster carried the flames across the old main stand like a cavalry charge. Inside four minutes it had engulfed the entire structure and taken most of its victims. Survivors poured on to the pitch. Television pictures should have been cut, but rolled on. Few who witnessed them can lose the image of a supporter running across the pitch, engulfed by flames.
The rain drops on to metal vases and pots at the memorial’s foot. It sounds like the ticking of a grandfather clock. They remember quietly here. Perhaps it is the Yorkshire way; a song and a dance are summat for Saturday night. Once a year Bradford gathers and Fletchers, Greenwoods and Ormondroyds stand in peace. They are joined by that generation’s City players, still scarred and silent.
I walk towards the modern Kop, where the glassy front, corrugated silver walls and amber ribcage of the main stand are a far cry from tradition and should be. Even for a stadium traditionalist like me there is no room for sentimentality here. Opposite the turnstiles is Bradford’s former superstore, built in times of Premier League expansionism. Little over a decade ago the Sky wagon was in town. Two top-flight seasons left a souvenir of two periods in administration. But what memories: from the jaws of 1985 to the clouds of 1999. There is a supporters’ cafe within the superstore’s blocky greys now, and a ‘Free School’ is due to be opened here soon. As such, the state will be buying the Bradford City Superstore.
I watch the people of Bradford float towards their turnstiles, the bottoms of their trousers sodden, and think of Priestley’s unsurpassable evocation of ‘Bruddersford’ and watching football:
It turned you into a member of a new community, all brothers together for an hour and a half, for not only had you escaped from the clanking machinery of this lesser life, from work, wages, rent, doles, sick pay, insurance cards, nagging wives, ailing children, bad bosses, idle workmen, but you had escaped with most of your neighbours, with half the town, and there you were cheering together, thumping one another on the shoulders, swopping judgements like lords of the earth, having pushed your way through a turnstile into another and altogether more splendid kind of life.
Today, and indeed often through my journey, it has been hard to believe that much has changed. The detail is different, the themes identical. All of us are still escaping when we push for that more splendid kind of life, and the pressures that make us want to do so are markedly similar. At the levels and places I have watched football, we are often working-class and very rarely of the corporate spectator middle-class. We are escaping from credit card debts, some of which have been generated following football. We shop in Sainsbury’s at the start of the month and Iceland by the end. Not dirt poor, not comfortable. We still feel part of a community even if we can’t quite define it, and in fuzzy days it is best embodied by our local football team. I cannot speak of those who do not go to football and answer whether they have been excluded by the price of the game, but this is what I see of those who do attend. Then when we are inside the ground and the green has lit our faces we are still Priestley’s characters. Nowhere else do we soberly hug strangers in ecstasy and cry out in agony. We feel more together with humanity here than in our own families. Admit it. On no other subject are we such seasoned experts; there are very few entertainments you can go and see where the audience is convinced, as one, that it knows more than the professionals on stage.
Underneath a sign that reads ‘No Ball Games in This Area’ I enter the Kop. Bradfordians talk and laugh in groups, hot or cold plastic liquids to hand. Gangs of friends and families, who know each other from home, work or here display Christmas levels of cheer. It is intriguing to watch such bonhomie in such sparse and dank surrounds, the faint balm of processed meat tickling the air. Under a sign declaring that ‘Bradford City Have the Following Vacancies’ someone has scrawled ‘Fans.’
It takes a good five minutes for me to reach my seat at the top of the Kop. I face the back wall panting and turn slowly around. This gigantic stand, this expansionist white elephant, may be a reason for Bradford’s financial demise, but the view is spectacular. The stadium feels like an opulent Tudor castle built from the spoils of war. Disregarding that the stadium is now owned by a pension fund (rent: £370,000 p.a.), I marvel at its otherworldly scale. The Kop is adjoined to a main stand that can hold 9,000 people, and itself has capacity for 7,500. To my right I watch each ruler-straight row of the main stand’s lower half become more than three quarters full with Lego-sized people. The Kop’s lower half is also the busier one – up here, my next-door neighbour is ten seats away. I am isolated and looking down on things, a human CCTV camera. Along the left touchline is a decent-sized stand rendered into Subbuteo scale by comparison. The end behind the goal is realistically tiny, which feels disappointing.
When the matchstick men beneath have finished their warm-ups and disappeared into mousehole doorways, the pitch waits empty save for one or two plodding mascot figures. Across the stadium people stand and stare at the dear green place ahead of them. Occasionally they share their thoughts but as the small hand grasps at ‘3’ they are either alone in their heads or together in song. As ever the choir must overcome the Tannoy, now belting out The Skids’ ‘Into the Valley’, a paean to the waste of war. The music relents. ‘Aye oh City, City Aye oh’ they peal like hoarse church bells. Then in the far corner the matchstick men stroll on to the pitch and a lone trumpet blasts from the speakers. Even if a fan is not speaking to their team after a recent humiliation, he or she loves them in this moment. We all know that on some days, 2.59 p.m. will be as good as it gets.
Led by three men in black the players stop on the halfway line. Claret and ambers shake the hands of blue and yellows then dart off to drink the rising praises of their crowds. The trumpet intro has ripened into a wholeheartedly performed local anthem (‘Proud to be a Bradford man, City through and through/Blessed to be a Yorkshireman, God’s Country that is true’), but most have stopped noticing as they attempt to work out the line-up and formation. Once the captains gather for their centre-circle photocall, singing is left to the experts. ‘Come on City, Come on City,’ shout the Kopites in quivering voices desperate to win, their fists pumping the air with each line. ‘We love you City, we do.’ As full-backs star-jump and forwards shake their legs, the clouds part and the pitch is suddenly lit from above. Even God needs escapism.
My isolation ends when two teenage girls arrive and sit in the row in front of me. An awful lot of young people have found Valley Parade the place to be this Saturday afternoon, which delights me. I am still thinking about my game’s rosy future when Bradford score. One-nil happens when a Wimbledon defender ducks under a vague punt from a home centre-half. City’s winger nips in from the cold, intercepts the ball like a squirrel snatching a falling acorn and swiftly makes the net swell. The glee of an early goal provokes a different noise to the normal one. There is a hint of shock in there, laughter even, like the noise of receiving a surprise present. ‘One nil, to the Bradford boys’ sing the teenage girls, eyes fixed on texting screens (‘1-0, Dad. Gr8 gl’, perhaps). I pause and look around: these colours, noises and smells, the communality of strangers, toiling players making five-yard slide tackles on the sopping green ... football, you’ll do for me.
As if proof were needed that this was the original and best Wimbledon, the visiting blues insistently hoist long-balls towards no one in particular. Perhaps they are waiting for the ghost of Fashanu to flick them on. Bradford, by contrast, push the ball around snappily and shoot whenever the goal is in view. They are not immune to an intense rally or two of head tennis, re-started each time by a centre-half’s chest, thigh then satellite volley. This brutal manoeuvring seems painfully slow from up here. Distance has altered time and given me the slowed-down vision of a fly. City eventually bring things down to turf. The ball is spun out wide, thundered across the six-yard box and rerouted into the net by a thrusting Wimbledon leg. Own-goal, 2-0. The og receives a cheer different to the early goal and also to a regular one; there is strong comedy to its tone. The rag-tag travelling ensemble from south London try to rouse their team. Even the flicker of an eyelid will do. ‘Should I be Bradford? Should I be Leeds? Here’s what he said to me ...’ sings the Kop.
Eventually Wimbledon stop trying to find God and embrace earthly football. Their twisty winger stretches Bradford, but baffles himself into losing the ball, a dog chasing its tail. City’s No. 10, a centre-midfielder, is intolerant of sharing possession with the opposition. For a period he repeatedly collects the ball from his back four and spreads it among them, one-two by one-two. His distribution is equalled and measured, a parent making sure every toddler wins at pass the parcel. When the back row has had its turn, he unleashes Bradford’s pair of scurrying wingers. They jab away at Wimbledon’s full-backs, who poke desperately at their twinkling feet. Corner follows corner, each time greeted by clapping hands on the scoreboard. The hands are clad in white gloves and their slowly pixelated motions give the impression of a sarcastic croupier. One of the City wingers provokes a foul, forty yards from goal. As several players stare at the ball and the crowd sing ‘Oh West Yorkshire, is wonderful’ a City centre-half lobs the kick into the area. It parachutes from the sky, swaying downwards. The keeper paws at air and the ball lands in the net. Three-nil, and no one quite knows how. There is disbelief in this round of hailing. Three goals in the first half-hour. Wimbledon agree that this is too good to be true and pull one back. A free-kick is curled in lusciously and their No. 9 kisses it with his forehead, the net rippling artfully. Two minutes later Bradford’s big man/little man front two tease a corner from Wimbledon. They bob and weave as it is winched into the box, rattling their opponents. One blue swipes for the ball and volleys only the wind while another slips over. With ease a Bradford player sweeps home. Four-one before half-time.
I relish the way Wimbledon and Bradford react after what is the away side’s fifth tip-tap on the centre-spot. The former charge gung-ho; the latter defend valiantly. The Dons’ pressure play musters two must-score moments, which invoke full-blooded Bantam blocks. Both teams seem to be imagining themselves in a cup final, 119 minutes on the clock. The Kop bellows its approval of every chest, thigh and head thrown in the line of bullets, and the teenage girls go teenage giddy. Passes, errors, wayward goalkeeper punches, slide tackles, crosses and headers – this match is relentless. ‘We want five’, everyone sings, and today they can always get what they want. The fifth is a showreel of this side’s best features. Their defence wins and distributes, their central midfield threads it on, their winger bolts to the ball and centres it, their taller centre-forward cushions it into the net.
‘Five-one at ’alf-time,’ says a pensioner in the pie queue. ‘When wa’ the last time that bloody ’appened?’ ‘Five different scorers an’ all,’ replies his mate. ‘I reckon they’re all gonna get one today.’ Before the second-half begins I find a spare seat halfway down the stand. The loneliness of the long-distance watcher was interesting, but football viewed alone is an incomplete experience. Besides, there is no roof here to block my view of life beyond Valley Parade. To the left I see terraces and fluffy hills. A large mosque rests among the sandy houses, its golden minaret pincers stretching high. Ahead, beyond skinny Dalek floodlights, are old mills and their chimneys, tower blocks and 1960s horror-show offices. After them can be seen open countryside. Happily, in times of dullness or defeat the Kop also acts as a gantry from which to view the layout of this absorbing city.
Bradford re-start the game and are taken aback, offended almost, when Wimbledon charge them down. For a long period, the away side play as if they have mistaken this not for a new half, but a new match. Several around me are hypnotised into the same disposition: when their heroic winger gives the ball away, they rise as one and barrack him. ‘Slack as owt,’ says the man I have moved in next to. In front of me sits a woman in her sixties, an old Umbro boot-bag containing a flask and biscuits by her side. With 1985 on my mind, I can’t help but wonder if there was someone she once went to the match with.
City foolishly retort by switching to a long-ball game of their own. I ponder how difficult half-time must have been for their manager. His task is akin to motivating an office worker to populate a spreadsheet on the last Friday afternoon of a hated job. They eventually settle back into a rhythm where wingers left and right stretch Wimbledon gaunt. Both incessantly twist, drop shoulders, cut in and curl, cross and shoot. Reprieve is a mixed blessing, coming only when a Dons centre-half is sprawled motionless across the floor, goalkeeper towering over him semaphoring to the bench with two whirling hands, the international sign for ‘substitution’. The player’s treatment goes through the usual stages. At first the home fans boo and one squat physiotherapist jogs on to the pitch. Then three more medical staff join him, followed by five people in fluorescent greens, the last of whom brings a stretcher. An age of careful rolling and strapping later and the soldier is stretchered off. When we see his neck brace we stand and applaud. His withdrawal makes a quietened crowd silent. There are no amusing remarks to fill the space. That is the trouble with an outcome already settled like this one – it kills sarcasm.
One of Bradford’s wing wizards beats three men and finds himself alone with ball and keeper. The church atmosphere helps us hear the noise his scuffed shot makes, that of a butcher hacking squelchy steaks. The game slumbers towards full-time in five-minute periods of good football and then chest smack head, chest smack head, repeat to fade. At one point, a lumped clearance dawns on Bradford’s crafty centre-half. He has space all around him, space to use his ample ability to bring down the ball and run or pass. He watches the ball descend and lands a thwacking header on it, his spammer vibrating as if a recovering bell. Bradford should really score again, but treat trying to do so as a heavy duty and not a prize honour. Besides, the Wimbledon keeper has been transformed from one who could not catch a cold to one who could catch the moon.
The game is dead; it has been since half-time. Talk turns to plans for tonight and television schedules (‘There’s fuck all on on a Saturday night nowadays. That’s why I just sit and get pissed’), and games to come. The stretcher incident means ten minutes of added time. The referee should put down the match, assisted suicide for Wimbledon, blessed heaven for Bradford. In the Kop, we need to get home and place our damp garments on radiators. ‘Let’s blow, ref, let’s finish it,’ says my neighbour. On rumbles the match, a dying dog with trembling paws, until at 5.01 the referee calls halt on the 5-1.
The rain is falling again as I approach my hotel for the night, The Midland. Outside its opulent front a wedding party of Bradford Asians squashes in for photos. The women wear bright turquoise and purple dresses that force a glare out of the waxy pavement. Typically cheerful sandstone makes a perfect background as they whoop and jig.
Just over a century ago Bradford City celebrated here too, at an official reception for their capturing of the 1911 FA Cup. They were founded only in 1903, built upon the assets and Valley Parade ground of Manningham rugby league club. Incredibly, ‘The Paraders’ were voted into the Football League having never played a game. Perhaps the Football Association sensed the city of Bradford’s sporting zest: it was a cradle of what became rugby league, and, with the creation of Bradford Park Avenue in 1907, would soon support two professional soccer teams. Five times over the years were mergers with Park Avenue suggested and rejected, extinguished by the strength of identity Bradfordians placed upon their teams.
City reached the First Division in 1908 and remained there for a decade. They would not climb so high again until those Premier League days, days whose debts may mean it takes another eighty years to rise again. Their FA Cup-winning season of 1911 brought fifth place in the league too, and was their greatest. The psyche of early days of glory and then sweet nothing forevermore does pervade at Bradford. There are no delusions of grandeur about them, just a keen sense of what was. They are like a great grandson of the Russian monarchy, proud to show his photos and medals and tell a colourful story. Their FA Cup win is a story worth telling, though, and its timing thickens the golden hue of Bradford’s, Priestley’s and England’s Edwardian and pre-war eras.
When City won the Cup, it was the modern version’s first outing. Coincidentally, a Bradford jeweller, Fattorini’s, designed and constructed the trophy, a piece whose silhouette is engraved into the imaginations of a million people like me. To reach the final, City beat New Brompton, Norwich City, Grimsby Town, Burnley (40,000 at Valley Parade) and Blackburn Rovers, the favourites. At Crystal Palace in the final they drew 0-0 with Newcastle United. They were weakened that day by the absence of outside-right Dickie Bond, suspended for using ‘improper language’ to the crowd at Woolwich Arsenal. Bond had courted trouble earlier in the season after misbehaving on a night out in Otley with fellow Scots Jimmy McDonald and Robert Campbell. Footballer misdemeanours are not new, only now they create moral panics. A crowd of 67,000 watched the replay at Old Trafford. After a quarter of an hour, the wind caught hold of right-half George Robinson’s punt at goal. A Frank Thompson and Jimmy Speirs tag-team headed it onwards, and Frank O’Rourke charged towards goal. It was enough to bamboozle Newcastle goalkeeper Jimmy Lawrence. The ball crept through the mud and over the line – 1-0 to the Bradford boys. The Magpies pecked away at the Bantams but could rob nothing, and so it finished that way. Bradford’s victory had a tartan tint – eight of the first XI were Caledonian, including the Otley revellers.
Back over the Pennines the Bradford Daily Telegraph had printed special editions with updates as the game progressed. At 5.10 p.m. a newsboy announced the score from his pitch at Mildred Court prompting an uproarious throng to gather outside the town hall. Soon the crowd stretched through the city centre. When the team’s train arrived at 9 p.m. the Idle and Thackley Brass Band could barely be heard above the din. Bradford supporters marked the day by presenting the club with a flag and mast known as ‘Peter’s Stick’ and donating a commemorative cot to the hospital.
Though City had peaked, football’s capacity to help the toilers of Bradford escape never waned. Valley Parade always offered entertainment, intrigue, interest: Harold Walden, in 1912 a key player for City and an Olympian with Great Britain but within a decade a comedy star and foil to Hylda Baker; Louis Bookman, an outside-left and the only Jew to be capped by one of the Home Countries; Willie Watson who, when caught on enclosed premises at the start of his stalwart career, pleaded that he had been ‘ghost hunting’; inside-forward Abe Rosenthal, a prominent member of Bradford’s Jewish community who in the 1940s and 50s played semi-professionally so as to keep his hand in at lollipop making. Once upon a time these Bantam fairy tales helped people escape. Now they add to a romantic nostalgia that cloaks the club. I need only read the names of former players to feel it: Irvine Boocock, Charlie Rackstraw, Watty Shirlaw, Aubrey Scriven. Even the name of Bobby Ham evokes his era, the 1960s, and the way they never quite swung in West Yorkshire. Ham played for both City and Park Avenue, and was with the former when the latter ceased to be in May 1974. Liquidation of Park Avenue robbed football of one of its great derbies, indeed the only provincial city clash to be played in all four divisions. Park Avenue were wound-up in a conference suite of the Midland Hotel, above which I now stand in my room for the night.
I switch on Radio Five Live to try and catch up with the scores. Instead, I hear a man from Hampshire who wasn’t at the Manchester United game talk about the Manchester United game to an ex-footballer who wasn’t there either. I switch off again and move to the ample bay window. Immediately below is a huge fenced-off muddy crater. There was supposed to be a Westfield shopping centre here, but the recession saw its developers withdraw. They may well still get their shiny way, but it seems to me like a benefit of the global financial meltdown. Admittedly, I am scarred as Westfield was a plot feature in my Leyton hell, but I also like The Hole as it allows an unencumbered view. Besides, the council are about to turn it into a temporary garden, picking up capitalism’s pieces. I stand and watch this space, listening to cars and buses hiss along the wet road. The night is falling, eclipsing the grey sky with its own black one. Couples share umbrellas and well-dressed Sikhs talk on corners. Mums race pushchairs along; each flagstone crossed one towards somewhere dry. To the right is the last man standing, a Victorian corner bank attached to nothing since the bulldozers dug The Hole. It is defiant, its chest puffed out while all else around is modern folly and nothingness. Behind the bank is an office block with its skeleton on the outside, a thousand rectangular windows framed by matchstick bone. Directly opposite, 100 yards away, are the white and grey towers of Premier Inn, a hotel chain unlikely to bookend the footballing history of a place as the Midland has. To the left is a high and handsome row of old mill buildings and warehouses, each seemingly coloured in with a gold felt-tip featuring a slightly blackened nib. This is the outer edge of Little Germany and it is enticingly beautiful, which is why I find myself back in the rain five minutes later.
‘This area, known as Little Germany, was the centre of textile warehousing in late 19th century Bradford’ reads an iron plaque. (It doesn’t actually. It reads ‘This area, known as Little Germany was the centre of textile warehousing in late 19th century, Bradford’, but I’m presuming the sign-maker was having an off day with his commas.) As I enter Little Germany I look left and see Valley Parade, murky in the distance, but pluckily raised. I imagine textile workers finishing the Saturday half-shift and beginning the slow uphill walk, pint on the way, the world theirs until Monday. They would leave the low town smog behind for songs and goals up yonder. Sanded, polished, cleaned-up and given prettily typefaced iron street names, Little Germany, I find, is striking. It consists of a main thoroughfare built on the kind of hill that makes handbrakes take early retirement. Long lanes of high buildings run from it. Each has ornate stone carvings and frills on edges where there is no need for edges, never mind frills. There seem to be windows as far as the eye can see, all dizzyingly symmetrical. On each corner they fan out, New York flatirons broadened by Yorkshire brute. The area was built upon the money of German-Jews drawn to Worstedopolis. Their arrival turned Bradford into an unlikely cosmopolitan hub. Hearteningly, Little Germany now is a living, working museum of warehouse apartments and web-design companies.
I bypass The Hole and head for the centre of town. After Little Germany’s lavishness some of Bradford’s shabbier streets are a shock. Looking so far back and indeed up has allowed me to forget the poverty that undermines and underlines this city. It can be seen, as in Burnley, in the pound shops and the shut down shops, the tatty and the derelict houses. Perhaps I also forget because so many buildings are the reassuring, richly comforting colour of Werther’s Original packets.
Outside the Kirkgate Centre two merry Wimbledon fans stop and stare at its malevolent concrete walls. Built in the 1970s when Bradford tore up much Victoriana and planned a future, it resembles an industrial oven with which the devil warms up hell. As I pass the two drunk Dons they are, perhaps surprisingly, deep in conversation about schools of architecture. ‘This kind of Brutalism will become sainted. You mark my words, Paul.’ ‘No chance, Dave. It hardly matches the Neo-Classic and Gothic Revival stuff down the hill, and we’re realising that now.’ I suppose it beats re-living the five leaked goals. I head towards their Neo-Classic and Gothic stuff. I have no idea what style the Wool Exchange is, but it is mightily impressive, as are most of the tarted-up old buildings on Hustlergate and Market Street. I cross the road underneath lights suspended from one building to another wishing Bradford a Happy Eid. A shop worker locks up at The In Plaice just as a man in his forties reaches her. ‘Oh love. You’re not shut, are yer?’ ‘’Fraid so, flower. It’s gone 8.’ ‘But I want haddock ’n’ chips, love.’ ‘Sorry flower. There’s Nando’s over there if you like that?’ His look suggests not.
Nando’s is part of the Centenary Square development, a gaping, gorgeous space recently restored to its best. Opposite it lounges City Hall, Bradford’s huge and haunting civic centre, a Gothic Titanic. Its tower rockets for the sky, symbolic of old money used to breed pride and forge ambitious citizens. A big screen pipes the Last Night of the Proms across the square, Union Jack colours reflecting on to the vast new pond and fountains. ‘Excuse me, Sir’ a man asks me, ‘can I borrow 67p?’ As I appreciate the precision of his request I give him a pound. I leave the square and cross the road by the Media Museum, filing by the cloudy light bulbs of the Alhambra Theatre. Beside the Alhambra is Bradford’s war memorial. The First World War ended Priestley’s golden England, slaying a generation of Bradfordians in harrowing numbers and changing the make-up of the city. ‘The men who were boys when I was a boy are dead,’ he wrote of a war he too fought in. Outside regular regiments, 2,000 local men joined the ‘Bradford Pals’ – 1,770 were killed.
I walk uphill, passing the German Evangelical Church with its plaque to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor killed by the Nazis for plotting to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer visited this church and made his ‘Bradford Declaration,’ denouncing in 1933 the rise of Nazism. Guided by the neon lights of pizza and chicken outlets, I find Bradford’s main curry district, or at least the place with the highest concentration of recommended restaurants on the map my wife has lovingly created. The first has a tremendous scent, but veers too far towards soup kitchen for a Saturday night. The second is bright and buzzing, but as I enter I am pretty sure I have gatecrashed a family party, so I leave. The hill steepens, the street lights become sparser and the rain begins its night shift. I think about turning back, but am lured towards the promising bright lights of the World Famous Mumtaz. Inside the Mumtaz is a factory-scale restaurant with in-built delicatessen, as well as a display devoted to the Queen’s recent visit. It is a loud, happy place, both in its marbled bling decor and its atmosphere. With alcohol banned I wolf down my sublime curry with a soft drink, an alien but endearing experience. Ninety per cent of the people here are of Asian descent, and the lack of white people could have something to do with the lack of alcohol. Happily, the ten per cent ‘others’ are not sat among themselves, but mixed as individuals and couples in large family gangs of gassing and giggling Asians. A decade ago riots here saw Bradford labelled a ‘racial tinderbox’. Across the city segregation remains, but after the low of Luton, I am beginning to think things are heading in the right direction.
I leave the Mumtaz and walk back downhill into town, past Desmond Tutu House and the Peace Garden. Two sights that stay with me end my night. One is a man in a Mr Bean mask trying to fight a fellow drunk. Both have girlfriends pulling them apart. The other is a carefree lass of seventeen or eighteen, dancing in the Centenary Square pond, her shoes in her hands, her face turned to the moon. Her boyfriend sits on the edge, looking on. Eleven cathedral bells ring and I feel so glad of Bradford, of England.