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Quote from Peter Hucker on a Facebook group
All the boys were in fear of him he held the key to their dreams
All the boys were in fear of him he held the key to their dreams
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Exactly people new because they heard stories , just like people new about Savile or Glitter in the seventies but no one done anything and the brave few that did stand up didn't get believed anywayOriginally posted by Bill View PostComment
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I grew up in the 60s where communities seemed stronger, so even as a kid, you knew who the dodgy characters were, and we always knew never to talk to them or go with them. There was a bloke who'd offer you sweets or small change which we'd grab off him and then leg it. But the terrible thing is that it was usually adults in positions of power, where kids often felt helpless. And as we're starting to see, this stuff was/is rife in our society. It also happens a lot in families. We've got a huge issue that needs looking at from all angles, because it says something about our society as a whole.Originally posted by West Acton View PostComment
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This is true remember going to an all nighter just off Shaftsbury Ave saw Black Sabbath and support band Gypsy we came outOriginally posted by Hubble View Post
early morning and looking in a jewellers window we were about fifteen and a guy comes up to us and want us to go for a coffee
we legged it and ended up at Gt Portland street station.......a close shaveComment
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This is awful news. Sadly I'm not surprised we've been named.
At this point we need to establish if the club was complicit and tried to cover it up.
Quick question for the older lads on here, does this taint your memories of the club during that period?
General question for everyone, how do you feel about the club now?Comment
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We had a teacher who cuddled smaller boys and got a boner. He used to come to the gym and hand out towels at the end of the shower run to us older kids 14-16 even though he was nothing to do with PE or sport. We weren't daft but we had never heard of paedophiles and we just had him down as an 'Omo - we knew nothing different. Us older ones just used to fix his gaze in the showers and he got really uncomfortable. Tell anyone? Old fashioned teachers in an old fashioned Grammar school - yeah right, we'd have been believed....no way. Tell you this though, and this is what doesn't add up to me, if he had tried anything with us we'd have been back to pay him a visit when we grew up and understood - not live with it for years. A bit of summary justice doesn't go amiss occasionally. Sorry Grauniad readers.Originally posted by West Acton View PostComment
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To be fair if it didn't happen to you, you can't really say what you would have done and I'm deffo not a guardian reader.Originally posted by Alanwycombe View PostComment
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This is my friend's post from Facebook - he became a professional footballer and after that a copper, he's a good writer and I think this is worth the few minutes it will take you to read, not least because it's connected to QPR, but also because it gives an excellent insight into exactly how this kind of thing happened and why so many kids suffered in silence (and why Alan's post above is, let's say naive). Here you go:
It looks like another Pandora's Box has been opened in respect of child sexual abuse - this time in the football community. Here's my experience of this subject contained in a half chapter from my upcoming memoir 'Police and Thieves'.
The ‘Great’ Delaney
I grew up in the 1970’s and in 1970 I was seven years old. Like most kids now and then I was football mad and spent all my spare time at school in the playground and after school in the street or local park playing the game. I must have been about eight or nine and playing football with some friends in a local street near to where I lived when a van pulled up and a man stood in the back with his trousers down masturbating as he watched us. He drove off when we called some adults but was later arrested. My cousin and I were required to identify him in court. It’s funny but I can still see the man’s face now after all these years though we both failed to identify him in open court. That was my first experience with what was then described as a kiddie-fiddler.
By the age of nine I was playing competitive boys club football for a local team that was first known as White City boys, where we’d train down at a youth club on the estate surrounding QPR's ground. It later split and we became known as Rangers, who trained at the Moberly sports centre in North Kensington and in Queens Park – my local park - in the summer. At its highpoint in the mid-to-late 1970’s most of the more sporting boys in the area played or tried out for the club who ran a variety of teams at different age group levels and also had a girls’ team who were good enough to compete in London age group finals. Our honouree presidents were QPR players Stan Bowles and Don Shanks and we had a number of different coaches, but the overlord and founder of the club was a man called Alan Delaney.
Delaney, as he was known or ‘Big Al’ was an imposing figure. About 6”2” with dark hair and ‘Michael Caine’ style black rimmed glasses. He usually wore a long black leather coat and owned a matching dark-coated and fierce Alsatian dog that usually accompanied him and went by the name of ‘Lonely’. At this period he lived in a flat in on the South Kilburn Estate. He drove a blue box van with his business logo on the side ‘Executive Cleaning’ which was an office cleaning company and another mini-bus which was used to transport the team to games.
‘Delaney’ was a very well-known and prominent figure in Kilburn and Queens Park and in some ways not unlike Michael Caine. I suppose you could call him a ‘wide-boy’, or maybe he was a bit old for that. He was certainly a West London ‘chap’ about the area and wouldn’t have been out of place in a TV series like George Cole and Dennis Waterman’s Minder. He was also a very charismatic figure with a dark sense of humour and particularly good at engaging with children and teenagers and was always involved in some kind of banter with us – bearing in mind that lots of the young players were proper street kids from working class communities – and remembering that children weren’t used to liaising with authority figures (adults) who talked to you in a conversational manner. He also had a number of favoured sayings and mannerisms which I still remember clearly to this day and which should have set the alarm bells ringing.
If anyone swore in the back of the van and said ‘####ing Hell’ he’d immediately say ‘Do they? I’ll have to go there’. He was also in the habit of pinching your nipple and giving it a twist while remarking ‘that’s a nice bit of tit’ and when you met him he’d often put out his hand and coerce a shake out of you whilst rolling your fingers into a ball and squeezing them till he’d forced you to your knees in agony. When you were on your knees he’d keep the squeeze on until he’d managed to force you to sing a jingle from a popular advert of the day advertising the Penguin chocolate bar. The advert was performed with a stutter by Derek Nimmo and went along the lines of ‘Pick up a penguin, a lovely big Penguin, if you feel a little pppeck-ish pppick up a pick up a Penguin’. If you didn’t get the stutter right you’d have to do it again until you’d satisfied him.
Delaney also kept a collection of nudist magazines in the back of the van which featured both children and adults when one of the boys would comment on it and call him a ‘perv’ or a ‘#####’ he’d laugh and say something along the lines of ‘it’s only naked bodies, nothing to be ashamed of’ and keep driving happily along. It never seemed to bother him if any of the kids made a negative remark about his sexual orientation – as would happen quite a bit (bender being the favourite) - he’d always have a ready put-down for them and if he didn’t it wouldn’t bother him in the slightest. I suppose he got his revenge in other more private moments.
I started off playing in a six-a-side league on a Sunday in a park on Fulham’s Lillie Road. There’d be mid-week five a side tournaments indoors at the Fulham Baths and two London-wide competitions of ‘the London Federation of Boys Clubs’ and ‘The London Union of Boys Clubs’ where you’d travel all over the capital playing five-a-sides. This was near the cream of London football and we had a good and successful side, winning both competitions though we did on occasion have ‘ringers’ in the team which were smaller, older boys with forged documentation and thus enabled to play. It was something of a ‘speciality’ of Delaney and I can’t remember any of the other coaches doing the same. After matches he’d take us to ‘Glad’s Café’ on the White City Estate for a fry-up - paid for by him - and sometimes to the ‘ Donut Diner’ in Shepherds Bush where you could sample the exotica of the doughnuts with something other than jam in them. A real treat in those days, and again paid for by him. He was a well-liked figure to a lot of the boys as it was rarity that any adult, other than your immediate family, would pay you any positive attention or do anything other than castigate you in a time when corporal punishment was the norm. I liked him – and as one of the team’s more prominent players he was good to me.
But there were other images of him to be taken into account. When we trained at the Moberly Centre in North Kensington there was a rule that every person there would have to shower after training – apparently this was on the grounds of ‘hygiene’. On one occasion myself and a friend breached the hygiene ruling and missed a shower. We were then banned from the club for a month which seemed a spectacularly harsh punishment. In hindsight – he obviously didn’t want a precedent to be set.
Delaney wouldn’t take the training himself and he’d nearly always leave it to the other coaches. If truth be told he didn’t actually watch much of the football, nor did he know much about the game: his role was more concerned with finding and signing players. However, there was one thing that you could always be sure of: he would always be there at shower-time to pass comment and make jokes as the transitory-to-pubescence boys were getting changed. It wouldn’t be unusual for him to be saying things like ‘ you’re getting a bit of fuzz around the nuts there; be soon time to get yourself a bird – see if you can get your end away’. I don’t think he was ever happier than in the changing room.
There were other occurrences of note. Every now and again a new player would be brought into the team with Delaney overruling the coaches and insisting that they should play. This usually created something of a difficult situation as it can take time to build up your teammate’s confidence in you. It was difficult for the new player who always seemed to be of a certain type – quiet and withdrawn white boys with good clear skin. You’d usually never see them again after the one appearance.
By modern standards Delaney was certainly racist though not particularly in the context of the time – we did have black players, but not that many and I can never remember him bringing any along to the club; rather they’d be introduced as a friend of one of the players. In hindsight it was ironically one of the few times when it was a bonus to be discriminated against.
Looking back now I find it amazing that none of the other adults involved in the club, or even in the connected local community, had an idea of what was going on or the true nature of what kind of man Delaney was. But it was a different era, and he was very charismatic and manipulative and also, if you crossed him – he could be quite terrifying. I remember when I was 13 or so I signed for another club. Rangers specialised in five-a-side football and this other club played 11 aside. A couple of schoolmates who were already playing for the team convinced me to sign and though I was ambivalent about it I did. Unfortunately I agreed to play in a five-a-side tournament for them and came up against my old team. Delaney went mad, but not at me. He confronted my new manager – who was a respectable and polite former teacher – and laid into him calling him a ####ing ponce and various other things and threatening to knock him out. It only stopped when a load of officials came over to intervene. The new manager was really shaken by the onslaught not having experienced anything like that before, but that’s what Delaney was like: he didn’t like anybody interfering with his boys. Delaney’s boys …
I’d had five years at the club from 1972-1977 but after that I moved on to varied London pro clubs and didn’t see so much of Delaney. I’d bump into him occasionally and have a chat and that was about it. It was all good-natured stuff. As I said before I liked him and he was good to me and as regards his sexual inclinations – you weren’t really sure where he actually stood. I do remember one thing though – and here’s an example of it.
One Friday when I was still pre-teen I bumped into Delaney in the street and he enquired of me.
‘Are you alright for the game on Sunday?
‘I don’t know Al,’ I replied. ‘I’ve got a bit of a groin strain’.
His eyes suddenly focused as he said. ‘Well, come up to the flat and we’ll get the heat lamp on it’.
‘I think I’ll be alright for the game’ I said
Even at that age your instinct told you that there was one golden rule.
YOU NEVER GO BACK TO THE FLAT.
I was one of the lucky ones. This is what happened.
In 1989, seventeen years after I first knew him, he was convicted as part of Operation Hedgerow an operation based out of Kilburn Police station which identified and prosecuted two organised paedophile rings. Here’s an online clipping that refers to Delaney who was at this stage living in Hounslow:
Delaney was jailed in 1989 after a year-long police investigation uncovered a paedophile ring stretching across the country.
It was hailed as the fall of Britain’s largest child sex network, which had seen more than 140 children – some as young as nine – abused.
Delaney, then living in Hounslow, Middlesex, and three accomplices were jailed for a total of 34 years.
Delaney was convicted of conspiracy to commit buggery, indecent assault, taking indecent photographs and attempted buggery.
At his Old Bailey trial, the jury heard that bespectacled Delaney posed as a cleaning company boss who would give odd car-cleaning jobs to youngsters for pocket money.
He also volunteered to train children at a local junior football club.
But his image as a kindly uncle hid his true motives. Children welcomed into his close-knit group were slowly turned to prostitution and then passed around other perverts in the group.
The boys were snared by offers of money, drugs, gifts and holidays.
But once Delaney and his evil friends had subjected them to a sickening catalogue of sexual abuse they were dumped on to the streets of London.
The ring was finally smashed after a telephone engineer fitting a phone in Delaney’s bedroom spotted a photograph album stashed behind a cabinet which contained hundreds of incriminating pictures.
As Delaney and his co-conspirators were led to their cells Judge Henry Pownall, QC, told them they had carried out “an unspeakable wholesale corruption of young boys”.
This was posted after Delaney had come out of prison after serving half his 11 year sentence and had moved to Poole in Dorset.
Last night the mother who helped us track Delaney down said: “I knew Delaney for four years. Once I welcomed him into my home with open arms as a friend who played football with my sons.
But behind his mask of civility was a monster intent on corrupting my young ones. When I discovered he had been released, I cried. I wept because I know him and I am frightened of him and I know he will be a danger to children until his final breath. I fear for the mites. It doesn’t take much of a leap of the imagination to know that these children are in jeopardy.“Delaney’s record speaks for itself. He’s an evil man who has a penchant for children.My campaign is for them. It is too late for my family. But others need to know who he is and where he is so they can choose whether to allow their children near him. I would beg them to think hard.”
The woman, who lives in West London but cannot be named for legal reasons, added: “I feel the justice system has let the nation down by releasing him so early. I believe people have a right to know when a convicted pervert moves into their community.This is what I am doing, and Delaney was one of the most evil paedophiles the nation had ever seen.In prison, his door would be locked but out on the streets his front door is always open to youngsters.”
Delaney’s boys: in the years after this whenever I met any of the former Rangers players we’d discuss Delaney and then there’d be a catch-up period when we’d find out how other ex-players had been doing. Players that we’d suspected of suffering at Delaney’s hands invariably weren’t doing well: drug addiction, suicide, death were all a part of his legacy to his players. Nearly everyone suffered in silence haunted by those breaches to childhood innocence Some perpetually asking themselves ‘was I to blame?’ With no one to tell them.
‘How could you be, you were just a child’.
Forty years later I find myself in a bar in Kensal Rise I’ve just popped in for a quiet drink. Inside, unbeknownst to me, a man is celebrating his 50th birthday. I get talking to him and we tell our relevant background stories. It transpires he played for the same boy’s club as me – though I didn’t know that. The conversation drifts to Delaney – as it always does – and then onto ‘Delaney’s boys’. He bursts into tears and tells me ‘I was one of those boys’. I think to myself – what have I done? You see, there’s no forgetting.
Two years after that and I’m in another bar with a load of the old Kilburn and Queens Park boys – all good, nice people – the conversation meanders onto Delaney and I’m asked to give my thought on it since I knew him well. I mention the gut-instinct theme ‘You never go back to the flat’ and someone says with a look of terrible sadness. ‘I never knew that then’ followed by ‘I hate him – I hope he’s dead’. You see, there’s no forgetting.
It said in the report that 150 boys were concerned, but these were just specimen charges and bearing in mind that I knew him seventeen years before he was eventually arrested – and he was certainly at it then - you would think that the true number of boys he corrupted could be in the thousands. And this was just one man – one group. I bet groups like his operated all over the country. So how many victims are we talking about?
I recently went on the Guardian Newspaper’s online comment section. There was a debate going on critical of the police investigations into historic sex crimes by establishment figures. I joined in by saying that surely the police unit should be congratulated and encouraged as it was a good thing that finally these terrible crimes were being brought to light and that the focus should be on the victims. Interestingly, I was heavily criticised. It seems that perceived rights of the accused trump the rights of the victims for certain segments of our society. I see it differently. To my knowledge there have been no ‘establishment’ convictions of sex offenders, because they all conveniently die before any charges can be brought. When it comes to MPs it’s like a dead paedophiles club.
Apparently, after Operation Hedgerow there were still a lot of outstanding enquiries and avenues of investigation open and it was suggested, in the early 1990s that a squad concentrating solely on organised paedophile rings should be set up. For whatever reason that didn’t happen, but certainly some of Delaney’s cadre were connected to Barnes Care Home that was recently implicated and I’m sure that they weren’t just cleaning the windows there. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the police managed to turn-up a paedophile ‘supergrass’, one who was properly connected, that would really put the cat amongst the pigeons? Somehow I think it will never happen. My gut-feeling is that for many of the victims of these monsters there will never be justice. I’ll leave this sorry subject with a verse:
The Football Coach
You learn things when you’re coaching children’s football
You learn that you don’t make a great player: they do it themselves
You impart whatever ‘knowledge’ you have
And they take it on, or they don’t
You offer whatever ‘advice’ you possess
And they listen, or they don’t
You try and hone and polish
But ultimately you come to the conclusion that you’re most important task is
Not to ruin them
For the ruin of a child’s hopes, dreams or destiny
Is the worst sin you can commit – except for one
The corruption of innocence
For that you should be eternally damnedComment
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Very interesting read. So very sad to hear of these adults who are still clearly affected by what happened when they were children. I think it's great that these people who didn't feel able to speak up before now have a voice and may be able to get any help they wish or need and of course the perpetrators of these crimes get the correct punishment.Comment
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Careful your lose your sky sports job, oh wait a min too lateOriginally posted by Alanwycombe View PostI played sunday league football today.
Clearly I was the best player on the pitch.
I scored 5 and made 7 last ditch tackles.
We lost 5-0 but the rest of my team were sh it!Comment
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Doesnt really affect my memories as they are all football based. I met him a few times and always found him weird, strange but that was more how he looked than anything else. Growing up back then society was very very diffferent to today, so in answer my feelings to that time don't change, he was one individual doing some very wrong things allegedly. Doesn't overly surprise me either and I'm sure this is only the tip of an iceberg throughout the 70's and 80's football.Originally posted by Joe90 View PostComment
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A peado once found guilty should be set on fire in public . I'd spend as long as I could on the bas tard possibly a week before I killed him. A fella once said to me could you shoot one in the face and not have any emotions, of course I could I said would quite enjoy it.Originally posted by Hubble View PostOoh northern lads love gravyComment
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I'll tell you with absolute certainty what I'd have done - I'd have told my Dad.Originally posted by jfish View PostComment
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I would be very suprised if this did not happen at every London club as it looks like it was rife during the 70's and 80's in London. The BBC mob and now the football clubs. I played for a team in West London in the 80's and the fella in charge was a wrong un which I knew from word go but there were lads who were given new boots or video games reguarly by this monster. I remember telling my old man about him and told me to tell him if he tried anything with me or my pals thankfully he didn't which was just as well as my old man would have most likely killed him. I met a bloke a couple of weeks ago when this came up and we both said the same thing.Comment
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