West Ham United

Jack Fawbert

Description

West Ham United: From East End Family to Globalised Fandom is the story of the evolution of West Ham. It charts how a works football team was transformed into a club that represented east London's working classes, only to be transformed again in the late 20th and early 21st centuries into a global brand with supporters in every habitable place on Earth. Starting as the Thames Ironworks Ltd works team, they changed their name to West Ham United in 1900, shortly before moving to the Boleyn Ground in Upton Park. For nearly a century they were supported by local working-class men from across the East End of London until a series of economic, social, cultural, geographical and technological changes brought the club a global fanbase. Through surveying West Ham United fan groups across the world, this book attempts to explain this phenomenon and to get a sense of what the club means to those who originally came from the East End, as well as to those who have no biographical connection to the area.

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 21 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781801502344
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2021
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Jack Fawbert, 2022
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Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
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A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781801500685
eBook ISBN 9781801502344
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Contents
Foreword
Introduction
1. From the Local to the Global
2. The Making of Football Fandom in the East End
Photos
3. Farewell to the East End? The Great Exodus and the Magical Recovery of Community
4. Inauthentic Fans, Virtual Class Tourists and Hipsters?
5. We All Follow the West Ham, Over Land and Sea!
6. Stand Up If You Love West Ham
7. We re All Going on a Worldwide Tour!
Photos
8. Conclusions: Casual or Serious Leisure?
Appendix
Bibliography
Foreword
THIS BOOK is all about the fans of West Ham. During my time as a player in the 1960s the fans were a very important part of the club. From my first day as a schoolboy until my last day in the first team I was well aware as a player, as were the supporters, of the family spirit at the club. My relationship with West Ham was like with every club where there are good and bad times, but my experience was very good due to the fact that we won so much.
It was great to be liked by supporters through from the youth team to the end of my professional contract. The spirit of the fans was uplifting with many families, including grandads, dads, mums and kids supporting the club year in year out. Over time the fans have made sure the club has been well supported with the kind of loyalty through thick and thin synonymous with the East End of London and the working class and I hope that stays the same for many years into the future.
Looking back over my time as a player, it was good to hear the support given by fans, home and away. The Chicken Run was my favourite stand. It was so close to the pitch and the way the fans responded to their favourite players was a dream , just like the song says. They even made sure the players got back into position before throwing the ball back.
The club has always been part of my life and I still look for their results on matchdays. This last season, 2020/21, was a great effort by the players and I hope that the supporters, although not able to be at the games, will look to the future for the same response from them.
Jack Burkett
FA Cup winner, 1964
FA Charity Shield joint winner, 1964
European Cup Winners Cup winner, 1965
Introduction
I WAS born in 1948 in Stepney Maternity Hospital, a brand-new NHS hospital in the heart of the East End of London just three days after the NHS had started. So, technically, as I was born within the sound of the bells of Saint Mary-le-Bow Church, I can consider myself to be a Cockney . However, I was brought up on the giant Becontree council estate in Dagenham on the outskirts of the East End. My parents were both manual workers; my father was a bricklayer and my mother did a variety of jobs including home-working as a very expert seamstress. Both my parents encouraged me, along with my two older sisters and brother, to engage in a wide range of cultural activities. However, they were not particularly interested in football and, as a young child, neither was I. On a couple of occasions my dad did take me to see Dagenham Town, who were the local amateur side at the time, but it didn t stimulate any great interest in football in me beyond a childish curiosity.
This all changed when I passed the 11-plus exam and went to the local grammar school, Dagenham County High. There, I made friends with a lad from Barking, Steve Mason. Steve asked me if I d like to go with him and another class-mate, Graham, to see West Ham United play on the following Saturday in a First Division game against Everton. This was in February 1961 and Steve had been a regular at the Boleyn Ground for some time. We stood at the front of the North Bank behind the goal, as many kids did in those days. It was a large, uncovered terrace at that time, and I found the whole experience exhilarating; the huge crowd of thousands of, mostly, working men, many of them East London dockers, packed together, the marching band playing before the game, the ex-soldier they called Monty marching up and down the pitch before the game saluting the crowd, the peanut seller shouting peanutter , the roar of the crowd when the teams came out, the men in their flat caps in the old wooden stand they called the Chicken Run swaying and singing the club s anthem I m Forever Blowing Bubbles and the celebrations every time West Ham scored each of their four goals that day. Harry Obeney bagged two and the others were scored by John Dick and Malcolm Musgrove. I remember the whole experience as if it were yesterday. I was hooked and I just couldn t wait for the next game.
Over the 60 years that followed I have been a passionate supporter of West Ham. I witnessed all their greatest triumphs including the FA Cup wins in 1964, 1975 and 1980 as well as that momentous night at Wembley Stadium in 1965 when they won the then highly prestigious European Cup Winners Cup. I was there for the return of England s triumphant trio of Geoff Hurst, Martin Peters and the inimitable captain Bobby Moore after they won the World Cup. When I left school at 16 years of age I served a traineeship as a cabinet maker, before becoming a joiner and eventually moving out of workshops to work on building sites as a carpenter. When I married, like so many from the area, as I ll talk about later, I moved the short journey along the Thames corridor to Aveley where me and my wife Sue lived and I continued supporting the Irons. In 1983 we moved much further afield to a village in Suffolk in order to be within daily travelling distance of Cambridge, where I was embarking on an Honours Degree in Sociology and Economics at what is now Anglia Ruskin University. After graduating I went into academia, first as a lecturer in Further Education and then as a senior lecturer in Higher Education. During that time I went on to complete an MA in Sociology at the University of Essex and a PhD at Leeds Metropolitan University.
For my doctoral thesis at Leeds Metropolitan University I studied the social meaning of replica football shirts for members of the Northern Hammers Supporters Group. I became fascinated with the reasons why these football fans at such remove from the locality of the East End of London chose to support West Ham. For some, it was quite simply that they had been born or brought up in the East End but for one reason or another, usually work, had become Cockney migr s . For others, there were a variety of reasons which fascinated me then and fascinate me now. Also, on a trip to see my equally passionate Hammers-supporting son, Paul, who lives in a suburb of Chicago, he took me to a West Ham pub where I met many Irons fans, including the manager who had themed the pub around support for the club. I resolved that when I retired in 2013 I would research such long-distance supporters and, indeed, the growing army of overseas fans of the club. Unfortunately various matters, including ill health, prevented me from devoting the time needed to research for and write this account. By the end of the decade, I found myself in a much better position to do so, especially with regard to health, and hence I m now able to write this book.
Though I now live 75 miles away from the East End, I still go to watch the Irons at virtually every home game, or at least I did until the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020. Although the club has now moved to a new stadium in Stratford, the 2012 Olympic Stadium, they are still in the East End and it feels like coming home every time I go to see them play. In the past, work, family commitments and a playing career of my own, albeit at a very low level, prevented me from going to games as much as I would have liked. However, since retiring in 2013 I have had the time, the money and a lack of commitments to family and playing to be able to indulge my passion, so I became a season ticket holder, first at the Boleyn Ground and now at the London Stadium as the Olympic venue is now called. Over those 60 years I have witnessed some enormous changes in the composition of the crowd, in ways of supporting the club, in the relationship of the supporters to West Ham s East End working-class roots and, as I ve said above, even where matches are now played.
Like me, many supporters have become socially and geographically mobile and have moved further away from the East End, first to New Towns in the home counties, especially in Essex along what is known as the Thames corridor, and later much further afield, including far-off lands across the globe. Giulianotti and Robertson (2007, p181) describe such supporters as diasporic self-sustaining communities . They are fans who originally came from the East End or are descendants of those who did and have inherited an oral tradition of support for the club and the notion of the East End family . However, economic, social, cultural and technological changes have also encouraged long-distance support from a new generation of fans with little or no familial or residential ties to West