It's coming up to a year since I posted Faces in the Crowd 1961/1962 in 'After You've Gone'- a collection of rather haunting photos taken by the local newspaper of football crowds at Brisbane Road, which were published in the match day programme of Leyton Orient FC. The idea was that if you saw your face circled, you won a free ticket to stand on the terraces at the next match. Half a century on such images are loaded with meaning - perfect micro-studies of people's clothes and hair styles of the time. Faces mostly caught unaware of the camera lens, and that one head picked out of the crowd, with an assassin-like target marking it out from all of the others...
Seven years after those images in http://colinville.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/faces-in-crowd-19611962.html, we journey about ten miles south of the Orient, to The Den, former home of Millwall Football Club, in Cold Blow Lane, London SE14. In Season 1968/1969, the official programme ran a feature called 'Featuring Our Supporters'. Unlike the rather crude white circles used by Leyton Orient back in the early 1960s, the Lions programme editor used a solitary yet perfectly round white O around a face in the crowd. The publication was printed in blue ink on white paper, and was sold outside the football ground for one shilling (5p).
Thanks to a cache of these Millwall programmes bought from a vintage football programme dealer this May Bank Holiday weekend (at a very fair price), I now present faces of the late 60s snapped for posterity by a photographer for the team's local newspaper - the South East London Mercury...
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| The same image was used twice in consecutive matches, and both times the face circled is unaware of being photographed |
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