“In a decently ordered society, members of Half Man Half Biscuit would be routinely carried shoulder high through the streets of every city they visit.” John Peel
Scrolling through the list of fixtures for the extra preliminary round, building up a mental shortlist of teams I fancied picking. And then, there it was, the away team in the final tie. Cammell Laird 1907.
‘Cammell Laird Social Club’ is one of my favourite albums. It’s tempting to quote vast chunks of lyrics, but even just going with song titles is entertainment enough: ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel is the Light of an On-Coming Train’ and ‘Twenty-Seven Yards of Dental Floss and She Still Won’t Give Me a Smile’ the pick of them. One of the reasons I’ve grown to love this band is their frequent references to things I also enjoy, music, cricket, the British countryside and football – they’re famously Tranmere Rovers fans. This album features two spoken word tracks including ‘The Referee’s Alphabet’:
“A is for my authority, which many players seem to question, thinking they’re somehow going to make me change my mind
E is for the eerie silence which echoes around the ground when I’ve booked a home team’s player and it’s obvious to everyone that he deserved it
U is for the umpire which I sometimes wish I’d been instead; you never hear a cricket crowd chanting who’s the bastard in the hat?”
In ‘Breaking News’ which lists a variety of people accused by HMHB of “annoying the nation”, part time football fans are wonderfully referred to as “Commodores, as in once, twice, three times a season, who feed sugar lumps to police horses at Cup Finals”. They’re also unimpressed by “grown men with replica shirts worn over their jumpers, who stand up and stretch out their arms when the opposing team fail to hit the target”. The opposing team for Cammell Laird tonight are St Helens Town and I promise not to “stretch out my arms” if a Twitter update tells me they’ve put one over the bar.
The Cammell Laird ship building company was created from the merger of Laird Brothers of Birkenhead and Johnson Cammell and Co of Sheffield at the start of the 20th century, with their first football team coming soon after. As well as ships the company built carriages for the London Underground. Despite their name the current club has only existed since 2014, however the Cammell Laird name has been represented in Merseyside, Cheshire, and the Northern Premier League since 1907.
For county-level glory hunting I seem to have stumbled on a formidable choice. Cammell Laird won the West Cheshire league in 1968/69 without losing a match. They would be the dominant force throughout the 1970s and 1980s, winning the title every year between 1975 and 1984 with the exception of 1980 when they came second. They would win another 4 in a row between 1989 and 1992. The end of this run of dominance on the pitch coincided with the closure of the yard in 1993 at the end of a submarine building contract. There after it has become a ship repair site with a variety of owners.
More recently the company won the contract to build a research ship to be based in the Antarctic which is my other reason for picking Cammell Laird – you may be able to guess where this is going.
Boaty McBoatface was the winning choice of a public vote to name the ship, with 33.16% (124,109 votes). In a disappointing case of the meanies, the name was ignored in favour of the 2.95% who went for the undoubtedly worthy Sir David Attenborough, who was only just ahead of It’s Bloody Cold Here on 2.85%.
So with the combined power of Half Man Half Biscuit and Boaty McBoatface behind them, let Cammell Laird 1907 go forth and conquer the rugby league town of St Helens.
Glory Hunting 