West Ham United: From East End Family to Globalised Fandom

By Jack Fawbert

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Mar 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781801502344

Book preview

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 émigrés’. 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 Ham United’s traditional East End working class. These ‘self-inventing transnational fans’ (Giulianotti and Robertson, 2007, p181) have little or no biographical attachments to the club or the East End of London, but their, often passionate, support for an English Premier League club has been facilitated by cheaper travel and media connectivity.

There are 700,000 fans on the club’s database and over 2.3 million likes on their Facebook page. At the time of writing there were 20 geographically based supporters’ clubs across the United Kingdom and 174 overseas groups on all six habitable continents across the globe. Many of Europe’s elite clubs now have large numbers of supporters’ groups across the world, but the question I wanted to try to answer is why there are so many groups for West Ham, a club who traditionally represented the strongly integrated working-class communities of the East End and who haven’t won a major trophy in more than 40 years. Indeed, for some of that time they have actually been in the second tier of English football.

So, the reason sometimes given for long-distance support or ‘glory hunting’ cannot be sustained with regard to these fans. At 174, West Ham have more supporters’ groups across the globe than internationally successful clubs such as Paris Saint-Germain (83), Chelsea (114), Juventus (85), AC Milan (105), Atlético Madrid (47) and even Barcelona (115). Of course, this is just the number of supporters’ groups and not the number of long-distance supporters, which is probably much greater for clubs like Barcelona. Nevertheless, I was curious to find out why so many football fans across the globe were West Ham supporters. I also wanted to find out whether or not that support was ‘softer’ and whether it can be argued that such fans can in any way be regarded as ‘inauthentic’.

It is no accident that virtually all major football clubs, certainly in the United Kingdom, are named emblematically after particular places and, thus, have affective ties to specific locations. Indeed, until relatively recently fan attachments to and identification with particular football clubs were, by and large, concerned with a love of particular places with which fans had an association, either by birth or residence. As recently as 2005, the FA Premier League Fan Survey found that the biggest reason fans started to support their favoured clubs was because ‘it is my local club’ (Waghorn et al, 2005, p13). Furthermore, as a consequence of the game’s specific history, it was strongly integrated, close-knit, working-class communities in particular that most football clubs traditionally represented for fans. This emphasis on the working-class community was central for most working-class men in particular, but also for many working-class women, in communicating a sense of identity to their male (and less often their female) offspring. Of course, I have to be careful not to over-romanticise this case because some clubs, especially the so-called ‘glamour’ clubs, have, for most of the 20th century, drawn support from outside their local communities. Manchester United, for example, have had a London branch of their supporters’ club, ironically now based in Stratford, since at least the 1970s. They have also had a large following in Ireland for many decades. Nevertheless, at least until the 1960s this was true only with regard to a small number of clubs like Manchester United and Liverpool and a small percentage of their fans.

However, football and football fandom have been changing for some time. The drivers of this change have been the breakdown of these traditional working-class communities, partly because of technological changes, the loss of large-scale manufacturing enterprises and manual occupations, their ‘outsourcing’ to developing countries, often by large-scale multinational corporations, the development of a more geographically and socially mobile nuclear family unit, greater ease of travel, increased flows of migration in what Castles and Miller (2009) call ‘the age of migration’, new communication technologies, social media and the global televising of the sport; the latter in particular, over the last quarter of a century or more of the FA Premier League through satellite television.

The biggest and most successful clubs have, as a consequence, been expanding their fan bases beyond locality, working-class lifestyles and family tradition for some time. Furthermore, as clubs have adopted more businesslike approaches, they have sought to globalise their operations by playing friendlies overseas in the close-season, selling branded merchandise more globally and using electronic media to build fan bases worldwide. Not surprisingly, the biggest and most successful club in Britain in the FA Premier League era, Manchester United, was at the forefront of this globalisation of support. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century they had become the world’s most popular football club with a global fan base of 659 million, more than half of whom were in the Asia-Pacific region. But what about fans of the less successful, less ‘fashionable’ Premier League clubs with traditions of strong ties to specific working-class localities; clubs like West Ham United? What are these new fans like and how can we explain this astonishing globalisation of West Ham fandom? Through surveying these fans, this is a question that this book attempts to address.

It is important, however, to start in the first chapter by looking at the history of football fandom in general from its 19th-century roots through to the present day. This will provide a context for understanding the making of football fandom in the East End and the reasons for its changes in general. The factors that shaped the culture of that quarter of London known as the East End and consequently the culture of support for West Ham United is the subject of chapter two. Chapter three examines the changes in the East End that precipitated what has become known to locals as ‘the great exodus’ and the role of West Ham United in providing a long-distance ‘magical recovery of community’ among the ‘Cockney diaspora’. It also examines the ‘adoption’ of the club by fans with little or no familial contact with the East End in what I have previously described as a ‘magical discovery of communion’ (Fawbert, 2017).

In chapter four I gather and present some qualitative evidence from the internet and in chapter five I consult with a sample of secretaries/leaders of 20 of those supporters’ groups to try to build a better picture of how fans at such remove from the East End came to support the club and how committed they are in that support. Chapter six is based on responses to the question ‘Why West Ham?’ that I posed to those secretaries/leaders of geographically based supporters’ groups. This provided me with a mixture of qualitative and quantitative data as well as guiding the kind of questions I should be asking and the options that I should be giving in a survey of fans. The resulting, mainly quantitative, survey of a self-selecting sample of fans worldwide in a self-report study is the subject of chapter seven and enabled me to triangulate the quantitative and qualitative evidence from a number of different sources. Throughout the book, I have also provided anecdotes and examples from my own observations over 60 years of supporting the Hammers which might be regarded by some readers as subjective. I hope, however, that these recollections add a richness to the story. In chapter eight I draw some tentative conclusions, using Robert Stebbins’s (2005) notions of ‘serious’ and ‘casual’ leisure.

The supporters’ groups range from one member to 5,894 and I would firstly like to thank all of those secretaries and fans who took the time to answer my questions and provide me with such a rich body of material to draw upon, as well as giving me permission to use photographs from their collections. Some of these people have been extraordinarily helpful, but there are so many of them that I can’t possibly name them all. You know who you are and my heartfelt thanks goes out to all of you. Indeed, after some introductory chapters about the development of football fandom in general, the history of the East End and the history of West Ham fandom, much of this book is about telling their stories rather than imposing my own narratives on them. Sometimes I have provided minimal commentary, allowing their contributions to speak for themselves.

I would also like to thank my son, Nick Fawbert. Nick is an IT engineer and he was a tremendous help to an old technophobe like me with the technical side of the survey, as well as with other aspects of writing this account. I would like to thank Jack Burkett for very kindly agreeing to write a foreword to the book. Jack played for West Ham between 1958 and 1968, making 181 appearances, and was the regular left-back for several years just after I first started watching the Irons. He is often overlooked when fans talk about the great Hammers side of the early 1960s that won the FA Cup and shared the FA Charity Shield with Liverpool, both in 1964, and won the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1965. Yet he is one of only seven players to have played for West Ham in all three games.

I would like to thank the staff at Pitch Publishing for their help in editing and preparing the book for publication. Lastly, I would like to thank Steve Mason, the school-mate who first took me to see the Irons. We remain friends to this day and by introducing me to the delights, and sometimes the trials and tribulations, of supporting West Ham United all those years ago my life has been made immeasurably culturally richer.

1

From the Local to the Global

‘MODERN’, ORGANISED games, as opposed to the more traditional ‘folk’ games of the Middle Ages, originated in the public schools in the 19th century as a way for masters to curtail the rowdiness and disorderliness of upper-class boys and thereby regain control. By the early 19th century, boys had become increasingly unruly to the extent that, for example, they frequently launched attacks not only on local people but also against their middle-class masters whom they considered as their social inferiors. At many of these repositories of privilege, boys also played violent and disorderly ‘mob games’ that they had learnt from watching the leisure pursuits of the ‘lower orders’ in the communities from which they came.

Reforming headmasters like Edward Thring at Uppingham and, most notably, Thomas Arnold at Rugby tried to direct the boys’ aggression to more ‘noble’ pursuits by converting these games into more rule-bound activities. The boys were encouraged to learn valuable ‘muscular Christian’ lessons about leadership, subordination to order, cooperation, fair play, discipline and deference to team spirit from these reformed games that they would then take on to university and, crucially, later life as gentlemen amateurs. One of these organised games, football, thus acted as a metaphor for life in modern capitalist societies; a set of moral instructions about ‘playing by the rules’.

Between 1845 and 1862 the seven main public schools put their rules in writing. In 1848 and again in 1856 there were attempts at a standardised set of rules called the Cambridge rules, but these were not universally accepted. Later, at a series of meetings at the Freemasons’ Tavern in London in 1863, representatives of the public schools, Oxbridge and 11 London clubs, a common set of rules were agreed. The Football Association was thus established by ex-public schoolboys and the first FA rulebook was written. Charles Alcock, a public school old boy, then founded the FA Cup in 1871.

Early clubs were dominated by public school old boys and university graduates. Wanderers, for example, the first winners of the FA Cup in 1871, included four old Harrovians, three old Etonians and one each from Westminster, Charterhouse, Oxford and Cambridge. The Royal Engineers were the winners of the next three FA Cups. They were a team of ex-public schoolboys. All commissioned officer ranks in the armed forces at that time came from public schools; a high proportion still do.

The ‘Corinthian spirit’ of the ‘gentleman amateur’ was hegemonic during this period. For example, it was considered ungentlemanly to demand payment for playing. A hegemony of ‘sportsmanship’ and ‘playing the game’ based on aristocratic notions of chivalry was encoded into football. It was also considered ‘cheating’ to train. Football was a pastime that wasn’t to be taken too seriously. A ‘gentleman’ was perceived to be someone who could win without sweating and without appearing to try too hard. ‘Gentlemen’ were assumed to win simply because they were ‘naturally’ superior. Adherence to the rules was important and players were obliged to accept the referee’s decision without question. Indeed, if a referee gave a penalty against Corinthians, a leading gentleman amateur team of the day, they would withdraw their goalkeeper to allow the other team to score because they wouldn’t want to be accused of gaining an unfair advantage.

At the same time there was increasing concern among this elite during the 19th century about the growing geographical and social divide that was opening up between the social classes and the squalor and degradation in newly urbanising, industrial areas that had been wrought by the Industrial Revolution; a situation that was fuelling growing unrest through strikes and demonstrations. Chartism, various socialist movements and the growing strength of emerging trade unionism, especially New Unionism in the latter part of the 19th century, were all developments that created concern among the elite classes that uncontainable disorder could break out at any moment.

They thought that organised games such as football could not only help to heal the class divide but also would act as a form of moral instruction in terms of the values that were encoded into such games. The wealthy became enthusiastic devotees of disseminating ‘respectable’ games to commoners, as long as the lower orders ‘knew their place’ i.e. that the gentlemen amateurs would always be the elite players. They wanted to ‘return’ football to the common people in reconstructed forms as they believed it would be ‘beneficial’ to promote class conciliation and cohesion and to spread ruling-class values to the most deprived and feared working-class urban areas. From the 1860s the working class in such areas were the object of the moralising influence of a civic bourgeois class who were keen to curtail all intemperance and ‘uncivilised’ behaviour. Following the 1884 Reform Act, which extended the franchise to all working men, businessmen were also keen to demonstrate their democratic legitimacy. The colonising zeal of the public school sportsmen was, therefore, welcomed by local businessmen in the most deprived, and what they regarded as most depraved, working-class areas. Indeed, muscular Christian missionaries flocked to these areas.

Much of this missionary work was performed through churches, schools and youth clubs, but many muscular Christian missionaries also became local employers and created leisure pursuits as a way of integrating their respective workforces into more harmonious relationships with their employers. For example, Stoke City, Crewe Alexandra and Manchester United were all created by railway companies, Coventry City emerged from the