Outstanding Look At When Wolves Were Leading Lights
Jake Perry in the wonderful Wolves Museum, displaying the fruits of his labours.
Who is Jake Perry? And more to the point: Where has he been all these years?
The questions become relevant with his excellent Nights In Gold Satin book, which has left me wondering why we hadn’t seen much more of his words in the past.
I’ve read every one of the 315 pages detailing Molineux’s famous floodlit era and this guy – born and schooled in Wolverhampton – can write.
The fact that he’s a music teacher in Edinburgh and a Scottish resident of almost 40 years’ standing partly explains the low profile he has had in Wolves circles but why wasn’t he even a familiar name on the various social media platforms or in A Load Of Bull?
Better late than never, though, he’s here now, with one outstanding Wolves publication not long off the press and another already in the planning.
And he remains a staunch enough fan to have been at Fulham at the weekend for the death throes in the dug-out of a man whose popularity had hurtled downwards in record time from the spring-time heights of six successive wins, a pint in Wetherspoons, man-of-the-people status and all that.
I finished his book yesterday morning and was actually mid-way through a half-hour phone interview with him when he alerted me to the sacking of Vitor Pereira.
“Although I moved up here in 1987 to study music at Edinburgh University, I still go to four or five games a season and probably more while I was spending a lot of time at the Wolves Museum or in the city’s Archive Library,” he said.
“The research is part of the book-writing process I really enjoy. There’s a real buzz in unearthing a few gems from the past that supporters generally don’t know about.
Mel Eves…..with another member of the side who beat PSV Eindhoven under the Molineux lights in 1980, Willie Carr.
“The inspiration for the book came from my family. My parents still live in Compton and my dad and Uncle Keith went to games in the 1950s and told me so much about the excitement of the early floodlit fixtures.
“Those stories made me want to dig much deeper and write at length about what was a golden era for the club. I also interviewed John Richards, Kenny Hibbitt and Mel Eves – three of my heroes from when I started watching Wolves in the late 1970s – to get their take on how they had viewed the teams and events of the 1950s.
“The actual choosing and installing of the lights was interesting, as was the wearing of special shirts, which I go into detail about. It was a lightbulb moment when I was thinking about the material Wolves used that made me come up with the book title – a variation on the title of a Moody Blues song from the 1960s.”
All of which makes further interesting reading – but why did this talented writer stay unpublished and out of view for all those decades?
“Sports-writing was something others did until about ten years ago,” he added. “I guess I lacked the confidence to write for the fanzine, though I was a keen reader of it.
“Then I saw a website advertising for writers in my other favourite sport, cricket, and I started doing items for them. Someone at Cricket Scotland saw my work and asked me to write for them. That led to two cricket books and involvement in the men’s and women’s game up there.”
No stone has been left unturned in the author’s efforts at shining new light on the set of 1950s fixtures that helped transport Wolves’ name further across the globe than ever before.
Much has previously been written about this period and the club’s halycon days and nights but he has succeeded in placing a lot more in the public domain for the first time.
One valuable line of information came from the access set up for him by Wolves staff to the minutes of old board meetings.
And it was through those that, among many other things, he was able to disclose that Dennis Wilshaw was once suspended by the club for his unwillingness to play in a reserve game because of his teaching duties.
A highly evocative front cover, designed to look like a yesteryear Wolves programme, of course.
Club historian Peter Crump was the vital link in making this precious archive available to the author and he, in turn, accepted an invitation to write the foreword to Nights In Gold Satin.
The £19.99 hardback (Pitch Publishing) gives a brief report and team line-ups from all the floodlit fixtures Wolves played from 1951-61 – not only against the Honveds, Spartaks, Dynamos and Real Madrids but also friendlies with clubs like Cheltenham and Bilston as the hosts.
But it’s the back-stories to these games, especially the big ones with European progress or national pride at stake, that I found the most enlightening and exclusive. They are excellent.
Christmas is on the horizon and we have no hesitation recommending this terrific piece of work as a present idea for those in the buying phase. It teaches us so much we didn’t know about the happiest period in Wolves’ history.
*Jake Perry is doing a second signing session at Waterstone’s in Wolverhampton on the Saturday of the Wolves v Crystal Palace game, November 22.