The True Story · People

The ICF and West Ham United

Inside the firm that produced Carlton Leach

1977-1990

What the ICF was

The Inter City Firm — or ICF — was the football hooligan firm associated with West Ham United. Mainly active in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, it grew out of older West Ham groups including the Mile End Boys and the Essex East London Firm, and officially formed in the 1977/78 football season.

The name came from the InterCity trains the firm used to travel to away games. Unlike the loosely organised hooligan groups attached to most other clubs, the ICF was structured, fashionable, brutally effective, and proud of all three.

The calling card

The firm became famous for leaving printed calling cards on their victims after a fight. The card read: “Congratulations, you have just met the ICF.” The phrase later became the title of Cass Pennant’s bestselling history of the firm.

Key figures

Cass Pennant — the firm‘s most famous member and one of its generals. Black Londoner, born Carol Pennant, who became one of the leading figures of the ICF and later a respected author and film producer. Books include Congratulations You Have Just Met the ICF, Cass, and Terrace Legends. Has consistently maintained the ICF was neither racist nor right-wing — a position lent weight by his own position within the firm.
Bill Gardner — Mile End Boys originally, then ICF. One of the most feared and respected faces in English hooliganism. His famous line “Good afternoon gentlemen, the name’s Bill Gardner“ became the title of his own 2006 memoir, co-authored with Pennant. Pictured on the cover of the original print of Pennant’s Congratulations You Have Just Met the ICF.
Carlton Leach — the man at the heart of the Rise of the Footsoldier story. Came up through the ICF in the late 1970s and early 1980s before moving from football violence into the nightclub trade and eventually the Essex drug scene.
Andy Swallow — originally from the Essex East London Firm. Later founded the influential pirate radio station Centreforce, which became a central plank of the early UK acid house and rave scene.

Rivalries

The most ferocious rivalry was with Millwall’s Bushwackers — south-east London versus east London, a feud that predates the firms themselves and continues to define English football culture. The ICF also clashed regularly with Chelsea’s Headhunters, Manchester United’s Red Army, and basically anyone who travelled to the Boleyn Ground or who hosted West Ham on a Saturday.

Media legacy

The ICF have left a deeper cultural footprint than any other British hooligan firm:

Hooligan (1985) — the Thames Television documentary that put the ICF on screens nationwide and remains a landmark of British social documentary.
The Firm (1988) — Alan Clarke’s BBC film starring Gary Oldman as Bex Bissell, leader of the fictional Inter City Crew. ICF members worked as consultants.
The Football Factory (2004) — Nick Love’s adaptation of John King’s novel, with Danny Dyer leading a Chelsea firm but drawing heavily on the ICF template.
Green Street (2005) — Lexi Alexander’s film starring Charlie Hunnam and Elijah Wood, with the Green Street Elite a thinly veiled fictional ICF.
Cass (2008) — the biopic of Cass Pennant himself, starring Nonso Anozie.
Rise of the Footsoldier (2007) — the franchise this site is dedicated to, which opens with Carlton Leach‘s ICF years before tracking him out into the Essex underworld.

The connection to the Essex Boys story

For anyone watching the Rise of the Footsoldier films, the ICF is where the story really starts. The discipline, the loyalty, the violence, the ritual — all of it was forged on the terraces of Upton Park and on InterCity trains across the country years before the first ecstasy pill changed hands at Raquels. When Carlton Leach left football violence behind, he didn’t leave the methods behind. He took them into the nightclub trade, into security, and eventually — through Tony Tucker, Pat Tate, and Craig Rolfe — into the events that ended in a Range Rover on a Rettendon farm track.

The ICF didn’t create the Essex Boys. But it produced the men who would later be at the heart of the story, and gave them their first education in organised violence.