Eastville Stadium

It was a stadium known for lovingly tended flowerbeds behind each goal but also a terrible fire. And perhaps most notably, it was known for its stench.

Bristol Rovers fans are still known as “gasheads” because of the proximity of their former home ground, Eastville Stadium, to the Stapleton Gasworks and the stench that wafted from it over the Tote End.

Eastville Stadium was home to Bristol Rovers from 1897 until 1986, purchased from Sir Henry Greville Smyth of Ashton Court, an extensive landowner in late Victorian Bristol, for £150.

Famous sportsman C.B. Fry described Eastville as “a ground surrounded with a gasworks, a railway viaduct and a river that always threatened to swamp the ground”. Indeed, local flooding continutally plagued the ground, with the pitch ending up under seven feet of water in November 1950.

Originally called Eastville Rovers, the club quickly thrived and established themselves as a professional team in the Southern League, attracting good crowds as east Bristol built up.

But World War II stopped play, and the club’s loss of revenue forced them to sell Eastville to the Bristol Greyhound Racing Association in March 1940 for £12,000. Rovers made an agreement with the Association to pay them £400 per year to continue playing on the ground. The Association’s support was crucial to the survival of the club, as the club’s official history describes:

As the matchless 1944-45 season progressed, Rovers’ debts mounted. £600 was still owed to the bank, £700 to creditors and £4,700 on outstanding loans and the season’s inaction had cost a further £1,000. On 15th June 1945, therefore, Stevens and Hare became chairman and vice-chairman respectively and Charles Ferrari was appointed secretary on 20th August 1945. Effectively, from 29th November 1944, for four years, Rovers became an undisclosed subsidiary of the greyhound company.

On 21st September 1945 Lew Champeny, an employee of the greyhound company and a key figure in the events of 1950, was elected to the Rovers board. Various well-wishers waived more than £2,000 of the unpaid loans and it was with a greater sense of optimism and purpose that Rovers pieced together a side ready for the resumption of League football.

The stadium underwent vast changes over the decades, with the south stand added in 1924, and floodlights installed in 1959. Capacity was as high as 38,000 in the 1950s and 1960s, with a record crowd of 38,472 for the visit of Preston North End in a January 1960 FA Cup tie.

Despite Bristol Rovers never reaching the top flight, the stadium played host to many memorable cup ties, such as the 1972 Watney Cup Final, settled on penalties (the Watney Cup was a bizarre, short-lived tournament contested by the teams that had scored the most goals in each of the four divisions of the Football League the previous season, excluding those who had been promoted or won entry to one of the European competitions).

But new government regulations meant the capacity was vastly reduced to 12,500 in the 1970s, and the stadium was far from soccer specific: as well as greyhound racing, the stadium hosted athletics, cricket, concerts, American football, circuses, and even the Harlem Globetrotters. Speedway was introduced in 1977, leading to a reduction of the pitch to just 110×70 yards, the smallest in the Football League.

The construction of the M32 motorway in the late 1960s destroyed the surrounding ambience (such as it was), the ground becoming the closest in the country to a motorway, with the noise level highly intrusive.

But the biggest blow to the ground came in 1980, when a “mysterious” fire broke out in the south stand, with disastrous consequences, as the club’s history describes:

Rovers’ future at Eastville was cast into great doubt following the events of the night of 16-17 August 1980, when a mystery fire badly damaged the South Stand at Eastville. The club’s administrative offices and changing rooms were destroyed. Eastville was left as a shell, with seating only in the North Stand and the traffic noise from the M32 motorway now increasingly evident.

It was a depressing situation. Terry Cooper’s young, inexperienced side was forced to play three league games and two League Cup-ties at Ashton Gate and, when they returned to their damaged home in October, were so deeply into their club record run of twenty league games without a win that relegation appeared the only possible outcome.

Eastville Stadium fire

On top of this, the club continued to pay the price for not owning their own ground. The actual owners of the stadium, Bristol Stadium Company, came up with perhaps one of the most ambitious ideas in the history of lower league clubs:  in 1983, they announced their intention to transform the ground into an all-seater venue with a sliding roof.

Eastville Stadium Plans Announced

Neither this plan nor Rovers own attempts to build a new stadium panned out, and when the stadium’s owners decided to raise the rent on Rovers in 1986, the decision was made to leave their historic home and groundshare with Bath City instead. Like much of English football at the time, gates were falling and costs spiralling, and Bristol Rovers played their last match at Eastville Stadium, a reserve team fixture, on May 3rd 1986.

The Last Game. Photo by Floyd Nello.

Floyd Nello, who took the photo above, recalls the final moments on his Flickr page:

After the match, I can remember trooping out of the ground whilst Bath’s very own ‘Tears for Fears’ song ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ was being played on the Stadium tannoy, through the car park towards New Stadium Road, and walking under a Double Diamond sponsored sign which ironically declared “Bristol Stadium – Come Back Soon”. This sign, erected in the late 1970′s, remained intact until the ground was demolished in 1997.

Rovers entered into a groundsharing agreement with Bath City, while their former home fell prey to developers, like many English grounds in prime urban real estate.

In 1997 Eastville Stadium was demolished, a single floodlight surviving until 2003, now removed and a large Ikea dominating the site.

Photos: Floyd Nello on Flickr

Bristol Rovers Football Club and the musician known as Leadbelly were both born in the 1880s, but—for a while, at least—they both had different names. The football club was founded, by a 19-year-old schoolteacher, in 1883, in a restaurant in one of England’s major seaports; they happened to wear black kits, and to play on a pitch next to a rugby team called the Arabs, and to mark both facts, they called themselves Black Arabs F.C. The musician was born, sometime around 1888, on a plantation near Mooringsport, Louisiana; he was named Huddie William Ledbetter—presumably to mark nothing at all.

Today, of course, Bristol Rovers are as associated with “Goodnight, Irene,” Leadbelly’s most famous recording, as any English club with any song. They’ve been singing it since the 1950s, a full decade before “You’ll Never Walk Alone” was heard at Anfield, 30 years before Manchester City fans began to chant “Blue Moon.” But the path that led to the association was chancy and circuitous, and in many ways, both Rovers and Leadbelly are lucky that they survived long enough for the song and the club’s fans to find each other.

Leadbelly lived through the old, weird America, as Greil Marcus would call it: deep swamp dance hall nights, brothels at St. Paul’s Bottoms, hobos on freight trains, chain gangs, Satan at the crossroads, impossible stars overhead. He was a “musicianer” as early as 1903, and learned in the red-light districts of riverboat towns to channel the mournful twang of American folk music into something distinctive and personal, made from his clear voice and his oversized 12-string guitar. He drank rotgut and fought anyone, and his prowess at one or the other resulted in the nickname he would later take on stage.

He went to prison, not for the first time, in 1918—for murder, after killing a man in a fight. He had a 35-year sentence, but was released just two years later after he wrote a song appealing to the governor for clemency. In 1930 he was in jail again, this time for attempted homicide; and it was here that he was discovered by John Lomax, the legendary musicologist, who traveled the country making recordings for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. With the help of another susceptible governor, Lomax arranged Leadbelly’s release, and recorded his versions of hundreds of songs—including “Goodnight, Irene,” an obscure number from the late nineteenth century that Leadbelly claimed to have learned from an uncle.

Black Arabs F.C. became Eastville Rovers in 1884, then Eastville Bristol Rovers in the late 1890s. In 1899, under their current name, they joined the Southern League, just in time for the great era of regional league play before the formation of the national Third Division. They were champions in 1905. During Leadbelly’s first serious prison stint, they were suspended for the First World War; they reformed, and joined the Football League as members of the new Third Division, around the time he was released. They stayed afloat during the ’30s, but signed a bad lease on their ground that would cause them trouble for decades, and finished last in the division in 1938-39.

The same year, Leadbelly was back in jail for assault. He’d struggled throughout the ’30s to make a living, despite the exposure he won as a protegee of John Lomax; record companies tried to turn him into a blues singer, which never really suited his style. But he was out of jail in 1940, and found himself in Greenwich Village just at the moment when the folk scene was forming: he befriended and influenced Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and experienced greater success in the 1940s than in any other decade of his life. He died in 1949, after falling ill during his first tour of Europe.

That same year, Pete Seeger’s group, the Weavers, released a cover of “Goodnight, Irene” that spent 25 weeks on the Billboard charts, peaking at #1.

It was the Billboard Single of the Year, and was quickly covered by any number of other musicians, including Frank Sinatra.

It worked its way to England, where it reached Bristol and became, by the end of the 1950-51 season, one of the Rovers fans’ favorite songs. There are any number of legends to explain the supporters’ adoption of a plaintive and slightly mystical American folk melody as their anthem, a song whose lyrics don’t exactly advertise their suitability for the purpose:

Sometimes I live in the country,
Sometimes I live in town,
Sometimes I take a great notion,
Jumpin’ into the river and drown.
…
I love Irene, God knows I do,
Love her until the sea run dry,
And if Irene turns her back on me,
Gonna take morphine and die.

Possibly the most persuasive story is that Plymouth Argyle fans sang the song to taunt Rovers supporters after Argyle took the lead in a match. When Rovers went on to win 3-1, their fans turned the taunt around and began to sing “Goodnight, Argyle.” And the song stuck. Something about it just fit.

I love thinking about the loose threads of beauty and meaning in this world and the way they sometimes come together in football. I love imagining Leadbelly playing in a smoky shack to an audience of hellhounds and moonshine runners while five thousand miles away a group of men with kestrel stares and pushbroom mustaches took the pitch in their high-waisted professional short pants. I love the way a game played by the children of lords and a suicide moan from the American folk tradition can make something bizarre and powerful today, something unifying, in a context that makes perfect sense to us, though it would baffle the people who invented them.

Brian Phillips is jumping in the river nightly at The Run of Play.