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Although the hall was originally built in Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition of 1851 it was moved to Sydenham in south London after the exhibition finished, an area which then became known as Crystal Palace. In 1905 workers at the hall formed a football team and also named it Crystal Palace.
The exhibition hall, the area and the football club share more than just a name. Both the club and hall suffered from financial difficulties.
In 2010, Crystal Palace went into administration. While in the 1850s, the company that built the original hall found itself unable to pay the debt for the building. They’d made a basic mistake. Most people worked six days a week with only Sundays off. The hall was only open six days a week and it closed on a Sunday. Even a candidate on The Apprentice can spot the flaw in this business model. Most people could not visit without taking time off work and when they did it was pounds not pennies the builders needed.
Unusually, the great rivals of Palace are not a London side but a club over 40 miles away – Brighton.
The rivalry with Brighton had simmered for a number of years but ‘officially’ started in 1974 when they were in the third division. Both sides had a large number of away supporters, regularly taking 12,000 to each other’s grounds. An FA Cup match saw the rivalry boil over after Brighton was awarded a penalty. They scored but the referee made them retake it as a Palace player had encroached into the box. The retaken penalty was missed and Palace went on to win 1-0.
Alan Mullery, the Brighton manager, was enraged and as he marched off the pitch he encountered trouble in the tunnel.
“As I was walking up the tunnel,” he told The Guardian, “a load of boiling hot coffee was thrown over me by a Crystal Palace supporter. So I pulled a handful of change out of my pocket, threw it on the floor and shouted, ‘That’s all you’re worth, Crystal Palace.’ And I’d shout it at anybody who did that.”
Mullery added further insults, and gestures involving his fingers, before storming into the Palace dressing room to confront his old Tottenham Hotspur team-mate and then Crystal Palace manager, Terry Venables. It was reported that Mullery threw a fiver on the floor and told El Tel he wouldn’t pay that much for the entire Palace team. Which was true, if 36 years too early. In 2010, following administration, he could have picked the whole team up for nothing.
Crystal Palace adopted the The Dave Clark Five song ‘Glad All Over’ as their anthem in the 1960s.
As with many football songs, the song was taken from popular culture at that time. ‘Glad All Over’ was written by Mike Smith and recorded by The Dave Clark Five. Released in November of 1963, it got the group their first ever number one several months later, in January the following year.
Unlike other football songs, the transition from chart to terraces was pretty much instant. Usually, it can take several years before a song is widely accepted as tradition but, in the case of Glad All Over it had easily caught on within the year and was solidified in matchday tradition by the end of the decade. So much so, The Dave Clark Five actually played the song live at Selhurst Park in 1968. Ever since then, the song has been sung before, during and after matches (providing Palace win).
The song has been adopted by Blackpool, who used Glad All Over as their anthem since the 1970s, and other English Football League teams Rotherham United, Port Vale and Swindon Town have followed suit, playing the song whenever they score a goal.
A cover version, sung by the then current squad, was released as part of their FA Cup run (where they reached the final of the competition) in 1990.
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About the Author
After too many years as season ticket holder at Parkhead, Andy Todd renounced the SPL three years ago to support Queens Park. One team is a rank bunch of amateurs who play in a state of the art stadium and the other is…(I think we can all see where this is going).
Andy has been performing comedy for 18 months but is currently ‘between gigs’ while he writes a book on Scottish property law to be published in Summer 2012. Its potential audience will be less than 300 but his mum will be very proud.
Follow Andy on Twitter: @toddandy
Check out Andy’s website: www.toddandy.com
