Brown Out
Review By Simon Redfern (The Independent)
Sunday, 10 February 2008
The autobiography of Sunderland's prolific striker Len Shackleton famously contained a chapter entitled 'The Average Director's Knowledge of Football', which consisted of a single blank page. But it is not an accusation that could be levelled at Terence Brown, the chairman of West Ham for 15 turbulent years from 1992. Not only did he play at a decent level but he found time in between building a property empire to watch many hundreds of games, not all involving his beloved Irons. A biography of this decent, reticent man could have had strictly limited appeal. Fortunately, Brian Belton has broadened his scope to produce an engrossing history of the club as it passed from being an East End family concern into Icelandic ownership, though his innumerable (and often irrelevant) asides about his own love of West Ham are an irritation. His verdict on the Brown era is ultimately positive: Brown Out perhaps, but certainly not a total power failure.
Review By Iain Dale
February 8, 2008
I spent most of my flight to Washington reading a new book by Brian Belton (author of several Hammers related tomes) called BROWN OUT! It was a slightly weird book in some ways - neither one thing nor the other. It was part biography, part hagiography, part history of the last decade or so at Upton Park. It certainly puts Terry Brown’s side of the story - and no bad thing too, but I did wonder how the book had actually come about. As a commercial enterprise I can’t see how it can have worked, so the reader is left asking if Mr Brown dipped into his substantial pockets to contribute to the costs of writing and publishing it. If that was the case, the reader should have been told somewhere in the book. But maybe I am nitpicking.
Belton writes in an engaging manner and isn’t backward in inserting himself into the narrative. On occasion this can irritate, but there’s no doubt about it that the man is a Hammer through and through, so he usually gets away with it as the reader can easily relate to his own experience.
Although I quite enjoyed the book I felt there were some incidents which were glossed over a little - Harry Redknapp’s departure being one. If you’re going to write a book like this you need to give the reader some kind of insight or detail that he hadn’t had before. In this, I think Belton fails in a number of areas. Anyone who reads this book is going to have quite a bit of knowledge about what happened, so a rehash of the facts isn’t going to suffice. It has to be said that on other occasions Belton does indeed give good insight into what went on - the Bond saga being a prime example. In his description of the players’ reaction and the financial aspects, he tolf me quite a bit that I didn’t know.
So all in all, this book is like the curate’s egg - good in parts. But well worth a read.
Fay Taylor – Queen of Speedway
Review By Ian Kerr
Motorcycling has always attracted its share of individuals, people with strong personalities that thrive in an environment that allows such temperaments to do well. To a certain extent it is such people who then inspire others and attract them into the magical world of motorcycling where you can really shine on your own, or be part of a team if you so wish.
As the title suggests, Fay Taylour was the Queen of Speedway, both here and in Australia and New Zealand, at least until they banned women from the sport in 1930. But, before Speedway she was a highly proficient motorcyclist in several other disciplines, such as scrambles and grass track, not mention trials.
She was a Gold Medal winner in the ACU Six Days Trial as well as being a medal winner in events of note like the Colmore and Bemrose Trials. In short she was a highly competent all-round motorcyclist and was in fact a member of the official Rudge Trials team when she worked for the British manufacturer in the twenties.
But, it is her achievements in the sport of Speedway for which she is best known; although she later went onto compete as a midget car racer, endurance car racer and she also showed some form at legendary banked circuit at Brooklands on four wheels.
Well known Speedway historian and writer Brian Belton has, with the aid of her own collection of press cuttings and writing, along with general research come up with an excellent work about this pioneering female rider who was capable of beating men at their own game.
It is a fascinating read, with direct quotes from the press at the time backing up the general text. In some ways it is shame that it concentrates on the speedway years because you end up wanting to know everything about this enigmatic woman, but her life after Speedway is only just briefly mentioned.
She spent time in America and tried to get a film made about her life for instance, and there is a lot more. However, she died in England in 1983 at the age of 75 without anybody ever taking her up on her ideas. You can’t help thinking that somebody missed the chance of an Oscar given the contents of this book alone!
However, like all such books you learn about the whole sport and motorcycling in general, which increases your knowledge and helps you to understand all aspects of motorcycle history. A far better read than any current biography about a footballer with little to say about a mediocre life, or ability to inspire!
British Baseball and the West Ham Club Reviews
J. Wallace "British Baseball fan"
This book opened my eyes to the whole UK Baseball scene and it made me think how much work was done then and the work that needs to be done now to bring baseball to the hearts and minds of the people of this fair isle.
The amout of research that Josh and Brian A Belton did for this book is amazing. The pictures and the newspaper articles that were found and included are great. They should be applauded for a brilliant book. Its not only a British Baseball book its also included the social and economic history of the early 20th century in and around London at that time.
If you want to know about British Baseball i would thoroughly recommend that you read it.
Matt Smith - Baseball GB
British baseball fans constantly have to battle against the prejudices and preconceptions of their fellow countrymen, not least of which is the belief that the sport has no history on these shores. The claim is often difficult to argue against because even a well-read Brit, who could tell you Ted Williams’ career batting average in a heartbeat, doesn’t know a great deal about their homeland’s relationship with the game. Thankfully, British Baseball and the West Ham Club provides the reader with all the information they will need to answer their critical compatriots.
The books co-author Josh Chetwynd will be known to many as the co-presenter on Five’s coverage of MLB. Coupled with his experience playing in the British baseball league and for the national side, he is the perfect person to bring the history of British baseball to life. Alongside Brian Belton, a considerable amount of research has been undertaken to piece together a story that has never been told in such detail before.
Although the title may lead you to believe this is a book about an individual team, it is in fact a more wide-ranging look at how British baseball has developed since the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The narrative allows Chetwynd to take a slight detour on two occasions; focusing on the 1936 Olympics and the U.S. Team’s visit to Britain, and the career of one Roland Gladu. The “Canadian Babe Ruth” played for the West Ham club in 1936 and 1937 and the description of his nomadic career provides a great insight into what life was like for ballplayers outside of the Majors in those times (Gladu did eventually make twenty-one appearances for the Boston Braves in 1944).
The book tells the history of British baseball as “a story of historical campaigning by a courageous and committed few against huge sporting, economic, and social resistance set within a transatlantic struggle for status, wealth and power”. The tale can be split into three main periods: pre-WW1 promise, blossoming between the wars and stop-start meanderings after 1945.
Prior to 1914, baseball made its first tentative steps in Britain via a series of small initiatives. In 1874 and 1888, American major leaguers sailed to the U.K. with the intention of introducing their game to a new audience. Such efforts were followed by the growth of British participation in the sport, largely involving footballers who wanted to keep fit over the summer. Football fans today would perhaps be shocked to learn of baseball games being played in their stadiums and that they often could draw a very respectable crowd. Around 4,000 fans descended on Tottenham’s White Hart Lane to watch Spurs’s baseball team win the British Championship in 1906 and when the U.S. Army and Navy played a game in July 1918, a crowd of 38,000, including King George V, filled Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge ground.
Baseball’s ‘golden’ period in Britain took place between the wars as various leagues were formed and proved to be popular. The authors focus particularly on the London Major Baseball League, providing a comprehensive overview of the teams involved, how they were formed, where they played and a detailed account of the two seasons that the league was at its height: 1936 and 1937. Teams such as the West Ham club, the Romford Wasps, the Hackney Royals, the Catford Saints, and White City all played in a league that could regularly draw between 4,000 to 8,000 fans. Baseball was also popular in the north (most notably with the Yorkshire baseball league), to the extent that 11,000 locals packed out Hull’s Craven Park to witness the home town team defeat the Romford Wasps in the 1937 Challenge Cup Final. There were definite signs that baseball was beginning to win over communities in certain areas and that foundations were being laid for a promising future.
Sadly, World War Two intervened and British baseball has never really recovered. Local leagues have started brightly before petering out due to lack of funds and other obstacles. The pattern of hope followed by disappointment was exemplified in 2005 by London being awarded the 2012 Olympics, only for the International Olympic Committee to throw baseball and softball out of the Games two days later.
Yet British Baseball and the West Ham Club shows what can be achieved and that the idea of baseball teams drawing crowds (even on a small scale) is not far fetched. Two key factors helped the sport to grow in the thirties and they are equally relevant today.
Firstly, British baseball benefited from several entrepreneurs who had the necessary vision and funding to put an organized and entertaining product on the field. John Moores, L.D. Wood, and Alf Grogan provided essential leadership and enthusiasm to allow teams to become part of their local communities, forming leagues that produced regular ball games for fans to watch and giving local youngsters the opportunity to play the game themselves.
Secondly, British baseball was able to utilise venues such as football stadiums and, particularly in London, greyhound stadiums to showcase the sport (one of the many excellent photos in this book shows an aerial view of Romford Stadium replete with a baseball diamond on the grass within the racing oval). They were far from perfect, but they provided a more professional and appealing venue to potential spectators than an all-grass diamond in a park. To evoke the spirit of Field of Dreams, building more baseball diamonds would greatly help the sport’s development in this country. A series of diamonds around the British Isles could act as local hubs where youngsters could play the game on ‘real’ ballfields and families could spend an afternoon doing something different from going to the cinema or paying £100+ to watch ninety minutes of football. Maybe it’s a dream (I doubt there are many people out there willing to provide funding), but it’s one worth fighting for.
There is a quote in this book from 1910 by a reporter in The County of Middlesex Independent newspaper in which he states: “baseball is not glorified rounders; it is a scientific game for men. Don’t think it is what one would call a ‘kid’s game’, because it isn’t”. Nearly one hundred years on, many Brits still haven’t adapted to this way of thinking, but British Baseball and the West Ham Club proves that it is possible for baseball to flourish, even as a minority sport.
As comprehensively as the sources allow, the book provides a fascinating overview of baseball’s history in Britain, while using the case study of West Ham to afford the reader a more detailed understanding of baseball in the 1930s. As something of a specialist book, it is slightly on the expensive side, but the knowledge a British baseball fan will gain about the sport’s heritage in their homeland makes it worth the investment.
Gypsy Ethnicity
The book explores the notion of Gypsy and Traveller ethnicity and provides a critique of the conceptual basis of racial and ethnic categorisation. An analysis of the post-war housing situation is given in order to illustrate a connection between social and economic conditions, legislation affecting gypsies and travellers and the visibility and general consciousness of the gypsy and traveller population.
The originality of the book lies in its argument that the position of gypsies and travellers largely arises out of social conditions and interaction rather than political, biological or ideological determinants. It puts forward the notion of an ethnic narrative of traveller identity and illustrates how variations of this have been defensively deployed by some travellers and elaborated on by theorists.
Belton focuses on the social generation of travellers as a cultural, ethnic and racial categorization, offering a rational explanation of the development of an itinerant population that is less ambiguous and more informative in terms of the social nature of the gypsy and traveller position than interpretations based on 'blood', 'breed', 'stock', ethnicity or race that dominate the literature.