Terry Scales made 234 appearances and scored seven goals during his six years at Brentford. He discusses his time in west London.

The castle crest was used by Brentford from 1975 to 1993.

Promotion was won twice during that period, from the Fourth to Third Division in 1977/78 and from the third to second tier in 1991/92. 

The other highlight was a run to the quarter-final of the FA Cup in 1988/89.

To celebrate the return of the castle crest on our 2022/24 second kit, we’re honouring those who wore it best the first time around.

Terry Scales signed for Brentford during the 1971 off-season.

He went straight into the team, playing mainly as a full-back, and made 46 outings during his first season as the Bees won promotion to the Third Division.

Terry Scales could probably not have asked for a better place to receive his footballing education than at West Ham.

A Hammers fan from an early age, he had been spotted playing for his hometown – Basildon in Essex – and brought to Upton Park as a 12-year-old, before spending a couple of years as an apprentice thereafter.

Having been a teenager in the summer of 1966, before long, he found himself rubbing shoulders with Bobby Moore, Martin Peters and Geoff Hurst, who had just lifted the World Cup with England.

Contact with the trio was brief and intermittent, but Scales recalls one interaction that has stuck with him.

“We had to go back to Upton Park one Friday, as that was when we got paid,” he explains from his home, once owned by the subject of the previous edition of Kings of the Castle, Stan Bowles.

“I had just passed my test and was driving home – and Geoff Hurst had broken down! I just drove past. I couldn’t talk to him, he was God! Funnily enough, he came back to the ground and asked why my mate and I hadn’t helped him when he was stuck on the side of the road!

“We used to train at Chadwell Heath and, after training, there were two of us lads that lived towards Essex, so our job was to clean the changing room and then go home, whereas the other apprentices got a minibus back to the ground, so probably had a lot more involvement with the superstars. I was in awe of them. I’m a fairly shy person and I didn’t think I could speak to them!”

Breaking into the West Ham first team proved near impossible, but, coincidentally, Scales’ first and only appearance there was against Brentford in Peter Gelson’s testimonial at Griffin Park in 1970.

The following year, he had signed for the Bees on a permanent basis. He remembers how it came about well.

“We had an A-team game on a Wednesday afternoon,” he says. “We got on the coach and on the seats were copies of the Evening Standard, which said everybody playing in this game was leaving because West Ham were having a clear-out. That’s how we were told.

“The next day, we had to go in and see Ron Greenwood who told us he didn’t want us. He said to me I could go down to Bournemouth because the two clubs had a good connection.

“At the time, West Ham promoted young players working in schools, so I worked in a school in the East End and Roger Cross [who had left West Ham for Brentford in 1969] worked in one around the corner. We met after school one evening and he asked what I was doing; I said I didn’t know and he told me that Frank Blunstone wanted to have a chat with me.

“I went to see Frank, and he sold me his story and what he was hoping to do at Brentford. They only had about 13 or 14 players in those days, after a terrible period where they nearly went bankrupt, so he was pretty much promising me that I had every chance of being in the first-team squad straightaway.”

The promise was honoured in an instant.

Scales made 43 appearances as Brentford won the league in 1971/72 and 46 in all competitions, scoring once. The move to west London may have meant dropping from the First Division to the Fourth, but it paid off, perhaps sooner than expected.

“We started with a bang, and I had the most wonderful season,” he adds.

“We went to Guernsey for five days on a tour, as part of our celebrations. We played two games against them and we thrashed them, but it was really just a chance for us to go and enjoy ourselves - so we were pretty much drunk for five days. We’d got over the season and were relaxed, but still fit, so we were still up for it.”

It probably goes without saying that Scales enjoyed his time working under Blunstone.

“He was a very quiet man and one of the nicest people you could ever meet,” he continues.

“You’d do something in a game you were quite proud of and, on a Monday morning, he’d say something like: ‘What you did in that game on Saturday was brilliant’. There were so many subtle things about him.

“He would pick up the good little things that you did that perhaps you thought no one had even noticed. He was always telling you what he thought and praising you. Of course, everyone takes praise a lot better than taking criticism.” 

Shortly after 1972’s summer of celebration concluded, there was a salary review.

“I signed a two-year contract, with a two-year club option, when I joined Brentford. I had a letter attached to the contract that said, if we got promoted, they would review it, as did others, I imagine, so the players went in to see Frank individually to see what was going to happen.

“I remember he said they’d reviewed my contract - and I wasn’t going to get a rise. That probably had some effect on all the players because you’re euphoric from the previous season, you go back training in pre-season and it’s all exciting and then instantly you’re knocked back.

“As a young lad, I wasn’t really aware of Brentford’s financial situation. It's only as I've got older, I’ve realised Brentford nearly went out of existence in the 1960s. We were getting crowds of around 10,000 the season we got promoted, which was magnificent, but that’s business, I suppose, and I still had to supplement my wages by working in the school.”

Perhaps it was the untimely blow to morale, or a direct consequence of stepping up a division with a small squad, but Brentford suffered immediate relegation from the Third Division in 1972/73, which spelled the end of Blunstone’s time in charge.

“In some ways, we played better football, but we got relegated. We were coming home knackered having tried twice as hard in training, but come Saturday, we were exhausted mentally because it really takes its toll. I don’t think we ever really looked like we were going to get promoted again after that.”

Mike Everitt took over after Blunstone’s contract expired. “It was like chalk and cheese between him and Frank.”

Scales recalls one time a tactical experiment under the new manager went wrong.

“One day, he decided he was going to play me left wing in the next game - and I’d never played in that position before! My starting position was a no.6 - I modelled myself on Bobby Moore as a young kid - but I could play as a holding midfielder and then I moved to left-back. That’s where I really had my success at Brentford.

“I’ve never been a forward player and I had one game there and I don’t think I touched the ball! I really didn’t have a clue what was expected, and I was never going to take the ball past people as I was fairly slow.”

Manager number three was John Docherty, who had been Scales’ team-mate less than a year earlier. He replaced Everitt in January 1975.

“Doc had always been involved there and I liked him,” he says. “He used to run the youth team under Frank and I’d help him train the boys. He could talk for Scotland! On a three-hour coach journey home, he would walk up and down talking the whole time!

“One day, we were driving to training and he told me he was going to have to tell five of the lads they weren’t going to make it. I asked how he could do that and it really put me off coaching forever. I knew how these kids felt because it was how I’d felt a few years before.

“I wasn’t playing particularly well at that point, though. My best season was the season we got promoted. To be a footballer is tough in that you’re always analysing yourself. I played football with fear in that I didn’t want to let my team-mates down. That was the pressure I put on myself.”

Docherty lasted until September 1976 in the hotseat, with Bill Dodgin Jnr replacing him just over a week later.

Under Dodgin, Scales was not a regular fixture in the first team, as he had been for the majority of the five years prior. He made the final 15 appearances of his 234 for the club that season, before being let go in March 1977 as the new manager moulded his squad that would go on to win promotion the following season.

“It wasn’t injuries, I just wasn’t playing. I can’t blame Bill, as it was me who didn’t perform. He played me enough, but maybe I’d lost the will. He pulled me aside, told me he used to think I was a good player and that he was letting me go mid-season. I had just got married and got a mortgage.

“I was approaching my late 20s and I knew that, at 30/32, that would be the end anyway so, from my point of view, I felt like I had to get a proper job. I left school at 16 with a few O Levels and I wasn’t stupid, but I was thinking about going for interviews and all I could tell them was that I had kicked a ball about.”

It eventually worked out, though. Roger Cross had played a key role in getting Scales’ career up and running in the first place – and he was instrumental in helping him prolong it after he left Brentford, albeit in Non-League.

“He phoned me out of the blue when I was trying to find work. I was pretty much prepared to pack up playing altogether then,” Scales admits.

“He told me Dagenham were interested. I went down to watch them in a cup game and after meeting the manager, he said he wanted to sign me.

“I said I’d sign but I wasn’t going to be involved in the cup because the players who were there already had got them to the quarter-final or semi-final.

“It worked out for me because they had a backlog of games. People said I had done well as an ex-pro, but I was trying to prove something to myself, that I could play football.

“I had a great time there, played 300 or 400 games, and the beauty of it was that I worked full-time, so if I had a bad game at the weekend, I’d be working Monday and could take my mind off it.”

So, what did he do when he first dropped out of the professional game?

“I got a job in the Inland Revenue as a clerk and I worked there for six months. My wife worked in a commodity brokers in the city and we'd known the company socially and within six months they offered me a job.

“Just as I was packing up playing at Dagenham in my mid-30s, I bumped into an old school friend who was setting up a business as a loss adjuster and he said to come and work with him. He set up an office locally to us here and he made me his office manager, which I did for about 15/16 years. That was a fantastic time.”

Scales is now 71 and working as a driving instructor. Whenever there is a chance, he’ll be talking football with his students, slipping his career into the conversation when he can.

“I tell them I used to score one goal a season, but they were all great goals! I would hit a 30-yarder into the top corner - but don’t ask me how!

“I remember one free-kick that was primed for Jackie Graham to throw up for John O’Mara to head. I was standing alongside him and told him to lay it across to me; he did and I slammed it into the corner. At the end of the game, Frank Blunstone told me that if I’d missed it, he would have gone mad at me!

“I was a tidy player through the background that I had. I wasn’t fast, I wasn’t aggressive. I was always told I was too nice because I didn’t kick people, it wasn’t my way of playing. But my dream was to become a footballer and that’s what I became. It was wonderful.”