I was there
Jeremy Clarke
uring the Queen's speech last _L./Christmas Day the dazzlingly beautiful, inarticulate little girl who was acting as Father Christmas presented me with a parcel from under the tree. Keeping one eye on Her Majesty, I unwrapped it. It was a paperback. I glanced at the blurb on the back, opened it, started to read and became so engrossed that I sat there like a gargoyle until I'd finished it and the fire had gone out and everyone had gone to bed.
I'd heard about this book because friends in London had been reading out chapters to me over the phone. I would have nipped into town straight away and bought a copy for myself, but in this remote part of the West Country they've only just started printing the Bible. I assumed I'd have to wait till I was next in London to get hold of one. And then, lo!, on Christmas Day this dimpled angel appeared unto me and presented me with one.
The fascination, for me, of Cass Pennant's Congratulations: You have just met the 1CF was that I was there at some of the worst episodes of football violence he describes. Through the Seventies and early Eighties we younger West Ham fans idolised our leading hooligans, Cass included, almost as much as we did the players. We weren't members of any of the loose alliance of West Ham's various hooligan 'firms' who, when combined and ably commanded, could stage such a spectacular show. Nor were we intentionally at the front row when it all went off. But we drank in the same pubs as them before home matches, travelled on the same coaches to away games, stood on the same away terraces in the same defensive squares, and now and then got caught up in the same pitched battles. And, to us, troop leaders like Cass, Bill Gardner and Teddy Bunter were father figures. If you were the right age and the right mentality, the Seventies and early Eighties, when English domestic soccer violence made sensational newspaper headlines every week, and West Ham's reputation for hooliganism was at its most prodigious, those decades were a kind of golden age. And Cass Pennant, who eventually went to prison for three years, and afterwards became a security adviser and writer, has become our Homer, our compiler-in-chief of the sacred book of the tribe.
The title, Congratulations: You have just met the ICF, is the text of the calling-card that members of West Ham's Inter-City firm were supposed to have left on the bodies of their victims. In Congratulations, Cass chronicles all the legendary battles of those heady years before Mrs Thatcher decided she ought to tell the police to put a stop to it. Home to Man Utd in 1967, the West Ham hooligans' creation myth — I was there, aged ten. The Harry Cripps testimonial, Millwall away. May 1972, about which Cass quotes the great Bill Gardner as saying, 'I've never seen nothing like that. I think that's the worst I've ever seen any trouble at football. . it was just unbe lievable — I was there, cowering in terror under a hail of bricks, glass and bits of ironmongery. Arsenal away in 1982, when a Royal Green Jacket on weekend leave lobbed a smoke grenade and we took their north bank with a superbly synchronised pincer movement — I was there, in the gents, missing it all.
Last Saturday I went up to east London to see the Hammers play Rotherham, my first visit to the revamped Boleyn ground for over a year. The embourgeoised stadium looks fantastic, but the intimate, raucous, cockpit atmosphere that we loved so much about going to watch West Ham has gone. The atmosphere was so quiet and polite against Rotherham that I felt obliged to ask my neighbour if it was all right to smoke.
It was so profoundly depressing I went to the bar well before the half-time whistle. And who should be down there with a pint of lager in each hand and presiding over a circle of adoring young acolytes but Cass Pennant. I bought two pints of lager for myself and went over to congratulate him on his latest addition to the canon. The only time we'd spoken before was when we were vastly outnumbered on the Kippax end at Manchester City over 20 years ago and he'd turned to me and said. 'I think it's time to go,' Before I could say anything about his book, however, he waved one of his pints over his young fan club in a kind of benediction, and said in his deep cockney, 'They honestly can't believe that a big black man with a fierce reputation like mine could be such a friendly bloke.' Then he turned and beamed at them like a saintly old headmaster tenderly cherishing hopes for the next generation. Naive hopes, in my opinion.
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