I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles was adopted by West Ham's supporters in the late 1920s and is now one of the most recognisable club anthems in English football along with the similarly adopted "You'll Never Walk Alone", "Blue Moon", "Blue is the Colour" and "Blaydon Races". "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" was introduced to the club by former manager Charlie Paynter in the late twenties. A player, Billy J. "Bubbles" Murray who played for the local Park School had a resemblance to the boy in the "Bubbles" painting by Millais used in a Pears soap commercial of the time. Headmaster Cornelius Beal began singing the tune
John Everett Millais in 1850-51. By the mid-1850s Millais was moving away from the Pre-Raphaelite style to develop a new form of realism in his art. His later works were enormously successful, making Millais one of the wealthiest artists of his day, but some former admirers including William Morris saw this as a sell-out (Millais notoriously allowed one of his paintings to be used for a sentimental soap advertisement). While these and early 20th-century critics, reading art through the lens of Modernism, viewed much of his later production as wanting, this perspective has changed in recent decades, as his later works have come