Words & Pictures to Follow: Billericay Town vs Hendon

It's off to the wilds of Essex this weekend for a match between a club transformed by one of football's strangest owners and some genuine non-league royalty.

It’s convoluted, and anybody who travels in this country at weekends will already know why the stomach turns into a knot at the very thought of it. There are no trains running between Worthing and Brighton this weekend, so the very first leg of my journey on Saturday morning is by replacement bus because apparently only weekday commuters deserve actual trains running to a normal timetable these days.

I then have to take a train from Brighton to City Thameslink–which is encouragingly known as Britain’s Worst Railway Station–and then walk for ten minutes from there to St Paul's underground station. It’s then two stops east on the Central Line to Liverpool Street, where it’s another half an hour out into the Essex countryside.

And as if that isn’t enough to be having to deal with, I’m also going to be weighed down with stuff. Ordinarily at the weekend, I travel up from Sussex to London on a Friday evening and return on the Sunday afternoon, but weekends are changing. For as long as I’ve known her (and longer), my girlfriend has been living in Bethnal Green in London, but this year has been one of waiting on a house-share to become available.

As the months progressed, she did as requested at every turn and waited, and waited. Until the house completely fell through, leading to the need to leave the Big City for the first time in three decades and return for the first time since her teenage years to the relative boondocks that is the Essex countryside.

This is only a temporary arrangement, possibly only until the end of December, but it’s already taken a toll. The emotional bonds that come with almost thirty years in the same city can be very strong indeed and, if you’re going to leave somewhere after that period of time, you want it to be on your terms and for reasons that you want. This is most definitely not that. Her fortitude and resilience over this uncertainty has been a marvel and an inspiration.

This weekend that run comes to an end. She’s been subletting for almost a year, but that finally ends at the end of November, so she’s moving on Saturday morning, and since there’s no need for my assistance, which would doubtless largely consist of getting in the way and dropping things, I’m off to Essex as well for some Isthmian League football, and to meet up with her in the evening.

But why should I be so weighed down with baggage that, for once, isn’t emotional? The answer to that question is my suit. It’s the annual FSA Awards on Monday evening, and one of you lovely people nominated me for one of them, so our weekend plan is to stay in Essex until Monday morning, then get the train back to London, where we have a hotel booked for the night. So the plan is, go to the FSA Awards, eat some extremely fancy food, drink too much booze, insult Neil Custis, collapse on a hotel bed, and then wake up the following morning with a hangover the size of Azerbaijan. What could possibly go wrong?

I don’t wear a suit very often. The one that I own is ten years old now, but I’ve barely worn it a dozen times in the intervening years, so it still scrubs up okay. The upshot of all this is that I’m going to have to make this tortuous journey from the bottom left to the top right of the south-east of England, not only with my normal bag of clothes and washing detritus but also with a freshly dry-cleaned suit hanging up in another bag.

And I know myself well enough that this brings with it the potential of my leaving it on a train, meaning that I’m going to have to employ a level of paying attention on my journey that isn’t my normal state of mind when leaving here for any period of time. It’s not that I’m definitely going to send my suit on an unscheduled vacation to Flitwick, Southend, or wherever. It’s more that I can’t 100% guarantee that I won’t. At least after last week’s dementia-related trip to Dorking, my brain shouldn’t be weighed down by too much other… stuff.

My eventual destination is Billericay, a town best known for an Ian Dury song and a man with a lot of tattoos and a bit of a coke problem. It’s also a place with which I have a family connection. One of my great aunts, Ivy, lived there with her husband Sam. Ivy had been the wildest one of ‘The Sisters’, as my assembled collection of great aunts were ominously called when assembled together, but had married Sam and moved to Essex with him.

They were a household of few luxuries, but one of the few that Uncle Sam allowed himself was a new Skoda car every two years, back in the days when their engines were in the boot and their reputation wasn’t completely undeserved. But Sam also flat refused to drive in the dark, meaning that if they came to visit us during the winter my mum would have to prepare Sunday lunch for a bizarrely early time because they’d have to leave at 2.00 in the afternoon so that they got home before the sun went down. Neither of them, as per my occasional questioning, were vampires, at least not to the best of anyone’s knowledge.

You can’t talk about Billericay Town Football Club without the name Glenn Tamplin coming up very quickly. Now, I wrote a lot about Tamplin back in the day. We’ve seen a lot of these types before at their level of the non-league game, self-made middle-aged men with a bit of an ego, a bit too much self-belief, some disposable income and more than a passing interest in football. But Tamplin’s apparent desire to push both himself and the football club into the national consciousness rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way.

No-one likes a football club that tries to ‘buy the league’, and that’s what the perception was in 2018 when Billericay won the Isthmian League with 99 points. But this came against a backdrop of turbulence at the club. At the end of February Tamplin, who had installed himself as manager of the team at the start of the season, had sacked himself following three straight league defeats and a disagreement with his players which came about when he told them to give up a week's wages (because that’s how employment works), only to rehire himself just two days later.

But the controversies wouldn't go away. Five weeks later, for the second time in two months, Tamplin announced via an interview on YouTube entitled "Understanding me – Glenn Tamplin" (now sadly deleted) that he would again resign his position. At the start of September 2018, Tamplin released a statement via the official Billericay Town website that the club was now up for sale, citing two incidents in which he was reported to police for alleged drugs offences which had led to the police questioning him.

By the time the pandemic came around, Tamplin had gone. His own indiscretions were threatening not only the club’s reputation but were also starting to provoke the interest of others, too. The club was sold in 2019. He pitched up at another club, Romford, for a couple of years, before leaving the game altogether in 2021. He was declared bankrupt two years later. But much as there was plenty to dislike about Tamplin and the way he presented both himself and the club while he was at Billericay, there is also something of a counter-narrative that deserves to be heard here, though I’ll be explaining that on Sunday.

Behind all this circus-like activity, Billericay Town continued to play football. Their best finish in three full seasons in the National League South was 8th place in 2019, but they were relegated back in 2022 and they have been play-off contenders in the Isthmian League in the two years since then, finishing 10th two seasons ago and 6th–missing out on the final place by three points to Horsham–last season. They’re fourth in the table going into this match, with just two defeats from their first sixteen games.

Their opponents on this particular Saturday afternoon are the sort of name that brings up the phrase “genuine non-league royalty” in my mind. Hendon joined the Isthmian League in 1963 and stayed there for 55 years without getting promoted or relegated (although they did win it twice, back in the days when there was no promotion to come with doing so), which is quite an achievement in itself, in its own way. But in 2018 they were transferred into the Southern League Premier Division South, where they stayed for six years before returning to what is quite clearly their spiritual home last summer. They’re in sixth place in the table going into this match.

There’s a familiar non-league story to be told about this club, too. Hendon played at Claremont Road for more than 80 years but property developers moved in and bought the ground in 2005, leading to them being rendered homeless in 2008. They groundshared at Northwood, Staines Town, Wembley FC and Harrow Borough over the next eight years before moving to Silver Jubilee Park in 2016. The club is now owned by their Supporters Trust, which is definitely A Good Thing.

And there’s some added spice to this in the form of Billericay’s current manager. It’s reasonable to say that Gary McCann is a Hendon legend. He first joined the club in 1997 as a goalkeeper, but took over as the club’s manager in February 2005 and stayed for more than 13 years before leaving to become the manager of Hampton & Richmond Borough in 2018.

McCann went to Billericay in February 2023, but this is the first time that he has faced Hendon in a competitive match since he left the club six and half years ago. This is a man who has a stand named for him at Silver Jubilee Park. It promises to be an emotional weekend, for the travelling supporters at least. It could be for me too, should I accidentally leave my suit on a train and have to turn up for this awards do on Monday night in a vest and pants.

Words and pictures to follow on Sunday.