BATES’ HOTEL
Back then, £50 a week was a fair wedge for
a club on its uppers. Bates ultimately had
bigger fish to fry: his toughest battle wasn’t
with agents, players or even the hooligans,
but a London property company not entirely
enamoured by the idea of Chelsea playing at
their spiritual home any longer than needed.
On September 23, 1983, chairman Bates
awoke to some surprising news. Not that the
club had been absolved of blame for another
terrace tear-up – this time during a match
at Brighton’s Goldstone Ground three weeks
earlier – but that Stamford Bridge had been
sold. The club would likely need an alternative
place to play while the most valuable ground
in English football, a 12-acre site of prime
west London real estate, was redeveloped.
“Chelsea’s chairman, Ken Bates, reacted
angrily yesterday when he discovered that
Stamford Bridge, the ground the club rent
from a property company, had been sold to
another property company who intend to
turf the club out for a couple of years as
they develop the site,” reported The Guardian
under the headline ‘Chelsea Seek New Digs.’
Given the reputation of their fans, finding
a temporary home was unlikely to be an easy
task. Of greater immediate concern to Bates
was that the freehold had been sold from
under his nose. SB Properties were majority-
owned by David Mears – the brother of Brian
and another grandson of Chelsea’s founders
- and Viscount Chelsea. When Bates bought
the club in the spring of ’82, they paid rent to
SB Properties, who remained responsible for
reducing the debt accumulated as the club
rebuilt their East Stand. Flogging the freehold
to Marler Estates was their way of clearing it
once and for all.
For the new man, it was a bitter pill. “My
comment on the way Mr Mears changed his
mind would be that his grandfather built the
club, but the current generation presided over
its decline,” said Bates, who was then asked
whether Mears would be welcomed back to
Stamford Bridge for Chelsea’s match against
Middlesbrough. “Lepers are more welcome,”
came his typically barbed response.
It marked the beginning of a long-running
battle between Chelsea’s chairman and the
freehold owners, but Bates found an ally in
the form of actor and Oscar-winning director
Richard Attenborough. While other ex-board
members sold their shares to Marler Estates,
Bates and Attenborough made life as difficult
as possible for the property company. The
1970s’ crash had originally caused many of
the issues that threatened the Bridge’s future,
but another economic collapse – this time
in the housing market during the early ’90s- eventually secured it, by precipitating the
collapse of its freehold owners in November
- Chelsea wouldn’t have been far behind
in the liquidation stakes.
“He’s a real bastard to get in a tangle with,”
David Mellor, the MP for nearby Putney from
1979-97 and a Chelsea fan, said of Bates. “He
used the Companies Act at every opportunity.
There are unattractive sides to him, of course
there are. But the people who took him on
didn’t realise how sharp he was.”
The man who’d installed an electric fence
which was never turned on suddenly had
control of Stamford Bridge. “So he set up the
Chelsea Pitch Owners (CPO),” explains Locke.
“Bates didn’t want that situation to ever arise
again, so he effectively handed the freehold
over to the supporters. That says it all about
him and what he did for this club.”
With that, Bates could roll out his big Blue
vision – adding two hotels, bars, restaurants,
apartments, the club megastore and much
more. “When I took over I thought to myself,
‘We’ve got 12 acres of land here in the most
valuable part of London – and it’s only open
for business 25 days a year’,” he said to The
Guardian in 2002. “What business can survive
on that? Ever since, I’ve been trying to make
it work 365 days a year.”
In 2011, Roman Abramovich attempted
to wrestle back control of the land on which
Stamford Bridge was built, but fell short of
the 75 per cent of shares he needed to force
through the issue. For those supporters who’d
experienced the uncertainty of the 1970s and
’80s, the CPO remain a necessary safety net –
although 11 years ago, none of those present
at that Emergency General Meeting would
have imagined what might follow in 2022.
Amid this season’s chaos, there are plenty
of Chelsea fans of a certain vintage who have
seen it all before... albeit with a very different
cast of characters. Crisis? What crisis?Below Blue Ken
saved Chelsea
from extinction
through a mix of
canny business
and a bit of luckCHELSEA
“KEn’S A BASTARD TO
TAnGLE WITH. PEOPLE
DIDn’T REALISE JUST
HOW SHARP HE WAS”