At times you forget how close we came to going out of business and how far we’ve come since then. I know we’re in the 3rd division but look around the ground and it’s unbelievable really (pity we don’t own it anymore though).
Lennie on the payphone at The Valley Club, the dash across to the High Court, know of some Charlton fans that followed the cab. And I'll never pay for a pie at Blackburn again.
Local papers used to be the main way of keeping up with Charlton years back.
Living in West London, I didn't even have access to anything other than Thames News or The Evening Standard. It was a horrible 9 or 10 days with very little encouraging news.
Lots of Greenwich Borough content on the front page of that “Kentish” newspaper!
What happened in 1984? Did we actually go out of business?
Yes, we were gone for about 10 days. Had to postpone a fixture at Blackburn and were warned by Football League that if we didn't play the next game v Grimsby, we were expelled from the league (like Bury were a couple of years ago).
It still annoys me that only 7,600 turned up to that Grimsby match, two days after we had been saved. Reality was, that back then, not too many people gave a proper shit about Charlton.
Local papers used to be the main way of keeping up with Charlton years back.
We lived in the North East in the early 1980s and, hard to believe maybe ... the only way that we had of keeping up with Charlton news was via the Mercury and Independent which were posted to me by my mother.
The letter would arrive on or around Thursday of the following week.
Internet? Apps? Pah!
This was also how I discovered local bias in such rags. I saw us get thumped at Roker Park. 0-4 and we did well to get '0'. But reading the London papers you would have thought that we had been robbed.
Local papers used to be the main way of keeping up with Charlton years back.
We lived in the North East in the early 1980s and, hard to believe maybe ... the only way that we had of keeping up with Charlton news was via the Mercury and Independent which were posted to me by my mother.
The letter would arrive on or around Thursday of the following week.
Internet? Apps? Pah!
This was also how I discovered local bias in such rags. I saw us get thumped at Roker Park. 0-4 and we did well to get '0'. But reading the London papers you would have thought that we had been robbed.
Fake news goes back a long way.
Exactly the same here. Getting info was a nightmare back then living oop north, even the limited sport news on the tele and newspapers was regionalised, football didn't exist outside of the north west. My nan used to send me the local rags and the sunday sports pages every week so I could keep up!
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But back to the original story. Those really were harrowing times and probably the closest we came to extinction.
Hundreds of thousands now.
There is (or certainly was a couple of years ago) an old ad for it on a newsagent kiosk at Bexleyheath station: https://853.london/2018/10/12/the-lost-independent-a-railway-station-sign-thats-a-piece-of-journalism-history/
It still annoys me that only 7,600 turned up to that Grimsby match, two days after we had been saved. Reality was, that back then, not too many people gave a proper shit about Charlton.
The letter would arrive on or around Thursday of the following week.
Internet? Apps? Pah!
This was also how I discovered local bias in such rags. I saw us get thumped at Roker Park. 0-4 and we did well to get '0'. But reading the London papers you would have thought that we had been robbed.
Fake news goes back a long way.