Millwall Football Club
There can’t be many more fervent hotbeds of football than the East End, and Tower Hamlets has certainly produced more than its fair share of soccer talent.
Yet it’s an irony that though the borough gave birth to two of the oldest and established football league teams, nowadays both play outside the area.
West Ham United have been gone for the best part of a century. Millwall, meanwhile, were still local lads until 1910, when they left the Isle of Dogs for a new home south of the river.
But while they may have a reputation for hard-battling football on the pitch, it goes hand-in-hand with an unfortunate reputation for crowd trouble off it – and it’s a reputation that has existed for almost as long as the club itself.
Like many of the early league teams, Millwall started off as a works side, giving the employees of JT Morton’s jam and marmalade works a welcome dose of exercise.
When the club was formed in 1885 the company’s works, in West Ferry Road, on the Isle of Dogs, was still a new operation.
Millwall Dock, at the southern end of the island, had only opened in 1864 – before that Millwall was a remote and unpopulated part of London.
But very soon the area was firmly industrial and populated with immigrant labour.
Nearly all of the workers at Morton’s were Scottish immigrants. In honour of their homeland they adopted the blue and white of the Scots flag as their team colours, and took the lion rampant of their country’s flag as their symbol. The football club they set up was called Millwall Rovers.
And the team had a ready-made fan base, in the thousands of men and boys who poured onto the island to work in the new docks. The uncompromising play of the Scots and the no-nonsense demands of the fans made Millwall a fearsome place to visit.
Things started badly though. The first ever fixture, on October 3, 1885, was against Fillebrook, from Leyton. Millwall lost 5-0.
The side gradually improved joining the old Southern League, and reaching the semi-finals of the FA Cup in 1903, losing 3-0 to Derby County in front of 45,000 fans at Villa Park.
Having gone through a name change to Millwall Athletic, they now became plain Millwall FC and played on a number of sites on the Isle of Dogs before moving to The Den at New Cross in 1910.
The 1930s and 40s saw huge gates of 40,000 plus, and the noise of the crowd saw The Den became one of the most feared grounds in the country. Cold Blow Lane was closed on a number of occasions as violence spilled on to the pitch and the streets around.
The decades since have seen the Lions yo-yoing up and down through the divisions, at one point becoming founder members of the old Fourth (now Third Division) by virtue of a relegation!
Current Spurs boss George Graham took over in 1982, and handed a debut to the young Teddy Sheringham. Graham guided the club back up to the Second Division, before leaving for Arsenal.
New boss John Docherty led Millwall to the Second Division championship in 1988 and First Division football for the first time in the club’s history.
Sheringham and Tony Cascarino scored the goals that put Millwall on top of the league, hitting the heights with a 3-2 win over QPR at The Den on October 1, 1988.
For the fans it seemed too good to be true. Sadly it was. Millwall finished tenth that season and, the following year, the rot set in. After briefly topping the table again, the Lions failed to win any of their last 20 games, and were relegated.
The subsequent years have been traumatic for Millwall – moving grounds, seeing a bewildering succession of bosses and currently sitting in Division Two.
But as a new season gets under way, the fans can dream about 40,000 crowds and topping the table.