Why I’ll never be a disappointed West Ham fan

It was one of the most visually striking events of the interwar years and one of the first times that moving footage captured a major news event clearly. A vast crowd poured onto a football pitch, only restrained from covering it completely by a single mounted policeman and his white horse holding them at bay. In fact, the horse, Billie, wasn’t white, he was grey, it just looked that way in the newsreel. And he wasn’t alone – he just stood out more than the other horses, bays and chestnuts. But a myth was born.

The ‘White Horse Cup Final’ was the inaugural match at the newly-built Wembley Stadium. While it was in construction, finals had been held at – and failed to fill – the much smaller Stamford Bridge. So the FA wasn’t expecting what happened next: tens of thousands of people turned up, many, many more than the 125,000 the stands could officially accommodate; so many that the pitch became an overspill and only the horses kept it clear enough to allow play to proceed.