Broadcaster, writer and West Ham United supporter Mark Webster takes us back to January 1964 and the start of our successful quest for a first FA Cup – joined by The Beatles, Carrie Grant and Nicholas Cage!
Hello and welcome to another trip through the temporal toll booths and into the Added Time Tunnel. Where we arrive just three days short of 60 years ago. And where, if we stare hard enough into the distance, we might just be able to see Wembley’s arch on the horizon. On 4 January 1964, however, the pot at the end of the rainbow was actually sat enticingly between the stadium’s iconic Twin Towers. That was until 2 May, when our skipper Bobby Moore led his team up the famous 39 steps to the royal box to lift the FA Cup, after a thrilling 3-2 victory for the Hammers over Preston North End.
That journey to ultimate Cup glory all began, however, over in the East End, on 4 January of that year. With a 3-0 third-round win against Charlton Athletic, and with goals from Geoff Hurst, Peter Brabrook, and the man who had made his first-team debut for us 363 days before striding out onto the Wembley turf, John Sissons.
Sissons first caught the eye of the Hammers as a schoolboy international, and also while representing his home county of Middlesex. John was born around the North Circular in Hayes in 1945, where on the day Sissons was helping us on the road to Wembley, one of the town’s most iconic companies was also sending out their young talent on the path to glory.
The imposing building you can see on Blyth Road in Hayes is now called The Old Vinyl Factory. Because in 1952 EMI Records started producing what we would now recognise as the first bona fide records there. On which they released music by the likes of Cliff Richard, The Rolling Stones, and a quartet of Mop Tops who had arrived in the capital from Liverpool to make it big, well, across the universe.
‘Introducing… The Beatles’ was the debut album of the band that quickly became known as The Fab Four. And it was released to a waiting world just as our own Fab Four – that’s John, Pete, Geoff and Mooro! – were making around 34,000 Hammers fans twist and shout against Charlton. Wooooh!
Also wowing them, but at the cinema, on that day in 1964 was a film featuring a Hollywood star who could actually call today’s FA Cup tie opponents his hometown team. The movie was the stylish thriller ‘Charade’ and its leading man started life in Bristol as Archibald Leach. And ended it as silver screen superstar Cary Grant.
Young Archie first made his way to America as a member of a music hall troupe in which he would show off his variety of panto skills. Then when Hollywood came calling, so did the suave screen star persona and the smooth new name, with which he went on to have a spectacular four-decade film career. Among them, four blockbusters with one of East London’s favourite non-footballing sons, Alfred Hitchcock. Including 1959’s… and I’m sure I'm reading this correctly…’North By Northwest Ham’. Yeah, sounds about right.
Come 4 January 1964, just as John Sissons was starting his journey back West and to Wembley glory, over in California, another famous big screen actor was close to beginning his. Exactly 60 years after the boys put three past Charlton in round three, Nicolas Kim Coppola entered this world.
The nephew of leading director Francis Ford Coppola, like Archie, young Coppola too would go on to change his name for the big screen, to Nicolas Cage. At which point he went on to have one of the most eclectic of acting careers you could imagine. Ranging from the Coen Brothers classic ‘Raising Arizona’, through to action hero flicks such as ‘The Rock’ and ‘Gone In 60 Seconds’. While he also provided wholesome family entertainment as historian/adventurer Ben Gates in the ‘National Treasure’ movies. A plot that Cage would go on to repeat in real life when, he recently revealed, he once made his way to England on a quest for the Holy Grail. Which makes perfect sense to us of course. After all, today, aren’t we once again embarking on a mission to travel the country, and to claim the sacred Cup?
