In 1978 West Bromwich Albion ended their season with a five-game tour of China considered so important to the nation that before their departure they were given a special briefing by the prime minister at Downing Street. To celebrate its 40th anniversary Brendon Batson, then a freshly signed right-back but who over the course of 220 competitive appearances would come to be remembered as one of the club’s legends, is returning to the country to walk part of the Great Wall for charity.

Ron Atkinson, then West Brom’s manager, recalled the original trip without much affection – “I thought it was a nightmare,” he said. “Personally, I hated it” – but Batson’s memory is considerably more forgiving. “It had its moments,” he says now. “There were lots of banquets and it was very formal at times – and the food wasn’t to everybody’s liking – but when you put a group of lads together we’re all like overgrown schoolboys. There’s that camaraderie that you have. I think I quite enjoyed the whole thing. It was one of those trips you reflect on and it became a better trip as the years went by.”

It was one that West Brom made only after Ron Greenwood, then England manager, had rejected the idea of the national team going. It had first been intended as a handy warm-up for the 1978 World Cup but its appeal did not survive England’s failure to qualify. As the first British professional team to visit China, they were considered groundbreakers – the sports minister, Denis Howell, described them as “football ambassadors” – but they were not the first western football side to arrive in China. New York Cosmos had visited in 1977 and in the three weeks after playing West Brom China’s national team also hosted the Mexican side Zacatepec, Ghana and Internazionale.

The Fiver: sign up and get our daily football email.

It is unlikely that any of those teams took quite as long to get there as West Brom, whose journey involved a flight to Hong Kong via Rome, Bahrain and Calcutta and then, after what Batson remembers as “a right good couple of nights”, a train ride to Guangzhou and another flight to Beijing. The entire process took 90 hours. “You could feel the change in the atmosphere as soon as we arrived in China,” he remembers. “We’re now in a place where we’re going to have to be more or less ambassadors for the UK. That’s the sense you got.”

When they got there they were taken to watch the domestic cup final, which had been delayed for a day so they could be present and where fans were regularly reminded by the public address system of the required decorum. The deputy general secretary of China’s FA informed the tourists that there would be “no whistling or all these strange kind of shouting noises” from the stands. There would be “only friendly behaviours” with local supporters so reserved that, “if they see a bad goal, they just feel pity”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brendon Batson, Cyrile Regis and Wayne Hughes on the tour. Photograph: West Bromwich Albion

West Brom’s first game was a 3-1 win against Beijing. “There were about 90,000 people there and you could hear a pin drop,” Batson says. “It was total silence. We’d been told it was almost impolite to shout and cheer and clap. So everything was very, very quiet. It was really quite eerie, to play in front of a big crowd but with hardly any atmosphere at all. We played in almost complete silence.”

West Brom played five matches, winning them all, with Cyrille Regis scoring in every game. According to legend at half-time in their second match, against the national side, they found in their dressing room a large table fully laid, with fine china and a clean tablecloth, and groaning with a selection of foods including ice cream. The unfamiliar food remains one of the strongest memories of the tour.

Your mind’s telling you it’s an egg, but your eyes are saying: ‘I ain’t quite sure about that.’

“It was totally different to what we knew,” says Batson. “You think you’re eating Chinese food here but you’re not. I always say you should try everything but there was one dish I think they said was duck eggs but they were almost black. You’re looking at it and your mind’s telling you it’s an egg, but your eyes are saying: ‘I ain’t quite sure about that.’ There was always a European table for the lads who wouldn’t touch it.”

There was little opportunity in China for the players to let their hair down. Atkinson remembered that “nearly every night the players got blazered and flannelled and we rolled up to some function or other”, while days without games, travel or training were filled with outings. There was a visit to Chairman Mao’s mausoleum, to the Ming tombs, to the circus – where highlights included a panda playing a trumpet while lying in a pram being pulled in a circle by a dog – and to the Great Wall.

“The day we went, a lot of the lads were saying: ‘Do we have to? Can’t we have a card school?’ But a few of us said: ‘Of all the things we’re going to see, you’ve got to see this.’” A camera crew was following the team for a BBC documentary and, when they got to the wall, John Trewick and Mick Martin were asked for their first impressions. “Well, I’ve bent balls round bigger walls than this,” said Martin. “When you’ve seen one wall, you’ve seen ’em all, haven’t you?” said Trewick, a comment that was taken seriously by many and earned him eternal infamy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brendon Batson, here pictured at the Hawthorns this year, says: ‘It was so far removed from the usual end-of-season trip.’ Photograph: Nick Potts/PA

Batson says: “It was so far removed from the usual end-of-season trip where you take your golf clubs and it’s about having a few drinks and relaxing and reflecting on the past eight or nine months. Most end-of-season trips you’d come back and say: ‘It was a bit like Spain’ or ‘a bit like Portugal’. This one we came back and you couldn’t benchmark it with anything else. We saw some extraordinary sights on the road, little snapshots of things. It was a real opportunity to enjoy something totally different.”

It was with some relief that the players returned home, after another difficult flight routed via Delhi and Beirut, but the experience did not seem to put them off adventurous travel. Seventy-five days after the last game of their China trip they were playing abroad again, as part of their preparations for the following season – in Aleppo, Syria – and everyone had reported for diplomatic duty again. Well, almost everyone. “Ron didn’t go on that,” Batson says. “He bottled it.”

Donations to the Albion Foundation can be made at justgiving.com/fundraising/jonathan-ward-china