Hooliganism goes mainstream
How Panorama shamed Millwall
It begins with a young kid and his older brother, wandering past council blocks and gasometers on the way to the match. We hear him singing, in a high-pitched voice, “When I was young and just a boy, I asked my mother, what will it be? Will it be Arsenal, will it be Spurs? Here’s what she says to me…” Then we’re looking down at The Den, and we’re among supporters wearing scarves and raising pint glasses, and they’re all bellowing, “MILL-WALL, MILL-WALL! MILL-WALL, MILL-WALL, MILL-WALL!” It’s 1977, and Millwall are in the bottom half of the old Second Division. The Sex Pistols have just released
Never Mind the Bollocks, power blackouts are plunging the United Kingdom into darkness, and the Yorkshire Ripper is on the prowl.
Unemployment is at its highest rate since the 1930s and violence is on the rise too, in pubs, in schools, on public transport – and at football.
The tabloids are loving it, splashing “SOCCER SHAME” and “SATURDAY AFTERNOON THUGS” across the front pages. The Mirror introduces a “League of Violence”, ranking fans by the trouble they cause, and The Mail launches a “Thug’s League”.
Hooliganism is big news, although no media outlet has bothered to investigate its root causes. Then the BBC blows the lid off the whole thing with a primetime Panorama documentary that will influence the public’s perception of football fans – and Millwall’s in particular – for years to come.
The programme goes out at 8.10pm on November 14, 1977 after Are You Being Served? and before the watershed, preceded by a warning that it will contain “language you don’t usually hear on television”.
It’s called F-troop, Treatment & The Half-way Line after Millwall’s three hierarchical hooligan firms, and it’s full of uncensored stories of battles and bravado from top boys with names like Harry the Dog, Bobby the Wolf and Mad Pat.
Inevitably, the broadcast is denounced for glorifying football violence, resulting in more tabloid outrage. It’s condemned by MPS, the FA and Millwall, who come to regret agreeing to participate. Forty years later, it remains the game’s most notorious football documentary.
“Millwall is more than a football club, it’s a way of life,” says the opening voiceover. “It offers comradeship, excitement and glory.” But for a largely unsuccessful team who, at this point, have never been in football’s top flight, “the glory comes not from the team but from the reputation of its supporters.”
“We’re always in the Second or Third,” says one fan in a blue and white scarf, “but people are frightened of us all over England.”
“If I wasn’t a Millwall fan I wouldn’t go down The Den,” says another, the aforementioned Harry the Dog. “They’re fucking mad.”
Harry is a top boy with the top firm, F-troop, described in the doc as “the real nutters” who go looking for trouble and often find it. Backup firm Treatment, who wear surgical masks on the terraces, don’t pick fights but are “always there when they happen”. The juniors are The Half-way Line, named after their favourite spot at The Den. “When it comes to aggro,” viewers are told, “they imitate their elders.”
The film includes footage of a dozen or so F-troopers visiting Charlton to charge 2,000 Tottenham fans, and of “self-confessed loony” Harry staging a one-man assault on Bristol Rovers’ home end. Others, sporting their ’70s haircuts, roll neck jumpers and flared jeans, are seen arguing over the need for violence.
“That’s not what football’s about, is it?” says a punter in the Crown and Anchor. “It is these days,” says another. “A good game of football, a good punch-up, a good piss-up,” says Harry the Dog. “That’s all about Millwall.”
Reporter David Taylor spent several weeks with Millwall fans, on the terraces, in pubs and in their homes, to learn what made them tick. “Back then, everyone was wringing their hands about football hooliganism,” Taylor tells FFT. “It seemed like no one had tried to understand why these lads behaved in the way they did, so every Saturday I went to a game in London and stood on the terraces with the hard boys. I went to West Ham, Arsenal, Spurs, Chelsea and Charlton, and when I asked who they all rated, they said Millwall. That’s why we asked to film there. To my surprise, the club agreed.”
Millwall had a long history of trouble on the terraces dating back to at least 1906, when their followers fought with West Ham’s during a Western League game. The Den was closed due to crowd trouble on multiple occasions from 1920 to 1950, and there were high-profile incidents through the ’60s and ’70s involving pitch invasions, violent battles and assaults on referees and opposition players. There was also an infamous incident against Brentford in November 1965, when someone in the Millwall end threw a decommissioned hand grenade onto the Griffin Park pitch.
However, Millwall wasn’t the only club with a hooligan problem, as fans began travelling to games in increasing numbers. Manchester United’s Red Army was emerging, as were the West Ham and Chelsea firms that would become known as the ICF (Inter City Firm) and Headhunters respectively. Weeks before the Millwall documentary aired, United were temporarily banned from the European Cup Winners’ Cup after violence at Saint-etienne.
The high-profile Panorama episode marked Millwall as a target for rival firms, who were irritated by the ‘come and have a go’ bravado.
“We’re the best supporters in the land,” says one Millwall addict in the programme. “We go anywhere. Anyone comes down here, they get slung out. I’ll tell you that now.”
Bobby the Wolf chimes in, “If someone has a go at me, I’ll have a go at them. And I won’t take it from a northerner. I’ve been following this club for years, and I mean years. And I’m not going away for some dirty northern ponce to spit all over me. If he spits over me, I’ll put a fucking pint glass in his head.”
The film’s mixture of violence and unbleeped language in a pre-watershed timeslot created a dilemma for the BBC, and for Taylor. “I can remember spending hours in editing with Bill Cotton, the controller of BBC1, trading swear words,” he recalls. “I agreed to remove three ‘motherfuckers’ in return for keeping a large number of ‘fucks’, the argument being that if you cleaned up the language too much, you’d destroy the programme’s authenticity.”
Perhaps the most revealing segment of the documentary is Taylor’s chat with 21-year-old Billy Plummer. Rocking a frizz of ginger hair and oversized specs, he lives with his mum and mentions a violent dad and a stepfather in prison. He left school at 13, has worked only odd jobs and is aware of his “limited horizons”. He admits, “I’ve never had a chance to fulfil my ambitions. If I have any ambitions, I don’t know what they are.”
Plummer suggests violence is aggravated by football’s confrontational atmosphere. “You get a lot of geezers taking the piss out of you at football,” he continues. “They start chanting at you and you lose your temper.” And it isn’t possible to simply ignore the provocation as, “You don’t want to be called a coward.”
It’s not just about violence. For a lad from a tough background with few prospects, the companionship and sense of belonging he gets from football is a welcome tonic. “Just as long as I’ve got enough money to go and see Millwall, that does me,” says Plummer.
“They’re a shitty team. They’ve never been in the First Division or done nothing like that. But it’s the fans, really. It’s your mates down there, mates you rely on. They’ve never had nothing except their reputation. They’ve always got their reputation.”
The film’s sympathetic approach helped fuel the backlash. Sports minister Denis Howell, a former Football League referee, expressed “grave concern”, calling it irresponsible and “almost an incitement to violence”.
The FA condemned it, suggesting it would “only give further encouragement to this social menace”, while Millwall labelled the episode “grossly exaggerated and insulting”, saying it could authoritatively state there were no more than 200 hooligans among the club’s 10,000 match-going fans.
This minority of supporters caused serious trouble at a Spurs game the following month. Then, in March 1978, The Mirror called on the authorities to “CLOSE THE LION’S DEN!” after disorder during a 6-1 FA Cup defeat to Ipswich. Afterwards, Town boss Bobby Robson issued an uncharacteristically brutal reaction to the hooligan issue, saying, “Get the flamethrowers out and burn the bastards.”
One of the most notorious incidents involving Millwall, whose firm were later known as the Bushwhackers, was the 1985 riot at Luton, which prompted the Thatcher government to threaten an ID card scheme for football fans. And the violence has continued.
After a 2002 play-off defeat to Birmingham, up to 900 hooligans tore through the streets around The Den. There were more ugly scenes in the Millwall end at Wembley in 2013, as the Lions lost an FA Cup semi-final to Wigan. And in January, fans of both teams clashed before an FA Cup tie at home to Everton. During that match, a number of Millwall supporters were recorded chanting racist abuse.
The club has worked extremely hard to curb hooliganism and improve their reputation. The 1977 documentary highlights efforts to engage with people and strengthen relations with the community, and those efforts continue today. Millwall Community Trust and the supporters’ club do important work around the local area. Millwall were named EFL Family Club of the Year in 2017 and in 2018 received their fifth consecutive Family Excellence Award, but the bad reputation has been difficult to shake off.
Some fans feel the Panorama programme was a ‘stitch-up’ and the club has suffered as a result for decades.
Those who knew the main protagonists say they suffered personally, becoming targets for rival fans and in some cases receiving beatings. Two of them later died in tragic circumstances unrelated to football violence, and a proposed 30th anniversary follow-up episode, aiming to catch up with the chief characters, was ditched by the BBC in 2007 due to “death, illness, and camera-shyness”.
Reporter Taylor rejects the accusations of a stitch-up, however, and says the Panorama documentary may have had a positive legacy, bringing the hooligan issue out into the open and forcing the authorities to confront it.
“Years later, I was filming another football story and we visited the Sir Norman Chester Centre for Football Research at the University of Leicester,” he says. Leicester was the first UK institution to conduct in-depth research into hooliganism. “They said they’d been set up in response to our programme, so maybe we achieved something useful after all.”
Part of the appeal of Millwall is its outsider status, as a working class club surrounded by affluent neighbours, untainted by top flight TV money and struggling to keep The Den out of the hands of property developers.
Rightly or wrongly, the barbaric reputation explored in 1977 has helped shape Millwall into a club that others love to hate, and Lions fans have learned to embrace the attitude summed up by their most famous anthem: “No one likes us, we don’t care.”
“GET THE FLAMETHROWERS OUT AND BURN THE BASTARDS” WAS ONE IDEA FROM BOBBY ROBSON