HAPPY HARRY EXPLAINS: UNITED AND THE BILLABONG SONG

Harry, the guiding spirit behind 100 Years of Coconuts, explains the jolly swagman’s link with Newmarket Road. 

If the dark day ever dawns when U’s fans are faced with the terrible task of choosing a successor to I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts as the Abbey’s victory anthem, which song will get your vote?

Tiptoe Through the Tulips by the Crooning Troubadour Nick Lucas, perhaps? On the Good Ship Lollipop by Shirley Temple? I bet your finger won’t be hovering anywhere near the Waltzing Matilda button.

Yet that bush ballad about a swagman who prefers topping himself in a billabong to facing justice for nicking a jumbuck has a reasonable claim to the status of United’s hymn. It has a U’s connection, which is more than Coconuts had when it was first dropped on the Tannoy man’s turntable.

Pffffft, you sneer. Justify that ridiculous claim, you demand. I will. Hear and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was, O my Best Beloved.

This is the sort of story that emerges when you start digging around in gloomy archives and little-known corners of the internet. This is the story of Henry Clement Francis.

HC, as we’ll call him, was the Abbey United president who gave the club the land on which the U's still play. His daughter, Elizabeth Muriel Saxon, kicked off the first match on the field that would later become known as the Abbey Stadium, on 31 August 1932.

Fifth son of lord of the Quy manor and solicitor of note Clement Francis, HC (pictured left) was managing director of the Star Brewery in Newmarket Road, a Cambridge alderman, a county councillor and chairman of the board of guardians for Abbey Ward.

Most of that happened in HC’s later years; his younger days were even more interesting.

He’d gone to Charterhouse, a posh school in Surrey, where he was a classmate of the Boy Scout movement founder Robert Baden-Powell. A dedicated and highly skilled horseman – he’s pictured on the right with Merryman and Gaylad outside his Burleigh House abode in the late 1930s – he went to Australia in 1876, at the age of 19, to further his farming ambitions.

And it was Down Under that he became great mates with the writer and fellow horse devotee Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson.

Banjo (pictured right) was many things – solicitor, journalist, author, poet, Australian icon whose image appears on the $10 note. In early 1895, while at Dagworth cattle station in Queensland, he also wrote the words of Waltzing Matilda. And there’s your Cambridge United connection.

This is one of many stories Coconutters are uncovering as they delve ever deeper into the social history of Barnwell, Abbey/Cambridge United and their people.

They're finding that not all of what we believed about the origins of our club is true, and they are revealing the amazing life stories of extraordinary people – not many of them from Henry Clement Francis’s social stratum.