CHRIS LAMB: THE CASUALS MELTING POT

The late Sixties and early Seventies were tough times for Corinthian-Casuals, who struggled at the foot of the Isthmian League while clinging to our unique identity. Chris Lamb, our goalkeeper at the time, talks to Dominic Bliss about a proud club adapting to the pace of change in football and society…​

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!’”