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Special edition booklet produced by West Ham United featuring a history of the club anthem "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles.
The song is best known in England as the club anthem of West Ham United, a London-based football club. It is said to have been adopted by West Ham's supporters in the 1920s (although there is no record of West Ham fans singing the song until 1940), and it is now one of the most recognisable club anthems in English football along with the similarly adopted "Keep Right on to the End of the Road", "You'll Never Walk Alone", "Blue Moon", "Blue Is the Colour", “On the Ball, City” and "Blaydon Races".
"I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" was introduced to the club by former manager Charlie Paynter in the late twenties. A player, Billy J. "Bubbles" Murray, who played for the local Park School had a resemblance to the boy in the "Bubbles" painting by Millais used in a Pears soap commercial of the time. Headmaster Cornelius Beal began singing the tune "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" with amended lyrics when Park players played well.[8]
Beal was a friend of Paynter, while Murray was a West Ham trialist and played football at schoolboy level with a number of West Ham players such as Jim Barrett. Through this contrivance of association the club's fans took it upon themselves to begin singing the popular music hall tune before home games, sometimes reinforced by the presence of a house band requested to play the refrain by Charlie Paynter.
21 x 15, magazine, 28 pages.
1999
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