I grew up, or as I like to call it, was ‘dragged up’, in the not-so-leafy suburbs of Birmingham. This city, once called ‘the workshop of the world’, used to manufacture everything and anything.
Our main source of pride, though, was not Rover, Cadburys, HP Sauce or Dunlop… it was our local football team: West Bromwich Albion. Not only was ‘West Brom’ one of the 12 original founders of the Football League, but they were also the first team in the world to lead a professional league table (after defeating Stoke City in 1888) and were even featured on the earliest film recording of a soccer match, in 1898!
In slightly more recent history, WBA famously toured Russia in 1957 and then China in 1978 making them the first English club to go behind both the ‘Iron’ and the ‘Bamboo’ curtains. They were also pioneers in promoting the amazing skills of black players such as Cyrille Regis, Laurie Cunningham and Brendan Batson.
Our Albion-obsessed family loved WBA’s quirky name, their rich history and, in the 1980s, their brand of exciting attacking football. We would trek up the long steep slopes to get to the game on match days; the fact that West Brom boasts the highest football ground of any English club (at 551 feet, or 168m) did not stop us.
West Brom’s logo was something of a novelty too: a small bird sitting on a fruit-bearing branch, backed by the team’s famous navy blue and white stripes. Former goalkeeper Simon Miotto described the club crest as a ‘bird on a stick with raspberries’ when he first saw it.
The origins of this crest trace back to 1884, when the players regularly passed a caged Song Thrush outside their changing rooms as they made their way on to the pitch. They believed the louder the ‘Throstle’ – the bird’s name in the local Black Country dialect — chirped, the better their luck would be. Club secretary, Tom Smith, consequently found his inspiration for the team emblem, and ‘throstle’ would also become the club’s nickname in their early days.
How wonderful to have a team badge inspired by gentle and familiar local wildlife rather than a fierce and exotic lion or tiger!
The Hawthorn branch that the ‘throstle’ is perched on in the motif also made its way into the club’s identity. Albion’s stadium is named ‘the Hawthorns’ in recognition of all the shrubs that were cleared during its construction around 1900.
Hawthorns can live for four centuries and provide sustenance for hundreds of different species, such as voles, butterflies and hedgehogs. Their red berries are essential food for birds – which help spread their seeds in return. These shrubs were, of course, habitat for the ‘throstles’ that were also displaced to make way for the ground.
Sadly, the team went on to use more caged song thrushes as their lucky charm. And when they beat Aston Villa in the FA Cup final of 1892, they displayed a stuffed and wizened bird
on top of the match ball.
These days a large sculpted ‘Throstle’ is permanently located inside the stadium and the club’s matchday mascot for many years was a cartoonish figure called ‘Baggy Bird’ (who bears little resemblance to the graceful Song Thrush).
After emigrating to Australia, I remained a fervent WBA supporter from afar and joined the advertising profession. I developed a passion for conservation that evolved into campaigning
to protect nature, the wildlife here being slightly more ‘exotic’ (for me, at least) than in the British Midlands.
One day, some stark news hit me from the UK: the Song Thrush, once the common garden species of my youth, was now on the IUCN Red List for Threatened Species. Hawthorns were additionally in steep decline due to more and more hedgerows being cleared for intensive agriculture.
England has recently been identified as one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth, with just half of its biodiversity remaining (far below the global average of 75%). Alarmingly, more than 40 million birds have disappeared from the UK’s skies since 1970.
The thought struck me that my team, West Brom, had been exploiting these symbols of nature now for nearly 150 years. Surely, when they realised that the real-life ‘throstles’ and hawthorns of their historic motif were under threat…they would be spurred into action! Just getting a conservation message out to a traditionally ‘non-green’ audience would be a positive thing – and it wouldn’t be expensive.
In 2017, I started emailing the club, figuring that the ‘Throstles’ would surely want to give their struggling namesake a helping hand. After numerous attempts, I finally got a response from the club’s Marketing Manager. His initial reaction was that he ‘loved the idea’ and that I should ‘drop by for a coffee’. But when he realised that I lived in Australia, all communication stopped.
I later approached the Birmingham and Black Country Wildlife Trust who were keen to progress the concept. Their attempts to contact the club were also met with silence.
It’s not that Albion aren’t open to sustainability. In 2019 they launched an initiative designed to turn the Hawthorns into a plastic-free stadium, and their community-based ‘Albion Foundation’ delivered programs that educated school children on the harmful impacts of single-use plastics.
The club has also supported WWF’s #WorldWithoutnature social media campaign, which displays the logos of sporting teams around the world without their featured animal. 400 famous brands have taken part, generating over 900 million impressions online.
The United Nations-backed organisation ‘Sports Positive’ rates Premier League Football Teams on their environmental performance. Liverpool (who came joint top with Tottenham in 2023) planted over 900 trees at their Academy and support the local Hedgehog Protection Society. So there is good precedent for English football clubs taking a lead on conservation issues. (WBA currently plays in the EFL Championship, the second level of the English football league.)
In 2023, WBA announced that Liquid, a global communications consultancy, had become a new sponsor. Their CEO, Elizabeth Lewi-Jones, is a former Trustee of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, she’s an Albion supporter and her company recently opened an office in Australia. It ticked all the boxes. Maybe she could open some doors? She seemed genuinely interested, but her attempts to canvass interest with the club were also deemed ‘too hard’.
In all my years in advertising…this campaign has proven to be the hardest nut to crack.
But I’ll keep going. For those of us who care about conservation, individual action to reduce our footprint on the planet is vital but it’s not enough: we also need to persuade the organisations we care about – businesses, schools and universities, entertainment venues, and of course sports clubs – to join the effort. It won’t be over till the fat throstle sings!
