40 years at Ewood Park 1964-2004
Life-long Blackburn Rovers supporter Bob Snape recalls the experiences of a football fan in years gone by...
In terms of the football itself, there is nothing I can add to the several existing histories of Blackburn Rovers. The club’s fortunes have changed fantastically over the last forty years and everyone knows what happened after Jack Walker began to fund the club. However, it’s not only the football that has changed. The whole social setting of football has changed too. Each time I see black and white television snippets of football from the nineteen-sixties they evoke a different era, one that perhaps only came to an end with Rupert Murdoch and the Premier League. Half-remembered impressions of grounds, crowds and away trips now recall something I didn’t fully understand at the time, which was that the decline of the Lancashire town clubs was coinciding with the passing of the cotton era and the end of a way of watching football that had changed little since my grandfather was a boy.
My first visit to Ewood Park was the home match against Manchester United in February 1964. There was a long queue at the turnstile, and it seemed at first we would never get in to the ground. For the first few years I sat on the low benches around the perimeter wall where although the overall view wasn’t good, you were close to the footwork of the wingers. At half time it was possible to get the scores from other matches by consulting the board mounted on the perimeter wall opposite. On this, matches were indicated by letters and all you needed was the programme to tell which letter symbolised which match. Programmes from that period were advertising Dutton’s beers, Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly, Wood’s Textile Oil and London Midland football specials to away matches. Most people did not travel to the match by car. Trams had long since disappeared, but at the end of the match there was a convoy of Blackburn Corporation buses waiting to take people back to the centre of town. Others travelled by coach. At least five coaches went from Chorley and one picked up on the way. Up to ten people waited just at my pick-up point, the Heapey Busy Bee Co-op in Wheelton. Ribble Buses also ran a special football service from Chorley. Social mixing thus began well before the match and continued long after it, thus emphasising the communal experience of attending a game.
At this time football hooliganism was in a more-or-less dormant stage and the terracing was un-sectioned from the Blackburn end all the way round to the Darwen end. At half time the fans behind the goal used to exchange ends. Those standing on the Riverside, caught in the middle, were buffeted around a little when there was a big crowd, but there was no violence. However there were occasional bouts of madness, such as the time two supporters cleared the Blackburn end perimeter fence to attack the opposition goalkeeper. There were quite a few women at these matches –not many, but enough to notice. There was too a small number of girls in the Darwen End who could occasionally be heard to start their own high-pitched chant. Once, for a cup match against Arsenal, we sat in the Riverside Stand, a haunt so ancient, gloomy and lacking in any sign of the modern that it was all too easy to imagine that it was 1912 and Bob Crompton’s team were about to run out onto the pitch. The biggest crowd I ever saw at Ewood was on a freezing cold February night in 1969 for a several times postponed cup tie against Manchester City. Even until late afternoon it was not certain if match would take place, but the temperature remained just high enough and over 42,000 people turned up to watch Rovers go down to a 4-1 defeat. Older fans, having been in much larger Ewood crowds, will read this with mild contempt, but I remember this experience as mildly unpleasant and somewhat frightening. I was on the Blackburn End, unable to extract my cigarettes from my jacket pocket due to the pressure of people around. I don’t remember much about the match but I do recall thinking about my uncle who had been at Burnden Park in 1946 when the Embankment terracing collapsed with terrible loss of life.
From about 1967 onwards I began to attend away matches on a fairly regular basis. Matches in Yorkshire and the midlands were easily accessible by coach, but in 1969 my friend Sid and I decided we would make the journey down to Cardiff. This was before the motorway network and necessitated a Friday night departure from Penny Street. In Darwen the coach broke down and we all had to get off to push. There were no stewards or away travel clubs then, so it was perhaps inevitable that a stop somewhere down the A49 in Shropshire should result in some people on the coach becoming embroiled in vandalism. A policeman boarded the coach to say we wouldn’t be moving until this was sorted out and I remember wondering how I was going to explain a mass arrest to my parents. Somehow the issue was resolved and we arrived in Cardiff at 6.30 a.m. As our optimistic fellow-travellers leapt from the coach in search of an early-opening pub, Sid and I looked forward to some much delayed sleep on the coach. This wasn’t to be however, and we too were forced to wander the streets of Cardiff for almost nine hours until kick-off time. Most trips were less eventful than this, though Carlisle in winter was almost too cold to bear in some years. One which does stay in mind for the wrong reasons was a night trip to Burnden Park when, while seated in the coach waiting to set off home, we were attacked by a volley of stones and bricks. There was not one window left in the coach by the time the salvo ended.
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