40. Season 1980/81

The last season at the Sports Ground on the site of the Paper Mill owned by the Nash family. which was closed in 1981.

Records show that the club were Champions of the South London Alliance Premier Division for season 1980/81

History Insight

This extract is from recollections by James Carver a present day friend and sponsor of the club.

"...Most fans have “another team”. The one we all turn to after looking at the main results to see how they got on. Yet, I’ve had to look further down the football ladder than most, as my other team has always been the little known Cray Valley PM FC. My love for “The Millers” stems from my late Uncle George, their club secretary in the late 1970’s, when he worked at William Nash’s Paper Mill in St. Paul’s Cray, Kent.

For a works team, the club enjoyed reasonable success, winning trophies like the Kent Junior and Bexley Hospital Cups. As a nine year old, I’d join George and a handful of fans following them both home and away, against opponents such as Snowden Colliery Welfare and Corpus Christi, cheering on determined players like Jimmy Crombie, Danny Shanahan and Ian Harper.

Our home games were played directly behind the old mill, on a pitch five minutes walk from a musty pavilion with changing rooms, over a rickety wooden bridge on the other side of the River Cray. After the mill’s closure and redevelopment in 1981, the club moved out, continuing under a new management structure, living a somewhat nomadic existence for many years before eventually settling in Eltham, on the South East London/Kent border...."

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