Feeding Lions — Terrace Edition

Words: Nick Hart

Images: Alex Micu

Supporting Images and reporting: Tom Reed

Have you ever been hungry?

I don’t mean everyday peckish.

I mean properly hungry.

Missing a meal hungry. No breakfast. No lunch. Who knows what you’re going to eat in the evening?

If anything.

That kind of hungry?

I never have. Not really.

Myself, I’ve lived a lucky life in truth.

I was brought up on a working class council estate in South East London.

School dinners. Proper food cooked by Mum in the evening. A treat of Arctic ice cream roll on a Friday night.

©Alex Micu/Terrace Edition. Millwall FC.

It was all real and, looking back, yes I was lucky.

Lucky to take such things that seemed so eternal, for granted.

Little did we all know that what seemed so solid.

So untouchable.

So ... well, so normal.

That it could all be dismantled so easily.

Like I say, I was lucky.

My Mum and Dad always worked.

We weren’t rich, but we were never skint enough for there not to be food on the table.

Morning. Lunch. Evening.

It was normal.

In fact, it would have have been quite unthinkable for there not to be...

Somehow though, ‘normal’ has been turned on its head.

We now have a situation where over 2,500 food banks have had to spring up across the UK, in the sixth largest economy in the world, according to the House of Commons library.

Once a church or religious based thing, many of them now based around football clubs - including my own Millwall FC.

The modern religion perhaps.

How did football, from Marcus Rashford to Millwall, come to take on a responsibility to put such a basic thing as food in kids’ mouths?

It’s a long way from striving for promotion, battling relegation or huffing and puffing about mid-table respectability after all.

One of the few benefits of getting older is that you can step back and remember a time when this ‘normal’ would have seemed totally mad.

Because that’s what it is, totally barking mad.

But here we are.

Back in the 1970s the name of ‘Millwall’ became a byword for all that the establishment saw as wrong about the game of football.

We were always the handy coat peg upon which society could hang its social ills - as our once chairman Reg Burr put it back in the 1980s.

If a headline writer ever needed an easy riff or a quick stereotype (and don’t they all?), there we were.

We still are.

The truth is of course that ever since the 1980s, Millwall FC has led the way in what has come to be known as ‘football in the community’.

Or basic decency as I like to see it.

These days, everyone’s at it.

Back in 1985, the club was one of the few that led the way in giving back to the community from which it sprang.

But we stray from the path of talking about food poverty dear reader.

Kelly Webster runs the Lions Food Hub that operates from the New Den and she knows what that feels like to be hungry.

She went through a period of homelessness herself and talks about a time living in a hostel and only having the income to live on packets of mashed potato and tins of sweetcorn.

Combine that with the reports of kids being given inadequate food during the early stages of the 2020 lockdown, and Kelly was inspired to help set up the Lions Food Hub.

Initially based on the Manor and Rennie Estates in Bermondsey, the service has expanded over time to help over 60 local households and to come under the wing of the Millwall Community Scheme.

Speaking to ITV during their recent report on the work that Millwall do in the community, Kelly describes her wish to ‘give something back’.

There’s that phrase again.

Like many clubs and fans across the country, there is amongst us all I believe a real desire to give back to those that need it most.

You can call it the basic decency of football supporters generally if you like, but really it’s the basic decency of the people of this country.

By way of proof, following the recent ITV piece, presenter Aaron Paul was contacted by a Smithfield meat dealer who made 50 turkeys available to the Food Hub.

This person was an anonymous businessman originally from the former Yugoslavia, who wanted to give back to the country that had enabled him to turn his life around.

The story goes that, upon hearing of his generosity, his wife demanded that those turkeys be expanded to 50 Christmas hampers.

So, that fantastic publicity has generated 50 normal Christmases for local kids via the Lions Food Hub - that’s the power of television and the social media for you.

On the day we pop by for Terrace Edition, Kelly and her small team of volunteers are busy dishing out the food to people who need it. Everything is done with kindness, precision and resourcefulness to make sure that everyone goes home with a good selection of items.

Stephanie and Sonya, two friends of the food bank and that’s what they are, friends receiving food and advice and a chat, speak highly of the Lions Food Hub at Millwall FC as a place to go to feel part of a community in the face of the isolation of worrying where the next bit of grub is coming from.

Everyone gets a hot cup of tea and a coffee, a godsend on a cold January morning and accessing the Lions Food Hub also means accessing various other services including advice on getting back into work, where needed.

Kelly seems the sort of person who will listen to your problems and do her best to solve them. A keen footballer herself who turned out for Millwall Lionesses, she had to pack in the 11-a-side game due to injury but didn’t give up and now plays walking football.

©Tom Reed/ Terrace Edition. Millwall FC.

The Lions Food Hub epitomises the best of MIllwall FC, with a strong team ethic and a willingness to help pull people up that need a hand

As much as the work of the food bank movement, including our own Millwall version, is inspiring though, I can’t help but remain saddened that it remains necessary.

And will remain so for some years to come in truth.

I started this article off with the thought that I’d never truly been hungry.

That I’d never truly missed a meal.

That I’d never truly known the uncertainty of where the next meal was coming from.

And I hope I that never do - nor you dear reader.

But something tells me we’d better plan for the possibility, don’t you agree?