Episode 7 : After the Summit (1966 to 1976)

The decade after 1966 brings the gradual departure of Moore, Hurst, and Peters — and the arrival of Billy Bonds and Trevor Brooking. It also tells the story of Clyde Best, the teenager from Bermuda who became the most prominent Black player in English football in the early 1970s, facing systematic racist abuse and responding with a courage that changed the sport. The episode ends with the 1975 FA Cup win — and a painful European final defeat to Anderlecht in Brussels the following year.

Research Sources

Wikipedia: Clyde Best – born 24 February 1951; arrived West Ham 1968; debut 25 August 1969 vs Arsenal (1-1); first goal League Cup vs Halifax 3 September 1969; 221 appearances, 58 goals; left January 1976; OBE 2006; Bermuda Sports Hall of Fame 2004.

West Ham United official site (whufc.com): Ade Coker and Clyde Best article – confirms 1 April 1972 three Black players (Best, Coker, Charles) vs Spurs; 2-0 win.

West Ham United official site: Clyde Best Black History Month feature – debut details, first goals, Ron Greenwood as pioneer.

BritBrief.co.uk: Clyde Best interview – acid letter detail; teammates forming two lines in tunnel; Everton monkey chants.

Somegreengrassandaball.wordpress.com: Clyde Best – The Pioneer – details on racist abuse, National Front on terraces, professional slurs including reserve game against Norwich.

WestHamZone.com: Clyde Best documentary preview article – confirms documentary 'Transforming the Beautiful Game' premiering London March 2026; quotes Best on playing for those coming after him.

Wikipedia: Billy Bonds – born Woolwich 17 September 1946; died 30 November 2025; 663 league apps (club record); signed from Charlton 1967; captain after Moore 1974; five-time Hammer of the Year; MBE 1988; Billy Bonds Stand renamed 2019.

Wikipedia: Trevor Brooking – born Barking 2 October 1948; 647 appearances, 102 goals; debut 1967; 47 England caps; 1975 and 1980 FA Cups; 1976 Cup Winners' Cup Final; Knighted 2004.

Wikipedia: Martin Peters – sold to Spurs March 1970 for £200,000 (British record); Jimmy Greaves came other way.

Wikipedia: Geoff Hurst – left for Stoke City 1972; 252 goals in 499 West Ham appearances.

Wikipedia: Bobby Moore – left West Ham March 1974 for Fulham; played in 1975 FA Cup Final for Fulham vs West Ham.

West Ham United official site (The Boys of '75 features) – Trevor Brooking and Pat Holland accounts of 1974-75 FA Cup run.

Wikipedia: 1975 FA Cup Final – West Ham 2-0 Fulham; 3 May 1975; Alan Taylor scored both goals.

Wikipedia: 1975-76 UEFA Cup Winners' Cup – route: Reipas Lahti, Ararat Yerevan, Den Haag, Eintracht Frankfurt (semi), Anderlecht (final). Final: 5 May 1976, Heysel Stadium Brussels. Anderlecht 4-2 West Ham.

Trevor Brooking's account (whufc.com): confirms Eintracht Frankfurt second leg at Upton Park (14 April 1976, 39,202 crowd) was best atmosphere of his career; Brooking scored a header.

All book references across the series:

John Powles — Iron in the Blood: Thames Ironworks FC, the Club That Became West Ham United (Soccerdata, 2005) — amazon.com/dp/1899468226 — Out of print; second-hand copies available.

Charles Korr — West Ham United: The Making of a Football Club (Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1986) — amazon.co.uk/dp/0715621262 — Out of print; second-hand copies available.

Elliott Taylor — Up The Hammers!: The West Ham Battalion in the Great War 1914–1918 (2012; Third Edition 2015) — amazon.co.uk/dp/1479279463

John Spurling — Syd King: The Man Who Built West Ham — Referenced in Episode 2 for King's management years.

Charles Booth — Life and Labour of the People of London (1889–1903) — Referenced in Episode 1. Searchable free via LSE Digital Library.

John Lovell — Stevedores and Dockers — Referenced in Episode 1. Background on dock labour conditions in Victorian East London.

Jonathan Schneer — Ben Tillett: Portrait of a Labour Leader — Referenced in Episode 1. Context on the 1889 Great Dock Strike.

Jeff Powell — Bobby Moore: The Life and Times of a Sporting Hero (Queen Anne Press, 2002) — amazon.co.uk/dp/1861055110

Matt Dickinson — Bobby Moore: The Man in Full (2014) — amazon.co.uk/dp/0224091727 — Supplementary to Powell.

Josh Chetwynd & ...

Transcript

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Welcome back to Irons Through the Ages. Last time, we climbed the summit. Bobby Moore lifted the Jules Rimmett Trophy at Wembley. Jeff Hearst scored three goals in a World Cup final. Martin Peters arrived, as he always did, in exactly the right place, at exactly the right moment. England 4, West Germany 2, and three of the architects of that afternoon wore claret and blue for a living. We ended with a question. Every summit is followed by a descent. The question wasn't whether the years after 1966 would be more difficult. Of course they would be. The question was, what kind of difficulty? And what would West Ham United become on the other side of it? The answer involved several things happening at once. A crop of extraordinary new players arriving just as the golden generation move on. A teenager from Bermuda stepping onto English pitches and facing something the game had largely ignored and needed urgently to confront. Billy Bonds and Trevor Brooking becoming the new spine of the club, and West Ham, improbably, winning their third FA Cup in 1975, and coming agonizingly close to a second European trophy one year later. This is episode 7, after the summit. The problem with winning the World Cup. There is a particular challenge that football clubs face when three of their players win a World Cup. The players come back famous in a way they have never been before. The attention is overwhelming. Other clubs begin to circle, and the players themselves, quite humanly, are changed. They have done the greatest thing possible in their sport, and the question of what comes next has no obvious answer. West Ham's league results reflect the ambiguity. 16th in 1966-67, 12th the year after, eighth the year after that. Decent enough, but without the consistency that trophies require. After the FA Cup in 1964 and the Cup Winners' Cup in 1965, no further silverware arrived until 1975. A decade without a trophy, in the years when three of your players were World Cup winners. Part of the explanation is financial. Ron Greenwood, for all his brilliance, was working with one of the more modest budgets in the first division. West Ham could develop talent superbly, they could not always keep it, and they could not supplement it with expensive purchases. The depth of the squad, which Brooking later identified as the club's perennial weakness, was never quite sufficient for a sustained challenge. Part of it was simply time. The players who had produced those extraordinary seasons were five years older. Martin Peters was sold to Tottenham in March 1970, with Jimmy Greaves coming the other way. The departure of Peters, the Plasto Boy, the purest product of the Academy, felt to many supporters like the loss of something irreplaceable. Bobby Moore remained for now. But even Moore could not hold back the tide of change that was coming. New arrivals, the next wave. What made these years something other than simple decline was the quality of the players arriving to replace those departing. This is the thing about the Academy culture. Properly embedded, it replenishes itself. Billy Bonds arrived from Charlton in 1967 for a modest fee and would stay for 21 years as a player. Trevor Brooking, born in Barking like Bobby Moore, made his senior debut the same year. Their stories come shortly. And in 1968, a teenager arrived from the island of Bermuda. He had never experienced anything like what awaited him in the football grounds of England. His name was Clyde Best, and his story is unlike any other in this club's history. A boy from Bermuda, Clyde Cyril Best was born on the 24th of February 1951 in Somerset Village, Bermuda. He was good enough to represent Bermuda's national team at 15, and when the team travelled to the Pan American Games in 1967, a West Ham scout was watching. What he saw was a 17-year-old centre-forward of genuine quality, powerfully built, technically accomplished, with finishing ability that is genuinely rare. In 1968, Clyde Bess boarded a plane for England. Nobody was there to meet him at the airport. He got on the wrong tube and ended up two stops past where he was supposed to be. A friendly stranger helped him find his way. He ended up staying for five years with a family called the Charles's, Jess Charles, a white woman who had married a black man in the 1940s and raised biracial children, and who understood something about navigating a world that didn't always make room for you. Her home became his home. He impressed enough in the youth team to earn a professional contract and made his first team debut on the 25th of August 1969, a 1-1 draw against Arsenal at Upton Park in front of nearly 40,000 people. He was 18. What he had not encountered before, could not have encountered in Bermuda, was what greeted him in football grounds across England. Racism on the terraces. The England that best arrived in was largely indifferent to racism in public life. The Race Relations Act had only just passed. In football, the terraces at some grounds had become active recruiting grounds for the far right, and the abuse directed at black players was not occasional or marginal, it was routine, public, and essentially unaddressed by the authorities. Best, as one of the very few black players in the first division, was one of the most visible targets. At away grounds across England, he was subjected to monkey chance every time he touched the ball. Bananas were thrown at him from the terraces. In his own words, wherever he went outside of Upton Park, it was there. And then there was the letter. Sometime around 1970, Best received a letter at the club. It told him that the next time he ran out of the tunnel at Upton Park, someone would throw acid in his face. Think about that for a moment. A young man, 20 years old, receiving a credible threat that he would be attacked with acid the next time he walked onto a football pitch. What Clyde Best did next tells you everything about who he was. He showed up, he ran out, he played, he scored. But not alone. His teammates, knowing what the letter contained, formed two lines as they came out of the tunnel and put Best in the middle. Bobby Moore, Harry Rednapp, Billy Bonds. The men around him made themselves a war. It is one of the most quietly extraordinary acts of solidarity in the history of English football, and it happened without announcement or fanfare because these men understood what it meant to look after their own. Best has said in every interview since, I had a job to do. I was brought up being told I was playing for those coming after me, and that's the way I went about my business. That is the sentence of a man who understood, at 20, that his presence on a football pitch was not just about him. The player. It would be easy to let the weight of that experience overshadow what best was as a footballer. That would be a disservice to him. He was very good. In 221 appearances for West Ham, he scored 58 goals. A physically imposing center forward with the strength to hold the ball against the roughest defenders and the technique to finish. By the early 1970s, he was a genuine fans' favourite at Upton Park. The supporters who watched him week in and week out saw a quality footballer giving everything for their club and responded accordingly. At the Berlin ground, he was theirs. The abuse came from everywhere else. And he was not alone for long. On 1st of April 1972, Ron Greenwood selected Best, the Nigerian-born forward Aide Coker and local player Clive Charles in the same starting 11 against Tottenham. West Ham won 2-0, and it was the first time in Football League history that three black players had appeared in the same team. Greenwood, who had spent 11 years building the Academy on the principle that talent and intelligence should determine selection, had simply picked the best team he had. The selection made the history. Best left West Ham in January 1976. He was awarded an OBE in 2006, and in 2026, a documentary about his life premieres in London. Fifty years on, the world is finally beginning to understand what this gentle giant from Bermuda actually was. The first black role model in English football. A man who played for those coming after him. English Football and Race - The Wider Picture. The story of Clyde Best cannot be told as though it were a few bad fans at a few grounds. It was systemic. Black players in the early 1970s were treated as a curiosity and subjected to abuse that was tolerated by the authorities, the clubs, and the media with a casualness that is now almost impossible to credit. The football association had no policy on racial abuse. The clubs had none. The police were not primarily concerned with what was being shouted. Into that environment came not just Best, but a small group of other pioneers. Cyrilla Regis, Viv Anderson, Lori Cunningham. Each of them absorbed something no white player was required to absorb, and each of them continued anyway. Their refusal to be driven out, their excellence in the face of contempt, is one of the significant stories of English sport in the 20th century. Ron Greenwood would later become England manager, and, in 1978, select Viv Anderson as the first black player to appear for the senior England team. That selection, unremarkable in how Greenwood made it, transformative in what it meant, was the logical extension of everything he had practiced at West Ham since 1961. Pick the best players, treat them as players, full stop. The fight for a football that looks like the communities it serves is not over. But the line runs clearly from Clyde Best's debut in 1969 to the diverse, brilliant England squads of the 21st century. He was the first, he was not the last. And that, in the end, was always the point. Billy Bonds, the heart of the club. William Arthur Bonds was born in Woolwich in 1946. He was working his way through Charlton's system when Ron Greenwood brought him to Upton Park in 1967 for a modest fee. It was one of Greenwood's most consequential decisions, not because Bonds was an obvious star when he arrived, but because he turned out to be something rarer than a star, a man who would give himself entirely to one club for the rest of his working life. Bonds played 663 league games for West Ham. A club record. His debut was in 1967, his last appearance in 1988. 21 years, through the departures of Moore and Hurst and Peters, through two FA Cups, through relegation and promotion, Hammer of the Year five times, named West Ham's greatest ever player in multiple polls. In 2019, the East Stand at London Stadium was renamed the Billy Bonds Stand. On the pitch, Bonds was everything distinctive about the West Ham approach, technically accomplished, intelligent, but he was also simply ferocious, hard, utterly competitive, a player who would run through a wall for the Clariton Blue. He began as a right back, moved to midfield where he became the perfect partner for Trevor Brooking, and later settled into central defense. And as captain, a role that came to him after Bobby Moore's departure in 1974, he was, by the testimony of every player who played under him, inspirational. Billy Bonds died on the 30th of November 2025 at 79. The tributes were uniform, a great footballer, a great captain, and an even better man. The club he gave his life to will carry his name on a stand at every home game. A small tribute to an enormous contribution. Trevor Brooking, Grace Made Physical. Trevor Brooking was born in Barking in 1948. Tottenham and Chelsea both wanted him as a teenager, but he chose West Ham, specifically because they were the only club that allowed him to stay on at school and finish his A levels before signing. That detail is very West Ham, the club that thought about the whole person. He made his debut in 1967 and became, by the early 1970s, the most elegant footballer in the first division. He wore the number 10 shirt as though it had been created for him. He lacked pace. His teammates called him Boog after a slow American baseball player, but pace is a poor substitute for thought, and Brooking had more thought than anyone. Greenwood said he had everything: technique, intelligence, composure, and the rare ability to make the players around him better simply by being on the pitch. 647 appearances, 102 goals, 47 England caps, 5-time Hammer of the Year, knighted in 2004, Sir Trevor Brooking is, by any measure, one of the finest footballers England has produced. And those who watched him at Upton Park, the number 10 gliding through defences, with something that looked less like football and more like thought expressed physically, knew exactly what they were seeing. They never forgot it. The end of an era. Moore Hearst Peters. Move on. The three World Cup winners left West Ham across a seven-year period, and each departure had its own texture. Martin Peters went first. In March 1970, sold to Tottenham for £200,000, a British record, with Jimmy Greaves coming the other way. Peters was 26 and still perhaps the finest creative midfielder in English football. There were suggestions of tension, of Peters wanting more security than a club of West Ham's means could offer. Whatever the truth, the Plasto boy never played for his hometown club again, and the sense of something interrupted lingered. Jeff Hurst left in the summer of 1972 for Stoke City at 30. He had scored 252 goals in 499 West Ham appearances, converted from wing half, made into a World Cup hat-trick scorer by the specific imagination of Ron Greenwood. The departure was expected by them, but still a loss the club felt. And then, in March 1974, Bobby Moore. His departure is one of the most painful moments in the club's history. Not because it was unexpected, but because it closed something so bright and so defining that its absence has never entirely been filled. Moore was 32. He wanted a new contract. The terms offered did not meet what he felt he deserved. There were discussions, delays, frustrations. And in March 1974, Bobby Moore joined Fulham. He would go on to play in the 1975 FA Cup final for Fulham against West Ham. He retired in 1977 and never managed at the highest level, a loss English football should acknowledge more plainly than it does. With Moore gone, Billy Bonds became captain and led the club toward the trophies this episode is still building to. 1974-75, a season remembered. By the summer of 1974, West Ham were a club in transition. Moore gone, Hearst gone, Peters long gone. Ron Greenwood had moved upstairs to a director of football role, handing first team affairs to his assistant John Lyle, a handover between two men who shared a philosophy and trusted each other. Lyle had been at the club since the early 1960s. He was West Ham through and through. Lyall brought in three new attacking players: Billy Jennings, Keith Robson, and a young forward from non-league football named Alan Taylor, not household names, exactly the kind of players West Ham had always found when they needed them. In the league, 1974-75 was middling. In the FA Cup, West Ham went on one of the most unlikely runs in the competition's history. They beat Southampton, Swindon, and Queens Park Rangers. Then they went to Highbury for the quarterfinal and beat Arsenal 2-both goals scored by Alan Taylor, a player who had never played in an FA Cup tie before that season. The Arsenal defenders, as Pat Holland recalled, simply hadn't heard of him. Ipswich Cup favourites were beaten in the semi-final, and on the 3rd of May 1975, West Ham United played Fulham in the FA Cup final at Wembley. Bobby Moore was in the Fulham side. Wembley, 1975, a strange and glorious afternoon. The game had a quality no scriptwriter would have dared invent. Fulham, a second division club, on their own extraordinary run, with Rodney Marsh, Alan Mullery, and Bobby Moore. Alan Taylor, the unknown from non-league, scored twice in the second half. West Ham 2, Fulham 0. For the second time in the club's history, they had won the FA Cup. Billy Bonds lifted the trophy, as Moore had lifted it in 1964, while Bobby Moore watched from the other side of the pitch in white. There is a photograph of Moore at full time, shaking hands with the West Ham players. His expression is composed, as it always was. Whatever he felt that afternoon, he did not make it public. That too was very Bobby Moore. Back in East London, the celebrations were a complicated joy, quieter than 1964, mixed with the knowledge of what had been lost in the years between. But still, they won. Bonds had his first major trophy. Brooking, now the creative heart of the side, had his, and the East End celebrated the way it always has. Back in Europe, the 1975-76 campaign, winning the FA Cup gave West Ham a second European adventure, a return to the Cup Winners' Cup, 11 years after the triumph of 1965. The route to the final took them past Ripas Lati of Finland, Ararat Yerevan of the Soviet Union, and Den Haag of the Netherlands, against whom a 4-0 first leg deficit was very nearly fatal before an astonishing home recovery. Then Eintracht Frankfurt in the semi-final. The second leg against Frankfurt at Upton Park on 14th of April 1976 is remembered by everyone who was there as one of the great Berlin ground knights. Needing to overcome a first leg deficit, West Ham won 3-1 Brookings, scoring aheader of all things, with a crowd of 39,000 creating an atmosphere Brooking later called the best of his entire career. They were in the final, Anderlecht, at the Heisel Stadium in Brussels on 5th of May 1976. Heisel, 1976. The near miss. The 1976 final is the one that gets left out of the polished version of West Ham's history because it doesn't have a happy ending. West Ham lost 4-2 to Anderlecht, one of the best club sides in Europe, playing in their home country, in front of a stadium packed with Belgian support. The defeat was not a disgrace. They were faster, more cohesive, better in the moments that mattered. West Ham played well in spells. Brooking was excellent as he nearly always was, but the margins went against them. There is a temptation to see this as the closing bracket of a difficult decade to FA Cups, but no European trophy to match 1965. I don't think that's right. The 1975-76 campaign, taken whole, was one of the most remarkable things West Ham have done. Produced by a squad that, in terms of resources, had no business competing at this level. The final was lost. The campaign was extraordinary. Both things are true. And the second matters more than the first. Player of the era, Clyde Best. For this era, 1966 to 1976, the player is Clyde Best. Not because he was the most technically accomplished player West Ham had in these years. Trevor Brooking was probably that. But because what Best did and what it cost him and what it meant goes beyond the usual measures of footballing. Excellence. 58 goals in 221 appearances over seven seasons. A genuine contributor to a good first division side. But more than the statistics, a pioneer. The first prominent black center forward in English top flight football, the man who received a letter threatening him with acid and walked out of the tunnel anyway, protected by the wall of his teammates, who endured abuse at ground after ground for seven years and responded every time by playing better. Ian Wright has spoken of Best as the player who made it possible for him to believe he could do what he did. John Barnes, Les Ferdinand, Viv Anderson. In different ways, these men have acknowledged what Best's courage opened up for them. He was awarded an OBE in 2006. A belated recognition of something that deserved recognition in real time. When he was 20 years old, running through that tunnel every week, making history whether anyone noticed or not. Clyde Best, West Ham United, 1969-1976. Remember him properly. Fanz eye view. For this episode's fan perspective, imagine being a West Ham supporter in the Chicken Run. The old covered terrace along the east side of Upton Park on a match day in 1972, watching Clyde Best play. You've been coming to the Berlin ground since you were a boy. You stood here when Moore lifted the FA Cup and the Cup Winners' Cup. You've watched the golden generation come and one by one go. And now there's this boy from Bermuda, big, powerful, genuinely good, playing up front in clarit and blue. At away grounds, you know what happens to him. You've heard the chanting when West Ham play on the road. It's vile and it makes you ashamed for the game. And there's nothing you can do about it. But here, at Upton Park, it's different. Here, he's yours. And when Clyde Best scores, when he turns and drives, and the ball hits the net, the noise from the chicken run and the south bank is the noise of people who have decided, without any formal discussion, that this man is theirs. And they will make that clear. Belonging is not a small thing. For a teenager from Bermuda in a football world that was hostile in ways hard to overstate, belonging to a crowd that claimed him as their own was, in Best's own telling, essential. The Upton Park crowd didn't solve racism in English football, but they told Clyde Best something true: you're ours, and we're proud of you. That mattered a great deal. The decade from 1966 to 1976 is West Ham United's most complicated, the greatest triumph in the club's history. Followed by the challenge of living in its shadow, the World Cup winners departing one by one. A teenager from Bermuda enduring things no footballer should have to endure without flinching. A new generation, bonds, brooking, building themselves into legends. An FA Cup won against a Fulham side that included Bobby Moore, a European campaign that fell just short. What connects it all is what has always connected West Ham's story, the culture, developing players the right way, the belief that talent and intelligence matter more than money, and the relationship between the club and its community Clyde Best, becoming the Upton Park Faithful's own, because of the particular warmth of that community in that ground. Next week, the late 1970s and the 1980s, John Lyle's West Ham, the second division title in 1981, and the extraordinary 1985 86 season when West Ham came within touching distance of their first ever league championship. Until then, come on you irons.