With Brentford taking on Millwall at The Den this weekend, we thought we’d look back at a couple of classic Millwall-Bees moments from yesteryear… in what is one of London’s longest running cross-city derbies. There may not be any real local rivalry attached to this fixture, but as you can see, there certainly is some great history between the two clubs.

The First one is from November 1965, and became enshrined in terrace folklore… can you imagine if the same thing happened in this day and age?

“The dead shell of a hand-grenade was thrown onto the pitch behind the goalmouth at Griffin Park (picture above) on Saturday during Brentford’s game against Millwall. Bees goalie Chic Brodie picked up the grenade from the pitch and threw it into the back of the net, where P.C. O’Connell saw it. The policeman, not knowing the grenade to be a dead one, put it in a bucket of sand and took it to Brentford police station where it was identified as a dead United States pine-apple type. Men from the RAOC bomb disposal unit removed the grenade on Wednesday. Concerning that grenade – Brentford Football Club have asked us to state that the grenade, said to have been thrown on Saturday, was found in the net at the end of the game and there is nothing to show that it had not been there at the start of the match. The object thrown out of the net by Brodie was a can.”

The second cutting is from waaaaay back in March 1906, when The Dockers and Brentford played out a 1-1 draw in North Woolwich before 3,000 fans on what was described as a cold and unpleasant  afternoon… there’s a fair few predicting a similar result in South-East London some 112 years later.

We talked about this incident in Beesotted’s first radio show on Love Sport radio (below)

Dave Lane
@beesotted100

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