Harold ‘Chimdy’ 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’t manage to finish building it until the weekend before the Quarter Final First Leg against Juventus in Turin. I must admit, I’d been surprised at this delay, given the way he turned his hand to things, but when he’d 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’d 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.

The morning started off fairly prosperously and we’d picked up maybe ten thousand lire, mainly from Shroud tourists visiting the nearby cathedral. The problems began around ten o’clock, when Arnold ‘Tockie’ Shipton and Ted Timms turned up. With a barrel organ.

They parked right by us to say hello.

“Where on earth did you get that from?” I asked.

“I made it ‘em,” said Chimdy, taking the opportunity to rest and stretch his winding arm.

“Whyever would you do that?”

“They paid me.”

“But look what a situation we’re in now! You’ve aided the competition.”

“What competition?” replied Tockie Shipton, licking an ice-cream, “There’s plenty of Turin to go around! No reason at all why we can’t both make a decent take!”

I scratched my jowl and nodded. “I suppose not. But you can’t stay here. One barrel organ in the Piazza Castello is just about capacity.”

Ted Timms wasn’t having it, however. “You car tell us where to set up! If you don’t like the competition, it’s you that should sling yer hooks.”

“We were here first!”

“Chaps! Be reasonable!” I protested, “We can’t possibly make any serious money with two barrel organs in the same piazza!”

“But it was always our plan to come to the Piazza Castello! We’re not about to redesign our entire business plan because you ‘got here first’” (nobody had invented the “quotation marks” hand signal back in those days. You just put on a more pronounced Black Country accent in order to suggest that the original speaker was thick.)

“Chaps! Be reasonable!” I protested, “We can’t possibly make any serious money with two barrel organs in the same piazza!”

There was a sudden quiet after I spoke; the kind that makes you turn around nervously. When I did so, Sid Pritchard and Peter “Handy” Ives were standing behind me.

With a barrel organ.

“All right, Gonby! Chimdy!”

“Right,” I said, “You can’t stay here. This is our patch.”

“It ay your patch!” said Ted Timms, sternly.

“Yow car tell us where to play,” said Handy, flicking his fashionably long fringe to one side, “This place seems as good as any, to me, Sid…”

Sid took off his flat cap and held it up as Handy cracked his knuckles and flexed his arms in preparation for a good wind. Before he got to start, however, the unmistakeable sound of a barrel organ playing Mary Hopkins’ “Those Were The Days” reached us from the southern corner of the Piazza. I raised my hand against the glare of the spring sun and made out Reg Cotteridge and Gerry Pinter. “How many of these things did you make, Chimdy?” I asked.

“Car remember. Quite a few.”

There was a pause, before Ted Timms asked, a little curtly, “Do they all play the same song?”

Chimdy nodded. “International, ay it?”. A middle-aged man strolled past us at this point, softly crooning “quelle irano giorni” into his wife’s hair.

It was clear we’d have to find a new patch. After a pensive Craven ‘A’, Chimdy and I headed towards the spires of the cathedral, beneath which, in the Piazza San Giovanni, Alfie Newham, Gosser Pembrose, Dick Flint, “Payday” Pete Gleeson, Charlie Sands and Bert “Traincrash” Thompson were operating three separate barrel organs, emiting Mary Hopkins’ hit at slightly different pitches and radically different speeds.

Thus we headed south, hoping to find some space and custom (and respite from the cacophony) in the Piazza San Carlo, but before we even got there (and having passed a number of itinerant Wolves organ-grinders on the way) we were stopped on the Via Roma by a well-dressed, diminutive Neopolitan with metal-capped teeth who introduced himself as the life-president of the Sindacato Italiano di Suonatori d’Organetto (SISO) and warned us, with the help of some intimidation by his much-taller associate, Scimietta, that we risked “arrest or worst” [sic] if we continued to practise organ-grinding without a licence, and our only options were to hand in our device to the SISO head office across the river in the Borgo Crimea, or to take it to the nearest scrapyard, also in Borgo Crimea, very close to the SISO office and owned by his brother, Paolo. We decided on the latter option, but the queues and animated arguments in front of us told us that we’d be in for a long wait and short recompense (supply far outstripping demand), so we dropped it off at the SISO headquarters and headed to the Stadio Comunale, where a Kenny Hibbit penalty levelled the scores and gave us a vital away goal for the home leg.

By that time, the song of those hundreds of defunct or commandeered barrel organs had captured the minds of the crowd, and Italians and English sang their particular versions of “Those Were The Days” throughout the game. Thus a Wolves tradition was born, though I don’t know why we don’t sing the “ner-ner-ner” bit at the end anymore.