In a 47-year career at the BBC, Nicholas Witchell has covered a string of major events. The list includes the deaths of Queen Elizabeth and Diana, Princess of Wales, the Falklands and Gulf Wars, Lockerbie and Zeebrugge. On Christmas Eve 1983, it was his solemn duty to inform the nation of something less seismic: the final score in the Division Three fixture between Brentford and Wimbledon.
The 5pm news, tucked away between The Dukes of Hazzard and Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, ended with a report from Griffin Park. The BBC had sent a crew to west London because it was the only professional game played in England. And though Leeds met Manchester United in the Premier League on 24 December 1995, it remains the last Football League fixture to be played on Christmas Eve.
Brentford had originally planned something even more headline-grabbing: the first Football League game on Christmas Day since 1965. It was the brainchild of their innovative chairman, Martin Lange. “Brentford were having a curiously bad season, near the bottom of the league and struggling for crowds,” says Rob Jex, a Brentford historian. “They were almost £500,000 in debt, which was big for a club of our size, so they were looking for a gimmick to get more fans in, even on a one-off basis. It was a desperate time financially, with setback after setback, and Martin Lange was trying anything to stabilise the club and keep it solvent.”
Lange, a Brentford fan from the age of five, was a popular, personable chairman who made his money in property. In 1985 he sold one of the Ferraris in his collection so that the club could buy the striker Robbie Cooke for £25,000. Last month, a similar car sold at auction for £42m. “Brentford played regularly on Christmas Day from 1906 to 1958 and Martin Lange may have been at some of those games,” says Jonathan Burchill, author of A Pub on Each Corner. “The idea that you could perhaps get a 10,000 crowd would have fired his imagination. He was always trying to do something different.”
It was Lange, a champion of the lower leagues, who came up with the idea for one of English football’s great successes: the playoffs. Perversely, Brentford then failed in nine consecutive playoff campaigns between 1991 and 2020. Lange, who died in 2015, was not around to see them finally end the curse when they were promoted to the Premier League in 2021. He also suggested the use of squad numbers and names on the back of shirts before they were introduced in the Premier League. When the idea was rejected, Brentford put their players’ names on their shorts instead.
Lange’s plan to play on Christmas Day made the back page of the Daily Mirror, thanks in part to a dubious soundbite. “We want to revive the old tradition of the husband going to football on Christmas morning while the wives cook the turkey,” said Eric White, a senior figure at the club who served multiple roles from press officer to deputy president.
In reality Lange’s vision was more inclusive. “There was always a special magic about Christmas Day matches and it is worth trying to recreate it,” he said. “I see it as a tremendous opportunity for the family to enjoy a fresh-air Christmas morning. Maybe we are taking a bit of a gamble but the response of the fans so far has been extremely encouraging and, after all, it is their needs we have in mind.”
The players’ needs were secondary, however. The match was scheduled for 11am, which would have meant an early start. Player power was a thing of the future and, even though the Brentford dressing room was full of robust characters such as Chris Kamara, Terry Hurlock and Stan Bowles, it’s likely there was nothing more than a few pantomime grumbles.
“Footballers don’t really see the Christmas period as a holiday – it’s just another week,” says Bob Booker, a Swiss Army knife of a footballer who was voted the supporters’ player of the year the previous season after wearing every shirt number except 1 and 11. “I doubt we were consulted. When you’re a footballer you’re a bit of a robot – you’re told where to go, what time to be there, you’re told what to eat. I’m sure some of the families would have been upset. I was single at the time so it didn’t really bother me.”
Jim McNichol, a Scottish defender who scored a thunderous free-kick in that Wimbledon game, has a similar memory. “You got used to playing over the Christmas period so you knew not to overeat or overdrink. Some of the families were against it because there’s a difference between training for an hour, which we normally did on Christmas Day, and playing a proper game. I don’t remember any dissent in the dressing room about the idea. I wouldn’t have had a problem playing Christmas Day – that’s your job, just do it.”
There were complaints from both sets of supporters, mainly on religious grounds or because of the lack of public transport. Lange had also promised Brentford would never play at home on a Sunday, which is when Christmas Day fell in 1983. That led to objections from local residents and in late November, three weeks after the original announcement, Lange reversed the decision.
“I certainly don’t recall an uprising from the fans,” says Jex. “I was 24 at the time and it didn’t make much impression on our group – it was just a bit of fun. I suspect the biggest factor was the reaction of people who lived around Griffin Park. More fans would have had to drive to the game because there was no public transport, so the streets would have been clogged on Christmas Day. Brentford has always been a community club and Martin Lange would have taken complaints from residents very seriously. He wouldn’t have allowed a commercial decision to override the feelings of the local community.”
“Santa stops play” ran the headline in the Hounslow and Chiswick Informer, below which a local councillor revealed the scale of the opposition. “We had a petition with 200 names drawn up,” said Bob Stratton, “but we no longer need it.”
The match was moved to Christmas Eve rather than back to the original date of Boxing Day. Wimbledon, whose nascent Crazy Gang were in the process of taking a shortcut through the Football League, won a ding-dong game 4-3 in front of a crowd of 6,689, almost 3,000 up on Brentford’s previous home league fixture. “Bringing it forward again to Christmas Eve was perfect – we played, then we got Christmas Day and Boxing Day off,” says McNichol.
Instead of playing two games in two days like everybody else – the second a long trip to Exeter – Brentford had 70 hours between matches. The Wimbledon defeat was their fifth in a row and they had won two out of 19 league games that season. A relatively refreshed side beat Exeter and then Newport on New Year’s Eve. Those games didn’t make the BBC News, but they were ultimately the difference between survival and relegation.
