South Kirkby bus trips and a Hollywood cocktail pianist - The story of 'Honolulu (Sheffield) Wednesday'

On August 23 1986, an old man drew his last breath and died from cancer at his home in Hollywood, California. His had been a life of interest, a fascinating tale of tinsel town’s trope of chewing up the little man and leaving potential unrewarded as glitzier names take the glory. Marvin Hatley had lived his Hollywood life largely in the background, stepped to the side of the spotlight as two forever-remembers icons flowered towards immortality instead.

Aged 40 and fired from his role as composer and musical director at the feted Hal Roach Studios, he produced his final score for film giants Laurel and Hardy and worked for the rest of his life as a cocktail lounge pianist. He later said he made more money from his work in the clubs than he ever did on around 200 movie titles - many of them regarded as classics.

His music lives on. His grave at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills features the inscription: "A Musical Genius / Composer - Laurel and Hardy Theme Song” - a reference to the instantly recognisable ‘Dance of the Cuckoos’. This weekend, the lesser-known ‘Honolulu Baby’ tune he penned for Laurel and Hardy’s 1933 title ‘Sons of the Desert’ will inspire the celebratory soundtrack of over 30,000 football fans - some 93 years and 5,300 miles into the distance.

The adoption and adaption of ‘Honolulu Baby’ into the Sheffield Wednesday songbook took place some decades ago and has become a beacon of glorious fanbase mythology, fans since regaling origin stories of supporters dancing with pineapples outside bars on European trips and of Wednesdayite links to the family of Stan Laurel. So rare in modern football - in a sea of boorish football libraries and ‘Who are yas? - is a truly unique chant.

“Honolulu Wednesday / where’d you get those eyes? / Honolulu Wednesday / In paradise..”

The most widely-circulated suggestion of the song’s origin is that it was started by the South Kirkby branch supporters group sometime in the mid-to-late 1970s - though nobody knows exactly how it came about. The West Yorkshire group was an eclectic mix of all sorts and was known as one of the ‘liveliest and well refreshed’ Wednesday cohorts going, taking in all sorts of personalities, walks of life and was aged from ‘15 or 16 to 70-odd’.

In 1976 a coach company, Browns, set up in South Kirkby and from there the group was formalised. Their bus was a rickety old thing but was protected from user damage when the company agreed that if it survived the season without harm they’d lay on a trip to Amsterdam. Terry Curran’s brother Alan was a regular and Hull City forward David Leadbeater would tag along from time to time to watch his old roommate Brian Marwood.

Legend has it that one chap would travel to away games in top hat and tails, one would wear a blue and white suit and another - who South Kirkby member of the time John Townend remembers to have been a shopkeeper called Hicklin - wore a Hawaiian shirt. On a call with The Star, the gruff and crackling Yorkshire accent of retired 69-year-old Townend sings when regaling his time with the South Kirkby branch - and the birth of ‘Honolulu Wednesday’.

“From going to the game, wherever we were, to coming back, we just did nothing but laugh,” he said. “You know, the result and how they played and all that, it didn't really matter. We were just knocking about with mates and meeting folk. We all came from different jobs and different lives. It was brilliant, just brilliant. I wish I was there about now!

“I think it could have been something like Peterborough away. We had a kid, one of us, they called him Hicklin. He'd always come dressed in this Hawaiian shirt and all of a sudden this day, on his own, he started doing a conga around Peterborough. The Kirkby lads joined in and someone started singing Honolulu Wednesday. That's how the chant started.

“My mate tells me the driver had a Honolulu Baby figure hanging from the mirror at the front of the bus. I can’t remember it, like. Apparently it used to shake and dance when you went over bumps and that. But that’s why the Hawaiian shirt started and then it all went from there.”

Mystery solved, perhaps. Wednesday fans wider in the fanbase tell us that the chant has tended to come and go across the years, that it took on a slower tempo in the early days and that the lyrics have been tweaked and altered from generation to generation. The question used to be from where ‘that smile’ was acquired and apparently there was at one stage a declaration of love for ‘Carlton’s thighs’. You can see how that would fit.

Supporters recall a late 1970s away trip to Crystal Palace when on the train down it is said the chant really took off for the first time, there was a sodden trip to Stockport County in which it took on an ironic resurgence and of course the end of season trip to Norwich City in 2000/01 that saw the Carrow Road away end filled with beachwear fancy dress. YouTube highlights of the match show a depressing fixture was won-out 1-0 by the Canaries, with ‘Honolulu Wednesday’ bellowing out over every clip.

Though perhaps superseded a touch by exclamations that ‘Wednesday are massive’ in more recent weeks, Honolulu Wednesday has been the soundtrack of Wednesdayite defiance throughout the second half of this long and painstaking campaign. It was droned out ‘again, again’ at Derby, at Norwich, at Hull, Middlesbrough, Coventry. It’s filtered into an improved Hillsborough atmosphere. And now even the Mayor of Honolulu is on board.

This weekend, the sold-out stands will throw on their Hawaiian fancy dress and celebrate the end of a season most brutal. But it will also be a celebration of how fans came together to first help save the club and then keep it going. It’s expected that there may well be another thing or two to celebrate, also. The club are well on board with the plans - and for one match only have relaxed the clothing policy in the executive boxes so everyone can get involved.

“It had to come from us as fans, I think,” said Supporters Trust board member Jake Lee, who has led on the organisation of the shindig. “Let’s face it, it would be a bit odd for the club to ask everyone to go out celebrating a season like this! But we engaged with James Todd (Commercial Manager) at the club who has been particularly great and so supportive. It’s built up and up on social media and it looks like we’re going to have a lot of people on board which is awesome. It’s all a bit of fun isn’t it.

“We requested the Fan Zone be opened up again and they’ve been great, doing all they can to make sure that could happen. Even with the inflatables, they’ve been relaxed about that - though if they end up on the pitch they will have to be removed. Everyone seems to have bought into it. It’s nice, working with the club on things. And it’s surreal, too. After what was before and how they set about working with fans. This is a different experience!”

When Marvin Hatley was tickling the ivories in cocktail lounges some time after his early departure from the film industry, he’d have had no idea that the essence of Honolulu Baby would provide an anthem for togetherness in Sheffield nearly 100 years later. It’s been an anthem for good, the undertone of an ironic, defiant spirit without which Wednesday stands could have looked very different in recent weeks.

Via Hollywood, a small town on the edge of Wakefield and of course the Steel City, Honolulu Baby has sparked a spot of unexplainable - and vitally important - silliness.