A Mythical Rovers Derby, Melchester v Felchester: Two Very Different English Fictional Football Fantasies

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Creative Writing, Leisure activities, Media & Communications, Memorabilia, Popular Culture, Sport

The ardent British football fan while waiting for match day or counting down the off-season days to next August can often be found lapping up all the available literature he or she can get their hands on about the beloved round ball game. The appetite for football fiction extends to the graphic novel and it’s predecessor the comic book. The perennially popular exemplar of this quintessential “Boy’s Own” exploits genre is Roy of the Rovers. 

[R] 17-y-o Roy Race on his ‘debut’

The comic Roy of the Rovers had its debut in Tiger magazine in 1954…the strip follows the fortunes of fictional football team Melchester Rovers, with the spotlight very much on its star centre forward Roy Race. Captain Roy and his team invariably find themselves the underdogs, battling adversity, foul play, injuries and bad luck, somehow in the end they manage to beat the odds and spectacularly win the game in the last minute usually with a corker of a goal by Roy (for supposed ‘underdogs’ Melchester Rovers are decided overachievers – over the years racking up eight fictional FA cups, three European cups and one UEFA cup!).

Roy on the field epitomises fair play (often in contrast to his opponents), his personality embodies all the virtues of “sportsmanship, etiquette and why a fractured ankle, a broken rib and an early case of polio should never stand between a determined team captain and victory in FA cups” (McGinty). Roy’s Rovers competed against the other teams in the League—like their arch-rivals Tynefield United—who never come close to ever matching up to the ethical pedigree of Melchester Rovers.

Roy of the Rovers moments
Roy of the Rovers permeates English football culture to the extent that it is a standard trope for fans of the game to invoke the comic strip to describe memorable sporting incidents, unexpected comebacks, miraculous wins from behind, etc.

Roy is beyond the slightest doubt the absolute gun player in Melchester’s colours, however it’s not quite a one man band. He gets stirling assistance from teammates, most notably from Johnny Dexter the team’s “hard man” and goalie Gordon (“the safest hands in soccer”) Stewart (cf. Gordon Banks).

The créme de la créme, the “Roy of the Rovers Annuals” were a staple for boys each year…over the years of the publication Roy and his team go through all the highs and lows – relegation to Second Division; kidnapping of players; a terrorist attack; the club experiences financial calamities and so on. In the process Roy briefly defects at one time to a rival club before returning to the fold before losing a leg in a skiing accident. After enforced retirement he becomes Melchester manager and his son Rocky assumes the mantle of the side’s star striker.

[B] Roy with his Prince Valiant hairstyle

By the early 1990s, with the inevitable ebbing of ROTR’s popularity, the publication folded. However, at several intervals, the comic, phoenix-like, has been resurrected for the diehearts, most recently in 2018.

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Socialism in one football club
In 1988 the BBC produced a two series radio program drawing inspiration from the legendary Roy of the Rovers comic but taking it in a very different direction. Lenin of the Rovers, “the story of Britain’s only communist football club”, written by Marcus Berkman, is both spoof and affectionate satire, sending up the football comic classic while retaining a sliver of nostalgia both for Roy of the Rovers and the British game of yesteryear. Lenin of the Rovers conversely takes a massive swipe at the contemporary (that is, as at 1988) world of Brit soccer, ridiculing big game commentators and pundits alike, skewering top-flight players for being overpaid, pampered show-ponies with their “in-car leopard skin yoghurt dispensers” (nothing’s changed!). Also in the program’s cross-hairs is the run amuck degree of football sponsorship (eg, the “Heinz Sandwich Spread FA Cup”) and stockbroker hooligans (Hughes). The LCD gutter press also gets a pummeling for its bald-faced lies and facile and trivalising reporting (eg, “Curvy Corinne’s” tabloid article in The Daily Tits: “My night of lust with Ralph Coates”✧).

The story line is pure farce, supposedly detailing the experiences of communist East European football player Ricky Lenin (Alexei Sayle in a heavily accented voice which appears to be channelling his Balowski family character from The Young Ones) at Midlands club Felchester Rovers. Lenin is portrayed as a “tactical mastermind/balding midfield maestro” but more accurately might be described as thick as two planks. Through constant rhetorical flourishes Lenin lectures the team on dialectical materialism, the inevitable destiny of Felchester Rovers football club*, but he is exposed as a faux Marxist for covertly trying to enrich himself through football connexions. Lenin launches a proletarian coup which removes the club’s manager Ray Royce (a  transparent pun on Roy Race), and then himself has to ward off a challenge from Felchester’s “burly defender” Stevie Stalin and “hard nut” henchman Terry Trotsky.

A riotous hoot
Many misadventures follow as Lenin and the club bungle their way through sex scandals, corruption and dodgy business deals, and a disastrous mid-season holiday in a war-torn Central American banana republic (El Telvador)+. The latter episode spoofs cult movie Apocalypse Now (“I love the smell of shin-pads in the morning”), with a side reference to the WWII football plot of Escape to Victory!

In the episode where Felchester travel to Germany to play Borussia Mönchenpastry (cringe!), they encounter diabolical German tabloid publisher Max Gut, a thinly disguised Robert Maxwell. Piss-taking comes fast and furious in LOTR, another episode involving Ricky putting out feelers for a move across the Irish Sea to represent the Republic of Ireland national whose team sheet reads like the United Nations with not a solitary Gaelic name in it! One of the team apparently qualified for Ireland due to having once read a James Joyce novel!

A recurring device sprinkled liberally through Lenin of the Rovers has Ricky Lenin speaking random lines from well-known pop songs – “We are family! I have all my sisters with me”; “A rebel to the core”, “Don’t go breaking my heart“, etc. ad nauseum.

From go to whoa it’s a pun bonanza, reminding me a lot of those exquisite Sixties radio comedies like I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. Felchester’s Euro opponent is Swiss club FC Toblerone (groan!). Their arch-rivals in the English comp is the thuggish Crunchthorpe United, however the Felchester team itself triumphs in the Cup employing the same tactics of illegal crunching tackles and skilless brawn. Needless to say that in the computer football universe, Felchester Rovers would be Melchester’s Crunchthorpe United.

 

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✧ LOTR takes no prisoners with the reputations of past FA stars with a constant flow of running gags at their expense (particularly cruel on Ralph Coates)

* with ideological fidelity he also devises a “five year goal plan” for the club, prompting his teammates to slag Arsenal for its “five goals a year plan”

+ there’s a reference to Terry Venables here, the former English manager’s nickname was “El Tel”

 

Reference material:

‘A teen magazine for boys — but will they buy it?’, The Scotsman, Stephen McGinty, 15-Jan-2004, www.thescotsman.co.uk

‘Lenin of the Rovers’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org

‘Radio revolution’, Rob Hughes, When Saturday Comes, November 2010, www.wsc.co.uk

‘Lenin on the goalpost’, Paul Shaffer, Lion and Unicorn, 2017, www.thelionandunicorn.wordpress.com

A Shipwreck Graveyard at the Top of the Harbour

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Coastal geology & environment, Local history, Military history, Natural Environment

Rusting and decaying dinosaurs of the sea moored permanently off Sydney Olympic Park

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Walkers and cyclists doing the path section of Sydney Olympic Park that stretches from Bennelong Speedway (oops! I mean Parkway) to the Badu Mangroves that guard the northern edge of Bicentennial Park would be familiar with the sight of half-a-dozen or so shipwrecks sitting calmly in the waters of Homebush Bay.

🔺 HMAS Karangi: once an important contributor in the defence of Darwin against the Japanese attack, now decomposing incrementally in the bay

🔺 the “interpretative and scenic lookout”

ჱჲს A metal plaque on the ground alongside the trail directs the curious passerby to an old wooden viewing platform where you can observe these maritime relics redolent of rotting timber and rusting metal. This spot contains the ship-breaking ramp (or what remains of it) that was used to dismember these ex-naval vessels. Missing is the wooden crane (presumably submerged) and the telescope.

🔺 The ship-breaking dock

ჱჲს The story of how these ships ended up here begins in 1966 when the Maritime Services Board approved the use of land here as a ship-breaking yard for the Port of Sydney. From 1970 till to the early Nineties private companies leased the yard to demolish hulks which had surpassed their use-by-date.

ჱჲს With the passage of time, left to nature and the elements, a number of these ex-ships have experienced an almost complete organic makeover. The dense mangroves of the bay have invaded the vessels, turning them into what one observer described as “a floating mangrove forest” (May Ly) and another, “a floating rusty relic forest” (Ruth Spitzer). The stricken and abandoned vessels are now a haven for local coastal birdlife (at dusk the hovering and nesting white gulls are easy to spot aboard the arboreal hulls).

ჱჲს The most striking example of this process of afforestation of wrecks is the SS Ayrfield. The UK-built steam collier, which ended up in Homebush Bay in 1972 after World War 2 service, is spectacularly overgrown with mangroves, a dense armada of trees literally bursting out of the ship’s disappearing hull and threatening to swallow it whole! High-rise residents in the Wentworth Point estate and people  strolling along the waterfront of the Point are afforded the best views of the organically-refashioned Ayrfield.

ჱჲს Also warranting special mention for a similar makeover courtesy of its biotic vibrancy–albeit much more obscurely located around the bend close to the Waterbird Sanctuary–is the 1924-built SS Heroic. The Heroic, a steam tug boat, saw service in both world wars before being consigned to the Homebush Bay cast-iron graveyard. Hidden behind a cloak of thick mangroves, you need to position yourself right on the muddy edge of the water and crane your neck to get a decent sighter of the nature-engulfed old tug boat. Its predicament, mirrors the Ayrfield’s but in a less advanced stage of arboreal encroachment.

ነሃጣፈነ A curious footnote to the 50 year-presence of the scuttled and abandoned ships in Homebush Bay is that the vessels, despite the egregiously bad state they are in, are ‘protected’ by legislation (under the Commonwealth Historic Shipwrecks Act 1976).

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Materials referenced:

‘Shipwrecks of Homebush Bay’, (May Ly), 30-Jul-2013, www.weekendnotes.com

‘Graveyards of a different kind at Homebush Bay’, (Ruth Spitzer), 2015, www.ruthspitzer.com

Parramatta Park Peripathetically

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Leisure activities, Local history

 

A journey in time from government domain to “people’s park”

Leaving the fringe of Parramatta CBD at O’Connell Street, we venture west onto the north bank of Parramatta Park… traditionally, before the white colonial takeover, this was Burramatta Darug country. Passing the car park at the front of Bankwest Stadium, we soon arrive at the park’s first slice of colonial history. The sloping grassland running down to the river—now the habitat mainly of ibises and swamp hens—was once Government Farm, the infant Sydney colony’s first successful farm. The early settlers (such as Dodd’s Farm) found the undulating fertile land here more conducive to growing crops¹ than the sandy soil and unreliable water supply at Farm Cove.The colony’s first governor Arthur Phillip gave the Parramatta area its first English name, Rose Hill².

Following the riverside path we come to the Old Kings Oval with its small Doug Walters Pavilion, a reminder that the 60s and 70s star cricketer played for the local Cumberland team when he first came to Sydney. The name of the oval is a clue to the fact that the prestigious independent boys school, the Kings School, occupied the surrounding land for 130 years (to the late 1960s). A sign on the pathway alerts us to another by-gone sporting activity of the park – there was also a (horse)racetrack that snaked around the river in the early colonial days.

If we cross the skimpy narrow metal foot bridge and head back towards O’Connell Street, we can spot the park’s principal building, Old Government House, an impressive grand Georgian mansion with a fascinating life story. Construction commenced in 1799, thus the UNESCO-listed structure is the oldest surviving public building in Australia. For the early governors this was effectively a country retreat for them, a preferred residence because of it’s superior air and distance from the crime-infested, unsanitary conditions of Sydney Town.

From 1910 Government House was leased to the Kings School, giving it another imprint on the park’s history. Till 1965 the former governors’ residence was home to junior boarders of the school. Two years after that the school moved holus-bolus to North Parramatta. Today OGH operates as a National Trust heritage site and the repository of Australia’s best collection of early 1800s colonial furniture.

Leaving OGH and continuing in the direction of Westmead we pass Governor Brisbane’s Roman-style bath house. It fell into a dilapidated state by the late 19th century and was subsequently converted (or reduced) into a (small) bandstand, which is it’s present state of obsolescence.

Just a bit further on from the Bath House we arrive at a curious-looking military monument to the Boer War. Mounted on a high platform supported by thick classical columns is a small 19th century canon on wheels. Menacing positioned at such an elevated vantage-point, you could just imagine it being used to take potshots at pesky Afrikaner farmer-soldiers skulking round the Transvaal veld or on the Rand.

Also near here we happen upon another, very different monument. This represents a tribute to a home-grown aviator pioneer of the Parramatta district, William Ewart Hart. The stone inscription informs us that he was “Parramatta’s Flying Dentist” circa 1912, believed to be the first Australian to fly an aircraft on this continent.

Looping round the path onto Railway Pde we take the road back to O’Connell St and the last stop on our ramble around Parra Park. The George St Gatehouse is one of six such guarding the entrances to the park. Picture-book English Tudor in style, it’s the most iconic, and since it was restored in 2014, the most aesthetically pleasing of the gatehouses.

Map identifying the main physical sections of Parra Park: Mill Race Flat, Pavilion Flat, The Crescent, Cattle Paddock, Salter’s Field, Old Orchard, West Domain.

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¹ the result of indigenous land management methods like the regular burning of grasslands

² the first settlement in Parramatta (1788) was a redoubt built by soldiers at The Crescent, a geological feature comprising flat alluvial ground contained by a bend in the river, situated to the south-west of OGH

Bibliography
‘Rose Hill and Government Farm’, Parramatta Park, www.parrapark.com.au

‘Old Government House’, (Sonya Gellert), Discover Parramatta, www.discoverparramatta.com.au

Levins, Chris, Parramatta Park, Dictionary of Sydney, 2010, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/parramatta_park, viewed 27 Feb 2021

‘The Crescent’, (Michaela Ann Cameron), Dictionary of Sydney, 2015, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/