Ipswich Town and the Nine Year-Old Oligarch

Revisiting the day that Ipswich Town, the team I supported as a child, won the FA Cup

In 1974, my “bestie” and I, Mick Ellingham, invented a fictitious football club – Millbury Town. As versatile multi-taskers, we did everything for the club. We played for them and the opposition. We commentated as we played. We picked the ball out of both nets and, in the interests of verisimilitude, occasionally fouled each other. Little did we know it then but being Millbury players, fans and coaches led imperceptibly to other things…

IPSWICH TOWN’S PROMOTION TO the Championship last week put me in mind of an episode from my youth. I’ll speak more about my strange, against-the-grain fascination with Ipswich Town in a moment, but for now let me tell you with the story of a club a friend and I invented and how – in a manner of speaking – we became nine year-old oligarchs.

My experience of childhood tells me that children, certainly up until puberty, are pretty socially promiscuous. This might have changed over the years but in the 1970s, in the corner of Johannesburg where I grew up, children were forever falling in and out of friendship groups and herds and scout groups and love. Such carefree social roaming wasn’t, however, without its tricky side. 

Take birthday parties: Did you invite a select group of intimate friends (remember, you were nine, so the phrase “intimate friends” wasn’t quite as voguish as it was later to become), or did you go big and invite the entire class, including the boy who dribbled while tying his shoelaces? And let’s not forget the girl who couldn’t string a coherent sentence together, so pinched those closest to her instead? 

The final decision was Mom’s. She would need to buy the invitations from the local stationers – a blue wash on the paper for girls, a pink one for boys – and she would need to do the catering. How many paper plates were necessary? And paper cups? Could she get away with just one plastic bottle of Oro, although, I have to say, it sometimes felt more like a keg? 

Deep orange-coloured Oros cool drink concentrate is, in many ways, the distillation of my youth. Every weekday at HA Jack Primary in Highlands North my mother filled my Tupperware water-bottle full of water and Oros. 

Sometimes it warmed up because I’d absent-mindedly left my school satchel in the sun. I’d take my first sip, expecting something cool, only for warm, vaguely rancid Oros and water to touch my lips. It was awful, but, like much of what we consumed as children, toxically delicious. 

Mom’s plans didn’t end with paper cups and plates. How many vanilla cupcakes with the sprinkles and hundreds-and-thousands were necessary – 24 or 36. Were sausage rolls worth it, or would they be walked into the carpet or eaten by the dogs? It was amazing how many found their way into little boys’ ears. Ah, the terrible fate of the average suburban sausage roll.

And what of the birthday cake? Chocolate or vanilla? Aeroplane or steamship? If you were a girl, did your mother go for a circle of nine dainty ballerinas to celebrate you turning nine, or would nine coloured candles do? Remember, every candle needed to be blown out because the ones that weren’t represented boyfriends; you wanted boyfriends but not too many of them, that was polyandry. There was a sweet spot in there somewhere but where was it exactly? Did you leave one candle flaming, or two?   

Sooner or later, the social side of primary school life sorted itself out and everyone settled down into cliques or groups. Some misfits and social liabilities were left behind. Some, like me, amiably and a little reluctantly, left the herd to go off wandering on our own.

Some swapped Action Men or Barbie Dolls or their outfits.  You discovered that like continents and hemispheres, there were social rules, although, like obscure countries you knew about in general but weren’t sure about in particular, you weren’t always certain what these social rules were. 

Sometimes you sort-of pieced things together. You weren’t invited back to Selina Beagle’s flat because bouncing on her bed until a spring broke demonstrated you were the son of dangerously laissez faire parents who had self-evident problems with boundary-setting. 

And let’s not forget the case of Robert Purves. Robert was in the same Grade at HA Jack Primary as Mick and I, lost, like us, in a bewildering new world. He wasn’t helped by having knock knees and, because of them, was horribly and mercilessly taunted. 

The teachers’ appeared not to see this, but Mick and I did, although were weren’t courageous enough to do anything about it. Occasionally I was invited back to Robert’s house on Glenhove Avenue. I promptly repaid my debt by demonstrating my perfect golf swing with one of Robert’s dad’s drivers, not realising that there was a light fitting directly above my head. Robert’s mum clearly had no problems with boundaries. Next week she had me back. Mowing the lawn.

Permissive parenting was a slippery slope. If you were the son or daughter of permissive parents next you’d find yourself at the School of Art, Music and Ballet or, this needed to be whispered, Woodmead, a liberal, child-centered school where learners were encouraged to express dangerously wayward political opinions. That, of course – all of Johannesburg knew it – was when Woodmead students weren’t indulging in carefree experimentation with drugs, sex and booze. The permissive Northern Suburbs. Were they crazy, or what?

And it wasn’t only Selina’s birthday party you weren’t invited back to. You weren’t invited back to Wendy Sleigh’s either. Was this because Wendy had grown out of climbing trees or grown out of you? 

Galling thing was, girls either couldn’t or didn’t say. One day it was just different. Suddenly they were poring over a popular boy’s pencil case like they were panning for gold and you were left to sulk throughout the history lesson on Wolraad Woltemade. What was Wolraad thinking anyway? What on earth possessed the man to ride into the sea on a horse?

How interesting could a lead pencil be? The boy’s name was Gary or Wayne, for sure. There was no way you could compete with a Gary or Wayne, it was one of the laws of the universe, pretty much as entrenched as the law of gravity: Law One of the Northern Suburbs of Jo’burg’s Dating Rituals: “Never compete with a Gary or Wayne – you will always lose”.

To say the temperature suddenly dropped a couple of degrees with Wendy is to put it too crudely. Sometimes the temperature was exactly the same but there was some unmistakable quality on the air, some change of tone or colour behind things. Once, so to speak, you were a loaf of freshly baked brown with pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds and all the health loaf trimmings. Now you were toast.

It was awkward because Wendy was still part of lift scheme, so there was the drive to and from school to consider. Did she really need this much new-found commitment to ballet? Or was it commitment to Gary or Wayne? Whichever it was, Wendy wasn’t saying. Neither was her mother. No more snuggling up on the back seat as you drove home. Ah, so this was what was meant by the “cold shoulder”?

It was roundabout the time that Wendy Sleigh decided – I was always secretly amused that Wendy’s dad was called “Bob” – I was not the man for her, that Mick Ellingham and I invented an entirely fictitious football club. 

For reasons which elude me now (Mick’s influence here, I think) we called them Millbury Town, a name which had a certain solid charm. This, we both felt, would be a reliable club. No promotion one year, relegation the next for these boys. No, Sir. These boys were as solid as a stencil. They would always be there or thereabouts.

As well as being one half of Millbury Town, Mick was also a West Ham supporter, otherwise known as the Hammers, while I was just beginning – I think – my early infatuation with Ipswich Town. West Ham’s colours were white, pale blue and maroon, while Ipswich’s were blue and white with an occasional splash of risqué yellow. We didn’t want to be too craven in our mimicry of the clubs we supported, so we decided that our new club’s colour scheme would be green and yellow, the colours of Norwich City.

There we no hard and fast rules about home and away Millbury matches. Some were played in Mick’s garden, at 43 African Street in Oaklands, while some were played on the back lawn at 55 Lyndhurst road in Lyndhurst where I lived with my parents, two dogs and my younger sister Laura. 

If Mick was sleeping over at my place we would wake early on a Sunday morning, dress quietly in our shorts and takkies and tip-toe out of the house, letting the dogs out as we went. There was often a lick of dew on the early-morning grass.

We’d make goals on either side of the garden with whatever was to hand – bricks or track-suit tops or offshoots or discards of wood from the outhouse – and blow an imaginary whistle to get the ball rolling.

Back in those days the idea of a slick, aero-dynamic football was just a distant glint in a designer’s eye. Balls were big and heavy, made of panels of hand-stitched leather little boys were meant to wash and dubbin but – because they were little boys – never did. Mick had a big black-and-white panelled ball that was so quickly saturated with dew that it became as heavy as a cannonball. Bounce of the ball was an entirely relative concept. Sometimes we were lucky if it rolled.

We made things up as we went along, mostly being on the same side but occasionally deputising for the opposition for dramatic purposes. Usually Millbury won but sometimes, for a sense of cosmic (if not, sporting) proportion, they lost. 

Afterwards we’d retire to pitch side to revel in make-believe defeat. This involved crouching down and putting our head into our hands as we complained about the referee and the saturated ball. The effect was sometimes undermined by our dogs – who took the opportunity to muzzle their wet noses into our faces and wag their tails. 

Ah, so this is what it means to receive a good licking, we thought.

Losing had its upside: We learned that one of the advantages of sometimes being the opposition is that you could always blame them for your loss without having to face the consequences of losing. Being on both sides of the pitch all the time was pretty damn handy. Never had losing felt so pleasurable.

Sometimes we felt that the match we were playing in, commentating on, and having fun with was too tight to mention, so we settled for a compromise draw. All the teams were played against were made-up, too, which basically meant just shuffling the appellations United or Town or Rovers or Argyll around and sticking them onto whatever vaguely English-sounding name we could dream up then and there: Macclesfield Rovers, Doncaster Argyll, Roehampton Warriors. Sometimes we had fun: Coventry Gentry, Shropshire Lads, Limehouse Cobblers. We made sure to beat Richmond Aristocrats 7-1.

Afterwards we recorded it painstakingly in a lined black A4 notebook with a blue spine we bought from OK Bazaars in the Balfour Park Shopping Centre with our pooled pocket money. Mick and I would take turns to faithfully record Millbury’s starting X1 and reserves, score, scorers and attendance. 

The latter category does strike me as a bit strange because at no time I can remember did Millbury have more than two in home ground attendance if you didn’t count our two dogs. I suppose making up thousands of imaginary spectators is one of the advantages of being your own oligarch. You can do pretty much anything you like, whether that’s on the pitch, the boardroom or the transfer market. We didn’t know how lucky we were.  

For a year or two we were dead keen on Millbury Town. They might even have gained promotion or galloped to a healthy Cup run. All of this was helped by our friend, Sean Pilkington, who we commissioned to draw us a team photograph, which we glued into our book with Pritt.

We couldn’t very well take a team photo, now could we? There weren’t enough of us. So Sean stepped in. He drew the Millbury Town squad and we paid for his toasted ham and cheese sandwich at the tuckshop. He did a fine job. We were pleased as punch.

After a season or two, Millbury’s charms began to fade. It was all too easy. You didn’t really celebrate your wins and you didn’t really suffer from your defeats with an imaginary side, now do you? It becomes the opposite of actually supporting a team. 

As, say, a West Ham supporter, you live in the knowledge that there’s absolutely nothing you can do to influence the outcome of the game. There might be times when you feel you can but you know this is bollocks and invariably you go back to believing that you must stoically accept the good with the bad, even an away fourth-round FA Cup draw to Carlisle.

Having your very own team isn’t like the enforced powerlessness of fandom at all. You are the most powerful man in the club (or, in the case of Millbury Town, you and Mick are). This, paradoxically, leads to terrible boredom. You can score a hat-trick if you like; you can score an own goal to level things out. But you are only ever playing against yourself. Even defeats can seem self-defeating.

Choosing an English club to support involved a great deal of calculation. Like the best girls, the best clubs were often taken. Liverpool were astonishingly popular with the boys of my generation. So, too, were the mystifyingly lightweight Arsenal and the self-deluding Spurs, a side who believed they could win things but seldom ever did. 

Manchester United were popular, too, but depending on whether they were concentrating or not, they had a tendency to slip into the second division. That left precious few clubs. Were Leeds United worth getting behind? Once upon a time Leeds had been pretty handy. But were they handy now?

Billy Bremner, Peter Lorimer and Norman Hunter had long gone and the club’s cachet had faded, like the pale yellow of their apologetic Umbro kit. There was something vaguely shameful about supporting Leeds United after their swaggering glory years of the early 1970s. It was sort of like admitting you had an older brother who painted watercolours or had a thing for macramé. Or perhaps it was like admitting that you yourself listened to Supertramp or the Electric Light Orchestra. Or Toto.

With so many clubs already taken, there were precious few free ones left. One of those clubs was Ipswich Town, who were intriguing because they always did better than you thought they would. And Ipswich had a South African connection, a midfielder called Colin Viljoen. For me, Viljoen acted as a kind of bridge. He made it easier to get an imaginary handle on a club that played their football so far away. 

Shoot magazine also helped. Mick would get his magazines delivered by a delivery man on a 50cc motor bike employed by Gardens Pharmacy, while I’d buy mine from the bookshop in Glenhazel. Viljoen’s photograph was in Shoot every so often. He played twice for England under Don Revie (formerly of Leeds United, as it happens) in 1975. 

There was a feature in the magazine in which that week’s chosen player answered supposedly revealing but really rather innocuous questions about their private life and likes and dislikes. 

To a man, I remember, footballers disliked bad or inconsiderate driving. Their favourite foods were steak and chips, lasagne and scampi. They had favourite television shows, like “Coronation Street” or “Wogan”, featuring talk show host, Terry, well, Wogan. Television hadn’t even come to South Africa at the time, it was only to arrive later. That’s why we had to make up imaginary football clubs like Millbury Town and pretend to be downcast when we occasionally lost, something our dogs showed not even the slightest interest in respecting.

Viljoen was loyal to Ipswich, or the “Tractor Boys” they were called. He was there for 12 seasons all told, 1966 to 1978. His glory years were in the middle, when Ipswich were often in contention for honours of one form or another, with players like Mick Mills, Kevin Beattie, Brian Talbot and John Wark in their midst.

In the second half of my first year in high school, I realised that it was probably best to keep my support of Ipswich to myself, because they weren’t doing very well, and I didn’t want to draw any more attention to myself than was strictly necessary. In November they were knocked out of what was then the League Cup by Manchester City and although they beat Barcelona in the third round of the UEFA Cup at home, they were beaten 3-0 (two goals to Johan Cruyff) in Barcelona before bungling the penalty shootout. 

Sadly, my man Viljoen was unsuccessful from the spot, Barcelona going on to lose their semi-final against the competition’s eventual winners, PSV Eindhoven.

Thankfully that year’s Christmas holidays came along to help me keep my guilty secret both guilty and secret but the beginning of 1978 brought a flush of hope. It was a new year. I was now in Standard Seven at Highlands North Boys’ High in Johannesburg and the FA Cup was just beginning. Was it time to come out of the Ipswich closet?

Dodgy league form, combined with their UEFA and league Cup setbacks, meant that Ipswich’s manager, Bobby Robson, was only too well aware of the significance of the FA Cup. They entered the competition in the third-round, with an away tie to Cardiff City. Robson dubbed the Cardiff match “the most important of the season”, so expectation was running high. Robson, a man who once described Ipswich as a “dishy side”, needn’t have worried. Ipswich beat Cardiff 3-0 and were through to the next round.

Later that same month they beat Hartlepool United 4-1 at Portman Road. I wouldn’t have been able to find Hartlepool on a map of England but I knew that Ipswich were now in the fifth round. I followed their exploits in the fine print of the classified sports results in The Star, our local evening newspaper, and although I didn’t start to brag, I slyly let it be known that if any of my classmates were supporters of a more glamorous club they shouldn’t count their chickens just yet.

In February, a hiccup. In the middle of the month Ipswich drew away to Bristol Rovers 2-all, scoring their second goal to force a replay only four minutes from the end. It was now or never. At least one tiny pocket of Highlands North Extension fretted. Back at home ten days later they won the replay 3-0, with goals from Mills, Clive Woods and Paul Mariner.

This meant the sixth round, all four matches of which were played on the 11^th of March. Ipswich’s tie against Millwall was fraught from the very beginning. Millwall fans stoned the Ipswich coach as it arrived at the ground and, bizarrely, the pre-match entertainment featured a mock Wild West shoot-out. Old photos of the tie show a coffin on the side of the ground, which suggest Millwall were confident Ipswich were the side who would be dead and buried. Unfortunately for Millwall supporters, Ipswich were in deadly form, winning 6-1. Which club was featured in the obituaries now?

In the first semi-final Arsenal played against non-league Leyton Orient, the second-oldest football club in London, being founded in 1881 and so-named because one of their early players worked for the nearby Orient Steam Navigation Company. In 1977/78 Orient had a charmed FA Cup run, beating Norwich, Blackburn Rovers, Middlesborough and Chelsea in a replay. Their remarkable run ended against Arsenal in the semi-final, however. Ace goal-poacher – the phrase was in currency then, much like jacket lapels the size of Lappland and bright loud ties in purple and electric pink – Malcolm Macdonald scored twice for Arsenal, with Graham Rix adding a third. 

Ipswich, meanwhile, playing at Highbury, dispatched West Bromwich Albion 3-1 themselves, with goals to Talbot, Mills and Wark. Robson was a relieved man and Millbury Town had been left well and truly behind by at least one of the two Town oligarchs. I set about knowing exactly who supported Arsenal at my high school, just in case I needed to be snide. All was set for the final. 

The final was played at Wembley Stadium in front of 100 000 spectators on a Saturday in early May, Arsenal wearing yellow and blue, Ipswich wearing white and blue. Looking back on it, Arsenal looked like a pretty cheeky proposition. They had Pat Jennings in goals, a player who was well known in the corridors of my high school and had a team teenage impersonators behind him rather than in front of him. Liam Brady, the Irish wizard, busied himself in the Arsenal midfield, while Frank Stapleton added his talents to Macdonald’s upfront. Would Ipswich, with their assorted “Micks”, “Clives” and “Rogers”, be enough to keep them at bay? 

I can’t have seen the final live, but I do seem to remember Mick and I catching a bus up Louis Botha Avenue into Hillbrow to catch the delayed event a week or two later. We knew the score by then, of course, and knowing it did absolutely nothing to lessen our excitement. We loved being in Hillbrow and walking the length of Pretoria Street towards the Chelsea Hotel and round the corner to the Mini Cine. Incense wafted out of the Flea Market and we made sure to stop in at Hillbrow Records, a shop populated by gruff eccentrics and immensely knowledgeable music listeners who had simply incredible amounts of facial hair and seemed to have been born into their jeans. They flicked through the stacked records with a practised legerdemain we would never possess.

Soon we settled down in the theatre’s plush seats. The projector flickered to life and the commentator chirruped through his spiel. We loved it all: the sunlight flooding the pitch, the packed stands, Robson in his attractive cream suit, looking like he was about to jet off to a holiday in Rio.

Arsenal might have been heavily laden with big names but in the final itself it was all Ipswich. Looking like a Bay City Roller with his mop of dark hair, Paul Mariner hit the crossbar with Jennings beaten with a left-footed shot early on. Wark, looking vaguely Village People-ish with that dandy moustache – no, he wasn’t the “construction worker” he was “the midfielder” – hit the upright in both the first and the second half. 

Eventually, Ipswich scored. David Geddis crossed on the Ipswich right; Arsenal’s Willie Young could only prod his clearance invitingly into Roger Osborne’s path and Osborne’s shot sauntered between Jennings’ left-hand and the left-hand upright. Ipswich 1-nil, a lead they protected until the final whistle. That the images were a week or two old meant nothing to me. I was thrilled.

In the days to come I kept quiet about our victory at school. Notice, intelligent listener, how I sneakily managed to insert the possessive pronoun into the previous sentence? There was no reason to shoot my mouth off now that we had won the FA Cup. If asked who I supported, however, I would come clean. “Ipswich Town,” I’d say nonchalantly, “have you heard of them?”