The Three Degrees Read online

  Based in London’s East End, Leyton Orient was the capital’s second-oldest football club, having been founded in 1881. In their long history, ‘the O’s’ had spent just a solitary season in the top division of English football. Orient played their home games at the ramshackle Brisbane Road, which during night matches was often shrouded in the mist that drifted over from nearby Hackney Marshes. The club had almost gone bankrupt in the mid-sixties, but was enjoying a relative golden period in the seventies under Petchey and his head coach, Peter Angell. Like Mee, Angell had come from an army background and was known to punish wayward players by having them cut the Brisbane Road pitch with a pair of scissors.

  Under the stewardship of Petchey and Angell, Orient had been promoted to the Second Division at the start of the decade. The pair had begun to build an attractive team based around a group of youthful players. Among these was a young Londoner named Bobby Fisher, a sixteen-year-old of mixed race who had been adopted into a Jewish family. Fisher had just then broken into the Orient first team. At training one morning, Petchey pulled him aside and told him a young lad would be joining them from Arsenal the next morning. The manager asked his teenage full-back to look out for the new recruit, suggesting he might be a bit on the wild side.

  Fisher arrived early the following morning to welcome Laurie Cunningham to Orient, but there was no still sign of him at 10 a.m. and no sign still when training started. Fisher and the rest of the players went out onto the Brisbane Road pitch to do their warm-up and then gathered around Petchey for his morning briefing.

  ‘Ten, fifteen minutes into this chat, I saw a figure emerge from the dressing rooms and start walking over to us – not running, but walking,’ recalls Fisher. ‘By the time he got to the group everyone was looking at him and yet he didn’t say a word. George eventually asked him why he was late and Laurie said he’d missed his bus. That was it. He didn’t plead or apologise. I thought there was either something wrong with him, that he was completely mad, or that he must be super-confident in his own ability.’

  By the end of that morning, Fisher had his answer. Training sessions at Orient were rounded off with the first team playing a game against the reserves and apprentices. Fisher found himself up against Cunningham and resolved to kick some sense into this upstart the first chance he got.

  ‘Two minutes into the game, the ball was moved out to Laurie on the halfway line,’ says Fisher. ‘I went in to smash his ankle, and the next thing I knew I was on my backside and he was running away from me with the ball. The rest of the game continued like that. He actually took the piss out of me and kept knocking the ball through my legs. The other players could see it as well – they knew that I wasn’t a bad player, so to have someone come along and do that to me, it was obvious he must be pretty special.’

  Petchey and Angell were also fast convinced that they had a unique player on their hands in Cunningham. So much so that that they made allowances for him. He didn’t get drummed out of the club on account of his habitual lateness, or even on the occasions when he went missing altogether and would claim to have overslept. The steadfast Angell would always be there to put a paternal arm around his shoulders and to smooth things over with the other players whenever they complained about the preferential treatment Cunningham was getting.

  ‘Peter would stick up for Laurie and stand in his corner,’ says Fisher. ‘There was a special sort of love there which most guys, and most clubs, didn’t have. But George also looked into things a little deeper. I’m sure he’d have researched Laurie’s background and spoken to people about the challenges he’d had growing up. He’s a very decent, caring man and he had a real hatred of racism, so he was going to go out of his way to make an exception of Laurie.’

  In his first few months at Orient, Cunningham turned out for the reserve team, being as raw as he was precocious. He was a self-contained lad, something of a loner and sat apart from the raucous dressing room banter. But he grew close to Fisher. The two of them would take off together after training and go to Kensington Market to shop for clothes. The introverted Cunningham came out of his shell whenever he dressed up. He had a particular fondness for forties-style double-breasted suits and wide-brimmed hats, a look he’d picked up from his favourite film stars, the song-and-dance men Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.

  ‘With Laurie, it wasn’t like having a conversation with the archetypal footballer,’ says Fisher. ‘There were other things going on with him, different levels, and he was buzzing with ideas. He was very much into his poetry, for instance. You could sense that he wanted to do something different and also that there was this thing that was holding him back. I think he was scared to vocalise all these thoughts he had, inside and outside of football, because he feared he’d be laughed at or not taken seriously.

  ‘We’d go out together and after a few glasses of wine he’d loosen up and different things would come out. He would say that he’d had it pretty tough growing up, with racism and prejudice, and also that he hadn’t had much contact with his dad.’

  The other great passion that lit a fire in Cunningham was dancing. He was as flamboyant and expressive on the dance floor as he was on the football pitch. It was as if this, too, unlocked something deep within him that he had to get out. No one ever saw him chat up girls, he was too shy for that, but they flocked around him whenever he danced. Sundays he’d go to a club in Tottenham called the Royal for the weekly funk night, and it was here that he was first drawn to a red-headed girl who also dressed in vintage clothes and appeared just as lost to the music as he did.

  In most other respects, fifteen-year-old Jacqueline ‘Nicky’ Brown had come from a different world to Laurie Cunningham. She was white, well educated and had been born into a comfortably middle-class family in Camden, north London. Her father, Mike, was something of a showbiz entrepreneur and worked variously as a booking agent, stand-up comic and bit-part actor. He’d appeared as an extra in the popular ITV soap Coronation Street and was a well-known face on the London club and theatre circuit.

  Nicky Brown was the kind of girl that stood out in a crowd. She was pretty, vivacious and self-assured. Her striking hair seemed to explode from her head in a wild shock. She was in her last year at school when she first met Cunningham and was already doing bits and pieces of part-time modelling and acting work. She’d come to the Royal that night with her then boyfriend, but found herself facing off with Cunningham on the dance floor.

  ‘He was suddenly there in front of me, and what a dancer he was,’ she recalls. ‘He was unbelievable, like he’d been born with rhythm. It was a stand-off – you did what the other person did and then added a move of your own. I joined in with him and we just connected straight away.’

  Cunningham introduced himself to Brown as ‘Paul’ and since he was wearing a fifties work shirt with the Esso logo emblazoned across it, she assumed he was employed as a mechanic. The pair of them began to meet up at the Royal both on Sunday and Thursday nights, when they would jive to jazz records until the early hours of the next morning.

  ‘One night, we missed the night bus and he walked me and my friend home to Camden,’ says Brown. ‘We swapped phone numbers that night, but it was pure innocence. We’d go ice-skating or into Finsbury Park on a Friday afternoon where we’d take a portable stereo with us and practise dance moves together. It was all just good fun back then; we’d have a picnic and a peck on the cheek.’

  The eighteen-year-old Laurie Cunningham was now on the verge of playing in Orient’s first team. As a young black man, he would be a rare, almost alien sight in the English Football League of the time. Ever since the formative years of the game during the Victorian era, only a handful of black players had represented British football clubs.

  Arthur Wharton, a goalkeeper, became the first black professional footballer in England when he joined Rotherham from Preston in 1889. The first black outfield player was Walter Tull, who was born in Folkestone in 1888 to a Barbadian father and English mother. Tull made ten appearance
s for Tottenham Hotspur from 1909 and later enlisted in the army for the Great War, rising to the rank of Second Lieutenant in the 23rd Battalion. He survived the Battle of the Somme, but was killed in action during the spring offensive against the Germans in March 1918.

  More recently, Albert Johanneson, a black South African, had signed for Don Revie’s Leeds United in 1961. Johanneson had completed a three-month trial at the club, having been told he’d have to pay his own fare home if unsuccessful. He became the first black player to appear in an FA Cup final when he turned out in Leeds’ 2-1 defeat to Liverpool in 1965. Yet his rewards from the game were scant and he was to die destitute in 1995. West Ham United, located just up the road from Orient in London’s East End, had groomed three black players during the sixties and early seventies. These were defender John Charles and two strikers, Clyde Best and Ade Coker. Best was the most prominent of the three and went on the make 186 appearances for the club up to 1976.

  Laurie Cunningham joined this select group on 12 October 1974 when he made his debut for Orient against Oldham Athletic, coming on as a substitute in a 3-1 win at Brisbane Road. He made an instant impression, gliding past defenders as if they were static. It was one that was picked up by the London Weekend Television cameras, filming the game for the following afternoon’s The Big Match highlights show. Nicky Brown’s father, a keen football fan, was watching it the next day when she happened to walk into the room.

  ‘I looked at the TV and there was Paul taking a tracksuit off and running onto the pitch,’ she says. ‘I told my dad that they must have his name wrong. I said that I knew him and that he wasn’t called Laurie Cunningham. When he phoned later to arrange to go out, I wouldn’t talk to him. I told my mom to tell him he was a liar.

  ‘He came and sat on the wall outside our house for hours until Mom made me go out to him. He said his family called him Paul and that he’d told me that was his name because he saw me as a friend and that he hadn’t wanted me to think he was boasting about his football. He took me home with him that night and I met his family for the first time. I don’t think we were ever apart after that. I had to have a room at his house and he had one at mine.’

  In his first full season at the club, Cunningham went on to make a further sixteen appearances for Orient, scoring one goal as the team finished the campaign in a secure mid-table position. Even then, people in the game had begun to speak of him as a shining prospect. On one of those Saturday afternoons, another black youngster who was then on Arsenal’s books came down to Brisbane Road to see what all the fuss was about. Brendon Batson remembers sitting next to Clyde Best in the main stand that day, the two of them looking on admiringly at Cunningham.

  ‘He was graceful, almost balletic, and so confident,’ says Batson. ‘He could go from a standing start to flat out like a Formula One car. He’d walk with the ball, almost inviting a challenge, and then he was gone. I thought he was quite extraordinary.’

  In the tight circle of friends that Cunningham cultivated were Brown, Bobby Fisher and another of the other young Orient players, Tony Grealish, an Irishman who was known to one and all as ‘Paddy’. The four of them went everywhere together, heading into the West End to see Bruce Lee films or to support Brown when she did fashion shows at stores such as Selfridges. On afternoons after training, they’d go dancing at a club in Soho called Crackers. Another of their favourite haunts was a champagne bar on Oxford Street.

  ‘We used to enjoy making a scene there,’ says Bobby Fisher. ‘There was a big spiral staircase leading down to the bar and Paddy would go down first of all. He had long ginger hair and a big Viking beard, not the sort of person you’d normally see in that kind of place. Then I’d come down with my afro, a satin shirt and platform shoes. And after that Nicky would emerge in tight white trousers and knee-high boots.

  ‘The people who drank there were very middle class, very pukka, and they’d be staring at us. But Laurie was another thing altogether. A black guy in a champagne bar – that just didn’t happen. He’d make his entrance last of all, wearing a suit, a cravat, a fedora hat and carrying a cane. Once we’d all arrived, the manager would get up from his seat and salute us. You could see all the other customers thinking, “Who are these people?”’

  Cunningham was also a man apart among his team-mates. He’d begun to take yoga and ballet lessons to help make him suppler, and before each game he’d take himself off to the kit room and warm up dancing to James Brown records. At home, he’d go out into the garden and practise with a ball until it got too dark for him to see what he was doing.

  ‘What he could do with a football was amazing,’ says Brown. ‘He’d keep it off the ground for nine, ten minutes at a time, and under total control. Or he’d kick it way up in the air and catch it under his chin. The first few times he tried that the ball would whack him in the face, but he’d stick at it for days on end.’

  ‘After a game on a Saturday, the typical footballer of the time would take his wife or girlfriend out to a steakhouse, sink a few pints of lager and be home in time to watch Match of the Day on the telly,’ says Fisher. ‘Laurie and Nicky would go off to a bar, have a glass of wine and then go home at 6.30 p.m. to get something to eat and have a nap. Then they’d get up again at midnight and go out dancing till five o’clock in the morning. He mixed with a completely different set of people.

  ‘On a Friday night, he’d go to a club in north London where they had these dance-offs for money. It was like a scene from Studio 54 in New York. This big group of girls and guys would form a circle around the dance floor and there would be Laurie in the middle of it all, dancing off against some other guy.’

  The money Cunningham regularly received for winning such dancing competitions came in useful. He used it to pay off the fines Orient gave him just as frequently for reporting late to training or team meetings. On one occasion, he and Brown found themselves marooned after a night out, having spent all their money. Cunningham was due at training in a couple of hours, so Brown rang George Petchey and asked him to come and pick them up. The Orient manager – as he would always do – obliged his star player.

  During the 1975–76 season, there would be no doubting Laurie Cunningham’s exalted status within the Orient team. The club once again finished in mid-table, but Cunningham brought to them the look of something exotic and an edge of excitement. He looked slight, frail even, as if a gust of wind might blow him over. But he was quick as a flash and would skip past opponents. He was a showman too, teasing defenders by beating them once and then turning back to bamboozle them all over again. He didn’t score many goals, just eight that season, but they were invariably of a kind to take supporters’ breath away.

  ‘Brisbane Road had one of the worst pitches in the division,’ says Orient fan Steve Jenkins. ‘The ground was brown, not green, so to see Laurie Cunningham come out and give some of the performances he did was amazing.

  ‘At that time, there were also some very uncompromising defenders in football, and he was getting hacked to pieces. However, I never saw him get involved in a fight. He used to get up, brush himself down and get on with it. I remember he scored one goal at Chelsea that was so good, both sets of fans applauded it – and also the Chelsea players and the referee.’

  Cunningham’s eye-catching performances soon enough brought him wider recognition. Writing in the Sun newspaper, football reporter John Sadler suggested that Orient’s flying young winger was the best thing to happen to the British game since George Best. Mavis Cunningham had begun to keep a scrapbook that bulged with such pieces. On a clipping of the Orient team line-up for that season she highlighted her youngest son with an arrow and underneath it wrote a single word: ‘Star.’

  Yet there was another, uglier kind of attention that was being focused on Cunningham and also Bobby Fisher that season. At almost every ground Orient visited away from Brisbane Road, the two players would be subjected to continuous racist abuse. This became so prevalent that it got to the point where the two of them would exp
ress surprise if they weren’t greeted with a chorus of monkey noises.

  ‘Laurie had got it when he was growing up and so had I, so it wasn’t a shock going into professional football, but it was barbaric,’ says Fisher. ‘As soon as we came out of the tunnel there’d be shouts of “black bastards” and “niggers”. And then, of course, there’d be bananas getting thrown onto the pitch. At some places we couldn’t go and take throw-ins, because you’d be too close to the crowd and people would try to grab you or spit at you.

  ‘You would also get racial slurs on the pitch from opposition players and the referees would often say things too. If Laurie was called a black bastard by a full-back, he’d fight back by putting the ball through his legs and making him look a fool. That would hurt them even more.’

  ‘Laurie and I had death threats – on the street, in clubs, everywhere,’ says Nicky Brown. ‘It could be very intimidating and frightening, but we dealt with it back to back. On the whole we tried to talk to people, so they’d think twice the next time they came across a mixed-race couple. The next option was to see if it was possible to walk away and if not, you’d have to stand your ground.’

  These dark, savage undercurrents were ebbing and flowing through the country as a whole at a time when more than a million people found themselves out of work. The first Race Relations Act that passed through Parliament in 1976 was established to prevent discrimination on the grounds of race, colour or ethnicity. It appeared a significant step forward, but Britain was still very much a divided nation.