LFW is sad to report the death of long serving Queens Park Rangers supporter Stuart Sykes who passed away in the early hours of Monday morning following a long illness.
It is actually Stuart’s fault that I am here writing anything at all, that this site is here, that the people of F Block have to suffer me every home game - if you’re looking for somebody to thank/abuse then it is all Stuart’s fault.
Stuart was a Grimsby man born and bred, and a Grimsby Town fan as he would occasionally remind us when things were going particularly badly or brilliantly at Loftus Road. He served in the army and with the police in Lincolnshire and had no connection with QPR until the 1970s when my father moved from the Met Police into the Lincolnshire force and began working with him. My dad had started watching QPR while down south having initially been born in Scunthorpe and after moving back to Grimsby he quickly, as was his way, commandeered a group of colleagues to tour around the country watching various football matches. Amazing stories of driving to Liverpool to watch Everton at lunch time and then shooting across to Man City for an afternoon kick off were often recalled.
QPR quickly became the favourite destination though and soon a car load of police officers and, when my dad changed careers later, insurance workers from Grimsby would head down to Loftus Road throughout the 1980s and 1990s to watch Rangers. The group, of which Stuart, my dad and my grandfather were the mainstays, made many friends at Rangers and could always be seen in The Goldhawk before matches.
I came along a little later of course. Born in Grimsby in 1984 and showing no interest whatsoever in QPR or football until we moved to London in the early 1990s. It was only when we arrived in Hampton that I started to meet people at school who supported the same team as my dad that I started bugging him to take me to games and so began the obsession. I had met Stuart before, when we lived in Grimsby his lovely wife June used to give me biscuits and things, but it was only once I started going to football that I actually got to speak to him. I grew up during the 1990s touring round the country with him, my dad and my granddad watching Rangers. It was easily the happiest time of my life.
Sadly the group diminished in 1996 when, after a 2-1 defeat at Reading when John Spencer scored his first for the club, my grandfather Tom suffered a heart attack and died. Three years later, shortly after picking up the club’s supporter of the year trophy, my dad Rob was diagnosed with throat cancer and despite a brave and at times grizzly battle with a particularly aggressive form of that disease he died nine months later.
We had moved back up north to Scunthorpe by that stage thanks to his job so his death, from a personal QPR point of view, left me some 200 miles away from Loftus Road and aged only 15. That could have been it for me and Queens Park Rangers, I could have turned into one of those supporters who followed the results on Soccer Saturday, occasionally taking in a match at Scunthorpe United and often going out with the chavs in Scunny town centre to get pissed not knowing or caring really very much how QPR had done. I could have become just another waste of space in a northern shithole basically.
That’s where Stuart stepped in. I wouldn’t say he offered to keep taking me to Rangers every week because I don’t actually recall an offer ever being made, and I wouldn’t actually say he took me even back then – we took each other, he kept me on track, and we developed a wonderful friendship through a shared love of really poor football. We were both devastated by the loss of Tom and Rob - we still are. They were both such characters and wonderful men and they left such gaping holes in our lives that, although we didn’t really know each other that well, Stuart and me were left only with each other to connect us to them and it was just an unspoken agreement that we would continue to follow Rangers wherever we could. There’s no greater testament that I could pay to him than saying that even as a retired man in Grimsby he still got up at the crack of dawn every Saturday to go to football in London with some spotty faced youth he had no real relation to because he knew that youth wanted to go and wouldn’t be allowed to without him. Selfless.
So this sort of awkward little friendship between the 15 year old and the 63 year old started to blossom. I remember a piece of QPR news breaking during a week soon afterwards and asking my mum if she thought it was weird for me to ring Stuart at home and tell him about it. The Wednesday afternoon phone calls, often lasting several hours, soon became a regular fixture.
Changes were made. My dad was quite an extreme gentleman at times, and Stuart and I both agreed that perhaps it wasn’t actually necessary to leave Scunthorpe at 6am for a Saturday match in London. We also set a rule that said we would only go to QPR matches we could get to reasonably easily by train and those days we couldn’t make it we would go to either Grimsby Town or Scunthorpe United instead.
Once I’d passed 16 Stuart, a keen snooker player and footballer in his day, started to palm off the booking of match and train tickets onto me and I started to push the boat out a little bit. Suddenly Stuart found himself at Stockport on a Tuesday night, changing trains twice to get to Burnley, and doing Grimsby and Brighton and back in a day – he moaned about it, but I don’t think he would rather have been anywhere else.
I think the worst one I roped him into was a game at Port Vale. Vale Park was one of the off limit grounds previously owing to the amount of time and changes needed to get there and the distance from Stoke station to the ground. I discovered that there was actually a local station called Longport much nearer the ground and having convinced him that this was a good idea we set sail. It turns out that Longport is a ‘request stop’ station like you get on the bus. That wasn’t a problem on the way there but after an afternoon spent in a pub boasting a notice demanding patrons “don’t spit on the pool table” and driving snow, not to mention a 0-0 draw in which QPR had keeper Simon Royce sent off after eight minutes, we then had to hail a train down to take us home. “Do you think you do it like this?” I asked while hanging out over the platform edge onto the high speed West Coast Mainline. “We’ll soon find out son.”
We went back for more the following season. This time the train was cancelled altogether and as we were, unsurprisingly, the first passengers the driver had had all day for Longport Stuart had to direct a bus full of angry people going to Stoke there first using an old Reader’s Digest Book of the Road. At first sight of the floodlights, and with the mood on the bus getting ugly, I insisted we jump off and walk the rest of the way. It turned out to be about two miles. I don’t think he ever forgave me that one.
When The Goldhawk was destroyed by a makeover and then The Brackenbury lost its Sky subscription we moved pubs to The Shepherd and Flock and The Dickens Inn in Paddington. The matchday routine always remained unchanged though – same trains, same cooked breakfast, regular pub, QPR defeat and home again. A keenness for punctuality and fondness of routine united us both. Those that knew us in the various places knew us as different things – some knew we were just mates, others thought he was my dad, some thought he was my granddad. We never corrected any of them, which was a bit strange, and we laughed about that sometimes. We let poor Steve in Sheffield think we were father and son for 18 months of travelling around together – in the end it was a bit like the Rodney and Dave bit from Only Fools, it had gone on too long to correct him. I’m not sure he knows now to be honest!
We went to Rugby League, the British Open golf and the snooker at Sheffield. It may seem strange two people of such different ages travelling around together but it felt like the most natural thing in the world. What else were we going to do? Saturday was always the best day of the week. We could talk for 12 hours solidly on a matchday, and then still have another two hours worth of stuff to say to each other on a Wednesday night. The best day we had together was for the play off semi final at home to Oldham – we had sat in the home end at the first leg after failing to get tickets in the away section, for the home game we spent the day visiting all the pre-match pubs we’d used together over the years, and then of course the match and the atmosphere that followed was very special as well.
I could tell you so many stories. The time he gave a false address to a police officer at Brighton so we could cut threw a back ally to the railway station, the time he arrived home in the middle of the night from a 3-1 win at Leicester singing Hi Ho Silver Lining with a St Patrick’s Day shot glass necklace tied around his head, the time he said “God I hope they don’t score again while I’m eating this sandwich” just before Akos Buzsaky drew is foot back against Bristol City last season. In a rare day in the hospitality suite at Blackpool we sat next to three gents who had a 'Come on you Pool' hipflask to swig from whenever that chant went up. A 'Come on you R's' flask was immediately commissioned.
There is a now infamous incident after a home match with Nottingham Forest where our train journey back to Sheffield was interrupted by fire, farce and cancellation resulting in us spending time at Flitwick, Bedford, Leicester, Loughborough and finally, at 2am, Derby. Stuart had by this point given up any hope of ever making it back to Grimsby and settled down with my Ipod in a corner somewhere. Just as a crucial announcement about how we were going to get home was being made by a member of staff he burst into his own rendition of ‘Amarillo’ at a volume that can only be achieved when you have headphones in and don’t realise quite how loud you are being. It drowned out the whole announcement and set about 200 people back another half an hour. We found it hilarious – mobile phone footage still circulates to this day.
Stuart can be seen on the match highlights charging off down the steps at Hartlepool while we all celebrate a goal to fetch the crown of his tooth that had fallen off and bounced down towards the pitch – later that same day we were chased through the mean streets of the north east by a man with a pool cue. That was another of his “what am I doing here at my age” moments but, if anything, the older he got the dafter he got for travelling to football.
He became known as ‘Last Season Stuart’ in the Shepherd and Flock because he would always insist he wouldn’t be coming again the following year and yet he always did. There is a QPR World clip of him somewhere insisting it is definitely his last season to muffled laughter in the background. First he planned to stop when I went to university in 2003, then he said he would stop once we got promoted, then once I started working and yet he was still going up until about this time last year when his prostate cancer, diagnosed seven years ago, really started to bite and have an affect on him.
When we started travelling around just me and him I think we were doing it to remember my dad, after his diagnosis I think Stuart did it to get away from it all. After a week of hospital appointments and various ghastly treatments he could go to Rangers where nobody knew he was ill, have a few drinks and forget all about it. We’ve been everywhere together from Selhurst Park, where we were beaten 5-0 by Wimbledon but had a wonderful day together, to Sunderland, where Stuart rated Paul Furlong’s goal amongst the best he had ever seen in 60+ years of attending football matches. Chances are even if you don’t know him, you’ll recognise him from the photographs above as a regular face at Rangers for the last 30 years or so.
It really hasn’t been the same for my brother and me travelling around without him this season, although he has been able to text bollockings to us about poor timekeeping, driving or state of shoes from home. We have kept in touch over the phone from matches and regularly popped across to Grimsby to see him for the televised games and fish and chip suppers. He shook my hand on Friday night in a very poorly state and I think we both knew then. God I’m going to miss him terribly.
Stuart, aged 73, leaves behind his wife June, two daughters and several grand children. His funeral will be held in Grimsby next Wednesday. A sad loss to his family and all who met him.