West Ham Till I Die
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Nostalgia

The East End Knees Up

The date was Monday 26th August 1968. An evening kick off at Upton Park and the opposition was Burnley. This was a special fixture for me in two ways. The first game I had ever been to was the season before at Upton Park and the opposition that day had also been Burnley. The other special thing for West Ham that night was, because it was a Monday and the other teams in the old 1st Division were playing their catch up game the following days, a win would send us top of the league albeit for a day or two. This was West Ham’s sixth game of the season after three wins, a draw and a defeat in the first five.
West Ham won 5-0 that night with two goals from Hurst and Brooking and one from Peters. It did not matter that Leeds, who were second, had two games in hand…We Were Top!! What happened on Green Street that night has forever been etched in my memory. Being August it was still light as the fans moved from the ground and onto Green St. Hammers fans formed rows and rows stretched right across the road, locked arms and started the biggest Knees Up Mother Brown I have ever seen. The high kicking rows moved onward and upward towards Upton Park train station, singing their song as raucously as they could and a little 12yo boy, who had told his mum that he was going to the match with a friend and his dad (fib), was having the time of his life!

Those who remember the days when the crowd swirls and collapses behind the goal were common may also recall that the song the North Bank faithful used to sing to start the push from the back, was indeed Knees Up Mother Brown. “Oh my what a rotten song” may have been one of the verses but it was an iconic song to the East End and also for West Ham United. Whilst “Bubbles” has been our own anthem for many years now, I guess the all seated stadiums have put an end to the jig that simply must accompany the singing of the Knees Up, so in effect it is not heard anymore in the ground. I wonder if that famous jig will be repeated down Green Street after the last ever match at the Boleyn in 2015/16?

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