So, just to prove that you’ve been paying attention to your humble guide, why not test yourself with the following questions? You’ll find the answer to each question in the write-up for that hero – eg the answer to question 11 is in the 11th place cult hero write-up, and so on. There is a prize of two season tickets for anyone who can get 30 points (but how are you going to prove to my satisfaction that you didn’t scroll through the list to look some of them up?!).

Up The Gills!

Eccles

1. What is the club record for consecutive home games without defeat? (Bonus point) Who finally beat Gills and what was the score?
2. What is the record number of league appearances, held by Johnny Simpson?
3. Who were handed their first home defeat as a league club by the Gills?
4. Which other Gills hero was charged with Ken Price following incidents in the players tunnel at Swindon?
5. Who became Gills manager in 1974?
6. Who succeeded him as manager?
7. Who was the first player to score 100 goals for the Gills?
8. Who were “Southern League people with Southern League outlooks”?
9. Where did Gills win promotion in 1974? (Bonus point) What was the score?
10. Where exactly could you see the sign “Patrons are requested to refrain from spitting”?
11. When was the first floodlit game at Priestfield? (Bonus point for opponents and score)
12. What unique honour did youth-team player David Peach achieve?
13. Who did Gills beat 5-4 in the opening day of that club’s last season in the league?
14. From where did Harry Barrett think he could recruit a championship-winning side?
15. What is Gills record FA Cup score? (Bonus point) Who were the opponents?
16. In 1955 when Charlie Marks broke the net with a penalty, who were Gills’ opponents?
17. Who did Gills play in the first all-ticket game at Priestfield?
18. What is the club record for consecutive league games played, held by Harry Hughes?
19. Which Gills hero of the 1970’s and 1980’s did Alf Bentley discover?
20. Following ground closure in 1961 due to the referee being assaulted, where did Gills play a “home” game? (Bonus point for opponents and score)
21. Who did Gills beat 5-1 in our first-ever Fourth Round FA Cup tie?
22. What record is still held by Derek Woodley?
23. Which First Division club did Gills play three times in the 1966/67 League Cup?
24. Which club did Basil Hayward manage before joining Gillingham?
25. Where could the tabloids catch 1950’s footballers “playing away”?

Freddie Cox signed Mike from Halifax in February in the middle of the big freeze of 1963. The fans didn’t take to him immediately, as it appeared that he had been signed to replace popular centre-half and captain Harry Hughes, so we were in critical mood when he made his home debut in March against Tranmere Rovers. Playing for them was Dave Hickson, a rough tough centre-forward who had played for both Liverpool and Everton in the Fifties. What a battle that was in pouring rain – boots, knees and elbows flew between them all afternoon. Late in the game and near the Gordon Road Stand, Burgess kicked Hickson yet again. Hickson spun round and threw a punch, and then they wrestled each other to the ground for a lively fight in the mud. None of the twenty-man brawls that happen these days, everyone stood around while the referee gave them a good talking-to and told them to get on with the game. It was a punch-up that was talked about and laughed about for years, and we realised at once that here was someone quite unique.

Like all great managers, Freddie Cox made sure that every member of his team knew exactly what their role was. Mike’s was simple. He had to clamp himself onto the opposition centre-forward, and make sure that he didn’t cause any threat. And that’s what he did – brilliantly. His long legs got in hard, crunching tackles, or brought someone down when they were through. His long arms enabled him to climb a little-bit higher for headers, or tangle up an opponent if danger threatened. Tripping over and pulling down someone who was through on goal was a speciality. Hard boney elbows were used to good effect to soften up his opponent early in the game. The nickname ‘Spider’ was perfect. He was at the centre of a defensive web, and with his long arms and legs and in the way he climbed all over and wrapped himself around players and snuffed them out the game, he actually played like one. The first visiting attack was usual greeted with a roar of ‘ ‘ave ‘im Spider!’, and Mike usually did.

Mike committed Gills’ first televised foul. In November 1963, the pre-Match Of The Day thirty minute Sport Special on BBC featured our First Round Cup Tie at Loftus Road. The grainy ten minutes of cine-film was the first time Gills had been presented to a national audience. Three years before Kenneth Wolstenholme uttered the immortal ‘They think it’s all over’ line, came the slightly less immortal ‘So Queens Park Rangers start this match – and straight away that’s a foul by Burgess’.

By 1964 football purists in Fleet Street were getting a little concerned at rugged and cynical play creeping into the beautiful game, particularly from the likes of Revie’s Leeds, and so the Daily Mail, as ever in the forefront of truth and justice, launched The Daily Mail Fair Play League. ‘In every match, Daily Mail reporters will mark your team as to how sportingly they apply the laws of the game’ they blared, with prizes for each of the divisional winners. What a hoot! Gills sunk to the bottom of it straight off, and officially became the dirtiest team in Britain. Who cared? The players certainly didn’t, writing “The Foul Play Calypso”, set to the theme of the then hit-TV series ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’. The first verse went:-

This is the story ‘bout a winning team,
To win the Third Division is our dream,
But their centre-forward was the finest in the land,
So big Mike Burgess kicked him o’er the stand.
…Boo! Dirty! Send him off!

Kicked him o’er the stand? Can’t say I remember that, but about fifty centre-forwards did get sorted out one way or another that’s for sure, some within the laws, some not. There were goal-machines like Carlisle’s Hugh McIlmoyle, who scored 41 goals in our Championship season, but didn’t get a kick (of the ball) in front of a crowd of 17,500. There were fancy posers like Torquay’s Robin Stubbs who was fearful all game of a Spider elbow ruining his glamour-boy looks. There were really skilful ones like Workington’s John Swindells who, with a crucial promotion clash poised at 1-1, brought down a clearance from his goalkeeper and turned Mike all in one movement, giving himself a clear run on goal. Spider got booked for bringing Swindells down from behind with a rugby tackle worthy of Twickenham. There were famous ones like Derek Dougan, then with Peterborough after storming out of Aston Villa, who Spider bottled up for the whole game and still found time to score one of only two goals he bagged for the Gills.

And then there was Arnold Mitchell of Exeter. He wasn’t a centre-forward at all, he was a bald and ancient right half and after thirty-one minutes of the match on Saturday 10th April 1965 he found the Gillingham defence uncharacteristically backing away from him. He got near the corner of the Rainham End penalty area and took a shot. It didn’t look as though it would have gone in, but Johnny Simpson was struggling for it, and Mike, standing near the penalty spot aimed to head the ball over the bar. He mis-timed it and the ball flew back across goal and into the net, accompanied by a mighty groan from the Rainham End.

Try as they might, Gills couldn’t pull that goal back and at its fifty-third defence ‘Fortress Priestfield’ had fallen. What irony! As with Troy, a great fortress had been brought down from within, and by one of its bravest warriors. Freddie Cox was livid, and at the end of that season he pulled the team apart. Mike had a knee operation during the summer and never really recovered from it, drifting off to Aldershot later in the year.

There have been more cultured defenders than Mike Burgess, there have been more skilful players than Mike Burgess, but in one of the greatest periods in our history there is no-one who more represents the dogged determination, defiance and siege mentality of Gills winning-against-the-world than him. For two whole years when he stood before us ready for battle – with tough tackling full-backs Geoff Hudson and Dennis Hunt and the dependable John Arnott beside him, the legendary Johnny Simpson guarding the goal, majestic captain Alec Farrell ready to feed the ball forward for Brian Gibbs and Ron Newman to crack home, other good, solid, steady pros all around ready to play their part, a packed Rainham End at their backs belting out ‘Glad All Over’ and roaring them on – our Championship-winning Gills truly were unbeatable. It was the ultimate Gillingham Football Club experience. And if anyone wanted to make something of that – well, Spider would ‘ave ‘em.

Johnny signed for Gillingham from Lincoln in June 1957 for £750. His 14 playing years can be divided into three parts – 1957 to 1962 under Harry Barrett when he played behind an unpredictable defence which might collapse in front of him at any time – 1966 to 1971 under Basil Hayward when he fought valiantly to help prop up a team in obvious decline – and 1962 to 1965 when, at the zenith of his strength and powers Freddie Cox built in front of him the meanest of defences and we witnessed the making of a legend.

Johnny Simpson had everything. At 6’1” and 12st 8lb he was tall and solid, but for a big man he was amazingly agile. He could fly across goal to get two hands on a ball aiming into the top corner, get down quickly to cut out dangerous crosses, dominate the box from corners, and perform his trademark one-handed catch. He was brave and courageous, going in amongst the boots and diving at players feet in the days when goalkeepers had nowhere near the protection they have now, and forwards didn’t hold back.

It is fitting that Johnny is the only Gillingham goalkeeper to win a Championship medal. In the 1963/64 season not only did he establish the then club records of 24 clean sheets and only 30 goals conceded as we won the Fourth Division, he more than anyone else had to take the venomous stick and high-flying boots and kicks as Gills prized out results on opponents’ grounds. Crowds had never before seen a goalkeeper dressed from head to foot in green, loping into goal looking completely disinterested, going all over the field to launch free kicks deep into their goal-mouth, and then deny them with a string of brilliant saves and remain unflappable under heavy pressure and extreme provocation.

Every Gills fan who saw him play has a few especially treasured memories of brave or brilliant saves. Mine are of a 2-2 draw at Swindon in September 1967, long before our ‘special’ relationship with them or when there were goalkeeper substitutes on the bench. Johnny was injured early on, refused to go off, and defied them with a string of brave saves while our trainer stood behind the goal the whole time, tending him after almost every one. Then at Watford on the Saturday before Christmas 1964. With about fifteen minutes left and Gills having been pegged back to 1-1, Watford had a penalty. Up stepped Ron Saunders, our great hero from former times, who had once beaten Johnny 16 consecutive times in a training session in the week before the 10-1 Gorleston cup-tie. A duel over twelve yards between two of our great heroes. Ron hit an almost perfect penalty, hard and low into the corner, but Johnny dived to his left and palmed the ball round the post. A brilliant save which turned the game. We won 2-1. Several of us were back-slapping him about it on the train back from Charing Cross that night, but he was as modest as ever. For him it was just part of the job. ‘Ron knew my weakness, so I guessed he might go that way. I was lucky he did.’

But it wasn’t just his prowess as a goalkeeper that gives him a special place in the heart of every Gills fan who saw him play. It was his obvious great love for the club, and for the fans. Johnny and his family were next door neighbours. They lived immediately opposite the ground in Gordon Road, and after he retired he ran the newsagents in Barnsole Road. He would always stop and chat, even after a bad defeat. His time for fans was no more clearly demonstrated than in the care that he took with his autograph – not the indecipherable scribble that so called stars give out these days, with Johnny you got ‘Johnny Simpson’ written in beautiful copperplate, and if it was outside an opposition ground the enquiry ‘Are you alright for tickets?’. Very few travelled to long-distance away games in his time and Johnny’s reaction would be ‘I’ll get you some, you deserve it for coming all this way’ and he was always as good as his word, collecting up the players’ allocations and coming back out with a fistful which we all shared out between us.

After he retired, Johnny Simpson was a regular in the Main Stand at Priestfield and lived the triumphs and disappointments with the intensity of the keenest Gills fan. No-one was more happier than him when we saved our league status against Halifax in 1993. Sadly, Johnny never lived to see his beloved Gills rise from the ashes – he died a few months later at the early age of 60. God must have needed a good goalkeeper.

Charlie was signed eve of season when most supporters had given up hope that we would ever get a replacement for Pat Terry. Gills paid £5,500 to Chelsea for him. That immediately caused excitement – Chelsea wasn’t a club we usually dealt with. And he’d played in the first team alongside Jimmy Greaves. There was more than the usual interest around the blue door before the first home match against Doncaster. A large American car rolled up, and several snappily dressed blokes in their mid-twenties got out. Blimey, Italian suits and shoes, jewellery, it was like Hollywood. The one with the sharp haircut, an early mod style, signing autographs, must be Charlie. What an entrance.

Then we got to see him play, and that was something else again. He was full of skill and tricks, able to beat players at dazzling speed, and had a terrific shot. His trademark was to get the ball inside our half, and then dribble through the middle beating man after man. It electrified the crowd, and he was an instant cult hero. How could Gills have managed to sign him, why did Chelsea let him go? Possibly because like a lot of mercurial players, he could drift out of the game, and sometimes he didn’t really want to know. But when he was hot, he was almost unplayable.

A home game against Southport on Grand National Saturday was a good example. In the first half, Charlie was completely out of it, then after half-time he tore them to pieces, scoring once and laying on all the others in a 4-0 win. Had he got the winner up? Then in January 1962, against Chesterfield, we were treated to something absolutely magical. Charlie picked the ball up near the Main Stand touchline, dribbled towards the edge of the box, flicked it up over the head of a defender, ran round him, flicked it up over the head of another defender, ran round him, and as the ball dropped onto the penalty spot volleyed it with tremendous power into the Rainham End net. Hats and scarves rained down on the pitch in tribute. It put us 4-0 up (we won 5-1). After all these years, it’s still my number 1 Gillingham goal.

Charlie was Gills first ‘modern’ footballer. Charisma? He oozed it. Everybody loved him. Dads respected him for his skills, and his reputation for being a bit of a Jack the Lad, especially with horse and dog racing, mums wanted to cuddle him, boys wanted to be like him and the girls fancied him. The local barber who couldn’t do a ‘Charlie Livesey’ soon lost the teenage market. If only we could build a team around him.

When Freddie Cox became Gills manager in June 1962 everyone thought that Charlie would be one of the cornerstones of his team, but an odd incident made me wonder. Walking along Redfern Avenue a couple of weeks before the new season, I saw Charlie standing forlornly outside the players’ entrance. ‘Which way did they go, son?’ he asked. A kid on a bike pointed towards Toronto Road. It seemed that Cox had sent the players on a run and left him behind. Had Charlie been late? Who knows, but it was an early indication that Charlie’s particular type of genius might not be exactly what Freddie Cox was looking for.

He got dropped for a few games. He returned in early October to inspire a comeback at Oxford when we turned a 2-0 deficit into a 3-2 win, the first home defeat Oxford took as a league club. It turned out to be Charlie’s last Gillingham goal. He played his last game the following Saturday at home to Bradford City, as the Cuba Missile Crisis reached its height. Krushchev and JFK didn’t contrive any nuclear explosions, but there was one in our house the following week when Charlie got sold to Watford for £6,000.

Charlie later moved to Northampton, and then spent four years at Brighton. For us, he made 47 appearances and scored 17 goals. I don’t know how many goals he scored for them, but did he score a better one than Chesterfield? Come to that, did anyone?

What a chant that was – warlike, primeval – you could imagine them chanting it in the gladiator arena in front of Nero. It was perfect for the man it honoured.

Gerry Summers signed Ken Price from Southend in December 1976 for £2,000. Summers tended to splash the cash a bit, but he got a bargain with Ken. A strong, bustling striker just over 6’ tall, he was all muscle, and really would have looked the part in some Hollywood epic set in Roman times. He could certainly put himself about on the field, and handle himself off it. Just the sort of bloke you’d want with you when you’re wearing your Gills scarf and celebrating another win in some New Cross pub full of rabid knuckle-draggers.

Ken was the perfect foil for the tricky and diminutive Danny Westwood (the fleet-footed striker of programme-speak), and full of powerful running to respond to Damien Richardson’s promptings. He could score by bundling the ball over the line in a goal-mouth melee, climb high to bullet a header, or crash in a powerful shot from long range. He scored 78 goals in 247 appearances before he was sold to Reading for £15,000 in January 1983, and in his Gills career we saw the lot.

There was Ken the powerful header – no better illustrated than with his last goal for us, in November 1982 in the League Cup Tie against Spurs. Ken’s towering header at the far post from Dick Tydeman’s corner saw Ray Clemence start the list of England goalkeepers beaten all ends up at the Rainham End.

Then there was Ken the fighter – no better shown than in the bitter, infamous clashes with Swindon in 1979. With Danny Westwood scandalously sent off in the home game, it was Ken who quite literally took the fight to the visitors. Booked for flattening McHale, he then went looking for Aizlewood, and sorted him out. As the referee reached for the red card, help was on hand in the shape of a right hook from a middle-aged supporter. Caring Ken was the first to help the referee up, and he stayed on. The return at the County Ground saw a fight break out afterwards in the players tunnel, and Ken, Dean White and two others were taken to Swindon Police station ‘to help with their enquiries’. A two day trial at Swindon Crown Court in January 1980 eventually saw Ken and Dean cleared of assault, but it was a close run thing. What should be the punishment for kicking seven bells out of McHale and Swindon’s trainer? Becoming Ken Price OBE at the very least, I reckon.

And of course there was late April 1979, and Ken’s finest moments. In the last but one home game, Gills were playing leaders Shrewsbury – win this one and we’ll do it! Fifteen thousand, the biggest league crowd for 14 years, packed in to see a dour, tense struggle. With the game going into injury time Shrewsbury had got the point they wanted, when out of nowhere Ken smashed a twenty yarder across goal which beat the keeper all ends up and flew into the top corner. The place went mad – but there was more.

Shrewsbury threw everything forward, and in the counterattack Tony Funnell and Ken were clean through. Tony took the ball down the left, drew the keeper, and rolled it to Ken, who only had to touch it over the line. That was too easy – he thrashed it for all he was worth, nearly lifting the net off, then ran round the side of the goal, his face contorted in a victory scream, his arm aloft and fist punching the air as the Rainham End cascaded onto the pitch around him.

It was the greatest picture of Gills In Triumph until Wembley topped it. What a memory! It was the last kick of the game, and it ignited spontaneous and wild celebrations all over Priestfield. Everybody believed we’d done it. The Men of Kent had finally battered down the gates to the promised land, and Ken was leading them through.

Ken! – clap, clap-clap, clap-clap – Price! – clap, clap-clap, clap-clap – Ken! – clap, clap-clap, clap-clap – Price! – clap, clap-clap, clap-clap

Mean. Moody. Magnificent!!!

We very quickly discovered that no-one extracted the urine out of Alan Wilks, the first signing in Andy Nelson’s three year rebuilding job to take Gills back into the Third Division. Quite the reverse in fact, his dazzling array of tricks and talents extracted it from tormented Fourth Division defences and left Priestfield fans in absolute rapture. After several years of utter dross, it was like finding diamonds in the compost heap. Alan won the 1971/72 Player Of The Year Award by a country mile.

Gills had probably been able to capture ‘Arthur’, as he was known by all the players, because he didn’t quite fit in to established team formations. He was a striker, but not really a target man as he rarely headed the ball. He tended to play down the right but he was not really a winger. He couldn’t tackle. He sometimes didn’t get into a game. But build the right team around him – and Andy Nelson did with a target man (Mike Bickle followed by Damien Richardson) and a goal-poacher (Brian Yeo) and you had shed-loads of goals and fabulous entertainment.

In the 1973/74 promotion season it all gelled together. Alan chipped in with 14 goals, but more than that game after game he was the man who totally destroyed defences with powerful runs, trickery, and telling passes, leaving Brian Yeo in particular to finish them off. Occasionally, Alan reached such a height that he really was unplayable. Two games stand out above the others. A 4-0 demolition of Workington in November featured a Wilks first-half hat-trick of stunning strikes, each time beating several defenders before finishing with thunderous shots. On the way to a 5-1 win against Doncaster in September, he picked up the ball just inside their half, beat about five players and with the goal at his mercy, crashed the ball against the bar. A defender booted it out for a corner. Dick Tydeman simply rolled the corner to Alan, who beat another couple of players as he cut into the box, before he buried it in the corner. Completely and absolutely breathtaking.

Then, with Gills back in the Third Division and new manager Len Ashurst in charge, it suddenly all went a bit haywire. Ashurst played a more defensive game, and Alan didn’t quite fit into it. Where everyone was itching to see him tear Third Division defences apart, he could only sometimes get on the bench. The skills were still there and he played a few cameo ‘super-sub’ roles turning games our way, but he had suddenly become a bit-part player. He drifted off to Folkestone in January 1976.

Alan Wilks scored 29 goals in 138 appearances for the Gills. In every one of those games, we worshipped at the feet of King Arthur.

He joined us at the age of 25 from Shamrock Rovers, where he had just become an Eire International. Quite how Andy Nelson convinced him to make the move to Fourth Division Gillingham is a mystery, but it was a brilliant coup. In his first home game, against league-leaders Mansfield in November 1972, after only twelve minutes he drifted through the middle of their defence and smashed a twenty-yard shot right into the top corner. Nelson, usually a calm man, leapt out of the dug-out and punched the air. He knew he’d got a winner, and so did we.

In the first few months, ‘Paddy’, as he was inevitably called by everyone, struggled to go the ninety minutes, but once he was totally match-fit the signs were clearly there that Gills now had all the ingredients to go up. There was too much ground to make up in 1972/73, although we had some humdingers to relish – for example a 2-0 win over a thuggish Hereford (including Ronnie Radford) where we saw that ‘Paddy’ could throw a bit of a paddy, smashing one past David Icke and then nearly decking the self-styled Son Of God in a post-goal rough-house. Then came 1973/74, when Gills stormed to promotion on a tidal wave of goals.

What a strike force! Tall elegant Damien Richardson, strong in the air and on the ground, with goal-poacher Brian Yeo and the mercurial Alan Wilks either side of him. Add the explosive fire power of David Peach, and George Jacks and Dick Tydeman chipping in goals from midfield, and you’ve got week after week when Saturday just can’t come quickly enough. When Damien cracked a low shot into the corner to set us on the way to beating close rivals Colchester 4-1 in early December, it was our fiftieth goal. That season we scored 97.

Back in the Third Division in 1974/75 with Len Ashurst as manager, Damien had his finest season. He was magnificent, scoring 21 goals in total, using the whole repertoire of his skills. In a portfolio of magnificent strikes, without doubt his finest goal, and one of the best Gills goals I’ve ever seen, came in 3-1 home win at Christmas against fancied Crystal Palace – a mazy run into the box, side-stepping two challenges, and from the corner of the box curling the ball into the top corner. It brought the house down. Quite how Gillingham managed to hang on to him at this point was another mystery. There were persistent rumours that West Brom were about to sign him, but it never happened. It was widely rumoured that he was Gills highest-paid player, but that doesn’t usually mean much in the final analysis.

With Ashurst gone and Gerry Summers as manager Damien moved to a different role – these days it would be playing in the hole (behind Danny Westwood and Ken Price). The goals didn’t come so regularly for him, but his clever football brain laid on plenty for the front two, and he chipped in himself, often from the penalty spot. Except in April 1978, when in the third minute of the match with Port Vale he put one out of the ground. Not as spectacularly as the Crewe full-back at the Gillingham End in 2002, this strongly hit effort soared onto the Rainham End roof and bounced along it several times before disappearing over the back close to Redfern Avenue. We drew 1-1.

Then came 1978/79, the year of Gills closest near miss, the year we should have made it to the promised land. Everyone has a theory as to why it didn’t happen (most of them involve Swindon). My own is that Damien’s leg injury at Hillsborough lost us the services of our most influential player for the last 17 games, and if he had played in them somewhere along the line we would have got the point we needed.

Back for the start of the 1979/80 season, Damien wasn’t really the same player, and his slow decline matched that of the team. His only goal that season helped beat Mansfield 2-0 in March 1980, when he became only the third player to score 100 goals for the Gills. His final season saw Gills in a relegation struggle, and him spending a lot of the time on the bench, excepting when Gerry Summers decided to infuriate the crowd by having him run up and down the touchline for twenty minutes and then getting him to sit down again.

In May 1981, Gerry Summers caused uproar when he announced that Damien was being released. With a further contract he would have completed ten years and qualified for a testimonial. Supporters were incensed and the local papers had their biggest ever post-bag on a Gills matter until Keith Peacock was sacked. As one, the demand was for Damien to given a new contract. The defence put up by Summers was that he had been the highest paid player for many years, so in effect had already received sufficient from the club. Summers obviously thought he himself was staying to rebuild, but suddenly he wasn’t being offered a new contract either, and left in acrimony as well. The whole thing left a pretty bad smell, which got stronger as you turned towards the Boardroom.

So that is why Damien Richardson the player is a cult hero. A loveable Irishman with a bit of a temper who could enchant the crowd with magical skills and wonderful goals, and who was the first Gills player to win a full international cap for 48 years. Damien Richardson the manager, sadly, is another story. Never Look Back? Never Go Back!

When Gills signed Brian in October 1962 he was 26 years of age and at his peak. Once Freddie Cox unveiled his defensive system a few months later, it became clear that Brian was exactly the type of player needed up front – strong, full of running, good in the air, able to forage on his own and worry defenders into mistakes, the ability to find space and put chances away. An exact CV for a modern forward, but a rarity back then. Brian excelled. In the five full seasons he played for us, he was leading goal-scorer in every one, and in total missed only 5 games. I don’t know whether Brian was born without any hamstrings and ligaments, but what I do know is that you could rely on him to play, and you could rely on him to score. He was the first player ever to score over 100 goals for Gillingham, banging in 101 in 259 appearances.

A Brian Gibbs goal was workmanlike rather than spectacular. As he was strong in the air he got a share of headers from corners and crosses, but his main source was to outpace defenders or get into space and belt the ball hard and low into the net. Who could argue with that? Well some old duffers did, suggesting his style was crude and the only reason he got in the team was because he was Cox’s son-in-law (he wasn’t, but it shows that totally pig-stupid thinking isn’t just a modern phenomenon). Amongst those who wanted to see Gills win, Brian Gibbs was a cult hero.

His first goal for us was a winner, a looping header over the Oldham goalkeeper to turn over the unbeaten leaders 4-3. From then on he got a goal every two or three games. More importantly, he got goals when we needed them, and most particularly when we needed one to extend the home record. In the 52 unbeaten games, we were behind in only 5 of them, and each time it was Brian who got the equaliser.

In the almost-like-clockwork goalscoring record these are some that stand out for me. April 1963 when a hat-trick of trade-mark goals beat Newport 3-1 to make us believe that we could actually go up. April 1965 when another run and strong shot won us a tough match 2-1 at Bournemouth – when again we all thought we were going up. September 1965 – we lost 5-3 at Oldham and he scored a hat-trick, the only time I have ever seen a Gills player score a hat-trick and we’ve lost. October 1965 – outpacing a Swindon defender and cracking it just inside the post to win 1-0 and silence a crowd that was vicious that day too. (It was my dad’s 57th birthday, and he was a big Brian Gibbs fan. Brian signed a card for him on the train home. Pretty good birthday all round, I thought). November 1965 – two goals in a 4-0 win in pouring rain at Oxford, and cannoning in the first one off Ron Atkinson’s ample backside. Did it sting much, Ron?

Even with the slow decline of the team under Basil Hayward, Brian still managed a good goal return, but it was clear that, like us, he was beginning to lose heart. It was no surprise when he asked for a transfer, and moved on in September 1968 to Colchester for £8,000. There he played for another 4 seasons – and achieved immortality. One of the biggest ever Cup upsets was in 1971 when Fourth Division Colchester overturned Revie’s Leeds 3-2, and he scored. A deserved triumph for a good pro and a genuinely nice bloke.

Then suddenly light appeared at the end of the tunnel. Gills announced the appointment of a manager that we had heard of – Freddie Cox. Wartime fighter pilot, a winger with Spurs and Arsenal, played in two Cup Finals, former manager of Bournemouth (where he took them to the Cup quarter-finals) and Portsmouth. He had been out of football for eighteen months building up a newsagents business in Bournemouth, but beggars can’t be choosers. We were to learn that Freddie was a driven, totally focused, dedicated man whose teams took no prisoners on the field, nor he off it. He was Pulis and Paul Scally rolled into one and he gave us a three and a half year roller-coaster ride of record-breaking, controversy, rows – and some unforgettable games.

Freddie soon set to work in bringing the team up to strength with some shrewd free-transfers, and then stunned everyone with an eve of season signing of centre-forward George Francis from Brentford for £4,000. George’s goals were the key to a string of early season victories that saw Gills comfortably placed just behind the leaders. But more than that, it was the manner of winning. Flowing movement and passing which was scarcely believable from the stuff that had been Barrett’s trademark. No better example of New-Gillingham was the 4-3 defeat of previously unbeaten leaders Oldham in November 1962, a match which finally got us back into Fleet Street’s good books. ‘Boom Days Return For Fighting Freddie Cox’ blared the Express; ‘after years in the doldrums Gillingham this morning wakes up to find itself a success’, said the Mail. The 2-1 Boxing Day home win over Chesterfield saw us comfortably retain fifth place.

And then it snowed, and snowed, and snowed. The Big Freeze of 1963 meant there was no football for two months. The Gillingham team that finally took the field again in early March played a different style. The passing and movement was still there, but a meaner, harder edge had been injected. Cox had clearly spent the two months drilling the tactics of a defensive formation which varied between 4-3-3 and 4-4-2, both then pretty well unheard of. Winning our remaining home games other than a 3-2 defeat by Barrow in April, and grinding out low-scoring draws away, Gills very nearly went up. The final game in a season which was extended to the end of May saw us beat Oxford 2-1 in an early evening kick-off at Priestfield to take fourth place, only to be squeezed down to fifth on goal-average when news came through that Mansfield had drawn their last game 1-1.

In the short summer break, Freddie Cox honed his tactics and in 1963-64 Gills were crowned Fourth Division Champions. The players had to follow his instructions implicitly. The basic idea was to defend in depth and keep the ball as much as possible. You started off with a point, so you aimed to keep it for the rest of the game. If a goal came, so much the better, you sat on it and passed the ball around for the rest of the game. It worked. Sometimes the passing destroyed teams, and we won games two or three nil – if not we just played out a draw. Most teams had no answer. We went 15 games unbeaten at the start of the season, we had 12 straight home wins, we were unbeaten at home all season, we only conceded 30 goals and kept 24 clean sheets – all club records at the time. Except for one Saturday in December, we stayed at the top of the table for six months (18th September 1963 – 14th March 1964) until two successive postponements knocked us off. When we played those games at the end of the season, at York and Newport, and won them both 1-0, we took the Championship.

However to say Gills’ success was not very popular would be a bit of an understatement. Gillingham were absolutely hated. The media’s descriptive powers were employed to the full – dour, defensive, rugged, crude, uncompromising, disgraceful, thuggish, agricultural, the tactics of the abattoir, killing football – and so on. Booed and jeered everywhere, they hated us because they could rarely beat us. At Tranmere, someone threw a teapot on the pitch in disgust, at Stockport Dennis Hunt’s tackling nearly caused a riot, at Oxford they had never seen a goalkeeper dressed completely in green take free-kicks from near the halfway line, at Halifax someone ran on to take a swing at Mike Burgess following yet another pass-back.

The most amazing incident however occurred in the home match against Doncaster in February. With twenty minutes left, Gills went 1-0 down, but equalised with ten minutes to go. From the dug-out in front of the Gordon Road Stand, Freddie clearly gave the team instructions to sit on the point, which they did. The crowd nearby started to give him stick, so he picked up the trainers bucket, and threw the contents all over them. Classic! The press picked up on it, and he retorted ‘They asked for it. The people here know nothing about football’. When he walked across the pitch at the start of the next home game, he was roundly booed by the Main Stand. He stopped in the centre circle, slowly turned round, and stuck two fingers up at them! The Rainham End, who regarded him as a cult hero, cheered him to the echo. However the Kent Messenger reporter was appalled at his behaviour, and said so. Just before the start of the next home game, Freddie marched up to the press box and threw him out.

If the KM getting what they deserved sounds familiar, how about the row with the Supporters Association. At his first AGM, Freddie launched into a spectacular attack on the Committee’s attitudes and approach. ‘Southern League people with Southern League outlooks’ he dubbed them. He followed it up in his programme notes with personal attacks on Jack Pynn, the Mr-GFCSA at the time, who reciprocated. They were going it hammer and tongs for several issues. The upshot was the formation of the rival ‘Blue and Whites Supporters Association’, sponsored by the Club.

Back on the field 1964/65, our first season in the Third Division, was probably one of our most exciting ever. Strengthened by John Meredith, Charlie Rackstraw and record signing Rodney Green we had guile and goal-power to add to our tough defence. Watford were beaten 5-2, there were back-to-back 5-0 wins against Shrewsbury and Luton, and a 5-1 demolition of Workington. At other times we ground out results in tough and tight matches. Crowds were enormous. By early April and with a 2-1 win at Bournemouth we were well on the way to the promised land – and then the roof fell in. On 10th April 1965 we lost at home 1-0 to Exeter, and a record-breaking run of 52 consecutive home games without defeat came to an end. We then lost three of the remaining five games to finish seventh, five points behind champions Carlisle. The legend of ‘They don’t want to go up’ was born.

Cox went mad. He tore the team apart. Out went Geoff Hudson, Mike Burgess, Alec Farrell and Rodney Green, and a rebuilding job went on for several months into the new season. Results were unpredictable – for example we let in five at Oldham, beat Swindon 1-0 at the County Ground, were embarrassed losing 2-1 at home to Folkestone in the Cup, and the following week won 4-0 at Oxford. Then suddenly the week before Christmas, Freddie Cox was gone. He resigned and went back to manage Bournemouth. It was always thought that Doctor Grossmark didn’t try very hard to keep him.

Subsequent games between the two sides were always tense, dour affairs – usually a low-scoring draw at Priestfield and a 1-0 defeat at Dean Court. Cox took Bournemouth to a fourth-placed finish in 1968/69, but in one of the great ironies that football often throws up, Gills 2-1 win at Orient in the last match of the 1969/70 season saved us, and relegated Bournemouth. Freddie Cox was sacked. He died three years later, at the tragically early age of 52.

Was Freddie Cox Gills’ greatest-ever manager? Yes.

What no-one knew at the time was that we had seen the first of 149 goals from Brian Yeo (136 league 13 Cup) over 345 appearances which would span twelve years – a record of scoring and loyalty to the Gills which will probably never be surpassed. Brian was what is currently known as ‘a fox in the box’, he was quick, brave and accurate. He almost always forced the keeper to make a save, and so many of his goals were down to placement and timing. A photo of a Yeo goal often sees the keeper’s hand covering the path of the ball, but it is already behind him and on its way to the net.

For the first two years of his career, Brian played mostly in the reserves, but when he did get called up by Freddie Cox he usually bagged a goal or three – his first hat-trick for Gills being in a 5-0 demolition of Luton in October 1964.

By 1966 he was a regular in the Basil Hayward teams, and must have become more and more disillusioned as those teams drifted closer and closer to inevitable relegation back to the Fourth Division. It is remarkable that someone who clearly had a goal-poaching gift wasn’t snapped up by a higher club. Brian certainly was able to score when it mattered. He scored the winning goal five minutes from time when Gills won 2-1 at Bribane Road in the last game of the season to save themselves from relegation in 1970, and, until Mark Saunders, Thommo and Trigger, he was the only Gills player ever to score in the Fifth Round of the Cup (a 2-1 defeat at Watford). Sadly, so often at that time his goals couldn’t stave off yet another defeat. Then with Gills relegated in 1971 and Hayward sacked, Brian enjoyed three golden goal-scoring seasons under Andy Nelson’s management. At 27 years of age, he was the finished article, and Nelson built around him a team of players who could centre the ball to him, pass the ball on the ground up to him, or crash in fierce shots themselves which would enable him to whip the loose ball into the net. Brian’s greatest ability was to spring an offside trap and go on and score in the one-on-one – probably one of the most reliable Gills players ever in this situation. If he had a weakness, it was his inconsistency from the penalty spot.

In the three Nelson years he scored nearly 70 goals, 31 of them in the 1973/74 promotion season, equalling the club record set in 1954/55 by Ernie Morgan. Although at 5’9’ he was not as little as my dad thought, he still was able to easily out-jump six-foot-plus defenders, to thrilling effect as for instance on Boxing Day 1973 when a hat-trick of headers beat Northampton 3-1. That followed up the hat-trick in September in the 7-2 demolition of Scunthorpe. All season there was the excitement of Brian pouncing on loose balls after a David Peach shot or a mazy Alan Wilks run had caused havoc, getting on the end of high or low crosses from D i c k Tydeman, or hooking in knockdowns from Damien Richardson. In April 1974, it came that Gills needed two more points to ensure promotion, and we got them with a 2-0 win at Colchester, thanks to two trade-mark Yeo close range efforts.

With Gills promoted Andy Nelson moved to Charlton and Len Ashurst took over. Confidence for the new season was high, when suddenly there was a bombshell. Brian Yeo announced his retirement to concentrate on his newsagents business. Fortunately Ashurst talked him back for one more season, and he helped Gills to consolidate at the higher level, playing a supporting goal-scoring role to Damien Richardson, and a remarkable mid-season burst from ex-Chelsea Peter Feely (16 goals in 27 appearances). At the end of the 1974/75 season Brian Yeo retired, at the early age of 31. His final goal was in the last home match, against Grimsby. The other goal in a 2-0 win was by 17 year old Mark Weatherly, a sort of symbolic hand-over of the torch of one-club loyalty from one generation to the next. Somewhere after Mark the flame went out and the torch got lost.

‘Yea-Oh! Yea-Oh! Yea-Oh! Yea-Oh!’ was idolised by the crowd. He was the first player to have his own personal chant, which has had a pretty good airing while I’ve been writing this column! And my dad always called him ‘Little Yo’.