Tag Archives: Crystal Palace

Zola’s bicycle women

Posted on September 21, 2017 | Leave a comment

This is a version of an article I wrote for the superb Mondial magazine, produced by Rapha. 

When Émile Zola lived in London between July 1898 and June 1899, he spent a lot of time on his bike photographing women on their bikes. The French author was in Norwood, a town dominated by the vast glass Crystal Palace exhibition hall, and most days he cycled around his unfamiliar environment. Zola attached a camera to his handlebars so he could take “photos that were marvellously sharp and clear”. He intended to “make an album of exile”, a record of his strange secluded months in south London. This was eventually published in 1997 by The Norwood Society as Emile Zola: photographer in Norwood, South London 1898-1899.

zola

Zola arrived in London on July 19 1898, carrying a nightshirt folded inside a newspaper and a piece of bread. He had left Paris in haste following his role in one of the great scandals of French politics. Alfred Dreyfus, a French soldier, had been accused of passing secrets to the Germans; Zola believed Dreyfus was convicted only because he was Jewish. He defended Dreyfus in a newspaper editorial – J’Accuse – and was charged with libel. Rather than spend a year in jail, he fled to London.

Michael Rosen’s The Disappearance of Émile Zola is a lively summary of Zola’s lonely London life, where he hid in an anonymous suburb, unable to speak English or enjoy the terrible English food. One of his few treasures was his bicycle – cycling round Paris had been a passion –and also his camera. He took more than a hundred photographs of Norwood, and Rosen describes these as “pictures of a new kind of London, the modern suburban fringe to the old city.”

The bicycle was part of this modernity, providing users with freedom and ease of use. Bikes crop up repeatedly in Zola’s photographs – on dusty roads, busy high streets, outside the Crystal Palace and in surrounding country lanes. He was particularly interested in one type of cyclist: women. Of the 100 plus images compiled by the Norwood Society, 15 feature women cyclists. They wear long skirts and hats, some wheel their bikes uphill or swarm past the camera in groups. The only two male cyclists Zola photographs have female companions. “I meet women who cycle in all weathers in order to go shopping,” Zola marvelled. His photographs prove these words to be true.

So why the obsession? Did Zola have a fetish? Was he surprised to see so many women cycling in London compared with France? Or was he simply recording what was naturally occurring around him? The answer is probably a bit of all three. Women certainly were cycling in large numbers – it was a good way to get around while husbands were at work – so genuinely formed part of the streetscape. All the same Carlton Reid, author of Roads Were Not Built For Cars, thinks Zola “was probably going to some lengths to make sure he got those shots. The boom years were 1896–7 so it would have been waning in 1899. He was the “Copenhagenize/Cycle Chic” of his day – spotting pretty women on bikes.”

Rosen is unequivocal. “He was certainly interested in women cyclists!” he says. “Zola did see women on bikes in Paris, but noted that they wore culottes but the women in London wore skirts. He thought the English women looked more elegant. His letters read as a man looking at women. There is an element of voyeurism about it. Of course there is a “modernity” aspect to this too – in Zola’s own lifetime, this was new. As a child he would not have seen women anywhere riding bikes. In 1898/99 there were many.”

Zola returned to Paris in 1899 after Dreyfus was pardoned by a new French government but this was not the only time the Dreyfus Affair touched upon cycling. Another Dreyfus supporter was Pierre Giffard, the editor of France’s leading sports paper, Le Vélo. His pro-Dreyfus stance led to arguments with advertisers, who withdrew support and formed their own newspaper, L’Auto. In 1903, with circulation low, L’Auto writer Géo Lefèvre suggested the magazine should invent a profile-rising six-day cycling race around France. Henri Desgrange, the editor, was intrigued. “As I understand it, petit Géo, you are suggesting a Tour de France.” And so it came to pass.

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Posted in Books, Cycling, Fashion, History, Journalism, Literature, London, Photography, Sex, Transport, Uncategorized

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Sportscapes of London

Posted on September 19, 2014 | 2 comments
oasis

The Oasis swimming pool in Covent Garden in 1946

I’ve spent the past week immersed in Played In London, a book that is about as ambitious as any you are likely to see published about London this year. Written by Simon Inglis (author of the seminal book on British football grounds) for English Heritage, it attempts to tell the story of every sport that has ever been played in any venue in the capital – that’s everything from lost Tudor skittle alleys to skateboard parks, including all the major football and cricket grounds as well as lost lidos and billiards halls, archery grounds and greyhound tracks, relocated diving boards and blue plaques. There’s even space to mention rugby netball, a sport created in 1907 by soldiers on Clapham Common and which is still played there every Tuesday and nowhere else.

It’s a breathtaking accomplishment, full of terrific nuggets of information – did you know there were Eton Fives courts under the Westway, or that the BBC’s Maida Vale studio was built in an old rollerskating rink? – but also attempting to tell the story of how a city and its people indulge in play, how that play is shaped by the culture and topography of the city, and how it develops over time, often wittingly reinventing itself as a ‘heritage’ sport rather than die out.

This is social history as much as anything, but goes much deeper than any other book I’ve seen on the subject, like the marvellous Pleasures Of London. One fascinating section looks at the history of company sports grounds. There were once dozens of these in south-east and south-west London – Catford had several – where civil servants or bankers could take part in regular games of rugby or football, or enjoy the annual sports day. Knowing more about these events, Inglis says, would let us learn so much about the culture of work, belonging and inter-office bonding in 19th and 20th century London.

hernehill

Bushel basket race for Borough Market sports day at Herne Hill, 1931

Given the scale of the project, the navigation of the book can be a little complex, but the layout makes sense over time. Inglis begins with an overview of the history of sport in London and of London parks and open spaces, before examining several areas in greater detail to see what they tell us about sport and London, and how certain spaces have been used repeatedly over time. He uses the phrase sportscapes and essentially is intending to show that sport, play and leisure require greater understanding of history than simply observing the architecture and listing club records (although the architectural chapters on Pavilions and Grandstands are genuine delights). It requires a knowledge of how space was utilised and developed, and what accidents of personality, business, culture and geography in the wider world outside sport allowed some sports and grounds to thrive while others died. It also shows how some spaces are defined by sport, but also how sports, clubs and associations are defined by the space they occupy.

The river is an obvious candidate for this treatment (and I never knew there were so many boathouses), but he also looks at length at such intriguing places as Wembley Park, Crystal Palace Park, Lea Valley, Dulwich and the Westway – all of which have long, complex relationships with myriad sports – to uncover stories that may otherwise only be known to local historians, or single-sport specialists. This approach repeats itself throughout the book, allowing ‘found spaces’ such as the South Bank skatepark to be included alongside manicured golf greens and expensive new all-seater stadia.

netball

Office workers play netball in Lincoln’s Inn Field, 1950s.

Oh, and if this isn’t enough the whole thing is illustrated lavishly throughout – indeed, they may have tried to cram in one or two photographs too many – with some spectacular mapping also included.

It makes a fine accompaniment to another book I read recently, on a more modest scale but still of some importance to London’s sporting heritage. Fighting Men Of London by Alex Daley is essentially an oral history – although the author occasionally makes his presence felt – of London’s boxing history between the 1930s and 1960s, told through seven former fighters. It puts some flesh on the bones of Inglis’s research: the boxers describe the lost boxing rings of London such as the shambolic Mile End Arena or the refined Stadium Club in Holborn, where inter-war gentlemen would dine ringside, ignoring the blood that splashed into their supper. They also talk about the old Central London gyms like Bill Klein’s in a basement in Fitzroy Street or Jack Solomon’s near the Windmill Theatre with an eye for detail that makes you think of Gerald Kersh.

The appetite for boxing in this age was vast, and many of the fighters interviewed built up large followings as they fought as frequently as once a month. None of them really made it into the big money though, and it’s notable that upon retiring several became involved in crime – The Krays, former boxers themselves, have walk-on roles in several of the stories. As a history of East End culture, it’s illuminating.

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Posted in Architecture, Books, Cockney, Crime, Cycling, Football, History, Place, Sport

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We Stand Around by I, Ludicrous: the best football song ever?

Posted on March 23, 2012 | 2 comments

I, Ludicrous were a two-piece consisting of John Prockter and David Rippingale that came together in South London through a shared love of Crystal Palace and The Fall. Formed in 1985, their greatest moment came on their 1992 album Idiots Savants in the form of a five-minute sinister, synth-led epic about being a football supporter called “We Stand Around”. The song was named Single Of The Week in NME by guest reviewers New Order despite only being available in Germany.

The lyrics are a masterful celebration of the essential pointlessness of terrace culture and football fandom, as this extended excerpt demonstrates:

We stand around in wind and rain, locked in voluntary,
All ages, all male, all swearing, all cold.
We sing and sway we punch the air,
We chant out names, we seek a wave,
In pens we huddle in corners too,
We shout out names we shout abuse.

We travel every Saturday,
We go wherever we play and pay,
spending money we cant afford,
We are the fans we go everywhere.

In groups of two we punch the air,
We sing and sway and dance and swear
We taunt the home fans humorously
The policemen eye us with ill disguised contempt.

We buy the fanzine its a con
Written by some Oxford don
who thinks he knows what’s going on.
But we know everything.
We know how much the players earn
where they live what they drink,
What happened on the Swedish tour
and why the right back was transferred.

We make a scene in every town
Our accents sting our voices loud
Old ladies in shop doors cower
We are the fans we have power?
Some have scars of well aimed boots
Some wear scarves some wear boots
The police escort eyes with ill disguised contempt

The video directed by Prockter that accompanied this minor classic has recently been put on You Tube and, like the song, is a beautiful evocation of football supporting in the late 1980s and early 1990s (the era, incidentally, when I began to attend matches). The opening sequence of floodlights and barbed wire – a typical sight at football grounds of the time – belong firmly to a different era, and here also are the crumbling stadia, the fanzines, the cheap programmes, the train journeys and the aggro. It’s a fine song and a brilliant video: enjoy.

For more on I, Ludicrous and football see this by Educated Left Foot.

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Posted in Film, Football, London, Music, Nostalgia

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Secret London: Toulouse-Lautrec in Catford

Posted on June 7, 2011 | 3 comments

Say what you like about South London, but it clearly has something about it. Why else would a trinity of the world’s greatest 19th-century artists have come here?

You probably know about Vincent Van Gogh’s time in Brixton because of the play from a few years ago. Van Gogh lodged in Hackford Road, Brixton in 1873 and regularly walked from there to Covent Garden where he worked as an art dealer.

This is the only surviving picture he sketched during this period It’s of the Georgian houses on Hackford Road itself.

Van Gogh also lived in Isleworth in 1876, at 160 Twickenham Road, when he later returned to London as a teacher. Hackford Road now has an English Heritage blue plaque for Van Gogh, and there used to be a Van Gogh Cafe on Brixton Road, but it’s closed down.

Camille Pissarro painted around a dozen pictures of Sydenham and Dulwich during his time in South London in 1870. I particularly like this one, of Lordship Lane Station.

As Michael Glover writes in the Independent: ‘The painting shows us a new kind of modernity. Here is London being mightily transformed by the growth of housing and the ever onward thrust of the railways in the second half of the 19th century.’ Pissarro lived at No 77 Westow Hill and then on Palace Road, and married at Croydon Registry Office. He returned to London a number of times. Lordship Lane station was demolished in 1954. A non-English Heritage blue plaque adorns the site of his house on Westow Hill and a restaurant called Pissarro is in Chiswick, but I’m pretty sure that’s named after his son Lucien.

Best of all, though, is the fact that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec did time in Catford in 1896. The diminutive brothel-loving soak was a huge fan of cycling and in 1896 was asked by a company called Simpson to work on a poster for their new bike, which used a new type of chain. This, according to Wiki, ‘was composed of linked triangles forming two levels. The inner level was driven by the chainring and the outer drove the rear cog. Instead of teeth, the chainring and cog had grooves into which the rollers of the chain engaged.’

I’m not sure what that means, and probably neither did Lautrec, so he came to the newly built Catford Velodrome to watch the bike in action during special races, set up by Simpson to advertise their product. Lautrec produced a couple of images during his visit. The poster was one of the last he designed before his death in 1901.

The velodrome was knocked down in the 1990s and there is no trace of it left (it’s location was approximately around Sportsbank Road), but there is at least a brasserie in Kennington called Toulouse-Lautrec.

But perhaps Toulouse-Lautrec had more influence on Catford than we may have thought?

Consider this, a famous poster advertising one of Lautrec’s favourite clubs by one of his contemporaries and very much in Lautrec’s style.

And this.

If you do not wish to go all the way to Catford to pay homage, an exhibition of Lautrec’s work goes on display later in June at the Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House, where you can also see Pissarro’s lovely picture of Lordship Lane Station.

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Posted in Architecture, Art, Celebrity, Exhibitions, History, London, Secret London

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South London and the birth of the educated footballer

Posted on November 8, 2010 | 8 comments

This is an edited version of a piece I wrote for 4-4-2 magazine in September 2009

Whitgift School in Croydon is not the sort of place you’d expect to find the future of English football. This breeding ground for bright young talent is as far from the stereotypical back streets of football’s urban north as you can get. Situated in 45 acres of parkland and boasting colonies of albino wallabies, flamingos and red squirrels, Whitgift School is one of the oldest and wealthiest private boys schools in the country. For centuries, it has produced outstanding academics and sportsmen. The latter have usually been rugby players such as England fly-half Danny Cipriani or cricketers (the county-standard pitch is used by Surrey CC), as befits the tradition of the English independent school, which  leaves football to the hoi polloi of the comprehensive sector.

So how have four professional footballers emerged from Whitgift’s ranks in the past few years? Why does the school currently count 13 children from different footballing academies – including Chelsea and Tottenham – among its 1,200 pupils? And how did the school attract three former footballers to work on its coaching staff?

To answer those questions, I entered the headmaster’s study to meet Dr Christopher Barnett, the man who brought soccer to Whitgift. As we talk, exotic peacocks can be seen through the study window, heads bobbing up and down as they wander around on impeccable lawns. It is an extraordinary environment. In these conditions, Dr Barnett’s belief he can ‘change the mould and develop a new breed of middle-class footballer’ seems entirely plausible.

The Australian connection

Dr Barnett’s conversion from rugby to football came in Australia. ‘In 1996 I went out to a school in Parramatta,’ he says. ‘I was walking round the grounds and it was rugby as far as you could see – rugby match after rugby match after rugby match. But then I turned the corner and there was soccer being played. So I thought, if they can do it…’

Convinced that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing properly, Dr Barnett looked for a coach and found Colin Pates, the Chelsea and Arsenal centre-back, who had retired with a knee injury. A posh school in the suburbs is not where you’d expect to find a hard-bitten former pro, and Pates admits: ‘Whitgift is quite alien to some of us, because we had state school educations. It was intimidating, and not just for the boys.’ But he jumped at the opportunity.

‘The headmaster asked me to take a sixth-form team on Wednesday afternoons,’ he says. ‘I asked if there were any goalposts, pitches, teams or even footballs, and we didn’t have anything. So we had to start from scratch, pretty much teach them the rules. They were rugby boys playing football, so these were quite aggressive games. But after three years we introduced fixtures and we’ve never looked back.’

Introducing football to a rugby school for the first time in 350 years was no easy task and Pates admits that ‘there was always a concept that we’d bring in swearing and fighting, but we’ve had none of that. History told me it was going to be very difficult to change people’s attitudes, but if you know you’ve got the support from the top man, the head, you can slowly change the perception of football.’ And the Headmaster – motivated by ‘old-fashioned esprit de corps’ as well as the desire to have the newly fashionable sport of football on the syllabus – gave it his full support.

As football cascaded through the school, the coaching team expanded to include John Humphrey, a right-back for Charlton and Crystal Palace, and Steve Kember, the former Chelsea and Palace midfielder. ‘It showed that we were engaging with how we would be a football school, but a different kind of football school,’ says Dr Barnett. ‘What I wanted to do was provide discipline and a serious education. We wanted to tell footballers who were coming to Whitgift: “Yes, but…” and the “but” is that you are going to work.’

 

The coming of Moses

Whitgift began to offer scholarships and bursaries to help parents of talented young players pay the £13,266 annual fee. It also established an informal relationship with Crystal Palace, with some of the club’s outstanding talent getting recommended for places at the school. David Muir, Education and Welfare Officer at Crystal Palace, explains ‘Whitgift is flexible and open-minded,’ he says. ‘Private schools are generally better than state schools at supporting the academies, offering excellent sports training and balancing that with academic work.’

By 2007, two Whitgift pupils (Victor Moses and Lee Hills) were in the Palace first team. But education was still paramount. ‘A lot of these boys are outstanding academically even if some of them can come here with what appears to be a relatively low IQ,’ says Dr Barnett. ‘But if you work with them and give them belief and encouragement, they can soar.’

Moses, now playing in the Premier League with Wigan, arrived at the school as an 11-year-old orphaned asylum seeker from Nigeria predicted to get no GCSEs at A-C and ended it as an England youth international with GCSE results above the national average. Dr Barnett is adamant that a good education and football skills are mutually beneficial. ‘We did a correlation study on pupils’ academic expectation on entry and then factored in how much they participate outside the classroom,’ he says. ‘And those boys that were more heavily involved in sport did far better academically – quite the reverse of what you might expect. Received wisdom is that if you do too much sport, you’ll damage their education, but that wasn’t the case.’

As for what education can do for your football, he cites the words of an FA Cup-winning manager, who watched Whitgift win the Schools Cup in 2005, when they beat Healing School 5-0 (Moses scored all five). ‘Lawrie McMenemy said to me that if he’s got a choice between a footballer without a brain and a footballer with a brain, he’ll always go for the one with a brain, because he knows he’ll follow instructions and understand tactics and you’ll get far more from him.’

Muir says that  ‘previously, you were either seen as a sportsman or an academic, but our best players have always had the potential to be high-achievers academically as well.’ This backs up Dr Barnett’s claim that ‘the managers of the academies want their boys at Whitgift. Because as well as getting good football training and terrific facilities, they’re going to get discipline and they’re going to get structure and they’re going to get their qualifications.’

It is this that will provide the new type of footballer desired by Dr Barnett. ‘You know that if they were in the state sector they would get lost. Football would be all they had and they’d probably end up with nothing, no career and no qualifications; here, they can end up with 10 GCSEs and still make it as a footballer. And that is one of the key differences in how they will conduct themselves on the pitch  and what image they provide for football. If you get enough kids doing this, you could change things.’

The movement is gathering place. Other private schools – including local rival Trinity and Ardingly College in Sussex – have started to follow Whitgift’s lead.

Finding the kids

So how does Whitgift recruit its talent? Muir says that ‘Palace put forward one or two players every year. We have to find kids who are both outstanding footballers and with a potential to do well academically because they have to pass the entrance exam. The parents pay the fees, though they can be helped by scholarships or wealth-related bursary schemes.’

Other relationships are less formal, and sometimes clubs foot the fees. And sometimes, the players are already at Whitgift before the clubs spot them such as Stefan Amokwandoh, a 13-year-old at Charlton.

A close relationship between school and academy is vital. The school’s fixtures are played midweek to avoid clashing with academy games, while academies benefit from the high standard of coaching the players get from the school.

Whitgift insists that all pupils play in school fixtures, compete in all sports and do their homework. ‘I have to work harder than the other boys at Chelsea,’ says Joel Witele, a 14-year-old who also excels at rugby. ‘When I get homework I have to concentrate and make sure I do it.’

For those football academies accused in a recent book (‘Every Boy’s Dream’ by Chris Green) of offering too many boys nothing but disappointment and educational underachievement, you can see why Whitgift is so attractive.

‘Look Sir, no litter!’

The notion of privately educated footballers no longer seems strange to Pates and Humphrey, even if it must to some of the school teams they come up against (‘We played a local state school,’ said Pates, ‘and one kid said: “Look Sir, no litter!’). Humphrey says: ‘We have quite a few guys at Charlton [where he is an academy coach] who go to private schools. If you have two boys of the same ability, you pick the brighter one because they’ll learn quicker, so we’re moving away from state schools monopolising football. There’s a lot of money out there, and parents want to give their kids the best education they can.’

Pates agrees: ‘A lot of footballers are sending their kids to independent schools. Working-class parents are earning money and putting their kids through private school. We’ve had [Brentford manager] Andy Scott’s boy here, Ian Wright’s boy, Steve Coppell’s – there are lots of them and its spreading into football.’

Muir concurs: ‘It’s great to see the kids get an opportunity I never had. It’s not what people might perceive of from an independent school, it’s not a bunch of boys with plums in their mouths, it’s just normal kids whose parents want them to do really well and provide them the best opportunity to do so.’

Another motivation for Pates and Humphrey is the experiences they had as players. ‘A lot of players from our generation had nothing to fall back on when they came out our game,’ says Pates. ‘There was also nothing in place when we were young – if you didn’t make it, that was that. So we ensure that our players have the opportunity to be everything they want to be, even when they leave. Rhys Coleman was released by Charlton, went to Glenn Hoddle’s academy in Spain and didn’t quite make it, so we got him a trial with Palace. It’s like aftercare. We try and help.’ Another former pupil managed to put himself through university with the money he earned from semi-professional football.

It’s all part of a package that Pates and Dr Barnett believe to be unprecedented. ‘You have to be an exceptional footballer to make it these days,’ says Pates. ‘So we want to give them the best opportunity to be a footballer, but also give them a magnificent education so if they don’t sign scholarship forms they have something to fall back on. It works for us, it works for the academies and it works for the families.’

The question now is will it work for football.

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Posted in Football, London

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