To Cap It All. Kenny Sansom
a coward to do anything really bad – unlike his brother Terry, who was, by association, involved in ‘the crime of the century’ – the Great Train Robbery, and is named in Mary Wisbey’s bestseller, A Gangster’s Moll. Mary was the daughter of Terry Wisbey, the girlfriend of ‘Mad Frankie Fraser’ for 10 years, and the godchild of Freddie Foreman. All three were notorious gangsters and all three were good friends with the Sansom brothers. There must have been something about that sinister world that fascinated the Sansom brothers and fed their edgy personalities.
If I am to believe family gossip, Dad inherited his ways from his father, and probably from his father before him. It’s as though you just get set on a path and breaking strong patterns in families is difficult.
Dad couldn’t stand being bored. So it should come as no surprise that he became addicted to anything that would give him an instant buzz. Needy kids like us didn’t figure in his world. We didn’t provide the instant ‘hit’ he craved. So off he went to find an atmosphere that did it for him.
I guess Dad was never going to hang round a decent woman like my mum for too long – not with all the tarts (his word, not mine) available in his chosen world, the underworld.
I have no memories of young fatherly love – any fatherly love, to be honest. But I can’t say I missed him or felt I was lacking in care and affection, as my mum made up for his absence by making her children the centre of her universe. She couldn’t be bothered with men after he left – well, he’d come and gone so many times and was such a womaniser that he ruined any trust she had in men.
Thankfully I was lucky enough to have my older brother Peter around. Being 10 years older than I was, he took on a paternal role and always looked out for me. He even chose my name. ‘I like the name Kenny,’ he told my mum and my mum said, ‘Kenny it is, then.’
When I was about 2 years old we all moved to a small estate in Tulse Hill, which wasn’t far from Crystal Palace, where I was much later to become one of the players dubbed the ‘Team of the Eighties’.
Peter missed our dad something terrible, and went off to see him as much as he could. I remember his saying, ‘I need my dad.’ It was weird for me to hear that, and later very difficult to comprehend his loyalty. I guess being a decade older than I was, he got to know dad as a person, but for me he was no more than a man who’d left us.
If there was pain or anger inside, I never felt it and I guess friends and football filled the gap where grief might have otherwise festered.
My mum has often said I was sad whenever he went away. ‘You had a broken heart, Kenny,’ she would sigh. It all sounds a bit too far-fetched to me, but as they say, there’s no smoke without fire, and it’s for sure the fire ignited and raged within me as time went by.
All I can say with absolute honesty is that my mum more than made up for the loss of my dad. She was, and still is, in the words of the Barry White song, ‘My first, my last, my everything’.
All of us adore her and are eternally grateful for the effort she put into bringing us up. She may have been small in stature, but she was a giant in every other way.
Off she’d trot in the late evening to do a night shift cleaning. But before she went she made sure we had everything we needed. Always determined to be around for us, she only ever worked while we were either asleep or at school. We were ‘well turned out’, as they say. Neat and tidy with shiny hair and scrubbed faces, we wore our Omo-white shirts with pride. I remember one kid asking, ‘How come you and your David are always so clean?’ I didn’t have an answer – that’s just how it was. But it set a precedent, because all through my career I kept my kit spotless while all around me were knee deep in mud with grass stains all over their bums.
There were no washing machines or modern-day gadgets to make life easier in our house. I tell you, the women of that era just soldiered on against any adversity, and my mum was one of them. She led the bloody parade.
Mum features heavily in my story and quite rightly so, as she has been with me every step of the way – following me all over the world. My number-one fan, she loved telling people, ‘My son’s the famous footballer you know. My son’s Kenny Sansom.’
I suppose you could say she was bragging, but she did it in such an endearing manner that everyone who met her wanted to spend more time in her company. If she asked for a lift to a match people would almost fight each other to have the company of lively Louise in their car. She was pure entertainment.
Born Rose Louise Culwick, Mum had been one of twenty children. Twenty! Imagine that. By all accounts, my granddad was a bit of a character, and I’m told he enjoyed a pale ale – I’d say he enjoyed much more than that.
My Nanny Culwick gave him the responsibility of registering their children – she was probably too knackered to think about such trivia as what to name her latest baby. Granddad loved the names Rose and Louise so much that he gave two of his daughters the same name. He’d intended to call one Rose Louise and the other Louise Rose. But he got in a muddle and so they both got named Rose Louise. I’m guessing he’d downed a few pale ales beforehand – and perhaps a Scotch or two in celebration. To end the confusion they referred to mum as Louise and her sister as Rose.
All the Culwicks were knee high to a grasshopper and Mum was probably the smallest of them all. Her brothers were stocky, though. At 5 foot 8, I have inherited the Culwick stature, with short legs and a solid frame.
One of Dad’s brothers was a middleweight boxer, so it should have come as no surprise to me when Terry Venables pointed out how lucky I was to have a six-pack without trying. It was true. Other boys had to sweat their nuts off in the gym or on the training pitch to build muscles that didn’t even come near mine. Thank God I wasn’t scrawny. If I’d been born minus the muscles, I’d never have made it in football.
Mum’s family were all full of life. My sister Maureen has this funny old black-and-white picture in her album of all the Culwicks waiting to board an old-fashioned bus, which was to take them to the seaside for a day out, courtesy of ITV.
My auntie Rose (who was by now Rose Welsh) had appeared on a new television programme called Take Your Pick, hosted by Michael Miles, and won the family an ‘away day’ to Margate. This show was hugely popular with the public. Up till 1955 viewers could receive only BBC, but the introduction of ITV was very exciting. Suddenly, television wasn’t all serious news stories but had game shows, soaps and comedy.
In his show, which drew in massive audiences, Michael Miles invited audience members to go up onto the stage, where they would answer questions and were then given a key to a box. In the box was a prize. Smiley Michael Miles welcomed Auntie Rose onto stage and among the cheering of the lively audience he tried to buy the key back off her for £20. Good old Rose stood her ground and ended up winning the prize of a holiday for herself and her family.
The following weekend an old green bus pulled up outside No. 133 Kennington Lane, which was Nanny Culwick’s home, fifty family members and friends climbed aboard and off they all went for a good old jolly-up down in Margate.
Whether they were cowboys or angels, both the Sansoms and the Culwicks were colourful characters. No one was academically bright, but from spivvy George Harry Sansom to his English Rose Louise, it was pure entertainment all the way.
Mum told me they’d met at a local dance hall close to Westminster Bridge. By all accounts he was not only very handsome but also a hardworking man – just the type my mum was looking for. Like his dad, he had worked the markets, and it wasn’t until later when times got hard that he found he could earn large sums of money the easy way. Mum said they were happy together until his brothers ‘turned his head’.
My brother Peter remembered Dad having very little cash in the early days, but that he always managed to get hold of money when things got desperate. It was a typical feast or famine lifestyle. Although Peter hated to admit it, he always knew deep down that Flash George destroyed Mum’s trust in men, and, if you took away his good looks and seductive manner, he was really a dirty dog. But he was a dog in heavy