5 minutes ago, Larky Blue said:

Would that be round about where the Peter Osgood statue is now ?

Yes. Ossie's statue is roughly in the area at the end of the blue corrugated fence and near the turnstiles.

Climbed over that gate at the top of the slope, open in the photo more than a few times.  

On 24/06/2018 at 13:19, erskblue said:

Stevie Clarke ?

Bluehaze: Just noticed you relied with Stevie Clarke. Cheers.

Our very first player manager was Scottish don't forget.

My old man used to go on about Alex Jackson all the time. He said he was dynamite on the wing and was Chelsea's best player at the time.  

Found this about Scots who have played for Chelsea. Some fine players in the list. Tommy Law was one of the famous Wembley Wizards when Scotland beat England 5-1 in 1928. Alex Jackson and Hughie Gallacher were in the same side although they were playing for other clubs at the time.

http://thechels.info/wiki/Category:Scottish_Chelsea_players

1 hour ago, Boyne said:

Found this about Scots who have played for Chelsea. Some fine players in the list. Tommy Law was one of the famous Wembley Wizards when Scotland beat England 5-1 in 1928. Alex Jackson and Hughie Gallacher were in the same side although they were playing for other clubs at the time.

http://thechels.info/wiki/Category:Scottish_Chelsea_players

Dave Mitchell threw me on that list. Always thought of him as Australian. Turns out he was born in bonnie Glasgow and emigrated to Aussie as a nipper.

1 hour ago, Ewell CFC said:

Dave Mitchell threw me on that list. Always thought of him as Australian. Turns out he was born in bonnie Glasgow and emigrated to Aussie as a nipper.

Threw me too, I had him as an Aussie that was bang average for us though had proved useful I think for Millwall in a league below.

Tom Boyd was the one for me that didn't stay long though looked like he might be good if given a decent run.

Edited June 26, 20188 yr by strider6004

19 hours ago, Ewell CFC said:

Dave Mitchell threw me on that list. Always thought of him as Australian. Turns out he was born in bonnie Glasgow and emigrated to Aussie as a nipper.

I remember Dave Mitchell playing for Rangers in 1983/84.

17 hours ago, Strider6003 said:

Threw me too, I had him as an Aussie that was bang average for us though had proved useful I think for Millwall in a league below.

Tom Boyd was the one for me that didn't stay long though looked like he might be good if given a decent run.

Tom Boyd was only with us for a few months in 1991/92 before moving back to Scotland to join Celtic.

Think he'd just won Scottish Cup with Motherwell before joining us.

He went on to have a good career with Celtic.

A shot in time: Defences were scared of Chelsea's famously infamous hit man Hughie Gallacher.

Imagine this trio turning up at your door.

More like bailiffs or worse than the Chelsea forward line, Jackie Crawford, Hughie Gallacher and Andy Wilson carried more than a goal threat when they posed like this.

It was 1931 and in west London, as well as Chicago, Al Capone was in vogue.

These three look like they are on their way to, or on the way back from, a hit.Two, Crawford and Gallacher, are smoking, because that was what you did. The other, Wilson, has one glove on, not because he had returned from somewhere he did not wish to leave fingerprints, rather Wilson had fought in the First World War and received a gunshot injury to his lower left arm at Arras.

2 hours ago, erskblue said:

A shot in time: Defences were scared of Chelsea's famously infamous hit man Hughie Gallacher.

Imagine this trio turning up at your door.

More like bailiffs or worse than the Chelsea forward line, Jackie Crawford, Hughie Gallacher and Andy Wilson carried more than a goal threat when they posed like this.

It was 1931 and in west London, as well as Chicago, Al Capone was in vogue.

These three look like they are on their way to, or on the way back from, a hit.Two, Crawford and Gallacher, are smoking, because that was what you did. The other, Wilson, has one glove on, not because he had returned from somewhere he did not wish to leave fingerprints, rather Wilson had fought in the First World War and received a gunshot injury to his lower left arm at Arras.

@erskblueThanks for posting. Gallacher's scoring record is very impressive. I didn't know that only Dalglish and Law had scored more goals than Gallacher but his 23 goals came in 20 games. A brilliant goals to games ratio. A sad end to his life. I also didn't know Wilson had received an injury at the Battle of Arras. A very bloody battle. 

Single bloke or very understanding wife !!

 

2 hours ago, bluehaze said:

Single bloke or very understanding wife !!

 

.... me! 

It reminded me a bit of a teenage bedroom, but it’s actually a karzi.

Just hope he’s not reduced to desperate measures when he’s out of bog roll.

ps my West Ham mates would have a field day in there.

Edited June 27, 20188 yr by Ewell CFC

Duncan McKenzie lol

 

R.I.P. Albert Sewell

https://www.chelseafc.com/en/news/2018/6/27/albert-sewell-mbe---1927-2018

Chelsea Football Club is greatly saddened by the passing of Albert Sewell MBE, the person who chronicled the club for three historic decades as we won our first league, FA Cup and European honours.

Sewell, who was 90 when he passed away yesterday, became editor of Chelsea’s match programme in 1949 and was a pioneer. It was he who developed the magazine-style, feature-heavy publication familiar today, setting a trend throughout football.

He wrote a book marking the club’s 50th anniversary which therefore became the definitive work on our league championship win of 1955 - Chelsea, Champions! (he is pictured above interviewing manager Ted Drake) - and edited a later series of hardback Chelsea yearly books which coincided with the trophy-successes of the early 1970s.

Sewell was also the football editor for a Fleet Street news agency, and he was a specialist in football statistics. He took up a role as statistician and researcher for the BBC’s new Match of the Day programme in 1968, which ran alongside his Chelsea work for a decade.
 

 

PAGES FROM A HISTORIC PROGRAMME FROM THE 1954/55 CHAMPIONSHIP-WINNING SEASON

The Chelsea match programme had been a pamphlet, little more than a team sheet since 1905 until the club decided to upgrade in time for Christmas Day 1948. The price doubled for the new 16-page edition but it sold out rapidly and was hugely successful for the rest of the season. It was handed over to Sewell who filled the pages with player interviews, features with their families, fans’ letters, articles by football writers, insider gossip and, of course, a good helping of statistics past and present.

In the 1960s, Chelsea became the first club to introduce colour photos to its programme, which Sewell edited until 1978. He continued working for the BBC for another 27 years and was frequently reference during broadcasts by presenter Des Lynam as ‘my man Albert’, when his facts and figures illuminated the football coverage. ‘Every week I've received Albert's notes - six pages of editorial gold dust,’ praised commentator John Motson on Sewell’s retirement.
Sewell was made an MBE for his services to the game, somewhat appropriately in 2005, the year of Chelsea’s centenary and second league title win.
 

 

ALBERT SEWELL AFTER RECEIVING HIS MBE

He provided the foreword to an official history of the Chelsea programme published in 2016 and was still contributing to the programme as recently as last season.

Chelsea sends our deepest condolences to Albert’s family and friends at this difficult time.
 

 

SHARING A DRINK WITH PETER BONETTI

Club historian Rick Glanvill writes:

Albert Sewell set the gold standard for statistics gathering and reporting at Chelsea FC. Everything that went before was hap-hazard in comparison and everything since follows in his wake.

As a club we were so lucky that while a young writer he happened to accept the job that introduced football’s first magazine-style match programme just after the war.

The original editor moved on to set up a similar arrangement at Arsenal, so Albert took his place, ushering in decades of achingly diligent number-crunching, as well as innovations such as the Chelsea Book series of the early 1970s.

He achieved legend status later when he moved on to the BBC and Match of the Day, but he was always a Chelsea man at heart. Those of us involved in such things regularly sought clarification on past stats, and he would jovially, patiently, precisely set out the answer.

On our recent book, [club statistician] Paul Dutton and myself found a minor but important anomaly in own-goal scorer figures in a long ago season. Albert was at the helm at the time, but the end-of-season programme gave one statistic, and his yearbook a few months later another.

A brief conversation solved the problem. ‘Well if I changed it over the summer it means I’d found a problem and got to the bottom of it,’ Albert said. As ever, that was good enough for us.

It was some comfort to his children that in his 91st year Albert was still active and sharp as a button. In May he attended fellow Chelsea fan John Motson’s BBC leaving do, then the next day watched his beloved Blues at Wembley beat Manchester United to win the FA Cup. How he will have enjoyed totting up all the data from that victory.

We will all miss him very much.

 

 

ALBERT SEWELL WITH SON DAVE ON FA CUP FINAL DAY BACK IN MAY

Hugh Hastings, now the club’s photo archive manager who worked with and then succeeded Albert Sewell as editor, writes:

For Chelsea fans like myself, who started watching matches at the Bridge in the mid-1960s, the name Albert Sewell is as much part of Chelsea FC as ‘Royal Blue’, ‘The Shed’ and ‘Peter Osgood.’ Albert’s old-fashioned sounding name masked the fact that here was a genuine innovator.

How on earth were the Chelsea board of directors persuaded at the time to remove adverts and create a 16-page programme packed with content and costing sixpence? In those post-war days every penny counted for families and businesses, so it was a genuine culture shock to see Chelsea take this route. But how right they were.

Roll on to 1977 and I am writing a polite letter to Albert at Chelsea, asking if he might be interested in my services as a photographer. I had noticed the club was paying for agency pictures and I thought, as I went to the games and I was a young, 20-year old aspiring professional photographer, I could shoot the action and save the club some money.
 

 

FANS' QUESTIONS ANSWERED BY ALBERT SEWELL BACK IN 1976/77

Albert set me a test of taking a portrait photo of Steve Finnieston at the Bridge, which he was pleased with, and I was taken on. Albert was a bundle of energy and great to work for; full of ideas and novelties and although in his later career he became very well known to viewers of BBC’s Match of the Day as the man with the head for stats, actually he was so much more.

I tried for six years to do justice to his legacy by editing the programme in the same way I thought Albert would do, but I was not in his league, though we achieved a few good things.

Each of us editors in our own times was standing in the footsteps of one man, Albert Sewell, who loved Chelsea and was so driven to share his enthusiasm for the club with its supporters that he invented a publication for it. We are forever in his debt. And by the way, what a gentleman he was. Rest in peace Albert, your work goes on.
 

I think that this picture has been posted before. Taken in about 1965?

Chelsea V Everton from The Bridge in 1969/70 40mins  from The Big Match and an interview with Charlie Cooke.

Worth a watch.

23 hours ago, erskblue said:

Chelsea V Everton from The Bridge in 1969/70 40mins  from The Big Match and an interview with Charlie Cooke.

Worth a watch.

Very good match with quality and endeavour from both sides on a heavy pitch. I would have been at that game but don't ask me where I was standing or what I remember about the game because, every game for me at that time, was gut wrenching and a blur, probably because I knew we had an exceptional side and the thought of getting beat by anybody was purgatory. A very interesting post match interview by Charlie with Brian Moore asking all the right questions. Can you imagine the rest of the team voting on the worst player in a match nowadays? The recipient of the 'yellow jersey' would say he was being victimised by his team mates and ask for a transfer. I had a chuckle at how close to the play, the photographers were then. 

 

 

1972-73 - Derby County 1 Chelsea 2  

19th August 1972. Brief highlights. Approx 50 seconds.

Rare footage of the Baseball Ground with,more than half a dozen blades of grass.

 

Our tie v Ipswich in 1973 at The Bridge.

Edited June 30, 20188 yr by erskblue

On 27/06/2018 at 19:41, Boyne said:

R.I.P. Albert Sewell

https://www.chelseafc.com/en/news/2018/6/27/albert-sewell-mbe---1927-2018

Chelsea Football Club is greatly saddened by the passing of Albert Sewell MBE, the person who chronicled the club for three historic decades as we won our first league, FA Cup and European honours.

Sewell, who was 90 when he passed away yesterday, became editor of Chelsea’s match programme in 1949 and was a pioneer. It was he who developed the magazine-style, feature-heavy publication familiar today, setting a trend throughout football.

He wrote a book marking the club’s 50th anniversary which therefore became the definitive work on our league championship win of 1955 - Chelsea, Champions! (he is pictured above interviewing manager Ted Drake) - and edited a later series of hardback Chelsea yearly books which coincided with the trophy-successes of the early 1970s.

Sewell was also the football editor for a Fleet Street news agency, and he was a specialist in football statistics. He took up a role as statistician and researcher for the BBC’s new Match of the Day programme in 1968, which ran alongside his Chelsea work for a decade.
 

 

PAGES FROM A HISTORIC PROGRAMME FROM THE 1954/55 CHAMPIONSHIP-WINNING SEASON

The Chelsea match programme had been a pamphlet, little more than a team sheet since 1905 until the club decided to upgrade in time for Christmas Day 1948. The price doubled for the new 16-page edition but it sold out rapidly and was hugely successful for the rest of the season. It was handed over to Sewell who filled the pages with player interviews, features with their families, fans’ letters, articles by football writers, insider gossip and, of course, a good helping of statistics past and present.

In the 1960s, Chelsea became the first club to introduce colour photos to its programme, which Sewell edited until 1978. He continued working for the BBC for another 27 years and was frequently reference during broadcasts by presenter Des Lynam as ‘my man Albert’, when his facts and figures illuminated the football coverage. ‘Every week I've received Albert's notes - six pages of editorial gold dust,’ praised commentator John Motson on Sewell’s retirement.
Sewell was made an MBE for his services to the game, somewhat appropriately in 2005, the year of Chelsea’s centenary and second league title win.
 

 

ALBERT SEWELL AFTER RECEIVING HIS MBE

He provided the foreword to an official history of the Chelsea programme published in 2016 and was still contributing to the programme as recently as last season.

Chelsea sends our deepest condolences to Albert’s family and friends at this difficult time.
 

 

SHARING A DRINK WITH PETER BONETTI

Club historian Rick Glanvill writes:

Albert Sewell set the gold standard for statistics gathering and reporting at Chelsea FC. Everything that went before was hap-hazard in comparison and everything since follows in his wake.

As a club we were so lucky that while a young writer he happened to accept the job that introduced football’s first magazine-style match programme just after the war.

The original editor moved on to set up a similar arrangement at Arsenal, so Albert took his place, ushering in decades of achingly diligent number-crunching, as well as innovations such as the Chelsea Book series of the early 1970s.

He achieved legend status later when he moved on to the BBC and Match of the Day, but he was always a Chelsea man at heart. Those of us involved in such things regularly sought clarification on past stats, and he would jovially, patiently, precisely set out the answer.

On our recent book, [club statistician] Paul Dutton and myself found a minor but important anomaly in own-goal scorer figures in a long ago season. Albert was at the helm at the time, but the end-of-season programme gave one statistic, and his yearbook a few months later another.

A brief conversation solved the problem. ‘Well if I changed it over the summer it means I’d found a problem and got to the bottom of it,’ Albert said. As ever, that was good enough for us.

It was some comfort to his children that in his 91st year Albert was still active and sharp as a button. In May he attended fellow Chelsea fan John Motson’s BBC leaving do, then the next day watched his beloved Blues at Wembley beat Manchester United to win the FA Cup. How he will have enjoyed totting up all the data from that victory.

We will all miss him very much.

 

 

ALBERT SEWELL WITH SON DAVE ON FA CUP FINAL DAY BACK IN MAY

Hugh Hastings, now the club’s photo archive manager who worked with and then succeeded Albert Sewell as editor, writes:

For Chelsea fans like myself, who started watching matches at the Bridge in the mid-1960s, the name Albert Sewell is as much part of Chelsea FC as ‘Royal Blue’, ‘The Shed’ and ‘Peter Osgood.’ Albert’s old-fashioned sounding name masked the fact that here was a genuine innovator.

How on earth were the Chelsea board of directors persuaded at the time to remove adverts and create a 16-page programme packed with content and costing sixpence? In those post-war days every penny counted for families and businesses, so it was a genuine culture shock to see Chelsea take this route. But how right they were.

Roll on to 1977 and I am writing a polite letter to Albert at Chelsea, asking if he might be interested in my services as a photographer. I had noticed the club was paying for agency pictures and I thought, as I went to the games and I was a young, 20-year old aspiring professional photographer, I could shoot the action and save the club some money.
 

 

FANS' QUESTIONS ANSWERED BY ALBERT SEWELL BACK IN 1976/77

Albert set me a test of taking a portrait photo of Steve Finnieston at the Bridge, which he was pleased with, and I was taken on. Albert was a bundle of energy and great to work for; full of ideas and novelties and although in his later career he became very well known to viewers of BBC’s Match of the Day as the man with the head for stats, actually he was so much more.

I tried for six years to do justice to his legacy by editing the programme in the same way I thought Albert would do, but I was not in his league, though we achieved a few good things.

Each of us editors in our own times was standing in the footsteps of one man, Albert Sewell, who loved Chelsea and was so driven to share his enthusiasm for the club with its supporters that he invented a publication for it. We are forever in his debt. And by the way, what a gentleman he was. Rest in peace Albert, your work goes on.
 

Remember after winning the cup in 97, des lynam mentioned on TV while all the on pitch celebrations were taking place that their statician Albert was made up as he was a Chelsea fan.

 

1 May 1977 LWT - The Big Match: Chelsea behind the scenes  

Some footage behind the scenes at Stamford Bridge before a Chelsea league game in 1977. Skipper Ray Wilkins can be seen discussing with manager Eddie McCreadie.

1 hour ago, erskblue said:

1 May 1977 LWT - The Big Match: Chelsea behind the scenes  

Some footage behind the scenes at Stamford Bridge before a Chelsea league game in 1977. Skipper Ray Wilkins can be seen discussing with manager Eddie McCreadie.

Used to prefer when teams came out separately especially when the away team came out first you could join in with the swearing with all the adults . Haven't seen one of those orange tops for years can't remember what year we stopped wearing them pre-match.

Just reading Jimmy Greaves’s autobiography. I had no idea that we were so dominant in youth football- between 1955 and 1965 we won the South East Counties every year but one.

Jimmy scored a mind blowing 122 goals in his last year before turning pro ( 57-58)

Hows this for a run of consecutive results from the start of the season. A modest 2-nil against West Ham, followed by Spurs 11-1, Watford 8-0, Millwall 5-0, QPR 9-0, Bexleyheath 12-0, Portsmouth 10-0, Fulham 6-1, QPR 6-0, Charlton 8-0, Palace 7-3, Arsenal 6-2, Brentford 12-1 and 8-2, Fulham 9-0, Millwall 10-0.

Dickie Foss was manager, aided and abetted by chief scout Jimmy Thomson.

Both a couple of duckers and divers and general characters by all accounts.

On 30/06/2018 at 08:53, chi blue said:

Remember after winning the cup in 97, des lynam mentioned on TV while all the on pitch celebrations were taking place that their statician Albert was made up as he was a Chelsea fan.

If your wondering how I remember that, well watched it that night after returning from Wembley and have dug the old tape out a number of times to watch game and celebrations, always puts a smile on my face, wonderful day!!!