back to the Kop and sat back down. We were defending our Kop, kids playing war games. It never entered my head I might get hurt.
The Wednesday mob didn’t go far. They appeared again soon after; this time they didn’t get as far as the first time as we chased them again. The turnstiles opened at 1.30, we piled on our Kop and, instead of heading for our usual place at the front behind the goal, lined up at the top of the steps at the back of the Shoreham. I didn’t have a clue what would be going through Wednesday lads’ heads. Did they have leaders? And, if they did, would they still come on, having already been run twice? Sure enough, they emerged and started queuing outside the Kop.
From our vantage point, we could see out on to the street. Everyone stood waiting for them to come walking up the 100 or so steps that lead on to the top of our Kop (or ‘angina hill’ as it was commonly called). The first 20 or so that emerged were greeted with a hail of rocks and bricks. They hid behind a wall at the bottom. They could actually enter the Kop in the bottom corner via the kids’ enclosure but no matter which way they tried they were fucked in our opinion, as we held the higher ground and pelted them with anything to hand. Where were the coppers? you ask. Nowhere is the answer; they didn’t fancy the prospect of trying to get in the middle of hundreds of armed-to-the-teeth rampant teenagers. Four, five, six times, the pig fans tried to get to the back of our Kop but each time they were beaten back.
Finally, after an hour of chaos, the police arrived and surrounded the Wednesday mob and actually walked them up our Kop! We charged down and threw everything we had at the two sets of pigs. The coppers were just as bad as their newfound mates but they also turned and fled under the barrage. Ten minutes later, more plod arrived. This time they mingled in with us and watched for any missile throwers who were immediately arrested. This allowed the police to bring up the Wednesday mob without it coming under attack. They were then placed at the right-hand side of us. The ground was about full now with both groups being swelled by more lads joining their ranks. Wednesday had obviously gathered a lot of the missiles we had thrown and returned fire. The Kop became a missile battlefield.
‘Mcduff’, the eldest of the six Cordell brothers (three were Blades and three were Owls), wore a hunter’s white pith helmet with the words ‘Blades’ written on the front. He’d borrowed it from me after my mother had purchased it at a jumble sale. It was lucky he had it on, as a large rock crashed into it causing a big dent on the side. Lads from both sides were led away with head injuries to be treated by the St John Ambulance volunteers stationed pitch-side.
There weren’t many black lads around at the time but one black lad called Mick Grudge hung around with the Heeley mob. Mick was a Wednesdayite and was at the forefront of the Wednesday mob dishing it out to any Blades that came near him. His fellow Heeley mates, Herman and the rest of them, had seen enough and, even though he was a mate, laid into him, forcing him back into the crowd. I can only remember one black lad with the Blades at that time; his name was Arthur, he wasn’t really black, just dark looking.
I’m ashamed to say it now but in our ignorance we were terrible racists at the time and used all sorts of names we wouldn’t use now. Parents even told you if you didn’t behave the black man would get you. We even sang awful racist songs. But, in our defence, we really didn’t know any better. It wasn’t until the very early 70s that we began to meet and get to know black lads in pubs and clubs in town. I began to realise that we were all the same and in all walks of life some were good, some were bad, no matter what colour the skin.
The game kicked off before 36,000 crammed into the ground. The fighting continued and both managers made loudspeaker appeals for calm. No one gave a fuck, we were having fun! With the game well under way, things calmed slightly but still the odd missile hit the target and some lad who couldn’t be treated on the spot was whisked off to hospital. Most Wednesday fans had left the ground before ‘iron lungs, legs of plastic’ John Ritchie scored the late winner for Wednesday (their last victory at beautiful downtown Bramall Lane by the way). We left the ground, pissed off at the result but proud that we had successfully defended the Shoreham. We did our usual walk up The Moor into the town centre but no mobs of Wednesday were around.
Front-page headlines read: ‘SIX HOSPITAL CASES MAR RITCHIE’S DERBY WINNER’ and all the information in the detailed report had been gathered from lads who took part! Their names and addresses were added on to their accounts – imagine that now! Everything was detailed from the meeting place of both mobs to the chase along John Street. United’s chairman played it down as high spirits! The national newspapers picked up on the story on Monday morning and, according to the tabloids, Sheffield United topped the league table for arrests and disorder, fuckin’ great stuff, top of the League at last.
During the 70s, Wednesday had a leader, not in terms of fighting ability, but a sort of cult figure who went by his nickname of Shandy, or Shandy the pig, as Blades called him.
When I first started going to the matches, it wasn’t long before you got to know the top, or most well-known, pig lads, and Shandy was certainly one of the most well known. In the 70s, a song would ring around the East Bank: ‘Shandy, Shandy, I walk a million miles for one of your smiles, oh, Shandy’, and if you had seen his smile then you’d realise that even Wednesday fans have a sense of humour. He was known well right across the city, both by the legions of football fans, no matter what colour their allegiance was, and also by a large percentage of the population at large. The main reason for this was that Shandy had unusual features, and I think that’s enough said on the subject, and wherever he went his rasping voice would chant, ‘Wenshdee! Wenshdee!’, his hair lip giving the enemy name a new sound. One thing about Shandy, though, was he was a laugh to have a drink with and I spent many an hour being amused by his tales of prowess among the hooligan world that we lived in.
He was often in the company of Blades lads and entertained us with his heroic stories of the Wednesday supermen led by himself, Super-Shandy. He lived in Hackenthorpe – still does, I think – and he knew most of the United lads from around that way; he also knew that we would ridicule him all night, not for his looks, but for his team, which tells you a lot about the problems with being a pig in our city in those days.
One thing United lads never did and that was hit or bully Shandy; no, we were better than that, we respected his faith to the blue and white. The last I heard of Shandy was that he had been hit by a bus while crossing the road in one of his many drunken binges; a shame really that a lad who had a lifetime of ridicule and verbal abuse for being a pig could suffer further misery. He recovered somehow. I don’t know about the bus though.
Shandy loved a drink and one time we took him around town after bumping into him in the Penny Black in town. We plied him with drinks, mainly shorts, until he spewed all over, pissed his pants, then passed out.
One of many stories from Shandy folklore: Shandy was once in the Birley Hotel, pissed as usual, and blurted out to the watching public, ‘I think that there is summat up with my water system.’ He then ordered a pint of whisky and supped the lot straight down. Suddenly his face turned from the usual arrangements of odd colours to bright green, he then pissed, shit and spewed up all at the same time, then collapsed. The ambulance arrived, and, as they were attempting to take him into the ambulance and off to hospital, he started coming round and started to shout, ‘Are we going to Gillingham, is this the bus?’ It so happened that the pigs were playing Gillingham the next day, and Shandy was having none of it, he escaped from the no-doubt relieved grasp of the medics and ran off down the street. We never did find out if he got to Gillingham.
We all remembered Shandy from the Testimonial games at the Lane in the 70s. At one particular game the pigs had taken our Kop, to add insult and humiliation to our lads Wednesday had Shandy hoisted up on to a crush barrier, singing, ‘Shandy, Shandy, I’ll walk a million miles for one of your smiles’. The 50 or so Blades who had bothered to turn up came in at the back and laid straight into the pigs, Scattering hundreds of the bastards until they realised how few of us there were, they charged back up the Kop surrounding us and we would have been battered if the coppers had not rounded us up and thrown us out of our own ground. It was