A Long Life (Or Six) And A Lively Day In Bolton

Saturday 26th February 1977. Another Saturday, another away trip. This time a long haul by train to Bolton, fellow promotion chasers. Chelsea were top of Division Two but had only won one game since New Years Day, Bolton were third but with two games in hand, so it was a critical game.

There were five of us travelling up from Canterbury that day. The usual three die-hards - me, The Curator and The Driver (both of whom I still sit with in the MHU) - plus Steve and Brett. Brett was a Bolton fan, and he was intending to travel up with us on the special, and break away from the inevitable escort at the ground. I was 19 and it was my first season watching Chelsea regularly.

We were driven from Canterbury to Euston in The Driver’s old 2CV. His role in the late 70’s seemed to be to drive us to Chelsea home games, sit in the Nell Gwynne drinking orange juice while the rest of us beered it up, watch the game listening to us talking drunken rubbish, then drive a carload of sleeping beauties back to Canterbury after the game. He did this for two years. Looking back, I have no idea how, or why, he put up with it, but we are very grateful.

The game was only confirmed ‘on’ at 09.00 as there were concerns that the pitch (‘a lake’ the previous morning) would be waterlogged. Luckily, it passed the referee’s inspection. The thought occurs that a couple of thousand Chelsea supporters at Euston with nowhere to go that morning might have been a challenge for The Met.  

Euston station in 1977 was even shabbier than it is now. On that particular morning, it was also full of Chelsea supporters, those on the specials plus a fair number catching the normal service train and changing en route. That season was the last one where special train tickets, usually on sale after the previous home game but often also on sale at the station on the morning of the game, required no membership to allow purchase. The specials were relatively cheap, though not massively so (the Bolton trip was £4.50 return), were stewarded and as things stood, allowed supporters to take alcohol on the outward journey.

The specials also offered very basic food. In fact the previous weeks’ programme (v Plymouth) announced the introduction of ”a ‘snack-pack’ on the trains, consisting of roll, sandwich, sausage roll, fruit & biscuit...75p...all profits to Chelsea FC”. Those who travelled on specials in the 80’s can rest assured that the 70’s sausage rolls were no better than their appalling 80’s equivalents. There seems no mention of the legendary Wagon Wheels, disgusting marshmallow-based chocolate sweets that seemed compulsory offerings at all matches and on all football trains.

Demand was such that Chelsea ran three specials to Bolton, a total of c1600 supporters according to the Blackpool programme the following week. One abiding memory of that day is the queue at the Euston station off-license as hundreds of supporters stocked up for the near four-hour journey ahead. One particular highlight was the off-license offer on Long Life, which we bought in copious amounts. Long Life was a beer ‘specially brewed for the can’. It was disgusting, but to be fair the mid-late 70’s were very dark days for canned beer drinkers. Critically, that day it was cheap.

Replete with beer stocks, we got on our train. An extraordinary amount of alcohol was taken onto that train by the c550 supporters, and also onto the other two trains. I am unsure why it seemed to be worse (or better, depending on your viewpoint) than on other specials I’d been on up to that point. Maybe they were all like that, though I certainly wasn’t as drunk going to Carlisle, a six hour train journey, three weeks earlier.

Some supporters also took food on board, presumably the ‘snack-pack’ on offer hadn’t sufficiently whetted their taste buds. Somehow, we managed to get our own six-seat carriage and settled down for the journey. The Driver wasn’t drinking as he’d be driving 12 hours hence, Brett was worried about getting out of the escort the worse for wear but the other three of us went for it big time. Up and down the train, groups of supporters were doing the same thing so, unsurprisingly, the journey got increasingly livelier and bellowed chants filled the air. Queues for the loos got worse and people started to use the windows. Not nice.

Aside: In 1976/77 Chelsea were basically skint and manager Eddie McCreadie had no choice but to field a side largely made up of youngsters. A host of reasons contributed to this financial mess, including massive overruns on East Stand construction costs, a declining team and relegation. Chelsea needed gates of 40,000 to break even but were averaging about 10,000 less. There was real concern they could go under, and this led to the ‘Cash for Chelsea’ initiative, one aspect of which was the collection buckets rattled as you left home games and on special trains. It may beggar belief in this day and age, but c1600 Chelsea supporters travelling to Bolton put £350 into buckets to help save the club.

By the time we got close to Bolton the three of us were absolutely rocking, and Brett was looking increasingly worried. As well he might. According to the Plymouth programme, the trains were scheduled to leave Euston at 10.20 and were due into Bolton at 14.10. With three trains, the second and third ones would have to wait while the first emptied its cargo of supporters and they were herded out of the station. All this meant that those on the final special, which we were, had to wait a while to get off the train and onto the streets joining our impatiently bellowing compadres.

The three train loads of supporters were therefore decanted and escorted to the ground. To locals, it must have looked like an invading heathen army. 1,600 supporters, largely beery be-denimed males, mostly aged 16-25, chanting “Eddie McCreadie’s Blue and White Army”, being escorted by a solid police presence in heavy rain to Burnden Park. Again, it is a long time ago, but that escort stands out as one of the most drunken large gatherings I have ever been a part of, and I’ve been in quite a few over the years. Many were the worse for wear, some were very much the worse for wear.

As we got close to the ground, we enjoyed watching Brett desperately trying to get out of the escort. His worst nightmare was having to watch the game from the Chelsea end. In the end the police let him out, but as things turned out, watching from the Chelsea end wasn’t an issue.

Our escort got to the away turnstiles. The game was not all-ticket and, unlike at Forest that season, I don’t think there was the opportunity for a mass climb in over the turnstiles. On entering the terracing, probably only about five minutes before kick-off, an amazing sight awaited us. A mass of Chelsea supporters were on the pitch, running up to the Bolton end. A Bolton end which was full of Chelsea supporters. Presumably a number of independently travelling Chelsea had deliberately gone into that end and chased the Bolton supporters into a side enclosure. As the three trainloads arrived in the ground, hundreds more Chelsea had gone across the pitch in waves to join them.

Three of us promptly went on the pitch, though The Driver stayed firmly where he was, on the relatively sparsely populated away terrace. The pitch was extremely wet and supporters were slipping everywhere, but I don’t remember police or stewards making any effective attempts to stop the invasion, though the local paper stated that police horses were used on the pitch at some point. There were 3-4,000 Chelsea supporters at that game and I suspect maybe half ended up in the ‘wrong’ end. There were 31,600 in Burnden Park that day, Bolton’s biggest crowd of the season at that point.

Two of us got over the barrier and into their end with no problem, joining the seething mass of Chelsea supporters. Steve managed it in the end, but only after a firm boot up the backside from a burly local constable. The pitch invasion was described in the following Monday’s Bolton Evening News as ‘ten minutes of madness’ by a senior police officer. He wasn’t wrong. It is the only pitch invasion I was ever involved in (apart from end-of-season celebrations) and was certainly exhilarating at the time. If the police had been more organised it would have got pretty hairy, though I guess many of them were still outside the ground at that point. As it was, according to the local paper 51 Chelsea supporters were ejected (including a fair number for invading the pitch) and there were a total of eleven arrests inside and outside the ground.

Chelsea lined up :- Phillips; Locke, Wicks, Hay, G. Wilkins; Britton, Stanley, R. Wilkins, Lewington; Finnieston, Swain.

The game itself was a cracker. Chelsea went 2-0 down through Neil Whatmore and Garry Jones and at half-time their prospects looked bleak. The visitors improved after the break after McCreadie told them to be more positive, highlighting the tendency of the home defence to be a little casual at times. Ray Wilkins and Garry Stanley increasingly dominated a midfield that Peter Reid had controlled before the interval. With twenty minutes to go Sam Allardyce (to score a famous own goal at Stamford Bridge eighteen months later) underhit a back pass and Steve Finnieston, back in the side after breaking a cheekbone, pulled one back. Seizing the initiative, McCreadie’s men’s pressure paid off when Ken Swain dispossessed Paul Jones three minutes later and fired home a crucial equaliser in off the post.

The travelling masses celebrated wildly then, and this continued after the game which ended 2-2. The police, however, had a problem. Their escort was set up to lead us from the away end to the station, but many of those on the trains were at the far side of the ground, further away from the station. This, coupled with our sheer numbers and the fact that a number of Bolton supporters were very unhappy at being usurped from their end and had congregated outside, meant it took a long time before our escort started off on the three quarter mile walk up Manchester Road back to the station.

There was a lot more chaos at the station. There were three special-loads to get out of town, together with independent travellers and locals. Some bright spark in authority decided that, rather than let supporters onto any of the special trains as they arrived at the station thereby minimising queuing, they would only let people onto the specific train they had travelled up on. This message was not communicated well, if at all, except to those at the front. The forecourt of Bolton station was total chaos as none of the supporters knew what was happening and started to push, shove and chant “what the f**k is going on?” with some force.

Our train was supposed to depart Bolton station at 17.10. I doubt if we were even on the platform before 18.00. We found The Driver outside the station, bizarrely his diary for that day refers to ‘lots of singing from the 3-4000 Chelsea supporters’ but not the train journey, pitch invasion or wait at the station. The journey home was a lot quieter, as most supporters were sleeping off the upward journey, and I think the police made sure no alcohol was on sale to us at Bolton station. I also think, though am not 100% sure, that alcohol was banned from Chelsea specials after that game.

We didn’t encounter a Bolton fan all day, though a few locals were obviously out for ‘revenge’, as we saw in the paper on Monday that an eight inch bolt was thrown at the Chelsea team coach outside Bolton after the game. Full back Gary Locke was showered with glass and Secretary Christine Matthews got a black eye. A sobering incident that was bad enough, but I guess could have been a lot worse.

All in all, a memorable away trip. Not as integral to Chelsea’s history as the Championship clinching win at the Reebok in 2005 but a key hard-fought point gained on the way to promotion. And a great day out.

Lifelong supporter Neil Smith remembers that day. I remember our promotion push had been somewhat hampered by weather conditions, not too unlike those we have experienced recently, with the Stamford Bridge pitch becoming a bog preventing us from playing the free flowing football we had witnessed earlier in the season taking us to the top of the table.

We had drawn the three previous home games with lowly Orient, Plymouth Argyle and mid table Millwall but remained two points ahead of Bolton but having played two more games. Remember there were only two points for a win then.

I had cajoled two of my mates to accompany me on one of the three Chelsea special trains up to Burnden Park as they were rather nervous about the reputation of our travelling support at the time but relented as this was probably the biggest and most important game of the season so far.

There was a party atmosphere on the way up fuelled, no doubt, by excessive imbibing. In between Chelsea anthems being belted out some lads in the adjoining carriage entertained us with renditions of “the Muppet Show” signature tune and impersonations of Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy and Statler & Waldorf. 

As we were about to alight an attractive young lady who had been enjoying the antics approached me and asked if I could accompany her to the ticket office as she had been promised complimentary seats from a current Chelsea player who she had started dating recently. 

I agreed but on opening the envelope at the office there was only one comp! We parted company and I raced back to the visitors entrance and entered the ground only to see my mates and the Muppet Show et al running down the pitch to the home end!

Indeed as was often the order of the day then, Chelsea fans had infiltrated the home end, and I ended up alongside Bolton fans who had fled their end. 

When a game of football broke out the home side dominated and took a 2-0 lead in the opening 30 minutes. We hardly had a kick with Peter Reid conducting the midfield ably assisted by former Manchester United players Tony Dunne and Willie Morgan. 

Thankfully after the break an errant back pass was latched onto by Steve Finnieston to halve the deficit and five minutes later Kenny Swain dispossessed Sam Allardyce before netting in off the post.

Needless to say it was an eventful walk back to the station. Unlike the previous home draws this one was celebrated like a victory. And unlike the journey up the one home was a lot quieter! 

Footnote;

The Chelsea player was Graham Wilkins. I met the lady at a couple of home games afterwards and although she wasn’t with Wilkins she spurned my advances.

Thanks to Chelsea Heritage colleague Neil Smith for his input to this piece. Many of Neil's Chelsea tales feature in 'Where Were You When We Were Shocking?', available on Amazon. Thank you to the supporter who sent me the train ticket and timetable a few years back. Apologies – I did not keep a record of your name.