Was a half decent player in his youth and harboured dreams of being a pro, in the end he wasn't quite good enough but a friend of his was at Chelsea as a kid in the sixties and he's told him that at the time one of the things all the apprentices said was that you didn't go into the treatment room alone with a certain member of the staff. He said nothing untoward ever happened to him and that it was always one of those stories they would joke about amongst them like some kind of boogie monster, but the rumours were rife.
Shame so many peoples lives have been spoilt, and people like Bristow don't ghelp. Stuff that happens to you as a kid can affect you for the rest of your life, it's easy to judge others, I saw my old headmaster a few years ago, it's a funny feeling, my first reaction was to think "Am I in trouble?" and then i kept calling him Sir which he said he hated as all his old pupils still did it no matter how old they were. (Just so you're sure he never did anything untoward to any of us he was just quite strict)
CRB checks (now DBS) are a fairly recent thing. As recent as 2002 I rolled out CRBs for a charity that had 50 plus volunteers - none of which had been police checked. The paperwork was fast tracked, took 3 weeks.
Predators like Ian Huntley (Soham murders) got round the CRB by moving county and changing his surname.
Sad to say that what we are seeing now in football / sports could be tip of iceberg. People just weren't vetted. Police checks didn't exist.