in particular, a chasm when it comes to football.
In the Artillery Arms, favoured watering hole for many of Portsmouth’s 600-strong Internet supporters’ group, the Pompey Anorak Brigade, Woodhead, a founding editor of the now-defunct fanzine Frattonise, takes a deep breath and lets me have it with both barrels. ‘The rest of Hampshire repudiates Portsmouth,’ he says. ‘Southampton might as well be the county town, even though it’s officially Winchester. The rivalry predates football by a couple of hundred years. Portsmouth has always been subsidiary to Southampton – until 1835, they owned the docks – and there’s always been that thing of the navy having bred Portsmouth. The rise of the town from a collection of villages was at odds with the tenor of the rest of the area.’
Woodhead believes the city’s history of ‘breeding people for war – with the blessing of the Crown for the most part’ is almost woven into the DNA of anyone born on Portsea Island. Its status as an island club makes Pompey unique in the English game. He admits to being simultaneously ‘proud and horrified’ of the more vociferous side of Portsmouth’s resolutely working-class support, and he’s not alone.
‘Aesthetically, there’s not much to the place. I wish it were more cultural. I can’t stress that insularity and tribalism enough. But there’s affection, big-arsed shaven-headed blokes will cuddle you. It’s cheerful and violent. It’s the end of the line – us against the world, out on our own little limb. It’s a Portsmouth attitude. You trust your family, the people you went to school with and grew up with in your own little area, and no one else. There are a lot of parallels with the East End.’
Attempts are being made to gentrify the area. On the seafront, the Gunwharf Quays development has a cinema multiplex, retail outlets, bars and restaurants galore – to be capped off by the £8 million Spinnaker Tower project. But for all the facelifts, the inescapable feeling is of a city with a distinct edge. Rough-and-ready Paulsgrove, to which many Pomponians moved following the huge swathe of postwar slum clearance, made the headlines in August 2000 for the residents’ week-long protest against ‘paedophils’ (sic) in the wake of the Sarah Payne name-and-shame campaign in the News of the World.
Crime writer Graham Hurley is a former producer of TV’s The Big Match, a resident of Portsmouth since 1977, who worked in Southampton for twenty years. The hero of his books, DI Joe Faraday, is based at Fratton nick. Hurley describes Portsmouth as ‘a gift’ to the novelist, a diamond in the rough. ‘Southampton is much less distinctive,’ he says. ‘It’s wealthier and has, by and large, attracted a better quality of business. Portsmouth’s lack of wealth has led to a particular kind of culture – it has no side. It doesn’t matter what you do, if you’re a brain surgeon, judge, novelist. People are not impressed. You’re judged on what you are, and I think that’s increasingly rare.’
Pride is not peculiar to the eastern end of the M27, however, as Nick Illingsworth, editor of Southampton fanzine The Ugly Inside, explains. ‘Southampton has had its bad years. The city was built on the shipping industry, and because of that it has a very cosmopolitan feel. But it went into steep decline in the 1970s as the great liners slumped. Throughout the ’80s, there was desolation, but the spirit of Southampton shone through, a spirit born in the days after the Titanic went down with the loss of so many local lives, and cemented in the Blitz as the town was flattened. That spirit resurfaced in the 1990s. We have a very open outlook on life. We don’t go for the insular mentality of our neighbours, but we are fiercely loyal and willing to stand up and be counted.’
Dave King, the deputy editor of the Southampton-based Southern Daily Echo and one-time sports editor of the Portsmouth News, recalls his arrival on the south coast. ‘I was shocked when I came down here, hearing about fans with such vitriol for each other that they claim they wouldn’t even visit the other’s city. That’s astonishing compared to places like Nottingham and Merseyside, where family members support both teams. You’d be hard-pushed to find that here. Depending on which side of the River Hamble you live, you’re Saints or Pompey.’
Martin Hopkins, match commentator for Portsmouth radio station, The Quay, laughs at the ridiculousness of it all, but cheerfully admits boycotting anything Southampton-based. ‘I wouldn’t dream of buying screwdrivers from Draper Tools, Sanderson Paints, or anything from their sponsors.’ He can still recall his first visit to the training ground in the early-1990s. ‘Mark Chamberlain turned up without a jacket. It got progressively colder, so he went to his car to get an extra layer. He came back wearing a Southampton training top. He’d been at their academy. When Alan Knight and Andy Awford saw it, they tried to wrestle him out of the car park. They were only half-joking.’
Hopkins’ colleague, Sam Matterface, has been equally struck by the passion and is now a committed fan. ‘You don’t have any choice. I’d liken it to the Mafia. It takes a while to get in, but once you’re in you can’t get out. It’s a working-class town and football’s a working-class game. Look at Southampton and its, “When are we going to Cowes?” Portsmouth’s built on its naval base and, “We’re off to sail the world in a five-tonne warship”, Southampton’s about yachting.’
Across the Solent, Nick Illingsworth finds the continual mithering about the weight of history not only a comparatively recent refrain, but a theory that doesn’t hold water. ‘I didn’t really come across it, even at school,’ he says. ‘It was only when we went down to the Second Division in 1974 that it started, and even then it seemed to be more of a one-way thing – a kind of siege mentality. After years of that, Saints fans started to hate Pompey back.
‘The navy divide and the working-class fighting myth seems to be a popular way of looking at it, but I don’t really buy into that. Take some of the violent cities in England – Manchester or Birmingham. No one’s gone to war en masse from there, apart from on each other. I think the analogy can be used in part, but I don’t think it’s the root cause. Pompey fans, or at least the more violent element, would like to glorify it, but that’s a theory I’ve only heard in the last year or so.’
He continues: ‘In general Saints fans don’t hate Pompey as much as Pompey hate Saints. You could walk down the street in Southampton with a Pompey shirt on and no one would take any notice. But just try wearing a Saints shirt in Portsmouth! You get the feeling Pompey consider themselves to be the club with the history – “We’ve won the title, you haven’t, you’re nothing”. Saints fans would say, “Fair enough, but we’ve been above you for forty years and you’re showing us no respect”, and so it’s gradually built up. And the fact that it’s two disparate cities living so close together lends it that edge. Other derbies, people live in the same houses, work in the same places and have an empathy. With this, it’s like Newcastle and Sunderland. Even if it was tiddlywinks, everyone would go that extra yard to have a go. There’s not a lot of friendliness.’
To the uninitiated, it must be a baffling state of affairs. We’re not talking about the Old Firm, after all, with its centuries of sectarian baggage. These are supposedly southern softies: the seaside, candy floss, kiss-me-quick hats, scenic walks on the South Downs, Howard’s Way, gin and tonics on the catamaran, and New Forest ponies. But on Sunday 21 March, the festering bitterness will reach boiling point in Portsmouth when Southampton pitch up for the first league meeting at Fratton Park since 1987–88, Pompey’s last top-flight campaign. Until this season, it was the club’s solitary spell in the big time since 1959.
You can take your piffling thirty years of hurt, it’s now forty-one since Pompey last finished above Saints and time, far from being a healer, has created a festering sore. As Steve Woodhead observes, ‘When I think of that club, I see a bunch of people who enjoy the status that should be ours and take it for granted.’
While once-proud Pompey, First Division champions in 1949 and 1950, slowly sank down the divisions – fans clinging to sepia-tinged photos of Dickinson, Harris, Reid, and Scoular – finally
