The (Personal) Historical Importance of the Bristol Rovers Supporter's Club Shop

My friend Henry is writing his Ph.D. on the poet CH (Charles Hubert) (!) Sisson. He was born in Bristol on the 22nd of April 1914, and the Telegraph's obituary from 2003 describes him as "the son of a watch and clock repairer who later became an optician." His roots were, as Sisson himself put it, in "innumerable generations of farmers" and he grew up in Eastville, notable for being for much of the twentieth century the home of my football team, Bristol Rovers.



The Eastville Stadium -- near the giant gas works that gave Rovers their nickname "The Gas" and their fans that of "Gasheads" -- was demolished in 1998 after a decade out of use to make way for an Ikea superstore. Sisson's house itself, if not entirely demolished, was certainly adapted. He notes in his autobiography (On The Look-Out: A Partial Autobiography) that his childhood home "is now the Bristol Rovers Supporter's Club Shop".

Eastville was where my mum and her brothers and her dad first watched Rovers. We've also since been to the Ikea. I don't know if Sisson's house still stands, no longer his house nor the Supporter's Club Shop, which has moved, along with the team itself, to the Memorial Stadium in Horfield.

What I like to imagine, though, is my mum walking past Sisson's house on the way to a game, maybe with her dad who was roughly the same generation as Sisson (and from a roughly similar background). Sisson, at that time, was presumably in the middle (or late-middle) of the writing career that Henry is now studying. In passing Sisson's house -- or the Supporter's Club Shop -- my mum marked out a connection fifty years in advance of my meeting Henry in Glasgow in 2009.