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Rolling with the 6.57 Crew

The True Story of Pompey's Legendary Football Fans

John Blake Publishing Ltd

Rob Silvester – 6.57 Crew

'The necessity of living in the midst of the diabolical citizens of Portsmouth Is a real and unavoidable calamity. It is a doubt to me if there is such another collection of demons upon the whole earth. Vice, however, wears so ugly a garb that it disgusts rather than tempts.'GENERAL JAMES WOLFE (1758)

Far from flattering were Wolfe's comments on Portsmouth, in a letter he wrote to his mother, shortly before sailing from Portsmouth to Canada and his eventual death on the Heights of Abraham, in 1758.

I caught the London Waterloo train bound for Portsmouth, for a journey to Portsmouth Football Ground where I was to meet up with Rob Silvester. As I looked up at the departure board – Fratton, Portsmouth and Southsea, Portsmouth Harbour – I remembered Rob had said Fratton. Fratton Park was their ground and I just couldn't believe I had never been there in my football-going days of travelling around with the West Ham boys. Never ever remember playing them, but Rob was to pick me up on that point later. I said something about it couldn't have been a row game. Rob said one word – Swallow. I said, 'You're kidding, I don't remember much said on that.' 'No, it was mainly Under 5s, all them. It's not a problem, Cass, there's never been no real animosity between us. We later got to know some of them well from the rave scene, Downham Tavern and Centreforce and all that.' Suddenly, I remember there's a lad they won't hear a bad word against who's been coming to West Ham for a number of years, but they only ever call him Pompey. And I can go back further, right back to the seventies. Whenever we came down to Southampton, a few Portsmouth would wait at the station and would want to join us. At first we were a bit surprised as back then, away from London, West Ham only ever had a small travelling firm, nothing like the firm that went away in the eighties. Even then we were used to being hated by all. You had this Pompey geezer that acted like one of those loners, but he was bit of a hard-nut kitted out like those dudes in A Clockwork Orange. He would join our escort, making these grunting and growling noises. People didn't take kindly to it and thought he should know. When a few decided to challenge the loon, a few of us had to step in. Even though the kid looked ready to defend himself, it became obvious he was a deaf and dumb mute – it would have been a liberty. No sooner had we befriended him, shouts went up that Southampton have made their showing. Fuck me, he was gone, out the escort, through the Old Bill and straight into them. People like to say we're mad, but he was proper mad. He didn't give a fuck. Later, we thought we had lost him, but in that shit ground they called the Dell, back then you could have the odd row in that Milton Road end, where they had solid concrete parts of the ground that reminded you of the old war-time pill boxes placed along Dymchurch and St Mary's Bay. Anyway, believe it or not, in those early times you could get a little off going with the Southampton lot and you would have to be showing your age to remember that. But only when you first went into the ground, mind, when no one's really mobbed up fully. Once everyone got together it would only be the Old Bill's dividing human wall before they had fences that would save them, but that wouldn't deter matey. You looked up at the other end, and it would be full of Southampton. I remember you see a small gap on the terraces appear, not big enough to register a mob going in. You wonder what West Ham are up there and then you see Old Bill pull him out and 'cause he's deaf and dumb the Old Bill don't know quite what to do with him yet he seemed well known to them, all right.

As we marched through the seventies he became a familiar face for a few seasons. People would tell others that hadn't made the trip before that a band of Pompey would be waiting to join us and to look out for the deaf, dumb, mute, he's OK, well mad, certainly in his hate for Southampton and he wasn't alone. Another trip we had a proper firm of Pompey meet us unannounced as usual. Now this was pushing it. For a start we didn't need anyone and by now this was bigger than any Southampton crew we were likely to find. To us, Southampton was a nothing day, just one of those away trips you had to make. Then someone spotted that they all had brand new West Ham silk scarves on the wrist. Now that gives the game away on what period we're talking here, but with them going as far as wearing brand spanking new West Ham scarves, any thoughts of hostility between the two groups went right out the window. Whatever anyone in the know thinks of Southampton fans, there's something far more going down with the Portsmouth lot when it comes to their local rivals. Other London clubs that went there told similar stories and of the period no doubt it was the same Pompey crew. And coming out of the seventies into the casual-era eighties. During which times you couldn't give Southampton a mention, those that bothered going only ever found what can only be regarded as a family club.

Rob just shrugged his broad shoulders. I had gone past the amusement stage and it seemed to be me mentioning Southampton that was doing it. We were round by the ground now and his blue eyes seemed to sparkle and now he would do the talking, but first by way of polite explanation he tells me quite warmly nobody says the word Southampton round here. 'Nobody can bring themselves to say it, Cass, and I ain't just talking about football supporters. It's Scum – we call them Scummers, Cass. That's what they were called before me and it will be the same after me.'

Silvester is taking me an away supporter's route around his home team's ground. As we walk and talk I notice Rob's leather Burberry bomber-style jacket, he raises his builder's arms silently pointing to graffiti further along some turnstile wall as we momentarily pause in this alleyway. 'FUCK OFF SCUMMERS' is written in classic Rolf Harris paint style.

'They're your nearest rivals, aren't they?'

'Yeah, 18 miles away. Anyone in between, Aldershot?'

'Yeah, but with Aldershot, Portsmouth outnumber them five to one.'

'How far away is Aldershot?'

'About 45–50 miles. You've got Bournemouth one side, 50 miles; Brighton the other, 50 miles; Southampton, 18 miles; and you've also got Reading. But as you'll find out later when you see the headlines after Portsmouth played Reading, the first time was Pompey animals. Run up there, pitch invasions, fucking chaos. These fucking square terraced houses are almost backing on to the ground. Some big games you get people getting on their roofs where the scaffolding is. Another good game I can remember getting thrown out, against Huddersfield, Spring 1980. That one I had actually been working on the roof of one of these houses, so I gets thrown out and I tries to get up this wall adjacent to the away end, when I see this bloke come round the alley with a Crombie on, dragging two crates full of empty milk bottles, sees me and puts them down right there. "Here y'are, have one each." Straight over the back there is where you've got the away support gathered and totally exposed in an open end. And it's these alleyways where the away supporters used to come in. But further along and over where that big yellow building is, that's where the coaches came in and there's plenty of places round here for just heads down walking, and just appearing, not in an ambush but frontal attacks. Or you could just mingle in with 'em like you was Joe Nobody ... Then smack, or you just spanked. You can have this away end sort of surrounded, 'cause the away end backs on to an alleyway.'

'What was it called, the away end?'

'The Milton End. It's sort of surrounded by the North Stand one side and the South Stand the other. I think it holds about four and a half thousand.'

'When the away supporters come unstuck here, I bet there's a few jumping over them gardens, then?'

'Well, they've been sort of run – what's the word when you can't escape – you run the gauntlet. Anyway, they run. If they run that way, they'll be coming out with all the Portsmouth fans emptying out. They'll all make their way round this way, and at the same time you had the other half of the Fratton End emptying – ambush. And in the old days, if you never went round the away end, you could still wait at train stations.'

'So what was it like when the Jocks came?' I asked.

'It was a money-raising game,' came Silvester's reply. 'Celtic lot weren't up for aggro. The police were there and just let them get on with it, stand in our end singing their songs. There wasn't many, but they still brought a good 800–1,000. Just walked straight into the Fratton End. I think it was '76. At the time, Pompey nearly went out of existence. They did the normal things like sell bits of turf, anything to keep them going, really. They just about survived. That was in the mid-seventies. Somehow they just survived it. Portsmouth is an island, isn't it? The actual city is Portsea Island. It's not man-made, it's an actual island which is why there's no major crime down here, just sort of three roads. Any bank robberies or big bits of work like that, they just stick their roads up and that's it, you can't get off.'

'Has Portsmouth got a major criminal community?'

'No, it's got its fair share of drug problems, thefts, you know. It's nothing like London. In the South London Press there's probably more crime in that than there is for like a year here. Portsmouth I always associate with being a hard area, probably the sailors and the docks ... the way it's laid out, it's well dodgy. Everyone's in the same area, full of alleyways and side streets?

'Yeah, it is really, very run down. It was blitzed in the war, flattened. That's the roads where the away coaches would always park, even today. They would have had to leave the coaches, come down here and walk up past sort of two roads and then into the alleyways, even though there was a police escort. As for the main route in, any minibuses, vans, people making their own way, they all come down and then they found out there's two main pubs full of Pompey always waiting there. You'd get exceptions. Preston turned up here last season, about five-to-three, and fucking done a few straggling Pompey. Coachload pulled up here somewhere.

'Like any, we have a couple of main pubs, strongholds of Pompey lads, the main two really being the Brewers and the Milton Arms. The Milton's got a little extension on it, which is called the Barn. Match days you'd have the Old Bill there with the camera, videoing everyone. The pubs are only about five minutes from the ground, so they're ideally placed for everyone to meet up. I only live a bit further back where you can actually hear the roar when they play at Pompey on a match day.

'This is the pub the lads ambushed Leicester in the play-offs. Riotous game ... 2–1 up there and we drew down here, which wasn't enough. All Leicester give it, they came flying out of the away end and run into Pompey right here, and Portsmouth was all over the place, run them back down into Carisbrooke Road where they were just getting ambushed by everyone that had come up from all the alleyways and cut them off from the park across Priory Crescent.'

'In the annals of the terraces, who had the big name? Any leaders who stood out?'

'There was never really a guv'nor over there, it was a bit independent, always had been down here, never been one person who's the main man or something. It was always sort of, on the day, everyone together. One name that always sticks out, and they said he was hard – Bob F. I don't know him myself personally, but one of the best stories about him was, in the days of them taking places ... Portsmouth fans were in the rival's end. He couldn't get at them, so he climbed up, went across the girders at the top of the roof of the stand and got down behind them. Just done it solo, on his own, and he was well renowned for it. He was a character and we had a few of those – the legend Fish, Ray G, even in what you could call ordinary supporters we had some mad support. People like Westwood with his flaming bugle who would never miss a game, home or away, become a landmark to Pompey fans when travelling away. There was the legend of Fooksie's coaches; back then he was the first to book our own train travel, before the club saw money to be made and took it over from him.'

Fooksie was the older generation of Pompey lads and a must to interview 'cause he remembered the early lads. When I met up with Fooksie, I asked the same question, his reply was,

All right, there was Ginger Howard from Paulsgrove. When Millwall came down the first time they tried to drown him in an ornamental fishpond at the station along Goldsmith Avenue. Big mop of ginger hair he had, from Paulsgrove, and, personally, the way I look at it, the way the City Council treated them people from Paulsgrove and Leigh Park was politically disgusting. The City Council let those people down terrible. It's one of the biggest housing estates in Europe and is just outside Portsmouth, that's also where you've got Paulsgrove which is on the hill that overlooks it. This is where the hardness of the city comes in. They got bombed out and they stuck them up there as a short-term thing and they're still there. The war finished in '45 and they're still there. The same as those Leigh Parkers, which is further out. It was only put up in 1946 for all the sailors who lived in prefab houses after the Second World War. You've still got them people up there. It was meant to be a brand new thing that's going to be a sensational way to develop, house 'em, get people out into the country, fresh air. Stuck them there with no amenities at all. They're council tenants living at Leigh Park, so they've got an attitude an' all. They feel nothing has gone forwards for them.

Fooksie has a point, suggests Silvester and reflects some more. 'I guess we have this feeling we're on our own down here, no one's going to help us ... Take Paulsgrove, that's where they had those paedophile riots, that estate up there. That's some estate. Fucking mad screaming women coming out and wanting to kill you, but that's a hard place. Dads know the dads and kids know the kids, it's very close up there. So think about it, if you're a Grov'ner, if you're brought up on Paulsgrove, you've immediately got the chip on the shoulder. You've got the chip and you've got the Grov'ner walk and you're anti-everything, and you take that to football. The Portsmouth area is bit of a hard place and it weren't the only place to be blitzed in the Second World War. If you take it, Coventry got whacked in the war and it got all rebuilt up lovely. But this city of ours never got rebuilt. It still had bombsites on it up until 1980. It's taken Portsmouth years and years. It's the last to be rebuilt. It sort of gives you an inner toughness.

'Relating it to football, especially when we played away, we was never afraid. We'd go Millwall, we'd go Newcastle, we'd go Birmingham, we'd go anywhere, we weren't scared. We didn't have a fear even if we were a bit naïve as a firm. We didn't used to question whether or not these teams we were playing had a firm, and whether they would be waiting for us and that, that didn't come into it. It was, "C'mon then, let's get up there, and we'll sort that out when we get there", you know, if there's aggro to be had and whatever's going to be done.'

According to Silvester, the other characteristic, which was not the norm when it comes to the elite of any top hoolie firms, is something Fooksie picked up on in the days he'd put on the travel arrangements – the fact Pompey never used to go tooled up on their travels. Fooksie recalls:

Something I used to find in some ways frustrating, never a little 2lb hammer in the top pocket or a little Stanley. They never ever went with that in mind, even though we'd be going away and there would be thousands of 'em. I could never work that one out with our boys. They would come back to me saying they'd got into a rumble, bit heavy [and then the shattering equation] – 'They was all tooled up, Fooksie' – I'd say, well, you know I can't help you. If that's what they are doing, that's what they'll do and you've got to make your own mind up about it now. But they never did it.

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Excerpted from Rolling with the 6.57 Crew by Cass Pennant, Rob Silvester. Copyright © 2004 Cass Pennant / Rob Silvester. Excerpted by permission of John Blake Publishing Ltd.
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