London Wolves at 60: Loyal supporters' club celebrates historic milestone

This coming weekend their members will congregate at an event hosted at The Valley in south-east London to celebrate the landmark. A more loyal and determined bunch it would be harder to find. The lengths they have gone to in supporting their team are worth recalling, and there will be plenty of reminiscing on the night.

It all began some months before that Plymouth fixture, at London Waterloo railway station in January, 1965. Stuart Earl was a teenager and Londoner who had seen Wolves on television and, like so many of that era, followed the club from afar. His dad had dropped him off at the station to catch a train to Portsmouth to watch his beloved Wolves.

“I was standing in the queue at the ticket office when I saw someone with a Wolves scarf in front of me,” Stuart tells The Wanderers Post. “It was a guy called Jeff Ball and we teamed up and went to the game, it was an FA Cup tie. We got chatting and Jeff talked me into going to a home game, as I’d never been to Molineux before.

“I’ll always remember the train times, we got the 9:15am out of Paddington that got into Wolverhampton low level station at 1:10pm. We started to see the same faces every week on the train. We got together and decided to put an advert in all the London clubs’ programmes when they played Wolves to see who would be interested in forming a London supporters’ club. Only Fulham and Arsenal responded, but they put it in their programme.”

From there, Stuart received letters from more Wolves fans, most of whom were also born and bred Londoners. They were able to put on a coach from Victoria station to matches, after finding a company called Cresta Coaches which, to put it politely, was running a budget operation.

“We finally ran out of luck away at Huddersfield,” Stuart explains. “We broke down three or four times on the way. We eventally got stuck on a hill just outside the town, and we all had to get off and push the bus to the top. Then we just rolled down to the ground on the other side. We didn’t get in until just before half-time, by then Terry Wharton had already scored the only goal, we won 1-0.

“After the game, we couldn’t afford the train fare back home so we waited outside the players’ entrance and a guy came out and started chatting to us. He asked why we hadn’t gone home and we explained what happened. He said, ‘If I lend you the money will you get it back to me?’ It turned out he was the chairman of Huddersfield. He gave us the money to get the train home and we got the money together in the week and sent it back to him.”

Through British Rail’s group booking offer, London Wolves soon transferred to trains and that has been the preferred mode of transport ever since, although that has brought its own dramas, too. In December 1979, a mid-week League Cup tie at Grimsby coincided with the birthday of then treasurer Terry Peachey, so London Wolves had a party on the way to the match.

The train wasn’t scheduled to stop at New Clee, the closest station to Blundell Park, but the travelling fans persuaded the guard to let them off as close as possible. So, he asked the driver to stop the train, before wandering down the track with a lantern to open a side gate onto the road so the Wolves fans could get off and walk to the ground. The return journey ended with an unscheduled stop at a Doncaster night club before changing trains and arriving back in Kings Cross in the small hours of the next morning.

“They were great times when we were all together playing cards and having a drink, but that has all gone out of the window now as we can’t get group travel bookings any more,” Stuart adds. “We can still get the train but we can’t get seats together. Pete Woodifield does a marvellous job organising all our travel.”

London Wolves needs the dedication of all its members. Secretary Dave Slape, best man at Stuart’s wedding, has been with them since the very beginning, and Peter Bartlett runs the long-standing website and produces a newsletter for the members. Many more have made important contributions to keep the club running.

At its peak, the supporters’ club had over 400 members. The record for numbers travelling on one trip stands at 108, for the 1981 FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough against Tottenham Hotspur. Now, Stuart fears for the membership of the club in the long-term.

“When we started, Wolves had won the FA Cup five years earlier and been runners-up in the league. They were one of the few teams you saw on television. We’re not as an attractive team to people any more, we don’t get as many new members as we used to.”

London Wolves has forged strong links with the club, presenting its own Player of the Season award each year whilst also being a long-time sponsor of Wolves Women. So, what is Stuart most proud of as the 60th birthday celebrations approach?

“That it’s lasted this long, without a doubt. I didn’t expect it to fold in the 1960s, I thought it would be an ongoing thing, but I think the longevity has been brilliant, alongside the people who have helped me run it.”