Transcription: Glen Chisolm

Content warning: personal experiences of racism

 

[00:00]

My name is Glen Chisholm, born and raised in Ipswich. I am 52 years old, and I've been involved in various community things over the years. I was a councillor for 10 years. I was privileged to be mayor of Ipswich at one point, and I've also recently been much more involved in creative and cultural things with the Red Rose Chain, Eastern Angles, and just supporting projects through that. 

 

[00:19] I fell in love with American football when I was about 10 years old. It started showing on British television, on Channel Four, and I remember Sunday evening and sitting there watching the highlights from the week before. And in the 80s, it kind of started to get a bit of a buzz. We had the whole ‘Big in 85’ with the Chicago Bears. And there was the ‘Refrigerator’ who was a larger than life character. So a group of my friends at school, we all kind of started falling in love with the game. We used to throw a football around in the field in between lessons. While a few of my friends were Chicago Bears fans, for me it was the Los Angeles Raiders. There's something about the silver and black, the pirate emblem. There's just a mystique about them.

 

[01:00] So I remember my mum buying me a replica Marcus Allen jersey, he was one of their great players, and I just loved the game. And then one day, we saw a leaflet up in our school about a youth American football team. So we went along to join. It was kids from different schools in the area, and it was…there it was called two touch football. So we didn't wear the full kit. We were only 14 years old and it was like an introduction into the sport. As it went on, I started playing for the Ipswich Cardinals, which was a local team. It's their 40th anniversary this year, so they've been going for 40 years, and that's where the connection with the bases comes in. 

 

[01:41] So we had Bentwaters and Woodbridge base, which were nearby. They had the American football team played on Woodbridge, there was the base team, and they played against other air force bases. But with the Cardinals, um, there was a retired U.S. serviceman called JJ Johnson, who lived in Woodbridge, and he became the head coach of the Ipswich Cardinals American football team. Now JJ was, I think, that he was one of the first Black master sergeants at Bentwaters in his time there. This is a guy who had a fascinating life story. He grew-up in Mississippi. He spent some time in Detroit, then he joined the U.S… U.S. Air Force. 

 

[02:25] And I remember when I was in my late teens, I got in some trouble outside of football, with some racists. I had… I had a fight with them. And I remember speaking to JJ about this, and he was very much, “As a young Black man, you can't fight your way out of every situation. There will be idiots out there who will goad you and push you, but you can't fight your way out of every situation. You have to be smarter, you have to know that you have to reach a higher standard, because there's going to be more eyes and more scrutiny on you and everything that you do”. And he's just, he was just giving me advice. So as a young man, having this role model, having a football coach, he'd been through…like what he'd seen in Mississippi, in Detroit, and here we were in little old Ipswich, and he's given me advice on how to handle racists, and it was something that kind of stuck with me. 

 

[03:18] So, yeah, he was a great mate to us. He is a great character. He was, he was hard. He was very into discipline. And he worked us as a football team. He made us physically, like, do lots of like jogging extra… fourth quarter drills we called them to run up and down the field. But it was, it was great.  

 

[03:38] So on the…taking a step back again. So on the youth team we had…our coach was a serving U.S. serviceman. So he was stationed at Bentwaters, and he was also coached the Woodbridge high school…Woodbridge base high school their youth team as well. So he brought some of his players over to our team. So the Ipswich Cardinals youth team was mostly British, but we had a, like, a core of American players who were like, brought over to us. We had an American coaching staff as well. All of them were connected to the base. All of them were either current or ex servicemen who had settled here in Ipswich. 

 

[04:20] I'm also involved with ISCRE – the Ipswich and Suffolk Council for Racial Equality. I'm a trustee there, and so going back, I'm going to say maybe eleven…twelve years ago, at an AGM, we invited JJ, my former coach, to come and speak at the AGM so he could speak about his experience of racism, growing up in the South in America and growing up in an urban area, what he experienced in the US Air Force, and also how it relates to today, then what was going on. 

 

So I hadn't seen him for a number of years, and Chris Cumberbatch still had a link with him from Woodbridge, because he still lived in Woodbridge, and so did he, and it was, it was great to see him again, and we shared some…some memories. And when he was doing the…his talk, he kind of called me out as a plucky underdog as a player, which he always had a bit of a soft spot for it seems.

 

[05:14] So it was, it was nice to do that but unfortunately, JJ passed away about five years ago, and yeah, I was, I was asked by BBC Radio Suffolk to offer some words about the impact he had on Ipswich, because he did. He led the Ipswich Cardinals to a championship. He was a foundation of the…their success in the early years. And he had an impact on lots of people and lots of players. So he was a…he was definitely a character. I think that's the best way to describe him. 

 

[05:44] Very much growing up, it was, it was interesting because our, pretty much our entire coaches and staff were U.S. servicemen, and they were Black U.S. servicemen, and even though our team was majority white, they brought a wealth of knowledge about football into that, but for the members of the team, who were young Black men, these were great role models. 

 

[06:09] They had a lot of history and a lot to say about their experiences growing up. And it became more than just coaches as a sport. They became coaches and mentors in… in life, as well as I, as I touched on. The fact that I had a racist experience, and JJ was able to give me some advice on how to how to deal with that, how to handle that. So they were great. They were great mentors. We also had another moment where, as 16 year olds, one of our players was involved in a car accident and sadly passed away, and this our youth team coach was a guy called Coach Hymes, and he rallied us together. He was a strong positive influence on us as young men, and he pulled us together in a sad moment. For a lot of us, it was the first time we'd dealt with…with death. 

 

[07:06]  We were young, 16 year old men. Some of us are like…most of our family members were still alive. I still had my my mum, my dad, my nan and granddad at that point. And I think there's only one, one of our players who'd experienced tragedy like that. He was an orphan. He'd lost both his both of his parents, and he was he was adopted, but on the whole, most of us hadn't experienced that. So losing someone our age, someone who we'd seen the Sunday before at football practice, and then he died on the Monday night. It.. it hit us so much, and Coach Hymes was, yeah, his strength in that situation, just pulling together as young men and being able to guide us through that was, it was a big deal. 

 

[07:45] So it just showed you that, as I said, these men weren't just football coaches. They were strong role models and mentors, shaping us ready for the future. Some, some of the things that you learn from playing an organised sport, about teamwork, about discipline, about respect, these are things which will set you on a good course going forward. And I think that the fact that a lot of these guys didn't just have a football background, they had a military background. They were military servicemen who served certain roles within that, I think that that helped shape their mindset on how to, how to guide us, and how to… how to help us going forward. 

 

[08:23] But we didn't play football on base. We played football at Northgate Sports Centre, and before that, Gainsborough Sports Centre. So the guys came from base and taught us on there. But I was, I was fortunate. I got to, I got to go on base when I was younger, with the guys, we used to go sometimes and watch different events on there. So I remember, this was before Burger King was really available in the UK. So it was my first time seeing a Burger King was when we was going on base. I was like, “Wow, this ain't the regular burger, that's some kind of super burger”. That was, that was, that was cool. And then when I was in college for work experience, I don't know, a month's work experience working out on on Bentwaters in the sports and fitness centre. 

 

[09:10] So I remember there's me and a friend Tony Manners for both of us were working out there, we we used to do different bits and pieces. At the time they were installing this, this Nautilus fitness equipment in the gym, and it was more advanced than anything I'd ever seen. In any gym in the UK there was nothing compared to this stuff they had on base. It was, it was, it was amazing. And like, we used to do things like, we cleaned the basketball courts down. We done some like, laying some fencing around the softball pitches. But also we got to, like, do the scoreboard, during the game so the basketball players were playing, and we'd be operating the score board and doing the buzzer, which I pressed at the wrong time accidently, and everyone just turned around and stared at me, and I felt like the earth could swallow me up. 

 

[09:52] But for our lunch break, we used to go into the like the… it’s like a bowling alley and there'd be like arcades in there. So we’d play, me and Tony were really competitive, so we play cyberball together, like trying to beat each other on that. And we'd have, like, hot dogs for lunch and everything. So it was, like, for a short period of time, it was a mini, mini slice of America that we were going to all the while. 

 

[10:16] So I had, I had good fun there. And it was, yeah, just great chatting away to the the guys. It was really because, because of my time, my links with the American football team, with the Cardinals, and the amount of servicemen, which would come and play for them, and got…and stuff like that so on base, there were quite a few people that I knew. So it'd be like guys who played for the Cardinals who were there. So you'd go around and it’d be, “Hey, Glen, how you doing?” Chatting away to them and that so it was a it was, it was nice. It didn't feel like an unfriendly place. There were lots of friendly faces there, and lots of opportunities just to just to chat, just to talk. But they, I think they found it fascinating that these little British kids knew so much about American culture and American sport. So we'd sit there with, like, at that point, I'd been, I'd been following the game for a long while, and I was a nerd, so I really, really like knuckled into watching the game and getting all the stats. 

 

[11:09] So yeah, I think they were, were shocked that we knew so much about the game. And like, we could name [coughing] all the players, all their stats, their heights, their weights and their 40 yard dash times, everything about that. So it was a great relationship that we had there. It was, it was really happy times, fond memories. Yeah, that's right, yeah. We were, yeah. When we were invited on there, we always were made to feel, feel welcome. And it was, it was good times.

 

[11:35] So I was, I was fortunate as well. So with Cindys [former nightclub in Ipswich frequented by many African American USAF service people], when I was 14/15 years old, they used to have an under 16s  night on a Tuesday night. Yeah, so I used to go to the under 16s night at Cindys, and so, yeah. So it was my first experience of a nightclub as such. 

 

[11:57] We used to get some of the kids who would come down for the… who were studying at Woodbridge High School. So they would… some of the American kids, kids would come down.  We’d jokingly, because we knew them from football, we’d jokingly have, like, little… little dance offs, a little bit of friendly rivalry. 

 

[12:12] It was interesting, because once this… So, once again, going back to the junior team. So the youth team, as I said, we had kids on there who came from Woodbridge base school. And once again, all of the kids that played for the team, all of them were of African American descent, and quite often on the, on the coaches... so we'd take a coach to different games, and they'd have a boom box and they would be playing Hip Hop. So yeah, for lots of us, I… I had like a wide musical taste growing up, but I did really, like have a love for Hip Hop as well in its in its early forms, and so it was great having that, that shared thing.

 

[12:55] So for some of the some of the guys on the team, it was their first experience of Hip Hop, some of some of the guys who were into their more rock and Iron Maiden and that kind of stuff. So sitting on the coach, having that, that exposure to the Hip Hop music was was new to them. But for us who liked Hip Hop, it was, it was great to have that shared. It broke down barriers as well. And like once again, it's making assumptions that I think the Americans were surprised that some of us British kids knew as much about Hip Hop as we did and knew as much about the music.

 

[13:27] It is it is interesting. It was erm…being a fan of American pop culture. We watch television. You love certain programmes and loving American sports, you kind of have a knock on effect when you fall in love with other aspects of the game. You learn about the cities through the teams that represented them but it reminded me of a conversation I had not so long ago. 

 

[13:48] So a friend of mine, he was actually erm related to my family. He was married to my mum's cousin. So he's a U.S. serviceman who settled in the UK, we had many conversations in later life about his experiences, about coming from New York and settling in Suffolk, and once he said to me, he goes…he almost feels like I'm bilingual in that he feels that some English people don't understand America, even though it's a shared language, there's certain subtleties and certain things that they don't get. And he feels that, because I've spent so much time around American culture, he feels that I'm bilingual and I get to understand certain things. And that's something that kind of stuck with me, because I guess it kind of makes sense in some way. 

 

[14:39] We probably didn't realise at the time, but my group of friends, and some of our links and connections, we were so fortunate. I mean, one of my friends, his mum, had divorced his father, and she'd married an American serviceman, and so we used to go around theirs, and it was our first experience of an American Halloween. I remember, like, for us, Halloween was someone like putting a bin bag and a mask on and doing trick or treat and it wasn’t really like like how Halloween is now. Back when I was growing up, it wasn't such a big thing, and then going to my friend's family's house for Halloween and they went full on! It was a big, major thing! And like Thanksgiving Day as well. Going around there for Thanksgiving Day, it was like something like, like, we don't have it here, but there, it was like a whole big… with a different food and that.

 

[15:29] [Coughing] And there was so many Americans who lived in Ipswich, who served on the base. So like my friend Danny, his next door neighbour, was a police officer on the… on the base. He was base police. And so when we were doing our work experience, my dad used to drop us off, and he used to drop us off home. Give us a lift home. So we got to speak to him, and got to know him quite well. But yeah, we just, we had pockets of Americans everywhere that we could speak to, that we could, that were part of our almost everyday lives. They were all over the place. 

 

[16:10] Finish.