Wherever you go around the world, it seems
you’re never far from people who know about Burnley. There are Clarets fans
worldwide, of course, some of them members of this club. The story of Clarets
lad-made-good Alastair Campbell venturing to Rio for the Earth Summit only to find that
the manager of the hotel in which he stayed was more interested in talking about Leighton
James than the ozone layer is a case in point. And everyone knows that the linesman at the
Stadio Giuseppe Meazza comes from Rawtenstall and really wishes he was in Burnley instead
of Milan. The internet has revealed to us the wonders of regular communication with Boston
and Philadelphia Clarets, while there are whole websites dedicated to the Scandinavian and
West Australian Clarets.
I suppose what makes this remarkable is the
smallness of the town of Burnley itself and the recent modest fortunes of our football
club. Burnley is a place that not many would have heard of, were it not for the past
successes of the club. And Burnley people can’t help spreading the word wherever they
go.
So there I was out in the hot sun of St Lucia, a
day or two after a miserable defeat at Wycombe. Burnley seemed a long way away, but I had
already been brought down to earth with a bang when meeting a local I was working with.
Educated in England, he asked me whereabouts I lived. East London, I replied. But
you’re not from round there are you, he responded. No, I replied, I’m from the
north, you won’t have heard of it. Is it Burnley, he asked. I picked myself off the
floor. Was it so obvious? He told me he’d been at college with a bloke from Burnley.
All he ever talked about was Burnley. People called him Burnley Dave.
Thanks to the work of this missionary, I could
relax in the knowledge that I would have something to fall back on if conversation ran
dry.
Meeting some other people at a reception I was
duly introduced. This is Andrew. He’s from Burnley.
One man exploded. Burnley, he said. Bob Lord!
The bastard!
This struck me as an over the top reaction. I
know opinion on the matter of Bob Lord was mixed, but this isn’t the kind of thing
you expect to hear while sipping rum punch around a poolside north of Castries. I urged
him to explain.
It turns out that, sometime in the seventies
(his memory was hazy), the Burnley team were taken for a post-season holiday in St Lucia
as a reward for securing promotion. If this was the case, that would make it 1973. As it
happened, football’s popularity was growing on this small Caribbean island, and the
club were pressured into playing a game against a St Lucian national side. Eventually, the
good Mr Lord agreed – at a price. A fee of something thousand Dollars was agreed for
a sixty minute match, and a game duly scheduled at the national stadium.
Come the day of the game, apparently Lord asked
for the readies before the team would take the field. The Lucians obliged. Here were the x
thousand East Caribbean Dollars. This caused something of a kerfuffle. Lord, it seems,
when he said Dollars, had meant US Dollars, and none other. 'Dollar' must be the most
common name for a currency in the world, but this is what he had meant. Exchange rates
have never been my strong point, but I reckon this would have been at least two or three
times as much money.
The money wasn't forthcoming? Then the team
wouldn't take the field. By now the ground was full, the crowd clamouring for the game to
start. But they had to play. Not without the proper money. But it was Saturday. The banks
were closed. Tough. The stand-off continued. In the end it took the British Governor's
personal guarantee that the rest of money would be paid (St Lucia was not yet then an
independent country) before our lads stepped out. Whereupon they enjoyed an hour's
kickabout and whupped St Lucia by a huge score. Something like 5-1, 6-1, my friend thinks,
the precise details lost in the fog of time. Glad they bothered.
But he's been dead for years now, I said,
leaping rather half-heartedly to Bob Lord's defence. I know, what do you think all that
partying was the day before, he replied. We celebrate it every year. (I'd arrived on
Independence Day.)
I have no way of knowing if this anecdote has
one grain of truth in it whatsoever, but my friend stuck to his story and whatever else
he'd forgotten, would certainly always remember the name of Bob Lord. It wasn't the last
time that week that his name was mentioned with a degree vitriol. It certainly sounds like
it could be plausible. It would just be like us to hack a whole nation off over a
friendly.
How good to know that this small town butcher
made good is still remembered half way around the world.
This wasn't my first introduction to Burnley
exotica. When I moved down to London in 1994 I shared an office with a man from Mauritius.
The conversation took its inevitable turn. You won't know it, I said to this fellow from a
tiny speck in the Indian Ocean, it's a small town in the north called Burnley. Ah Burnley,
he said, Burnley Football Club, I've seen them play. Whereabouts? Oh, in Mauritius.
Here the details are sketchier, but what we
managed to piece together was that Burnley visited Mauritius in the 1950s, and apparently
played a series of three friendlies against a Mauritian representative side. My friend at
work remembers the names of McIlroy, Jimmy Adamson, Bill Holden and Les Shannon. Over
forty years on, not many memories remain, but he seems to recall that in each game we won
by a bigger score than the last, having apparently started by being gentle with them, with
something like 3-0, before progressing to somewhere near 6-1 in the final game. Games took
place in various venues around the island, including the King George V Stadium in Port
Louis and Quartre Bornes. Folk spent hours walking to the game in Port Louis, and such was
the interest in the game that people climbed trees to see into the ground; one tree
couldn’t take the strain and the branches broke off. My friend strikes a rather sad
note in telling this story, saying that football then was just getting off the ground in
Mauritius, there was a lot of interest in these games with a then well-known side making a
rare visit from overseas, but their collective morale never really recovered from the
crushing blow we dealt it.
I must confess, I’d always treated this
tale with a degree of scepticism, but the recent publication of a book of photographs of
Burnley FC in the ‘Images of Sport’ series confirms the story. It carries a
photo of Jimmy Adamson being presented with a trophy by the Mauritian Football
Association. This trophy apparently still graces the Turf Moor cabinet. The tour took
place in 1954, which I reckon makes Burnley something of a pioneering club. The book
carries many other photographs from overseas tours, which it seems at this time were an
annual event, in places like Germany, Italy and Turkey, but Mauritius then would have been
real exotica. In all, they played three games in Mauritius and one in Madagascar, where
the final score was 14-1. (My friend was contemptuous of the much larger island –
‘they know nothing about football’.) Of the four games on the tour, 28 goals
were scored and only two conceded, with Bill Holden scoring twelve! In the book, Ray
Simpson reports that Burnley played "in front of healthy and admiring crowds." I
showed my friend the photograph, and he pointed out the cheap corrugated metal of the
stadium roof above Adamson’s head. I also had to give him a copy of the
Guardian’s splendid recent feature on Jimmy McIlroy, to send home to football friends
who remembered the games.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that
enterprising local entrepreneurs sold posters of Burnley players in the street, I'm told
that everyone in Mauritius now supports Arsenal, Liverpool or Man Utd. It seems we didn't
make any long-term converts.
I don't suppose anyone has more information on
either of these stories, but if you do, please let me know. For the mag and website, I'm
always interested in hearing from anyone who's seen the Clarets abroad, either in our two
European campaigns or in similarly odd friendlies.
You see, it remains my ambition to see Burnley
play in a foreign country at least once in my life. Sadly, I suspect the European
competitions are still some years distant from us. They even axed the Anglo-Italian Cup
when we got into the First Division that time. I'd have gone all right, to Ascoli, Bari,
Cremonese or wherever. Sad it may seem, but for some of us the nearest we've got to
watching Burnley somewhere exotic is a pre-season friendly in Dawlish.
Firmo
February 2000
