{"id":315,"date":"2019-08-21T13:32:48","date_gmt":"2019-08-21T13:32:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gonbys.com\/?p=315"},"modified":"2019-08-21T13:32:48","modified_gmt":"2019-08-21T13:32:48","slug":"juventus-1972","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gonbys.com\/?p=315","title":{"rendered":"Juventus, 1972"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Harold \u2018Chimdy\u2019 Sweep had originally come up with the idea of making a barrel organ and busking to the UEFA Cup (or “EUFA Cup”, as the Brits were calling it back then) before the first round match in Coimbra, but he didn\u2019t manage to finish building it until the weekend before the Quarter Final First Leg against Juventus in Turin. I must admit, I\u2019d been surprised at this delay, given the way he turned his hand to things, but when he\u2019d shown it me on the Sunday after an afternoon at the Crown and Cushion, I can tell you it was a real beauty. Confident of our earning capacity, we\u2019d decided, in the end, to head straight to Turin, make a killing in the Piazza Castello, and either head straight back or stop off in Paris and grind if we were still a little short for the boat fare. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The morning started\noff fairly prosperously and we\u2019d picked up maybe ten thousand lire,\nmainly from Shroud tourists visiting the nearby cathedral. The\nproblems began around ten o\u2019clock, when Arnold \u2018Tockie\u2019 Shipton\nand Ted Timms turned up. With a barrel organ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They parked right by\nus to say hello.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhere on earth\ndid you get that from?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI made it \u2018em,\u201d\nsaid Chimdy, taking the opportunity to rest and stretch his winding\narm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhyever would you\ndo that?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey paid me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut look what a\nsituation we\u2019re in now! You\u2019ve aided the competition.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat competition?\u201d replied Tockie Shipton, licking an ice-cream, \u201cThere\u2019s plenty of Turin to go around! No reason at all why we can\u2019t both make a decent take!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I scratched my jowl\nand nodded. \u201cI suppose not. But you can\u2019t stay here. One\nbarrel organ in the Piazza Castello is just about capacity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ted Timms wasn\u2019t\nhaving it, however. \u201cYou car tell us where to set up! If you\ndon\u2019t like the competition, it\u2019s you that should sling yer\nhooks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe were here\nfirst!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cChaps! Be reasonable!\u201d I protested, \u201cWe can\u2019t possibly make any serious money with two barrel organs in the same piazza!\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut it was always\nour plan to come to the Piazza Castello! We\u2019re not about to\nredesign our entire business plan because you \u2018got here first\u2019\u201d\n (nobody had invented the \u201cquotation marks\u201d hand signal back in\nthose days. You just put on a more pronounced Black Country accent\nin order to suggest that the original speaker was thick.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cChaps! Be\nreasonable!\u201d I protested, \u201cWe can\u2019t possibly make any serious\nmoney with two barrel organs in the same piazza!\u201d \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a sudden\nquiet after I spoke; the kind that makes you turn around nervously. \nWhen I did so, Sid Pritchard and Peter \u201cHandy\u201d Ives were standing\nbehind me. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With a barrel organ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAll right, Gonby!\n Chimdy!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRight,\u201d I said,\n\u201cYou can\u2019t stay here. This is our patch.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt ay your\npatch!\u201d said Ted Timms, sternly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYow car tell us\nwhere to play,\u201d said Handy, flicking his fashionably long fringe to\none side, \u201cThis place seems as good as any, to me, Sid…\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sid took off his\nflat cap and held it up as Handy cracked his knuckles and flexed his\narms in preparation for a good wind. Before he got to start,\nhowever, the unmistakeable sound of a barrel organ playing Mary\nHopkins\u2019 \u201cThose Were The Days\u201d reached us from the southern\ncorner of the Piazza. I raised my hand against the glare of the\nspring sun and made out Reg Cotteridge and Gerry Pinter. \u201cHow many\nof these things did you make, Chimdy?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCar remember. \nQuite a few.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a pause,\nbefore Ted Timms asked, a little curtly, \u201cDo they all play the same\nsong?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chimdy nodded. \n\u201cInternational, ay it?\u201d.\n A\nmiddle-aged man strolled past us at this point, softly crooning \n\u201cquelle irano giorni\u201d into his wife\u2019s hair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It\nwas clear we\u2019d have to find a new patch. After a pensive Craven\n\u2018A\u2019, Chimdy and I headed towards the spires of the cathedral,\nbeneath\nwhich, in the Piazza San Giovanni, Alfie Newham, Gosser Pembrose,\nDick\nFlint, \u201cPayday\u201d Pete Gleeson, Charlie\nSands and Bert \u201cTraincrash\u201d Thompson were operating three\nseparate barrel organs, emiting Mary Hopkins\u2019 hit\nat slightly\ndifferent pitches and radically different speeds.\n \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nThus we\nheaded south,\nhoping to find some space and custom (and respite from the cacophony)\nin the Piazza\nSan Carlo, but before we even got there (and having passed a number\nof itinerant Wolves organ-grinders on the way) we were stopped on the\nVia Roma by a well-dressed, diminutive\nNeopolitan with metal-capped teeth who introduced himself as the\nlife-president of the Sindacato\nItaliano di Suonatori d\u2019Organetto (SISO) and warned us, with the\nhelp of some intimidation by his much-taller associate, Scimietta,\nthat\nwe risked \u201carrest or worst\u201d [sic<\/em>]\nif we continued to practise organ-grinding without a licence, and our\nonly options were to hand in our device to the SISO head office\nacross\nthe river in the Borgo Crimea, or to take it to the nearest\nscrapyard, also in Borgo Crimea, very close to the SISO office and\nowned by his brother, Paolo.\n We\ndecided on the latter option, but the queues and animated arguments\nin front of us told us that we\u2019d be in for a long wait and short\nrecompense (supply\nfar outstripping demand),\nso we dropped it off at the SISO headquarters and headed to the\nStadio\nComunale, where a Kenny Hibbit penalty levelled the scores and gave\nus a vital away goal for the home leg. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\nthat time, the\nsong of those hundreds of defunct or commandeered barrel organs had\ncaptured the minds of the crowd, and Italians and English sang their\nparticular versions of \u201cThose Were The Days\u201d throughout\nthe game. Thus a Wolves tradition was born, though I don\u2019t know\nwhy we don\u2019t sing the \u201cner-ner-ner\u201d bit at the end anymore. \n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pushing a barrel organ around in search of a patch you could call your own, while avoiding the attentions of the local union leaders; oh yes, those were the days…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":316,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gonbys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gonbys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gonbys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gonbys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gonbys.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gonbys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gonbys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gonbys.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gonbys.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gonbys.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}