West Ham United FC

I went to university in Essex and have been fortunate enough (…) to have spent my formative years surrounded by Hammers fans. Many of them are still my friends now. So it has been with some delight that I’ve been reminding them of the cost to the taxpayer that their recent relegation has cost us (they have an incredibly generous rental agreement with the local council on the Olympic Stadium, which means that upon relegation their rent goes down by roughly £2.5 million a year! – agreed to by Boris Johnson – so another amazing legacy of his…)

Alas.

The East End has produced plenty of things over the years. Sailors. Dockers. Market traders. Gangsters. Politicians. The odd world champion boxer. And, of course, West Ham United. The Hammers. The Irons. And a bunch of really loud University of Essex fans during the 2003 play-off semi-finals. Not that I’m still bitter.

The club's badge is one of the most recognisable in English football. Two giant crossed hammers. Claret and blue. Job done. Some sort of factory thing. Won’t take long to explain it.

Or so I thought.

Because tucked away within the modern badge is something I bet most fans don’t even know – the shape of the shield itself ties the club to both its own past and Britain’s past as the heart of a mighty maritime empire.

The shield isn’t actually a shield. It is the cross-section of a ship's hull.

Not just any ship either.

HMS Warrior. The same ship you can still visit today at the Portsmouth Dock Yards.

Now we're talking. Maritime history. Much more my thing.

To understand why they have the Royal Navy’s first ironclad stitched to their shirts, we need to head back to the old Docklands. The industrial East End. Proper London.

A world of cranes, foundries, shipyards and men whose jobs involved hitting things with hammers for twelve hours a day. Swearing. Gambling. Making rude jokes about their wives. Proper London.

In the nineteenth century, the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company was the biggest shipbuilder on the River Thames. At its peak it employed thousands of workers and occupied huge sites around Bow Creek and Canning Town.

Among its many achievements was the construction of HMS Warrior.

When Warrior was launched in 1860, it changed naval warfare forever. Before Warrior, most warships were made from wood. Warrior was made from iron.

Before Warrior, warships relied primarily on sail. Warrior had steam engines.

Before Warrior, the Royal Navy ruled the waves through centuries of tradition and the massed (and masted) ranks of disciplined crews still basking in Nelson’s glory. Dreaming of a day when they’d be ordered to Engage the Enemy More Closely and board French ships, slipping on bloody decks and swinging across the rigging.

But Warrior announced that the future had arrived. Warfare was no longer about coming alongside your enemy and blasting them to pieces, hoping your gun crews were more disciplined than their opponents – that they could fire faster despite being deafened by their own cannons, pulverised by incoming cannonballs and sliced to pieces by razor-sharp fragments of decking and hull zipping through the air. Remember, one lad's job was simply to keep the sawdust fresh on the floor to soak up the blood.

Warrior was the beginning of a new world – one of explosive shells, radio, radar and cold hard steel – and the Royal Navy was once again at the forefront of it.

And the men who built her? Many of them worked for the same company that would eventually give birth to West Ham United.

The club began life in 1895 as Thames Ironworks F.C. It was founded by shipbuilders, boilermakers, riveters, engineers and labourers who were among the most skilled craftsmen and technicians on Earth.

The crossed hammers on the badge represent the riveting hammers used by those workers. That is where the nicknames "The Hammers" and "The Irons" come from.

Which brings us back to the badge.

When West Ham redesigned it ahead of their move to the London Stadium, they removed the castle (which referred to Boleyn Castle – a local landmark near their old ground, the Boleyn Ground) but retained the hammers and adopted the hull-shaped shield as a tribute to HMS Warrior and the Thames Ironworks that built her.

But that is only part of the story.

Firstly, let’s visit this thing about blowing bubbles.

I recently visited the London Stadium and was amused at the bubble machines they wheeled out before the match and seeing the whole crowd singing in unison about bubbles – not exactly the most fearsome of war-cries, and somehow lacking the poignancy of Liverpool’s You’ll Never Walk Alone.2

So where does it come from?

I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles originated as a popular song from the 1918 Broadway musical The Passing Show. It became widely known in Britain through the working-class music halls of London during the 1920s, which picked up the tune and made it popular on this side of the Atlantic.

I had always assumed American music was a relatively recent import to Britain, but this proves that working-class Londoners could be humming Broadway hits over a century ago.

These music halls were lively venues offering affordable entertainment, where ordinary Londoners enjoyed songs, comedy and variety acts. They were a huge part of urban working-class culture, only really disappearing with the rise of cinema and later television. The last real connection my generation has to that world is probably Bruce Forsyth, who cut his teeth on the remnants of the music-hall circuit in the 1940s and 1950s.

The song became linked to West Ham through a local schoolboy nicknamed "Bubbles", whose headmaster would sing it whenever the school team played well. The headmaster happened to be a friend of West Ham manager Charlie Paynter, and the song gradually made its way onto the terraces at Upton Park.

In 1999, Hammers supporters set a world record when all 24,000 fans in attendance blew bubbles continuously for one minute. A record nobody has bothered trying to beat. Probably because why would you? But still, well done them.

So that’s the badge and its shipbuilding past. That’s the song and its music-hall origins.

Are we done?

Not quite.

Because we owe it to history to visit one final character: Arnold Hills.

Hills belonged to that old class of Brit – the sort who went to Harrow (like Hills), then Oxford (like Hills), and somehow ended up running vast industrial enterprises while representing England at sport and probably discovering a lost civilisation before breakfast. Hills himself didn’t quite manage all of that, but nineteenth-century Britain seemed remarkably good at producing wildly talented, outrageously privileged people.

Hills was an athlete who represented England at football and won national athletics titles. He was also, of course, the managing director of the Thames Iron Works in Canning Town. Imagine Wayne Rooney simultaneously running one of Europe’s largest manufacturing firms.

Unlike many Victorian industrialists, however, Hills took a keen interest in the welfare of his workers. He lived for five years in a small workers' home in Canning Town and ensured the company provided recreational facilities to improve workers’ lives.

It was this belief in organised sport as a force for discipline, health and community that led him, alongside foreman Dave Taylor, to found Thames Ironworks F.C. in 1895 – the club that would eventually become West Ham United.

Hills provided the financial backing that allowed the club to grow, helping transform a works team into a community institution.

Yet he was also a fascinatingly unconventional figure: a committed vegetarian, temperance campaigner and philanthropist.

He established the London Vegetarian Society and appointed a young man called Mahatma Gandhi to its board (in the society's first photo you can see him sat on the front row - when he had hair). He set up the Vegetarian Cycling Club, founded a newspaper called The Vegetarian, and helped create the Oriolet Fruitarian Hospital – Britain's first hospital dedicated to treating vegetarians and promoting natural, fruit-based healing.

…What utter woke nonsense is this!?

How many of West Ham’s die-hard supporters, proudly flashing crossed-hammers symbols, know that they owe their existence to a lily-livered vegetarian?

I absolutely love it.

It makes Dale Vince’s Forest Green Rovers look like gas-guzzling MAGA voters.

Superb stuff from the Hammers.

I’ll be looking forward to their Arnold Hills anniversary vegan-inspired third shirt. Come on, Hammers. Let’s make this happen.

There is almost nothing more British than West Ham.

The grit, sweat and clanging steel of the shipyards that helped build and defend an empire, workers who spent weekends singing American songs and getting drunk, all funded by an upper-class eccentric who represented England in sport and promoted a hippy lifestyle.

I say again – I absolutely love this club.

Up the East End Vegetarians!