For some people, Hull City didn’t exist until May 2008, when the club joined the upper echelons and entered the national consciousness. For long time City fans though, the Tigers are far more than a single match or season, they are the sum of childhood memories of standing on Boothferry Park’s ‘well’, of recollections of Simon Gray coach trips to away games, even of events not witnessed first hand but passed down from a previous generation of Tiger Nationals. Hull City is a rich tapestry comprised of many individual and overlapping threads.

Some threads are more important than others though, and we set out to define what it is that makes Hull City unique, different from every other club in the land. What are the 100 key events, people, sights and sounds that combine to form the soul of Hull City? Not every entry has to be of monumental historic importance, but it has to be quintessentially Hull City…

PAYTON & SWAN
Dramatis Personae

A terrific strike partnership that should never have been, really. Peter Swan wasn’t even signed as a centre forward when City shelled out a record £200,000 for him in 1989, and absolutely hated playing up front.

But, with Keith Edwards and Billy Whitehurst both buggering off the following season and Dave Bamber ultimately ending up as a worthless yet expensive piece of shit, needs must and the big centre back, who had a scoring record as an emergency striker at previous club Leeds United (including a consolation at Boothferry Park on the same day youth product Andy Payton grabbed his first senior Tigers goal) was shoved up the field.

It also shouldn’t have worked because the two evidently didn’t get on. The brilliant, short, mulleted Payton was beyond archetype as the selfish centre forward, both in the way he played and the surly air he gave off in interviews and the like. He felt a strike partner, even a good one who benefited his own game, was some kind of occupational hazard.

Yet Swan aided Payton and Payton helped Swan, if only to appear professional, and the two scored for fun in Stan Ternent’s unspeakably abysmal team of 1990-91, one of the more freakish and unlikely statistics in Hull City history. Swan was tall and courageous and scored most of his goals while airborne, whereas Payton relied on flicks and crosses or simply his own pace and a self-confidence bordering on narcissism to earn the many goals he stuck away.

Sadly, the defence was way too often unable to prevent a similar concession rate to the strike rate at the other end, and ultimately it was Payton and Swan alone who benefited from their prolific association as City were horribly relegated. Payton went to Middlesbrough for £750,000 a few months into the next season after Swan had already offed it in the summer, heading for Port Vale.

Payton maintained, publicly, his love for Hull City afterwards following a nomadic career which involved many moves to acquire signing-on fees (and probably avoid bills, fines and divorce lawyers) whereas Swan built a local media career which proved successful enough to warrant an autobiography that was panned in reviews but did reveal his dislike and mistrust towards Payton. Thankfully, that they worked together so well, even when shoddy defending at the other end meant it almost didn’t matter, will remain the dominant memory of them. It ultimately wasn’t relevant that they weren’t particularly enamoured with one another. All that was important was that they were ace.

HALFTIME V. LIVERPOOL (1989)
Heights of joy

So rarely in the life of a lower league football club do significant moments arise of genuine global proportions. Perhaps this new Premier League Tiger breed has lost sight of what a remarkable achievement it can be, to briefly best a genuine world class footballing side. In 1989 the Tigers, an established second tier side thanks to the calm administrations of manager Brian Horton but now piloted by dour Leeds-type Eddie Gray, reached the Fifth Round of the FA Cup after solid wins at Cardiff and Bradford and drew a plum tie at home to 80s global phenomenon Liverpool.

The masses crammed into Boothferry Park (the attendance of 20,058 in the old place that day was never bettered) and watched in amazement as goals from bludgeoner Billy Whitehurst and arch-poacher Keith Edwards saw City return to the dressing room at half time with an unlikely 2-1 lead. Boothferry Park witnessed a remarkable spectacle at half time, an almost deafening hum of people talking in low tones to each other about how unbelievable this all was. It was a sound that many football fans will never experience.

Alas, it all faded away as quickly as it arose. Liverpool soon assumed a second half lead and the plucky Tigers went down 2-3. City narrowly avoided relegation while Liverpool suffered their worst of tragedies two months later when the South Yorkshire Police force facilitated the death of 96 supporters in the sheep pens of Hillsborough. But just for a moment, whispering scarcely credible predictions over steaming cups of half-time Bovril, the little guys from Hull believed they were going to rock the footballing world. Nice feeling, that.

 

ASSOCIATE MEMBERS CUP FINAL – NOT AT WEMBLEY
That’s SO Hull City

A competition which has struggled on manfully under the weight of high street sponsors like Sherpa Van, Autoglass and, currently, Johnstone’s Paint, the Associate Members Cup final made its debut in the 1983-4 season in an effort to give lower division clubs the chance of proper silverware and an appearance at Wembley. Yet the second of those laudable incentives didn’t happen in its first year as the national stadium’s pitch had been ruined by the Horse of the Year show – and obviously that had to be the year Hull City got to the final.

It was an easy path that Colin Appleton’s men beat through the competition, defeating northerly foes like York City and Sheffield United on the way to a final that, in any other circumstance at all, would have had the Tiger Nation dancing in the streets at the prospect of a first ever visit to the Twin Towers. Once that dream had been shelved by equine vandals and their jodhpured friends, the mood went from disappointed to perplexed when it was decided that Boothferry Park would host the match, awarding the Tigers an obvious and clearly unfair home advantage for a one-off, winner-takes-all occasion.

Of course, by the time City played Tranmere in the semi-final, the promotion from the third tier dream had been shattered courtesy of one poxy goal, and Appleton had announced immediately after the crucial game at Burnley that he was doing one. Chris Chilton had to lift the heads of a gutted team three days later as they beat Tranmere 4-1 in the semis, but it was all too much at Boothferry Park once the final came. Bournemouth won the game 2-1 and took the trophy back to Dorset. In pretty much one fell swoop City had lost out on promotion, lost out on a visit to Wembley, lost out on a proper trophy and lost a good manager.

Naturally every subsequent final in this competition until the original Wembley was torn down made it to the great stadium, while City had to wait another 24 years to get there. Typical.

 

BILLY BLY
Dramatis Personae

Hull City’s history might be a bit underwhelming, but our history of goalkeepers most certainly isn’t. From Eddie Roughley, reputed to have been so outstanding in Hull City’s first serious stab at promotion to Division One, to the underappreciated Boaz Myhill more often than not standing as firm as could be expected behind such a porous Premiership defence, the list of Hull City greats is heavily weighted in favour of custodians of the leather.

Boaz would rightly have his supporters in an all-time City XI, as might George Maddison, Maurice Swan, Ian McKechnie, Jeff Wealands, Alan Fettis and maybe even Roy Carroll. In all likelihood, however, the green jersey would go to one of two men: Tony Norman or Billy Bly. In the event of a tie, the decision would have to go on who has the most pre-season trophies named after them.

Bly was born in Newcastle in 1920 and came through his home town club’s youth system. It was while playing for Walker Celtic that he caught the eye of Ernie Blackburn and joined City as an apprentice in August 1937. However, Bly had to wait until April 1939 to make his debut at Rotherham in a 2-0 win though he was to remain City’s first-choice keeper for the remainder of the season. The war seemingly ended Bly’s City career before it had begun. Though he was to turn out for the club in a few wartime games, there could have been no clues that this skinny keeper who had played only a handful of games before the commencement of hostilities in Europe was going to stamp his name all over the history of the Tigers.

It was a 0-0 draw at home to Lincoln City in August 1946 in which Billy Bly’s City career started in earnest. He was first choice for City that day, and was to remain so until March 1960. Indeed had it not have been for a series of unfortunate injuries (Bly was reputed to be ‘the most injured man in football’ at the time) and the war robbing him of six years of his career, one can only wonder just how many more appearances than the eventual 456 Bly would have racked up in his 22 years at Hull City.

Bly’s star was to rise quickly. In the hubbub that surrounded Raich Carter’s appointment and the club’s rise in the next couple of years from half-decent Division Three (North) team to being on the verge of promotion to the First Division, Bly was outstanding. Carter’s class may have been taking the plaudits on a national scale, but among the City faithful Bly’s popularity was second to none. In the famous 1949 FA Cup run , Bly kept an impressive clean sheet at Stoke in a 2-0 win to set up the famous Sixth Round tie at home to Manchester United. The 55,019 fans at Boothferry Park that day saw Bly break his nose in the first-half, and bravely play on despite clearly being concussed. It was such devotion to the cause that means that ten-a-penny fanzine writers are still writing about him 50 years on and why fans at the time loved him so much.

Injuries then started to hit Bly. He missed much of the 1950/51 season with a variety of injuries (his bravery was to see him suffer 14 fractures in his career, as well as a glut of other injuries). His fitness also seemed to be affecting any possible football career outside of the confines of Boothferry Park too, with Bly having to withdraw from an England ‘B’ call up due to injury. The rest of the 1950s seemed to continue with a pattern of: Bly plays, City look fine; Bly is injured, City look shaky. Indeed Bly was to never be ever-present for City in any season. The closest he came was in 1958/59 when he missed just one game. It was no coincidence that that season City were promoted from Division Three.

Despite his obvious frailties, Billy was 39 when he played his final game for Hull City in a 1-0 defeat at Bristol Rovers. His final season was, predictably, blighted by injury, and again, City fortunes floundered in tandem. Relegation at the end of the season also saw Bly announce his retirement, 21 years or so since he’d made his debut in a career that spanned four decades. Bly came out of retirement to play for Weymouth two years after his last game for Hull City, and helped his new team to a giant-killing run into the fourth round of the FA Cup, but as far as league football was concerned he remained a one-club man. After his football career ended, he ran a sweet shop near Boothferry Park and remained a City fan after his playing days had ended.

So there’s much more to Billy Bly than a mere trophy. The trophy – usually presented to the victors of the North Ferriby v Hull City pre-season match by his son, Roy – means that his name stays in the conscience of Hull City fans, but in truth his achievements while at City deserve more recognition than that. The longevity of his City career, his bravery, his talent, his likeability and the achievements of the club while he was stood between the sticks make Bly a worthy recipient of the title ‘legend’, a title that shouldn’t diminish with time.

MAULED BY THE TIGERS
Fan culture

Liverpool (and Celtic) have You’ll Never Walk Alone, Manchester City have Blue Moon, West Ham have I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles, Manchester United have whatever the ‘terrace poet’ appointed by the marketing men in charge at Old Trafford tells them to sing. Even the rugby clubs have their own anthems – the only, and I mean ONLY, thing that they can maybe feel superior to us about. And what do we have? Don’t even think about claiming Can’t Help Falling In Love – Sunderland have been singing that for ages. Sadly, Bread of Skeltons rarely gets an airing these days. That leaves our only unique terrace chant/song as Mauled by the Tigers. Still, it’s better than most have to offer.

Born some time in the mid to late 90s, the ‘Mauled’ chant, with the accompanying hand movements, has been taken to the bosom of City’s support. Younger fans seem to love its childish appeal, older fans appreciate that it’s just plain amusing and a more inventive way of reminding opposing fans of the fact that their team is losing than simply chanting the scoreline. A few fans may harrumph at how gay we all look, but we know its shit, and never shitter than when thousands of hardened, tattoed Hullensians are singing it in unison. However, it’s also funny, and never funnier than when it’s being chanted at Anfield or the Emirates.

It’s unlikely – given that among English clubs there’s only Millwall who it might apply to – that anyone is going to steal it off us. Most importantly though, it’s ours, in all its self-deprecating, camp, mocking glory.

CITY BLOW CHANCE OF TOP FLIGHT PROMOTION, 1910
Depths of despair

Oldham Athletic. When they’re not stealing Jobbo for half his true worth, or poaching our best schoolboy players of the late 80s and early 90s, or gaining an unfair advantage on a plastic pitch, or persuading us to overpay for Andy Holt, then they are pipping us to promotion to the top-flight of English football 100 years ago. Bastards.

1910 was when we managed to mess up the best chance we’d had of promotion to what was then known as Division One, and were to get for another 98 years. City’s team back then doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like the great post-war teams but that’s more to do with the length of time that has passed than it is the quality of the players. You’ve all probably heard of EDG ‘Gordon’ Wright. Some of you may even believe that he was our first and only England international (he wasn’t; official FA records have him down as a Cambridge University player, unfortunately). But there was more to this team than the Hymers College schoolmaster. Manager Ambrose Langley seemed to want to field teams with as few surnames as possible, meaning the defence and midfield was based around the Browell brothers, George and Albert, while up front the goals were largely supplied and scored by ‘the three Smiths’, Joe (five goals), Jack (32 in 35 games) and Wallace (17). Davy and Dan Gordon were also crucial members of the squad. And in addition to Gordon Wright’s impeccable wing play, City’s forward line was usually completed by Arthur Temple – who contributed 16 goals that season – or occasionally the highly rated Alf Toward, who Langley deemed surplus to requirements and sold to Oldham for £350 mid-season.

City didn’t seem to miss Toward – who had contributed little that season anyway. Going into the final game of the season in second place, City needed to win at Oldham, who were two points behind but with a better goal average, which was how teams on level points were separated, or draw and hope that third-placed Derby didn’t win. As City went into the game unbeaten in 12 games, 11 of which were wins, top-flight football was City’s to lose. And lose it they did.

Derby did their bit, only managing to draw against West Brom, but City were blown away by Oldham. Missing the influential Jack McQuillan, City had no answer to the Latics attacking football. The home side went ahead on 18 minutes, and were two up on 25 minutes when – you guessed it – Alf Toward scored from what looked like an offside position. The third in the 80th minute compounded the agony. Oldham – who had spent much of the early part of the season propping up the Second Division – were promoted. City were left vowing to make amends the following season. And the season after, and the season after, and the season after…

And that was it. Of course we finished sixth in Division Two in 1986 – the year before the play-offs came into being –but until 2008 this was the nearest City had come to experiencing the upper chamber of the football league. It can only be speculated what might have happened had we won that day. Would we have gone on to greater things, build on the success and flirt with greatness in the way in which teams from similar-sized cities and towns with similar resources to City managed? Or would we have come straight back down and endured a very similar path to the one we were to tread anyway?

One thing we can be sure of, however, is that we wouldn’t have got to witness the too-good-to-be-described-in-words events of May 2008. Sure, promotion would have been incredible even if it hadn’t been our first time in the top flight, but knowing that we were prising a 104-year-old monkey off our back made the celebrations all the more elating and tear-inducing. So while our great-great grandfathers missed out on the opportunity to sup celebratory halves of milk stout down Canal Street, them being denied their bit of history made the bottles of over-priced piss that we got hammered on on the streets of Camden and Soho taste all the sweeter.

 

KC STADIUM MOVE
Talking points

A ‘super stadium’ in Hull had been talked about for decades. The more Boothferry Park and the Boulevard crumbled, the louder the calls for such a development came. However, a few things always seemed to be lacking: money, ambition, interest from the clubs’ respective boards and the ability to pull in the fans to fill anything worth building.

To make such a stadium work, a successful, well supported football team would be needed, as rugby league, despite what a handful of egg-chasing fuckwits will tell you, doesn’t have the interest in Hull or anywhere else in the country to make such a large-scale project viable. In a case of impeccable timing, Adam Pearson took over Hull City just as the local council became rather wealthy after selling a percentage of its shares in Kingston Communications.

The money was there, the ambition from Pearson certainly was, and the Hull City fan base, which seemed to swell to vaguely impressive levels as various ‘saviours’ came in and raped the club after the hated Needler regime was replaced, suggested that if they built it, we would come. The complacency and self-serving of endless Labour-dominated councils in Hull did the city few favours while other cities in the UK of a similar size were regenerating and making themselves attractive to investors, but in building the KC Stadium rather than spending the share money on worthy bottomless pit projects is something we should always be grateful to the then council – and Paddy Doyle in particular – for. The KC Stadium, and the change in fortune it helped bring about in Hull’s only sporting team that had any hope of becoming a recognizable name outside the confines of the M62, has done more to raise the profile of, and feelgood factor within the city than anything else in living memory.

Premiership football, international sporting events and concerts by internationally renowned pop stars mix seamlessly with community events, schoolkids playing on the many outlying all-weather pitches and corporate events. And it’s all surrounded by attractive parkland within walking distance of the city centre.

The KC looks at home in what is arguably the best, and richest, football league in the world. It’s a thing of beauty and it has done as much to turn around the fortunes of Hull City as any player and chairman. In fact, the campaign starts here: let’s have a statue of the KC erected. Just outside the KC.

 

BEST STAND DUST SHOWERS
Fan culture

Best: a superlative of ‘good’, meaning of the most excellent or desirable kind – though the word is often loosely used to describe something that’s less shit than whatever is surrounding it. Hence, Mel C was the ‘best’ singer in the Spice Girls, Benidorm is the ‘best’ ITV sitcom of the past 25 years, Carlsberg is probably the ‘best’ lager in the world, and Boothferry Park’s ‘Best Stand’ was fractionally less shit than the South Stand, North Stand or Kempton.

The Best Stand had very little going for it, other than the fact that it wasn’t one of the three other stands. Yes it housed The Well, and it was where the dignitaries and sponsors sat, but it was still shit. In the final 30 years or so of its existence, when it had basically been left to rot, it had the added benefit of showering City fans with dust, rubble and bits of masonry whenever a clearance from a City player (or a pin-point pass from Steve Terry) hit any part of the stand’s upper areas. If the ball happened to hit the part of the stand’s roofing above the players’ wives, it was often the highlight of a Saturday afternoon watching these ladies, done up to the nines (well, more like threes for the most part), having to pick bits of concrete out of their Mark Hill hair-dos. The KC has yet to show any signs of fraying, but should the day come it can only be hoped that it does so in as comical a fashion as its predecessor.

 

A KICK IN THE BALKANS DOCUMENTARY (1990)
Talking points

The fall of communism brought a multitude of benefits to Bulgaria; free elections, a restructured economy, and, err, a visit from Hull City. Recently departed chairman Don Robinson saw the legacy of ‘Perestroika’ as an entrepreneurial opportunity, and involved himself with ‘dental tourism’ to the Balkan state. He also organised a three game pre-season tour of Bulgaria for the Tigers in the summer of 1990, and for commentator John Helm and a Yorkshire TV film crew to document the trip.

The result was a moderately intriguing half-hour programme which aired after the 10 o’ clock news on ITV, punderfully named ‘A kick in the Balkans’. Highlights include pre-game folk dancing, Dave Bamber’s critique of local cuisine, Paul Hunter’s Bart Simpson tee shirt and Don Robinson talking to camera topless. Iain Hesford’s contrived links counting down the days until the squad return home aren’t quite as mirthful as the corpulent ‘keeper believes.

MICHAEL TURNER
Dramatis Personae

From (very) briefly threatening to become one of the worst Hull City defenders ever, to the sight of a city shedding real tears of anger and distress at his sale, the three years Turner spent with the Tigers epitomised the growth and progress of the club as a whole.

When Peter Taylor left for Crystal Palace in the summer of 2006, he took Leon Cort with him in exchange for a seven-figure sum and his successor Phil Parkinson needed to find an imposing central defender quickly. He brought in Turner, a former Charlton trainee who had dropped down the divisions to Brentford and become a big hero there. The fee was £350,000 but soon it seemed clear that he was overpriced, overrated and, well, now over here.

There were many shaky games for the new centre back, though occasionally he would redeem himself with a crucial goal or two, notably an injury-time equaliser against Palace at the KC that ruined Taylor’s return and also mercifully stopped Cort’s awful over-celebration of his earlier strike in front of the East Stand being the defining memory of the day. However, Turner was culpable for at least two of Colchester’s goals in a dismal thrashing at Layer Road, the nadir of a wretched period for player, manager and club, and before long Parkinson was gone. Phil Brown took over and Turner seemed transformed.

A stunning volley at Luton later in the season as City battled like hell to stay up (and send Leeds down) became the official goal of the season but by now Turner had discovered his defensive attributes again and, aside from when he was bafflingly dropped for the awful Danny Coles on the opening day of the next season, neither he nor the Tiger Nation looked back. Unerring in his reading of the game, accuracy in the tackle, total dominance in the air and occasional knack of scoring immaculately timed goals (an injury time winner at Burnley, another injury time equaliser against QPR, a first minute header against Watford that settled everyone down) made him by a mile the player of the season as City reached the play-offs, then his immortal act of chucking himself at a late, obviously goalbound Lee Trundle shot at Wembley, deflecting said effort over the bar, provided the moment when we knew, deep down, we were going up.

In the Premier League he never missed a minute, never mind a game, and Fabio Capello had supposedly kept a bespectacled eye on him (albeit from a distance, and only after the Hull Daily Mail felt obliged to write to the FA), putting him in a provisional England squad though eventually leaving him out at the final stage. Turner never once, just once, looked forlorn or out of his depth, even scoring a few smart goals, and was again the runaway player of the year as City stayed up by a whisker. It seemed that for as long as Turner was around City, City would be around the Premier League, so when he was sold to Sunderland at the end of the summer transfer window with worrying enthusiasm by Paul Duffen and for a fee nobody would reveal, there was an outcry of atomic proportions that took Duffen and the hierarchy by surprise. Turner himself, befitting the serene, unaffected and affable figure he cut in interviews, never asked to leave and gave his all to the last moment, his parting gift being an eye-watering block with his wedding tackle on the goal-line which preserved a point at Wolves. Within 48 hours he was gone.

His character was enhanced further when he inevitably scored against City on his Sunderland debut (in one of those coincidences that happen, and one the club didn’t seem to notice) and offered a gesture of apology to the Tiger Nation before taking the celebration to which he was entitled elsewhere. When Adam Pearson returned to the club two months later and instantly disclosed that merely £4m, minus sell-on payments to Turner’s two previous clubs, was all City got for an all-time great, his legend was somehow enhanced within the shrieks of rage and idle threats aimed towards the departed, discredited Duffen.

The destiny of City without Turner remains unclear, but Turner’s own destiny surely is the international recognition he merited for some time and maybe a huge move to one of the biggest clubs in the land. The best we’ve ever had? Yeah.

Entries by Richard Gardham, Ian Thomson, Matthew Rudd, Mike Scott and Les Motherby

Missed part one? Read it HERE
Part two can be found HERE
Part three is housed HERE
Part four is situated HERE