by Greg Tesser
Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Prologue
1 The Beginnings
2 Jimmy Greaves and The No.28 Bus
3 Snowdrifts and Tommy’s Stomach
4 The Yardifying Yardbirds and not Forgetting Chelsea
5 More Soho Adventures and Chelsea’s Treble-Chase
6 Chelsea ‘Alone in Europe’ and ‘They Think It’s All Over’ and All That
7 A First Final for The Blues and Ossie’s Nightmare
8 I Tell Ossie About Eric Clapton
9 1969-70 – Ossie Hits The Highspots and Shamateurism is Exposed
10 Endorsements and that Cup Final
11 Euston Station and Beyond
12 Communists and Fascists and Fashion
13 Film Stars – Flim-Flam and Rock ’N’ Roll
14 European Glory and the Athens Trio
15 Austerity and the Big Break Up
Plate Section
Copyright
Acknowledgements
There are far too many people to thank, but pride-of-place must go to former Chelsea star Alan Hudson for his brilliant foreward. These days, Huddy’s skills with the pen match his once-famed artistry with a football.
Another handshake must go to photogapher Jeremy Fletcher, whose iconic photographs are featured widely in the book. I first met Jeremy in 1964, and, even though he now lives in Australia, his support during the production of the book has proved invaluable. Another ‘super snapper’ to thank is Chelsea fan Terry O’Neill, whose ideas so often bore fruit more than forty years ago. Yet another photographer, Richard Sainsbury of Delmar Studios in Taunton, proved to be a wizard with his scanner. And finally, a special thank you to my wife, Gianna, for her support and her regular supply of tea and sandwiches!
FOREWORD
How the times go flying by. The one thing that I have found is that a lot of the people who will be mentioned in Greg’s book will not have the same memories that I hold. Age is our biggest opponent when it comes to something like this, and then there are those who never enjoyed such times like we did at Chelsea.
I first met Greg Tesser when agents were scarce; I remember that George Best had Ken Stanley and I had Ken Adam, all pretty new to the job of handling such players. The only difference with Greg and Peter Osgood was that Greg was not only a massive Chelsea fan, but that his client was his hero. Osgood was exactly what he was to the majority of the Chelsea Shed; the King of Stamford Bridge, just as Charlie Cooke was the prince and I was the upcoming young pretender. My respect for these two players went beyond a love for playing the game.
It was, in those days, magical; just like ‘The Logical Song’ by Supertramp. But then the magic was lost as the game was streamlined and made more ‘logical’. For me, however, it remained magical (and always will) as the 1960s led into the ’70’s – the last incredible period for our game. The Bosman Ruling, which came into being in 1995, finally allowed freedom of contract, but sadly came along far too late for players of our generation.
And after my first long chat with Greg, this is exactly what he is endeavouring to recapture; if it is not magical then it is ordinary, and today there is far too much of that from English players. The likes of Osgood are now a distant memory, which is one of the reasons I took up writing for a hobby.
I wish Greg endless success with his book, knowing that he will capture those magical times. Once it is in print it is something that can never be taken away from you, even if only one copy is published and one person reads it, and hopefully when reading it that person manages to grab just a little of the glitter and gold of those days; glitter and gold that I’m afraid is missing today.
Alan Hudson
Former Chelsea, Stoke City, Arsenal & England star
PROLOGUE
It’s different below in the dressing room before a match. There’s no cool beer or King’s Road dollies, none of the euphoria of up-top – an excitement, sure, but one that’s heavy with anxiety; a religious dedication to the rituals being performed. An implicit notion that a life or two may be changed before the day is out.
The floor, a mass of shin pads, shirts, shorts and socks; tracksuits and towels and bottles of oil; tins of Vaseline and packets of studs; hammers and pliers; laces and boots; scissors; bandages and strips of Elastoplast and tufts of cotton, and small grey balls of spat-out gum.
And, tucked unobtrusively in some quiet corner, sterilising in a stainless steel basin of blue alcohol, the tray of surgical instruments, razor sharp scalpels and evil-looking sutures already threaded with brown stitching gut, awesome tools that ring distant alarm bells in the mind and impose a subtle sobriety on the proceedings.
The air smelling hot and linimenty, and everybody milling round like nervous bulls. White-coated helpers rubbing down muscles and studding boots, while the team manager circulates quietly with last-minute words of encouragement and caution. The room full of naked bodies with massively developed calves and thighs topped with chest cages and arms that look fragile in comparison, bending and stretching and windmilling in well-practised warm-ups. Grown men, whose behaviour in the half-hour or so before the kick-off is a gross caricature of their norm. Extroverts clowning away time, while the introverted retreat to private worlds behind walls of trivia, rituals of boot-lacing and nail-cutting. But the tension is getting through to all – you can be sure. You can tell by the forced laughter that greets even the dullest remarks and by the constant procession to the John.
Yes, this is how it is all right. Your guts like water, your thoughts racing on the edge of hallucination. Alone you sit amidst the jock-strapped torsos pulling jerseys over their heads and bandaging ankles, glad for the times when you trained to exhaustion. And heavy with guilt for all those other times when you did less than you might. There will be a reckoning. You know it. Not today perhaps, not tomorrow either. But you will pay. Remote, you sit in this bustling nervous community making an MGM production of trivial tasks on account you don’t want time on your hands.
Yes, this is how it is, that feeling close to vomit just before the ‘off’. Your skull is aching like it’s ready to burst. The tension is almost tangible, thick in the air, and everything is getting quieter, conversations just above a whisper, but with the referee’s buzzer, a sudden babble of voices, each wishing the other well, bodies intertwining in ritual handshaking. Some have a soft moist feel, while others offer only their fingers. And some take a firm masculine grip, perhaps clasping your forearm as well, like it should be, you think, and you feel a bit better for it.
Soon you are lined up at the door, everybody marking time, some jostling neurotically for a particular position, slaves to their superstitions, studs nervously clicking on the floor. But finally the door opens and you are in the tunnel, marking time again, your studs clattering on the concrete and your opponents lined up similarly a couple of yards away. You stand there fidgeting, nowhere to put your eyes, never looking at them, not for any length of time anyway. But you can see your opponents from their waist down and your stomach almost turns at the sight of those massive hairy legs, rock-hard columns of muscle that set you thinking that these geezers can probably go like gazelles. And you think of the irony of it all. Maybe 60,000 excited fans up top that would give anything to be down here in your place.
And you? Right now you wouldn’t mind being up there, with the cool beer and the King’s Road dollies, immersed in the collective euphoria. Yet you know that when the concrete yields to turf, when your studs cease their chatter, and you start to swing the ball about in those long looping practice passes, it will start to be all right again and the game will take over.
Char
lie Cooke, Chelsea’s Scotland International winger of the 1960s and early ’70’s penned this (in collaboration with Greg Tesser) in January 1971 in the Club Secretary’s office at Stamford Bridge. It was published on 15 March 1971 in Vogue.
ONE
THE BEGINNINGS
At the tender age of seven years and seven months I fell in love. Not some kind of pre-pubescent romance with a girl, but with a football club – Chelsea Football Club.
This was many years before I started to knock back chardonnay or Barolo al fresco with all the aesthetes and ‘beautiful people’ under a gaudy Martini sunshade at a table of an ultra-modish King’s Road eatery in the company of Charlie Cooke, or munch shellfish in his cosy Mini or visit Scottish international Stewart Houston in hospital with the King of Stamford Bridge himself, Peter Osgood.
When I was a boy in the embryonic years of the austere 1950s, we had a housekeeper. Her name was Mrs Brooks, and she was all contentment and geniality and old-fashioned reverence. She was large and she waddled, and she had a husband called Percy, who was a dustman, and she was proud of him and the fact that he wore a bowler hat to work. She always called me ‘Master Gregory’, and in the manner of some Edwardian nanny, spoilt me rotten. She voted Conservative and was a staunch monarchist. She was the archetypal working-class snob.
She knew nothing of football, or soccer as it was always called at my prep school, an establishment where the masters in charge of sport regarded rugger as the real football. Yet there she was on a dank December day in 1954, handing me a hot drink, as I watched Ted Drake’s Chelsea on our 9in ‘Ekco’ TV, purchased by my father in 1949.
I was reclining languidly, almost ostentatiously, in a 1930s Chesterfield with a cup of tea at my side – Mrs Brooks was an ardent advocate of strong, sweet tea as a cure for all ills – for, following a little bit of vomiting just before breakfast, my mother had decided I was too unwell for the rigours of school.
The BBC were broadcasting the second half of Chelsea’s friendly with crack Hungarian outfit Red Banner, captained by the legendary Nandor Hidegkuti; his deep-lying centre-forward play had so tormented England twelve months before at Wembley in the Hungarians’ 6–3 demolition of the game’s founders.
The result was 2–2 in a contest most notable for some of the poorest penalty kicks ever witnessed at Stamford Bridge, but I didn’t mind – I was hooked.
Now, I was born in Hornsey Lane Highgate, just a goal-kick away from Arsenal’s home of Highbury; yet despite my North London beginnings, I soon latched on to Chelsea. It was the exploits of Roy Bentley that did it, a Roy of the Rovers-style centre forward who banged in the goals with feet and head, and was the archetypal English sporting hero of those monochrome days of rationing, reserve and stiff upper-lip.
Bentley was about thirty years old, but he looked years older. His roughly chiselled face was lined and his forehead contained deep furrows. But these were special men – men who had survived the Second World War and all its many deaths and deprivations and heartaches.
Even for me, a mere child, the Second World War was still all around us, what with the bombsites we played on, still littered with the detritus of the Blitz, visits to the Food Office on Archway Road with my mother, and the ration books and the gas masks that were tucked away on a shelf in the sitting-room, seemingly waiting for action. I had just missed it. I had been conceived just a few weeks before the guns went silent, but it was still everywhere.
At Stamford Bridge, they were getting excited.Never before had the club, so often the butt of music hall jokes for their lack of success, been League Champions. But by the spring of 1955, when Teddy Boys were ripping up the cinema seats to Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around The Clock’ and James Dean lookalikes were emerging from suburban front-doors, only champions Wolverhampton Wanderers – or Portsmouth – it seemed, could deprive the Blues of the coveted top-flight title.
By this time I was living in an Art Deco block of flats called Brook Lodge in north-west London, on the junction of Brent Street and the North Circular.
Neither of my two best friends was a Chelsea fan. There was Anthony van Straten, whose father was a leading light in the Edmundo Ros Rumba Band. Anthony was quiet and reserved, and his dance-band-dad mirrored his son; certainly not the archetypal Mayfair musician of the time.
But what a man Edmundo was! Thickset, but extremely stylish, he was the personification of suavity. So much so in fact, that he became a favourite of the Royal Family. In fact, the-then Princess Elizabeth danced in public for the very first time to his band at the fashionable Bagatelle Restaurant. Later he performed regularly at Buckingham Palace.
Despite his extravagant and hedonistic lifestyle, Ros had tremendous staying power, and in 2011 he became a centenarian, only to pass away later that same year.
I think I was about eight when I first encountered Ros. He seemed massive, to such an extent that he rather frightened me. He once asked me a question about football – I can’t remember why – and I answered rather sheepishly that I wanted to go to Stamford Bridge to watch Chelsea. He just smiled, and said nothing.
Then there was Geoffrey Levy, whose mother had been a fashion model, and whose father, Leslie, owned La Strada restaurant in Hampstead Garden Suburb in partnership with comedian Charlie Chester (another favourite of the Royal Family, he died in 1997).
Incidentally, Charlie was also a fan of the round ball game, with the iconic ‘Wizard of the Dribble’, Stanley Matthews, being one of his closest friends. I never managed to discover his favourite football team, but three of his contemporaries, fellow comedians Arthur Askey, Jimmy Jewel and Ben Warris were all committed Chelsea supporters.
Geoffrey broke my arm once. We were re-enacting scenes from the Walt Disney film Davy Crockett, King of The Wild Frontier – it was all the rage then – and as we fought out the Battle of the Alamo in Brent Park, my arm suddenly snapped like a twig. It wasn’t Geoffrey’s fault; the doctor said later it could have happened at any time. It had something to do with calcium deficiency in my young bones.
However, his mother took a different view. She was a strict disciplinarian, and she caned him with a long curved thing she kept in a cupboard. She even thrashed him once in my presence. But Geoffrey was brave, for he never shed a tear. This is how it was back then. Cruel by today’s standards, but sixty-odd years ago children knew what to expect and existed within strict parameters. As normal boys we realised that if we transgressed, the outcome would be a painful one!
Anyway, Geoffrey was a dab hand with a cricket bat and a budding footballer, and, just days before my father’s thrity-seventh birthday, it was suggested that all three of us make the pilgrimage to Stamford Bridge for the Football League Championship-decider with Wolves.
It was 9 April 1955. The weather was mild; almost balmy, and my head was full of the Bill Haley record ‘Crazy Man, Crazy’, which my father had bought for me from a record emporium in Hendon. It wasn’t a new release, for Haley had hit the charts two years before with this ditty that contained the immortal lines: ‘Strauss discovered waltzing, the handyman found the blues, crazy man, crazy, crazy news.’
I kept singing the words out loud, and it must have been really irritating for those around me. Maybe that’s why my dad inadvertently sat on the disc, smashing it in two. For as the psychiatrists say, there is no such thing as an accident!
At the eleventh hour, Geoffrey decided he couldn’t make it, so it was just Tesser senior and junior. How my father managed to make sure we got seats, I don’t know, but he was always a supreme fixer.
My father, Victor, a child of the East End, was born during the dying embers of the First World War. He was what is commonly referred to as a ‘self-made man’. He had socialist principles, and in fact had been at the front line when Oswald Moseley’s odious Blackshirts had goose-stepped their way into Cable Street, a primarily Jewish area, on 4 October 1936. Known as ‘the Battle of Cable Street’, it was a day that East Londoners still regard as their own personal victory against
Fascism – the day that Oswald Moseley’s thugs were driven out of their cosmopolitan domain forever.
Ironically, in later years one of my father’s closest friends proved to be the late Clem Mitford (Lord Redesdale), a nephew of Moseley’s wife Diana. An elegant, easy-going chap, he later helped me with the launch of my very own football magazine – but more of that later.
Fast-forward nineteen years and by this time my father was a successful businessman, owning a silk screen-printing works in Belsize Park, ‘Studio Torron’, just a stone’s throw away from Hampstead Heath – plus a photographic studio in Dean Street, Soho.
Despite his humble beginnings and rudimentary education, and the fact that his parents – his father from Poland, his mother from Odessa in Ukraine – spoke in Yiddish, my father learned as a young man to cultivate and develop what used to be termed a ‘cultured voice’. He was also a serial name-dropper, having at a comparatively early stage in his life somehow managed to befriend actors, aristocrats, politicians and writers.
Both actor Richard Burton and Welsh writer Dylan Thomas – he of Under Milk Wood – were his regular drinking companions, mainly at the Cruel Sea, a far from prepossessing pub in Heath Street, Hampstead, where a diverse bunch of bohemians and polymaths would hold court as the alcohol-fuelled voices rose to a crescendo and every ill of society was addressed and cured. They were, by the standards of the 1950s, long-haired young men, many wearing corduroy jackets with leather patches.
It was certainly a far-cry from the likes of Hoxton and Stepney in the East End, but my father’s roots were to hold him in good stead when chatting and fraternising with the likes of Rodney Marsh and Bobby Moore. Marsh in particular was proud of his Stepney heritage, and my father and he, despite being of different generations, would revel in comparing nostalgic notes.
