'We're so proud of my dad and the football anthem he wrote'

Gerry Hicks wrote the song Come on the Town as part of a musical [Daniel Hicks] Go to any Ipswich Town match and you will hear a song about a fan called Edward Ebenezer Jeremiah Brown – who everybody calls Ted. It is played over the PA system at the start of every home match and sung spontaneously by fans in the stands. The song, called Come on the Town, describes a fictional Ipswich fan who has a scarf, a rattle and a big rosette, and has not missed a game since he was three.

Supporters have been proudly belting out the song for decades, but its origins have slowly been forgotten. So how did it come about, who was Ted, and what is the legacy of this fan hit? The BBC tracked down the son of the song's creator to find out.

The song is still sung by Ipswich Town fans today [PA Media] The song was written in the late 1960s by Gerald Hicks, known as Gerry. Born in 1933 in Wickhambrook, near Newmarket, he had been musically gifted from a young age. His son, Daniel Hicks, 66, who lives near Beccles on the Suffolk/Norfolk border, explained how his dad learned to play the piano as a child before teaching himself the saxophone as a teenager.

As an adult, Gerry led dance and jazz bands and played the piano in pubs. He began to take more of an interest in composing music, specifically for musicals, and in 1967 joined a local amateur dramatic group, the Cavendish Players. Gerry recorded his compositions using reel-to-reel tape, before his friends would transcribe them into sheet music [Daniel Hicks] It was with this group that Gerry wrote his first musical called Ring Around Rosy, which featured 18 songs, including Come on the Town.