An occasional thread for posting information about players of Yesteryear. Not just from CAFC, but any Club. I'll start with a piece from the BBC Sport website about Notts County player Jimmy Logan https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/cz9xg08yj1po How different times were at the end of the 19th Century. A team who played a match in their street clothes as their kit was not brought with them, Logan getting drenched, going home with no chance to dry himself and eventually catching pneumonia. Players don't know they're born these days.
Frank Beattie. A coal miner who worked a 6am to 2pm shift before having lunch and reporting for training with Kilmarnock. He did this until the age of 26 when he went full time and became club captain until he was late 30's. Highlight was when he captained them to the league title in 1964/65. More recently he had a stand named after him.
Good to see Chris Powell get his MBE at the Palace this week. For all his limitations as a manager, an admirable bloke who’s had a great career in football.
Matt Tees in the 1968 Charlton team. My favourite ever Charlton team. 32 goals in 89 games. After beginning his career in the local leagues in Scotland with Cambuslang Rangers before joining professional football with Airdrie. He then joined Grimsby Town, Charlton Athletic, Luton Town and back to Grimsby Town, during his second spell at Grimsby, Tees was part of the 1971–72 team that won the Division Four title.[3][4] A 2017 BBC documentary on dementia among retired footballers included a visit to Tees' family home, where it was confirmed he had an advanced stage of the condition; it was suggested that the cause may be the high number of times he headed the ball during his playing career
Things were a lot different in those days. I remember the Charlton squad running up and down the vast East terrace as part of their training. After training they would pop round to the Fish and Chip shop which I think was in Floyd road.
The 5,000 fans who stuck with CAFC for five long seasons at Selhurst Park. “Home” crowds that went as low as 800 during that bleak period. Very many of these forgotten Charlton heroes are no longer with us (both the guys I stood with in the Arthur Waite stand are now dead), but the club & current fans debt to them is bloody huge.
This is fascinating In September 1933, Hamburg team-mates Asbjorn Halvorsen and Otto Harder bade each other farewell. They ended up on opposite sides of a concentration camp fence. Worth a google
Roger Alwen. We wouldn’t have a club now without him. Not just a lifelong Charlton fan, from a family of Charlton fans, but also the epitome of a civilised and understated English gentleman, as anyone who has met him can testify. What a contrast as a human being to the succession of cheap trash that followed him as owner. Roger wasn’t fantastically wealthy, but he ploughed in every penny he could afford to take us back to the Valley. Not only that, along with the late Mike Norris (another hero), he bought the club out training ground at Sparrows Lane. As he said at the time: “I felt it was essential the club once again had a footprint in Greenwich”. This is why my p iss boils at times, not just at forum fans who belittle our surrender of the club assets, but also at the succession of cretin owners & grifter execs that allowed it to happen.
