Every now and then, a former player gets in touch with the club out of the blue, sometimes decades after their time here. Often, they have reached a stage in their life where they begin to reflect on years gone by, on the moments and the places that made a lasting impact on them, and Corinthian-Casuals springs to mind.
Chris Lamb initially contacted us to tell us that the ‘Former Grounds’ section of our website failed to include a brief return to The Oval in the 1971/72 season, something he knew because he was our goalkeeper at the time. After assuring him we’d made the amendment to our records, I asked if he’d be interested in doing an interview about his time at the club, and he was delighted to take the time out to do so.
“Wow, now that’s what I call a reply!!” came the response. “I’d be delighted.”
The result was an eye-opening conversation with a man who has vivid memories of a make-or-break era for Corinthian-Casuals.
Lamb was witness – from behind the back four – to a seriously tough period in the club’s history, even by our standards. In his eight seasons with us – between 1966/67 and 1973/74 –we finished bottom four times, and our highest position was fourth from bottom.
You might think he’d reflect on a run like that with trepidation, but Lamb considers his time here the highlight of a footballing journey that took in appearances for England Grammar Schools, Southampton University, Walton & Hersham, Eastbourne Town and Carshalton Athletic.
“Talk to anyone and they’ll tell you that their late teens and early 20s was the best period of their life – that’s just a fact,” he says. “You’re growing up, you’ve got your freedom, you’re spreading your wings.
“I thoroughly enjoyed playing football, and even more so enjoyed playing for Corinthian-Casuals. It was only after I left and played for a couple of other clubs that I realised how special Corinthian-Casuals was. Yeah, they were clubs and it was football, but it was never quite the same – there was never the same spirit.”
Lamb made his debut for the club when he was still at school. He was at St Clement Danes Grammar School, where his maths teacher, Don Palmer, was secretary of the England Schools Football Association and a member of Corinthian-Casuals. He recommended many of his pupils to the club, including Lamb.
“He was very good at pushing, promoting, developing – whatever adjective you want to use – his best players from school,” Lamb explains. “Dave Richardson was one of them, and he played for Corinthian-Casuals, so he got me involved, playing with the reserves, during my final year at school.
“Then, in February 1967, Paul James and Chris Swain – the regular first-team goalkeepers – were both injured, and I was asked to play against Wealdstone under floodlights at Dulwich Hamlet’s ground at Champion Hill. That was my first match for Corinthian-Casuals, as an 18-year-old schoolboy.”
Lamb came face to face with the most talented of the St Clement Dane’s alumni that afternoon, as England Amateur international and Olympian, Hugh Lindsay, lined up for Wealdstone.
“I can remember we were one down and he got through one on one with me,” says Lamb. “I was thinking, ‘Bloomin’ heck! Here I am, one on one with an icon of my school – what do I do?’
“Well, you just do what you normally do, so I managed to move him far enough out to my left-hand side that when he got the shot off, I was able to save it. That’s my abiding memory of my first match.
“After the match, I got lots of congratulations – I think we lost 2-0 – and I’ve actually got the newsletter, where it says that one of the good signs was young Chris Lamb, who played his first game.”

Lamb became a mainstay in goal after he returned from university in the early Seventies, around the time that Micky Stewart took over as manager and the club took its next steps towards modernising, starting with the revolutionising of training.
“The club had started sinking a bit at that point, then Micky came in and he had something about him – charisma, contacts, and what have you,” recalls Lamb.
“We were doing pre-season training at Motspur Park, which is now Fulham’s training ground, and he’d said at the previous training session that he was bringing one of his friends along on Thursday night.
“We were all saying, ‘Who’s it going to be?’ and George Cohen turned up! Well, obviously everyone sharpens up and he’s mixing in, being a nice guy, doing a few routines. Then we started playing a match – he was at right-back and our left-winger thought he was the bee’s knees. He called for the ball, and George Cohen hit a diagonal ball 30 or 40 yards… and it was delivered with so much more power than our left-winger had ever received a diagonal before, that it got tangled up between his legs and he fell over! It was one of those magic moments that he never lived down.”
You start to understand why Lamb speaks of this as a club like no other. A World Cup winner taking training, a cricketing icon as manager… these are not normal occurrences in non-league football. We even returned to The Oval briefly in 1971/72, but the small crowds and the awkwardness of marking out a football pitch in the vast cricket field meant that it never quite worked. The experiment was abandoned, but it pointed to Stewart’s ambition.
“Micky was being Micky,” says Lamb. “When he came in, he had something about him whereby you wanted to try and do things for him. In terms of shamateurism, semi-professionalism, whatever you want to call it… the game was on the cusp. Boot money was there, everybody knew about it, but nobody was prepared to do anything about it at that point in time.”
And did they ever discuss whether remaining strictly amateur was unrealistic in those changing times?
“There were conversations,” he says, “mainly among the team, although probably among the committee as well: ‘We’ve got that trust fund there, we could use it to start paying players, get better players in, and move up.’ But the trust fund was sacrosanct – that wasn’t being spent on anything else.
“But there was this feeling that the club was what it was because of what it was. And it was better to be true to that than it was to throw your lot in with everybody else and see what happened.
“So, Micky was good, the committee were good, but we were zigging when everybody else was zagging.”
The club was starting to look further afield than its usual pool of players, though, and Lamb remembers how the camaraderie crossed classes, reflecting changes in society.
“It was very Oxbridge when I started, and I remember at one time we had both the captains of Oxford University and Cambridge University – Peter Slater and Sid Hill. But it was beginning to change.
“You had people like me – who came from a blue-collar family and was the first in the family to go to university – mixing with everybody from public schoolboys right the way through the spectrum and connecting with people you would never have even met before.
“David Harrison, for instance, was one of those people that was always around and always very supportive. My girlfriend – who’s now my wife – and her flatmates would occasionally have a party, and David would come along and mix in. He was stood in the kitchen where the beer was, the same as everybody else! He may have had a ballerina girlfriend, which wasn’t the norm, but that was the thing – you go back to that period and there was a massive mixing of people that had never occurred before. There was this big melting pot taking place and Corinthian-Casuals was part of that.”

Lamb departed in 1974, the year in which a Second Division was introduced to the Isthmian League, and Corinthian-Casuals were duly relegated into it, before immediately finishing bottom of that new level of the pyramid in 1974/75. It highlights the challenges the team faced during Lamb’s time here, but he has kept a close eye on the club’s ups and downs since moving to Norwich in later life, and sometimes his past catches up with him unexpectedly.
“I’m now a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Butchers and I went to the Court Lunch a few weeks ago,” he says. “And I was sat next to a guy who played for Corinthian-Casuals a few years ago – Terry Murray!”
It’s an enduring image: two ex-Casuals players – complete strangers, several generations apart – discovering their connection over small talk at an official lunch. The pride in Lamb’s voice is palpable.
“You get those links every so often,” he says, “when you get into a conversation with people you don’t know and tell them you used to play football.
“Then they’ll say, ‘Who for?’ and when you say Corinthian-Casuals it’s always, ‘Oh yeah, I know them!’”

Few Corinthian-Casuals supporters can boast a connection to the club as deep as David Bowell, who began coming to games when we played our home fixtures at the Oval and is a near ever-present at King George’s to this day…
 
Tell us how you became a Corinthian-Casuals supporter.
 
The story begins at the Oval in the 1956. My dad, Lawrence, who worked at Battersea Town Hall, took me along to watch Corinthian-Casuals. That was the year we got to the FA Amateur Cup final, and the thrill of being at Wembley among more than 80,000 people was really exciting.

My first real memory is the semi-final against Dulwich, at Stamford Bridge, and in those days the kids got pushed down to the front so they could see – I was about seven years old and I remember that well. I also remember my dad had to work Saturday mornings, so we were late for the final!

But I have a lot of happy memories of the Oval. I got to know the players because they had to walk around the outside of the field as they weren’t allowed to walk across the sacred turf. After the game, you could chat to the players and get their autographs, and I just remember the smell of the embrocation and the sight of these big footballers going by.

One of them, Jack Laybourne, took a shine to me because I was in hospital a lot as a kid. I was in St Thomas’ Hospital for three-and-a-half months, and after I got out he invited me to a tour of the cricket museum at Surrey. He gave me a diary every year for three or four years, with J.S.L., for Jack Sylvester Laybourne, on it. That was a treasured possession. He was and Olympian, and he was in the team when we had Micky Stewart playing, with Doug Insole – an Essex and England cricketer – on the wing.
 
How did you support develop over time?
 
My dad and I followed the team through the days playing at Dulwich, then Tooting. I have strong memories of the Watford game in the FA Cup in 1965, when we lost 5-1 in the first round.

There was one season, 1966/67, when I left school and had a year before college, and I went to every single game. I was working up in London that year and I could just hop on a train or tube and go to Clapton for a lovely Tuesday evening at the Spotted Dog Ground. If you were lucky, you’d get a stale cheese roll and a pint of beer!

I’ve got lots of happy memories. I used to keep all the programmes, and I used to write down the teams and the goalscorers in little notebooks for every season. I loved it.

Then our loyalty wavered a little bit when we played at Molesey. I was at college and doing other things as I got older, and I kind of drifted out of it for a bit, but when I found out we’d got our own ground after all those years, I started coming with my dad again. It wasn’t long before he died, but he had the joy of seeing us play at Tolworth.

He had been secretary to the supporters’ club, and he used to sell scarves, ties and badges that you would stick on the front of your car bumper plate. I’ve still got a scarf and tie from when he ran it! We used to begin the season by reciting the Amateur Cup final team together, from Paul Ahm to Jack Kerruish.
 
What have been your highlights since we moved to Tolworth?
 
I’ve got strong memories of the Manchester United game in 2004. I just felt that, now we had our own ground, as a club, there was a community atmosphere. I met people like Rob Cavallini, who was writing a book about the club, and I leant him all my programmes, and got to know some of the other supporters too.

Then, in the James Bracken years, I just felt so passionate about the club. I remember hugging Roger behind the goal after the game down at Hythe, when we reached the play-offs. And the sheer atmosphere of standing behind the goal for the penalty shoot-out in the play-off final, and the game at Greenwich in the semi-finals.

I knew all the players’ names then, and it was no surprise who was playing, and so those last two years when we were relegated and I couldn’t identify who was playing, it was quite sad. But this season that’s coming back again – I recognise most of them and I just feel more associated again. Brian Adamson asked me if I’d be an ambassador for the club, and now Brian Chantry and I help on matchdays, with the teas and coffees. It’s a friendly little club now.
 
You have made some good friends through Casuals, haven’t you?
 
I used to stand behind the goal, leaping up and down, and all the rest of it. But as the years went by, my eyes weren’t as good and I couldn’t see down the far end. So I started to sit in the stands and that’s when I met Brian Chantry and this lovely old chap called Ted, whose joy was Casuals.
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He was a great character, Ted. Once he wrote out all his ideas on how James Bracken could improve the team’s play, and my advice was not to give it to James! In the end he did, and James was very good with him. Ted spent his 90th birthday in the clubhouse with about 50 or 60 people, and James came along with one or two of the players to support him.

I’ve still got the passion. There have been a lot of rough times, but my enthusiasm didn’t seem to dwindle. That’s loyalty. And it is my club – the last couple of years I could’ve gone to watch Sutton or Carshalton, because I live over that way, but I just couldn’t.