In the long, and briefly glorious, history of Nottingham Forest, there is a small and exclusive band of people whose contributions to the club will be remembered until the year dot.

The obvious one might have patented the words “young man”, liked to give television interviewers a kiss on the cheek and sprinkled his precious magic over the City Ground for 18 years. There are the players from Brian Clough’s teams who took the club on a wild, eccentric journey from the depths of the old Division Two to a real-life football miracle featuring back-to-back European Cup final wins.

And then there is David Lewis, whose name might not be so familiar, even if his part in the story is written indelibly into the fabric of the club.

Don’t be too surprised if you have never heard of Lewis. Many Forest fans wouldn’t recognise this man, now 77 and living in a sleepy village 50 miles or so from the Nottinghamshire border. And he has always been happy to remain in the background.

“It’s not like a piece of artwork, where you sign your name at the bottom,” he says. “You do it anonymously. You see your work, lots of people see your work, but you don’t add a signature. You do it, you hand it over and you say goodbye to it.”

All of which helps to explain why Lewis seemed slightly bemused when The Athletic turned up out of the blue to ask whether it was time he deserved a bit more credit, a little bit of appreciation, perhaps — if he was indeed who we thought he was.

Was he the man? Had we come to the right place?

Then a smile crossed his face as he saw the Garibaldi red of a Forest shirt and the familiar crest on its left breast.

It had taken some time — Lewis is not an easy man to find — but we had finally tracked down one of the most important people, without any exaggeration, in Forest history.

It was March 1973 when the notice appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post to announce that Forest were holding a competition for fans to come up with a new badge for the club.

Lewis was 29 then, working as a graphic designer and lecturer at Nottingham’s College of Art, and fancied having a stab at winning the £25 first prize.

But there was one problem.

“I was a football nut,” says Lewis. “I decided that, ‘Yeah, that would be an interesting competition’ but when I started reading up about it, I realised I faced a dilemma. The main judge, it transpired, was a man called Wilf Payne and the reason why I recognised that name was because he was my head of department.

“I didn’t think that any design I entered could have been judged fairly if he knew it was mine, and I also didn’t want to embarrass the judges. I did want to enter, though, so I decided to use my mother’s maiden name to hide my real identity. My mother’s side of the family were Italian immigrants and her maiden name was Lago. So I submitted my design as Lago and it wasn’t until afterwards that the judges found out my real name.”

In total, the competition attracted 855 entries, from as far afield as Australia and Germany, including 268 in a junior section and one particularly enthusiastic fan who submitted 27 different designs. Wally Ardron, one of Forest’s all-time leading scorers, included some Nottingham lace in his entry and another area product, in the form of a Raleigh bicycle. Others referred to Robin Hood or the archer from the local Home Brewery’s badge.

Yet the winning entry was the one that showed a “tricky little tree”, to use Lewis’ affectionate description, and had a unique slant when it came to spelling out the team’s name.

The Forest badge David Lewis created (Photo: Andrew Matthews – PA/Getty)

“I wanted to retain some of the history of what had gone before,” he says. “The tree had been part of the previous crest, from the Nottingham coat of arms, and I wanted to retain it.

“Then I wanted to take into account the fact the City Ground was on the banks of the River Trent. I know the Trent isn’t the sea, but waves represent water. At first, I had two waves but it didn’t look right. I tried four and that looked almost military. In the end, three waves seemed to be the right balance.”

This next line might make fans see that famous crest in an entirely different light.

“I was also conscious – and I have never shared this with anyone – that subliminally it is very much a phallic symbol,” Lewis says. “Not as a sexual image, but more as an upward thrust or representing a surge of emotion. That was quite deliberate, because of the red-blooded nature of football fans — even though I’m not sure many of the supporters would ever have thought about it that way.”

Today, the mystery can also be solved, almost half a century on, about the unique style of lettering of “Forest” beneath the tree.

That, too, was quite deliberate, though Lewis confesses it took a bit of time before he came up with the final design.

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“It was there… it was not there; it was there… it was not there,” he recalls. “I wanted some informality, so that’s why the tail of the (capital) R curls under a lower-case ‘e’. If it was a normal R and a capital E it would have taken on an official appearance, whereas I wanted something unique that could be owned by the club and the supporters. The small ‘e’ gives it a personal identity.”

What happened next, as they say, is history.

“Then, of course, Clough came in and the next thing I know, this badge is all over Europe. Within a few years, Forest had won the European Cup twice. I’d become a Forest supporter and felt quite attached to the club. And it was a bit more emotional than my usual work.

“There were times when they were playing in Europe, beating everyone, winning all the trophies, wearing the badge … I’d be watching on television and, yes, sometimes I’d think, ‘Bloody hell’.”

The saddest thing, perhaps, is that nobody at the 21st-century Forest has ever seemed too interested in tracking down the man who came up with their badge and has largely been forgotten in the years since.

“There have been some interesting times at Forest, with different owners. I sometimes wonder whether any of these people know there is a story behind the badge or whether it is just arbitrary to them,” says Lewis. “Though I also wonder sometimes whether I should have taken the initiative. I do wonder whether they know, especially with it coming towards 50 years.”

Maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised. Football moves quickly and Forest, in common with lots of clubs, have different priorities these days.

“In a lot of walks of life, we seem to have lost some respect for our heritage and our history,” says Lewis. “It’s sad in a way, because our past is also our present and our future. Everything we do now is because of what happened before.”

Lewis’s own introduction to football came via the Wolverhampton Wanderers team that his brother and brother-in-law followed around the country. He also had a soft spot for Arsenal and tells a story of an early visit to the City Ground, as a young autograph hunter, waiting for Forest’s players to arrive for training one day in the 1960s.

“First in was Johnny Carey, the manager at the time. He told me in vivid, agricultural language to clear off and threatened to throw me off the forecourt if I didn’t obey. I remembered that incident when I won the badge competition and was welcomed into the ground.”

Clough, he recalls, gave him an entirely different reception a few years later: “I met him a couple of times. ‘Very pleased to welcome you,’ he said. ‘If there is anything I can do, just ask’. He had this huge character but, if you met him outside of that, he was absolutely the most courteous gentleman.”

The presence of an I Believe in Miracles DVD on his shelf, telling the story of Forest’s Clough glory years, is a clue to where Lewis’ affinities now lie.

Lewis was also the designer who created the Nottinghamshire County Council’s logos. “It’s interesting,” he says. “If I drove over Trent Bridge, I could look one way and see a Forest flag flying and, on the other side, the council flag flying at their headquarters. The leader of the council once said to me, ‘Oh, you did a much better job of ours than the Forest one’.”

That is not a view many Forest fans, or supporters of football in general, would share.

“A few years ago,” says Lewis, “there was a discussion on one of the Forest internet forums and somebody raised the question, ‘Well, isn’t it time we had a new badge?’. There was a hell of a reaction and the idea was quickly lost because of the clamour to say, ‘No, this is our badge, it cannot change’.

“I also remember reading an article from America where there had been a big survey about sports images across the world to find out the ones people remembered, and liked, the most. The Forest badge was in the top 10. Again, that was very nice.”

On another occasion, his son, Tristan, went public on one of the internet forums. One of the replies was so touching Tristan had it printed onto a T-shirt for his father. 

It reads: “I don’t think his importance to the social history of not only Forest but Nottingham as a city, and football in general, can be understated.”

These days, Forest have added two stars above the crest to symbolise those European Cup wins. And the man who came up with the original design is happy with the change. “How many English clubs have got more than one of those? The sad thing is, the club have done nothing for 20 years. But there’s still a lot of pride.”

Lewis can be proud, too, as he heads off to walk his dogs in the Staffordshire countryside.

“I’m not sure, by any stretch of the imagination, that I would regard it as my best design work,” he says. “But I am proud in the sense that it is the best known and that it may actually be the best loved, too.”

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