Dec 5
Happy 30th anniversary Back to The Valley Day.
We’ll ignore how the team did their very best to bury any memories of a wonderful time in our history on Saturday. A penny for the thoughts of those real Charlton legends including the peerless Roger and Heather Alwen who had to sit through that tosh.
Please click for more32 years ago tonight there was a warm and expectant air circulating around the Woolwich Town Hall. Spring was around the corner and hundreds of Addicks including my brother and I were stood outside on the steps on Wellington Street pre-mobile phones and texting waiting on word of what was developing in the chamber inside.
If you have not caught any of Heather McKinley’s football stories and articles before then you are missing out. The Glasgow based Addick writes mostly for the Scottish football magazine Nutmeg, but somehow finds the time in between running her own strategic marketing business to write some excellent other stuff such as her chance meeting with Roger Alwen’s wife, also called Heather, for football journal The Blizzard.
The article about Heather Alwen’s role in their families ownership of Charlton and the struggle to get back to The Valley is superbly written and stirs some strong memories for me and my own family who lived game by game not knowing if we had a club to support the next week.
Mike Norris’ name will always be synonymous with getting Charlton Athletic back to The Valley. Sadly the former director and vice chairman passed away yesterday.
Mike, a chartered surveyor by trade, was a lifelong Charlton fan, and was hugely important in the Sunley days of keeping the club alive in 1984. That of course meant that we had to go to Selhurst Park, but although there were then divergent opinions on the future of the football club among individuals at the time, Norris was always in the camp of returning the club back to borough of Greenwich.
Chicago Addick 