A Tale of Two Cities

Here are two contrasting team photos from the 1973/74 season. In the first we see the West Ham United squad.^[1]Courtesy of The West Ham Years, an absolute must read for any West Ham fan, for more information contact: Tim Crane (timcranetwhy(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)gmail.com) Reflecting the ethnic diversity of London even in those days, the photo includes at least eight Black or mixed heritage players (four of whom played in the first team at some point in their West Ham career).

Meanwhile in Nottingham, the team photo for the. same year showed future England international, Viv Anderson, as the lone Black player among the forty faces who lined up for the pre-season team photo. Nottingham had hosted a small but vibrant Caribbean community for many years but at the time of the 1971 census it was still a predominantly white city with just five per cent of the population coming from an ethnic minority.

There is no doubt which of these two photos is the more typical of the period.  Being a Black professional footballer in the 1970s could be a lonely experience, if there was racist abuse (and there was) a player had to deal with it alone.

Viv Anderson commented to Bill Hern, co-author of Football’s Black Pioneers, that:

I put up with the abuse because I had no choice.  I wanted to be a footballer more than anything in the world and if I had let racism affect my play I would have been dropped. Walking off was never an option.