Ten people I'd love to have met - Alfie Conn

I thinking of the ten people I’d love to meet / have met, the list wouldn’t be right if there wasn’t a Spurs hero in there. Let’s face it by my current estimation thinking about Spurs accounts for about 30% of my waking time.

The player I have gone for is not one of the established stars but he is repeatedly top of the Spurs fans voting charts as ultimate club cult hero. He also hit my consciousness at a very, very relevant stage of my life, in the final months leading up to the Leaving Certificate (trauma number 1) and as Spurs faced relegation for the first time since I was born (trauma number 2). I dealt with the first trauma myself and Alfie Conn sorted out the second one for me.

The Spurs fansite mehstg (my eyes have seen the glory) in its’ tribute to Alfie describes the run-in to the 74/5 season well and the matches referred to are vividly etched in my mind – so much so that I can remember where I was when the results came. Sweetest, for obvious reasons was the Chelsea game, which was followed on the radio in Rich Hudson’s house in Waltham Terrace.

From mehstg:

Spurs were in desperate trouble during that season, but Alfie managed to keep the crowd enthralled by his brilliant skills and flair. He scored a sensational goal as Spurs beat Wolves 3-0 at the Lane and was absolutely brilliant throughout the game, leaving Spurs just six games to go to stay up. A 1-0 away win at QPR was followed by a 2-1 home win over Luton. When Spurs went on to lose 2-3 at Burnley, things looked bad. However, Alfie lifted Spurs to great heights in the next game at home to Chelsea when 50,998 watched the game. Chelsea had both the Wilkins brothers in their team, with a young Ray Wilkins as captain. His brother, Graham was sent off and Spurs survived the pressure well to win 2-0 with Alfie Conn again brilliant in his dribbling and shooting and creating chances for the others from the wing.

Now there were just two games to go. A 0-1 reverse at Highbury against Arsenal left Tottenham having to win the last game of the season to stay up. It was at home to Leeds on Monday 28th April and Leeds had a European final to play later that week. Spurs were absolutely brilliant that night and Alfie's skills inspired Spurs to a 4-2 win and he bagged one of the goals. The others were scored by Cyril Knowles (2) and Martin Chivers.

It had been a breathtaking end to the season and Alfie had been in inspiring form as Spurs stayed up. Conn had made 17 League starts in the season and scored six goals. The next season Alfie suffered an injury and made just eight appearances in the starting line-up as Spurs finished 9th. His final season for Spurs was in 1976-7, when he made just 13 appearances.

Conn was a maverick, with dirty unkempt looks which embraced sideburns and long hair (a la 70’s) and an individual style of play which actually promised the unpredictable. The kind of skill that is beaten out of players nowadays. He was lovingly and humorously arrogant, not in a manner that is spawned by continual success but more out from an apathetic I don’t give a damn attitude. Robin Friday springs to mind.

Surprisingly Conn was Bill Nicholson’s last signing for Spurs and he also chose Celtic ahead of Rangers when leaving England to go back north purely because of the influence of Jock Stein. A peculiar affinity between two hard-working gentlemen of the game and the wayward genius. In many ways, not dissimilar from Best’s relationship with Matt Busby.



And so, Alfie, great to meet you, tell me about your days at Spurs………...

Ten people I'd love to have met - Mahatma Gandhi

Second person in the “Ten People I’d love to have met” list is Mahatma Gandhi.





















In our sanitised Western commercial world, we have little need (and maybe time and desire) to consider and identify individuals who provide true inspiration on spiritual or life matters. As a generation, we have drifted away from the Church and have failed to replace the unthinking singular devotion to Christ with respect, dependence or admiration for anyone or anything else. Ideologically we have become self-sufficient, driven largely by financial well-being.

In looking at those who could provide inspiration, if we were to seek it or need it, Mahatma Gandhi is right up there at the top of the list.

He was assassinated in 1948 by one of his own religion who felt that he was moving to close to the Muslim world (and specifically Pakistan). His violent death was contrary to everything he stood for – he espoused the virtues of peace, preferring non violent civil disobedience as a method of achieving change. He lived a simple life and worked to alleviate poverty and end the Indian caste system.

Having gone through the debacle of the Celtic Tiger, which destroyed the fabric of our own country it would be interesting to know how things might have turned out if we had more of Gandhi’s leadership than that provided by the evil troika which influenced our country in recent years – the Government, the banks and the builders. I have to think we be in a far better place.

"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed” – Gandhi.

My debate with Gandhi would centre around the question of whether he was too naive and too idealistic, and whether living a longer life would have resulted in his philosophies having a greater influence on the shape of the newly established state of India. And how similar was he to our own De Valera, whom in equal measure I castigate for his policies of independence, isolationism and self-sufficiency - dancing at the crossroads and all that went with it?

As Wikipeia sumarises, The modern India with its rapid economic modernization and urbanization, has rejected Gandhi's economics but accepted much of his politics and continues to revere his memory. Reporter Jim Yardley notes that, "modern India is hardly a Gandhian nation, if it ever was one. His vision of a village-dominated economy was shunted aside during his lifetime as rural romanticism, and his call for a national ethos of personal austerity and nonviolence has proved antithetical to the goals of an aspiring economic and military power. By contrast he is given full credit for India’s political identity as a tolerant, secular democracy.”

And therein lies his legacy.

Ten people I'd love to have met - Lee Miler

Often think about the question "Who in the world, living or dead, would you have liked to have met and why?"

I decided to work through this issue over time and list the top ten on CD&B - in no particular order, all the more so as the list is not yet fully compiled at this point in time.

So here goes with No: 1 - Lee Miller the American photographer.

Probably most notably remembered for a photograph which she did not take - of her sitting in Hitler's bath in his Munich apartment not long after the Allied troops liberated the city in April 1945 - Miller was born in 1907 and established an early career in modelling, appearing on the cover of Vogue at the age of 20.

















Her interest in photography came from her father and between the wars she worked in the industry in Paris, Cairo and London. When the WWII broke out she became a photojournalist as the official war photographer for Vogue documenting the Blitz, and was enlisted into the U.S. Army as a war correspondent for Condé Nast Publications from December 1942.

Miller entered France a month after D-Day and recorded the first use of napalm at the siege of St. Malo, the liberation of Paris, the battle for Alsace, and the horror of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. The photograph of her in Hitler's bath was supposedly one of her washing away the dirt from the Dachau deathcamps.





















The photographs taken by her are remarkable in that not only do they allow us to see the true horrors that were perpetrated by the Nazi regime and by war in general, but they are superb feats of technical skill in the age when the routine processes behind photographic reproduction were alien to what we know now. She also dared to be there.





















Above : László Bardossy, Fascist ex-Prime Minister of Hungary, Facing the Firing Squad, Budapest, Hungary 1946

So why the appeal or fascination - after all I could as easily have chosen Karl Mydans or Robert Capa or another of the great war photographers - yes, true, it is probably because she was a woman and a beautiful one at that, but there's also the sense of spirit that embraced travel, adventure and danger - she was probably lucky enough to have these options or choices available to her but she went ahead and took them.

She died in England in 1977.