Pitch Black (5 page)

AUDLEY ANDERSON HAD
arrived from Jamaica in 1954. His wife Myrtle joined him a few months later to make Nottingham their home. Their son Viv was born in the summer of 1956. Competition for the most important of resources – jobs, homes and social spaces – had created serious racial tension in the city between its newly arrived immigrant population – some 2,500 West Indians, almost all of them, like Audley and Myrtle Anderson, from Jamaica, plus around 600 Asians – and the local British-born whites.

The simmering tension exploded into violence and, as is often the case in these matters, the thorny subject of inter-racial relationships – or, more explicitly, inter-racial sex – proved to be the combustible material that exploded into all-out warfare between blacks and whites. The seemingly innocuous sight of a West Indian man enjoying a drink with a blonde British woman in a pub in the St Ann’s area brought things to a head. The man was assaulted and soon a crowd gathered. Contemporary reports at the time said that the police and local whites were surprised at the speed of the West Indian response as blacks took their revenge on ‘local teddy boys’ and, over a period of several hours, fierce battles were fought in which there were several beatings and stabbings. The police finally gained some control
and, over the following week, word of a massive once-and-for-all showdown between blacks and whites culminated in some 4,000 angry and up-for-it white people gathering in St Ann’s to put the blacks in their place and show them decisively who was in charge. Unfortunately for the racists, in all the excitement no one had bothered to invite the blacks to the battle and, fuelled by adrenalin and spoiling for a fight, the crowd turned on each other; dozens were arrested.

Vivian Alexander Anderson was two years old during that long, tense Nottingham summer. He would go on to make history. Like most boys, black or white, Viv Anderson wanted to be a footballer. Eschewing support for Forest or Notts County, he was seduced by Best, Law and Charlton into supporting Manchester United. He’d attended the biggest secondary school in Nottingham and they dominated football in and around the Nottingham area. Included in his school side were Peter Wells, a future Forest and Southampton goalkeeper, and Glyn Saunders, who would later also play for Forest.

Nottingham has produced its fair share of black footballers. As well as Viv Anderson, pioneering football manager Keith Alexander was born in the city. Record-breaking goal scorer Andy Cole hails from Nottingham, as well as Calvin Plummer, Michael Johnson, Chris Fairclough, Ian Benjamin, Tristan Benjamin, Jermaine Jenas, Jermaine Pennant, Leon Best, Wes Morgan, Tom Huddlestone, Martin Carruthers, Julian Bennett and Devon White, all of whom began their footballing journeys in the streets and parks around Nottingham.

In the 1960s, the city went through a process of slum clearances. The West Indian community were dispersed to council estates in and around the city itself. With few
alternatives, many boys and young men gravitated towards football, and a network of teams and clubs sprang up around the Nottingham area. It became something of a rite of passage for black boys to join clubs and teams in the area, and the early success of Anderson and others like Tristan Benjamin and his brother Ian provided the role models for the tight-knit community. Anderson’s father was well known in the city as a swimming instructor and was a popular figure both in the local area and within the black community. Jermaine Jenas’s father was a well-known footballer and coach who helped nurture the career of his son and others, working as a coach at Nottingham Forest.

At fourteen, Anderson was signed on schoolboy forms by Manchester United. On a separate pitch, yards from where he trained, he would see Best, Law and Charlton, as well as the rest of the first team, being put through their paces. He spent a year at United before being released. Devastated, he returned to Nottingham to play local football and found work as an apprentice silk-screen printer. The job lasted some five weeks before he was offered a chance to sign for Forest as an apprentice. At the time, he was the only black player or indeed employee at the club. However, his school friends Saunders and Wells, who also lived on the same council estate as Anderson, helped him settle in.

While still an apprentice, he made his first-team debut in a pre-season friendly in August 1974 and made further sporadic appearances as the season progressed. Results that season were poor. The Forest side was a mediocre outfit, languishing in the lower reaches of the Second Division and embroiled in a relegation battle. In January 1975, manager Allan Brown was sacked, to be replaced the following month by Brian Clough. As the saying goes, the rest is history.

As a young player, the worst racist abuse Anderson received was at Newcastle, which he remembered vividly because it was the first time he’d been subjected to such hatred. In a midweek League Cup game, he got what he described as ‘dog’s abuse’. He was accustomed to being racially abused: it had occurred several times during games as part of the cut and thrust. A misplaced tackle or hefty challenge would usually be the trigger for some foul-mouthed racist invective, but this was the first time he’d heard such wholesale abuse in a stadium environment. The game hadn’t even started; he’d only gone out to inspect the pitch.

Shaken, he told Clough he didn’t think he could play. ‘You’re playing’ was Clough’s gruff response. The following Saturday, they’d played Carlisle in a league game. Anderson had been named as substitute and part way through the second half was instructed by Clough to warm up. Going through his routine, he was showered with bananas and other fruit. After five minutes he sat down. Clough said, ‘I thought I told you to warm up’, to which Anderson responded, ‘They’re throwing bananas, apples, pears and everything at me.’ Clough was firm: ‘Get back out there and get me two bananas and an apple.’ Anderson finished warming up and eventually got on the pitch. However, Clough didn’t leave it there and gave Anderson the most important advice in his young career to date, words that were to shape the rest of his career.

A combination of instilling the young Anderson with self-belief and warning him to focus on football or he would jeopardise his career before it had got going did the trick. It was the advice that the young Anderson needed if he was to become a professional footballer.

At the end of Clough’s second full season, Forest finished third to win promotion to the First Division, where, implausibly, they were to go on to win the title and the League Cup and, impossibly, then went on to win the European Cup the following season, knocking out cup holders Liverpool along the way.

After the European Cup triumph, veteran left-back Frank Clarke, an all-knowing, all-seeing oracle who would later manage Forest and head up the League Managers Association, had told Anderson and his fellow youngster Tony Woodcock to enjoy the moment. ‘You haven’t a clue, it doesn’t get any better than this.’ Clarke was right, to a point, but the following season they retained the European Cup, winning a tight game against Kevin Keegan’s Hamburg.

In the years preceding Anderson’s historic debut for England, the question of who would be the first black footballer to play for the full England side had been the subject of media attention for some time. Laurie Cunningham had been touted as the favourite and had cemented this status during a scintillating performance for the England under-21 side against Scotland. Cyrille Regis had been mentioned along with Stoke’s Garth Crooks, but Anderson wasn’t really
in the running. The others had strong under-21 credentials and Anderson didn’t. However, Forest’s meteoric rise had brought him attention, trophies and experience. By 1978, he had racked up a league title, a League Cup and a European Cup. Cunningham was to make his own England debut a few months later, but when Ron Greenwood’s squad for England’s game against Czechoslovakia in November 1978 was announced, it was Viv Anderson’s name on the list.

The significance of the achievement didn’t go unnoticed. The media seemed to regard it as part historic event and part novelty as they reported on Anderson’s selection. In the run-up to the game, he received a telegram from the Queen and also one from Elton John. East Midlands television visited his parents’ home in Nottingham and broadcast a feature to mark the historic event. Before the game, seasoned internationals Trevor Brooking and Kevin Keegan had given him encouragement and advised him to play his normal game. Running lengthways, one half of the pitch was icy and the other half was soft, so he had to change his boots at halftime. He had a hand in the move leading to the goal that proved to be the winner as England won 1–0. His England career was sporadic, winning him thirty caps over a nine-year period. He went to four tournaments including two World Cups, though he never played in either. He lost out to the experienced Phil Neal and Mick Mills and, later in his career, had to contend with the emergence of the youthful, dynamic Gary Stevens, who’d won titles both north and south of the border and earned European glory with Rangers and Everton. He was never able to get a run in the England set-up, his longest consecutive run of games being four.

Of that legendary Forest side, Anderson was the last one to leave. He joined Arsenal in 1984, winning the 1987 League
Cup in the process. He became Alex Ferguson’s first signing for Manchester United, finally getting the professional contract for United that had been denied to him at age fifteen.

Anderson didn’t conform to any of the stereotypes that characterised the image of black players. He wasn’t a fast, skilful winger or battering ram centre-forward who lacked bottle and couldn’t play in the cold. He wasn’t in possession of natural athletic flair but lacking the intellect that white players possessed.

Significantly, of the players who had been in the running to be the first black player to represent England, Anderson was the only one who wasn’t an attacker. As for the cold, he always wore short sleeves, and, as for bottle, he was always a tough and resilient defender. As he put it, his job was to kick wingers and anything else was a bonus, but he does himself a disservice with that description. He was far classier than he gives himself credit for. He was very quick, got forward extremely well and scored with a few spectacular strikes, and his distribution was excellent. After playing for Manchester United, he reinvented himself as a centre-back, where his experience, intelligence and positional sense allowed him to make the successful transition.

Anderson had opened the door to allow other black English footballers an opportunity to represent the national side and, over the next few years, the inclusion of black players representing England became increasingly commonplace. His appearance cemented the belief amongst black footballers and fans that the presence of black players within the English game was no longer something of a novelty, but evidence that they had arrived and were here to stay. The impact of Anderson’s debut also represented a significant milestone at a time when the notion of ethnicity and
national identity was being fiercely debated and when parties advocating repatriation of people of colour were gaining significant electoral success.

OF THE VERY
few statues or memorials that commemorate the achievements of black people in the UK, three are of footballers. There is one of Arthur Wharton, considered to be the first black professional footballer in the world. He was inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame in 2003 and a statue of him was unveiled in October 2014 at St George’s Park, the National Football Centre. There is a second of Walter Tull, who played inside forward for Tottenham and Northampton Town. He was the first black outfield player to play in the top division and the first black person to be commissioned as an officer in the British Army in May 1917, despite the
Manual of Military Law
specifically excluding ‘Negroes and Mulattoes’ from serving as officers. He was killed in action in March 1918 and a memorial to him can be found at Sixfields Stadium, the home of his former club, Northampton Town. The third is at the home of West Bromwich Albion, The Hawthorns. Entitled
Celebration
, the bronze statue is of Brendon Batson, Laurie Cunningham and Cyrille Regis and is a fitting tribute to their achievements and legacy.

The West Brom team they played in certainly had more about it than just the Three Degrees. The side included
Bryan Robson, who would go on to captain England and become a Manchester United legend. On the opposite flank to Batson was Derek Statham, a talented full-back who never fulfilled his early promise but was an important part of the side. However, the Three Degrees were critical to the team’s success. Batson added steel, composure and class and he marauded forward at every opportunity. Cunningham provided flair, grace, creativity and attacking menace and pitched in with a few goals. Regis offered strength, pace and great movement and regularly found the back of the net. ‘He is all muscle, all black power,’ as
Sun
journalist Brian Woolnough said of him.

They were all highly intelligent, not necessarily in an academic sense (although there is no doubt that had they had the opportunity and inclination they would have been good students), but they were intelligent in a footballing sense. They were able to ally their technique and skills to an acute understanding of when and how to use them.

At the time the Three Degrees were the toast of The Hawthorns, there were perhaps fifty or so black professional footballers in total, compared to an estimated 900–1,000 today. The decision to have three black players playing in one side was therefore met with a large degree of curiosity and bemusement by some, indignation by others, and, for those who really couldn’t handle it, outright hostility.

Britain under the Labour government of 1974–79 saw living standards fall for the first time in real terms since the 1930s. Unemployment had risen from 500,000 to over 1.5 million, while inflation eroded the wages of those still in work. Health, education and welfare services were being savagely cut. Traditional industries such as dock work and
shipbuilding, which had provided employment opportunities for generations of working-class communities, were being modernised or lost altogether, threatening the security of families and communities all over the country. Black youths in particular were struggling to find employment and found themselves on the dole in an increasingly competitive and discriminatory job market.

In this economic climate, a new racist offensive was taking place, something that hadn’t been witnessed since the arrival of large numbers of migrants from the West Indies and Indian sub-continent in the 1950s. This offensive contained a number of key elements: far-right activity; the appropriation of racist ideology and language into mainstream politics; an increase in racist murders and attacks; and an increase in respectability for popular racist ideas.

In 1976, the National Front had won 20 per cent of the vote in local elections in Leicester. In May 1977, they had achieved 17.4 per cent of the total vote in the Greater London Council (GLC), polling 119,060 votes and beating the mainstream Liberal Party in thirty-three out of ninety-two constituencies.

Brimming with confidence from their election result, in August they announced a march through the ethnically diverse area of Lewisham in south London. Seeking to intimidate and harass the local black community, they marched under an inflammatory slogan claiming that 85 per cent of muggers were black while 85 per cent of their victims were white. Calls for the march to be banned fell on the deaf ears of then Metropolitan Police Commissioner David McNee, who declined to make an application to the Home Secretary for a ban to be imposed on the NF in favour of the local black community and anti-racists, claiming that a
ban would lead to ‘increasing pressure’ to ban similar events and he would be ‘abdicating his responsibility in the face of groups who threaten to achieve their ends by violent means’.

The NF’s confidence was checked, if not shattered, in the wake of the so-called ‘Battle of Lewisham’. The NF planned to march from New Cross to Lewisham, but never reached their final destination. Two hundred and seventy policemen were injured and fifty-six hospitalised, while over 200 marchers were injured, with seventy-eight hospitalised. Riot shields were used for the first time in the UK outside Northern Ireland as the police and racists on one side and local black youths and anti-fascists on the other side were involved in violent clashes.

Fearing similar violent clashes, Greater Manchester Police banned an NF march through Hyde in October 1977, but were defied by NF guru Martin Webster, who marched alone carrying a Union Jack and a sign reading ‘Defend British Free Speech from Red Terrorism’. In spite of the ban, Webster was protected by some 2,000 police as he marched, since ‘one man’ did not constitute a breaking of the ban.

The NF was the predominant Nazi organisation of the 1970s. They adopted an opportunist approach to politics by campaigning aggressively against non-white immigration, particularly highlighting supposed competition for jobs and housing, and preyed on the fears of British-born whites by emphasising black youths’ alleged propensity for crime. An unashamedly racist membership organisation, it actively tried to recruit amongst white football supporters and engaged in highly provocative actions such as marching through black and Asian neighbourhoods and communities, therefore deliberately provoking a violent confrontation with black and Asian youths and white anti-racists. Invariably this
provocative behaviour was supported by local police forces, who took the side of the far right, as illustrated in Lewisham.

As a matter of operational policy, the police systematically misappropriated Section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824 in order to harass, intimidate and criminalise black communities, particularly young black men. The ‘Sus’ law, as it was referred to in common parlance, enabled police to stop and search certain individuals they suspected of frequenting or loitering in a public place with intent to commit an arrestable offence.

This hated law had provoked drives for greater police accountability in the use of stop and search, as black communities increasingly took exception to the manner and frequency with which young men were being harassed. The law illustrated the overwhelmingly tense and suspicious relationship that was the dominant feature of relations between the police and black communities, which occasionally spilled over into violent clashes. In 1975, a Bonfire Night celebration in Chapeltown, Leeds, where Ces Podd grew up and where he would later undertake some outstanding community work, ended in a violent confrontation between black youths and police in which police cars were stoned, severely injuring two officers, and pitched battles were fought with police who arrived to rescue their colleagues. The much larger and higher-profile disturbances at the Notting Hill Carnival over the August bank holiday weekend in 1976 provided a further example of this fraught relationship.

In mainstream politics, Margaret Thatcher, then leader of the Conservative opposition, had told ITV’s
World in Action
, when speaking on the subject of immigration in January 1978, that ‘people are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture’.

Her comments didn’t represent a shift in policy. The Conservative Party had taken a hard line on immigration since she had been elected as party leader in 1975, and she had reintroduced a racist discourse to mainstream politics not heard since Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, which had seen him dismissed from the shadow Cabinet – a discourse that had been confined to the far-right fringe for a decade. Shortly after her comments, a National Opinion Polls survey recorded an increase in support for her party, who jumped to an eleven-point lead over Labour, whom they had previously been trailing by two points, followed by the general election victory a year later.

Between 1976 and 1981, there had been thirty-one racist murders and countless racist attacks on British citizens of black and Asian heritage. These included the murder of ten-year-old Kenneth Singh, who was stabbed to death yards from his east London home on 21 April 1978. The killers, who were never found, left eight stab wounds in the back of his head.

Even popular musicians were willing to express openly racist ideas. In 1976, Eric Clapton had praised Enoch Powell, and warned against Britain becoming a black colony, in a drunken rant during a performance in Birmingham. David Bowie had expressed his admiration for Hitler and fascism. Ironically, both artists had enthusiastically embraced black musical forms throughout their careers, but this paradox was seemingly lost on them. In addition, crude racist stereotypes and ideas were regularly evoked within British popular culture by comedians and in TV dramas.

It was in this climate – with the rise of the far right, the racist discourse in mainstream politics, increased racist attacks and murders, hostile relationships between black
communities and the police, the willingness of prominent public figures to align themselves with racist ideas and the widespread use of casual racism in popular culture and the press – that Brendon Batson joined Cunningham and Regis at West Bromwich Albion. The area itself was no stranger to racial tension. In May 1973, in a by-election in West Bromwich West, the National Front candidate, Martin Webster, polled 4,789 votes (16.2 per cent).

The racist abuse suffered wherever Albion played was so prevalent as to be a normal occurrence. Batson remembers the noise and volume of abuse at some grounds being deafening. Upton Park, the home of West Ham, Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge, The Den at Millwall and St James’ Park, where Newcastle United played, were amongst the most hostile and vicious places to be a black footballer. As Batson later recalled:

The three regularly received hate mail and death threats. An Everton fan regularly wrote them abusive letters and on one occasion had urged Atkinson not to select ‘monkeys’ for an upcoming game against the Merseysiders.

Cunningham in particular received more than his fair share of hate mail. His high-profile relationship with his fiancée, whom he had known since the start of his career
at Orient, was often the subject of tabloid titillation and curiosity. It was this relationship that invoked the most opprobrium, since, in the eyes of the racists, he had broken that most solemn of taboos: he was having sex with a white woman. Death threats were sent to their home in Birmingham and on one occasion Cunningham was forced to stamp out a petrol bomb that was thrown through his front door.

During games, bananas were pelted in their direction and they were booed and abused horrendously every time they touched the ball. When they did something good, which wasn’t uncommon, the level of abuse would be cranked up several notches, particularly when they played at those hothouses of Upton Park, Stamford Bridge, Elland Road and St James’ Park.

In addition to the racist abuse they received from the terraces, they would be routinely abused by their fellow professionals. A mistimed tackle, a fifty-fifty challenge, indeed any minor altercation would be the trigger for racist abuse. Sometimes it took far less than that. Opposition players would regularly abuse them for no apparent reason. However, it would be churlish to suggest they were passive recipients. They would talk back: a racist remark about the size of black men’s sexual organs (racists appear seemingly obsessed with sex) would be countered with an invitation to allow the player’s wife or girlfriend to spend a night with them or some other unspecified black man. However, this was no tit-for-tat exchange of petty insults: it was a conscious attempt to turn the racists’ arguments on their head by playing up the racial stereotypes to invoke some deep, dark sexual fear on the part of their antagonists. This kind of retort would often invoke fury from the abuser, raging
about the unfairness of the remark and how some line at the summit of some moral high ground had been crossed. But sometimes the insults were so hateful there was no possible response.

Their sense of isolation was palpable. There was little chance of any recourse from teammates or the media, the FA or the police. Brendon Batson, speaking to Paul Rees for his book
The Three Degrees
, said:

However, they drew strength from each other, three black men joining together to share experiences. They bonded on a number of levels. Three black Londoners, living and working in the Midlands, facing abuse every time they went out to work. They would exchange stories and observations about particularly abusive crowds, about comments from and altercations with particular players, and they would discuss the attitudes of teammates and opponents alike. They would bond in hotel rooms and at social occasions, drawing mutual support from each other, comfortable that they were all walking in the same shoes.