The Derby County Collection with Andy Ellis
Andy Ellis writes about the Derby County Collection which is probably years ahead of most of us in terms of progress and scale as a heritage group.
What’s the formal status of your heritage group, which groups are involved and how did you get started?
The Derby County Collection was started a little over eight years ago as a charitable trust and so is registered with HMRC. The East Midlands Museums service were invaluable in talking through various options open to us, based on what our short, medium and long term goals were. They provided links to various documents prepared by museum associations that helped formulate a decision e.g. “Big Questions? Big answers” by the Scottish Museums Council, and suggested the initial steps. The charitable trust allowed us to remain a separate entity from the football club but working closely with them. It would show potential donors that we were a serious organisation, not for profit.
A couple of like-minded fans and collectors visited other clubs that already had established heritage experts and systems, and we made a trip to the NFM in Manchester to see the curators and the cataloguing documents and processes. At the same time, meetings took place with an East Midlands Museum advisor who provided various documents and guidance.
A presentation to the club directors ended with them giving written authority to act on their behalf in all matters relating to club history, heritage and memorabilia. It also helped that I had been writing in the club programme for over ten years and written several books, so I was known to the club management. The intention was to bring together the club’s own memorabilia, fan donations, a large personal collection and anyone else’s material under one umbrella for the greater good of the club and community.
We have a website with the headlines of what we do Derby County | The DCFC Collection (wixsite.com), an active twitter account @dcfccollection and an eBay account for selling surplus items. We are members of the Sporting Heritage network community,
How much stuff have you got?
Having moved from the Baseball Ground to Pride Park there is signage, boardroom fittings, a few minor trophies and dozens of framed pictures that were retained. These were originally kept in metal shipping containers and a couple of moves later into more local, controlled storage units.
Amongst the collection as a whole we have 98% of first team programmes since 1940; hundreds of reserve programmes and team sheets; team sheets from first team games; ticket stubs; 100+ match and replica shirts; signed balls; every Derby County book; 16,000+ glass plates, slides and negatives (all with our copyright); 4,000 press photos; club letters; 3,500 cigarette and trade cards and stickers; record books; in all some 54 different categories that have been modified from the original Everton Collection list.
It is an ongoing process to try and document what there is, and it is time consuming, but necessary. Every item (including all 16,000 negatives) is recorded in a spreadsheet with a unique code, and photographed or scanned. This also gives us a list of duplicated items that can be sold or used by the club’s community team or other local groups in their projects.
How do you store your stuff?
A club sponsor organised some industrial racking to assist. The negatives are stored in museum-quality sleeves, programmes in binders on shelves; shirts are individually wrapped in tissue paper and then in large plastic storage boxes; cards and stickers are put into individual ‘penny sleeves’ and then in nine pocket sleeves and albums.
The smaller storage unit houses the more valuable of the framed photos, some worth several thousand pounds, and some items from the old stadium (old wooden seats, floodlight fittings, boardroom fittings).
How do you make it available for public view?
We have held several major exhibitions in the city that ran for several months, attracting thousands of people and getting a special commendation at Derbyshire’s Heritage Awards when put up against full time museums.
We are invited to many club functions which involve fans – for example season ticket holders, women’s team when they play at the stadium, community trust events; and in a new venture we have a couple of rooms displaying at a local library that can be moved to different areas around the city.
The Community Trust link gives us scope to be involved with dementia groups, over-85 supporter groups and care homes, and we jointly stage a series of public shows with former players on stage in a series called ‘Access all Eras’, where we have loaned the first division and second division trophies from the Football League.
We have been into schools for sessions on ‘Football in Victorian Times’, delivered a presentation to the second year academy players on the history of the club and we are the primary source of contact when the club receives any history or heritage-related queries.
What’s the best / most unusual memorabilia find?
Some of the most interesting are the Board Meeting minute books from the early 1970s when Brian Clough was certainly a law unto himself. These were amongst boxes and boxes of documents thrown out when the club moved between stadiums. Oddities include a 78rpm vinyl record of crowd noise from fans welcoming back the triumphant 1946 cup-winning team as they paraded through the town, and a doll given to each player during a tour of Czechoslovakia in 1947.
What piece of advice would you offer people trying to set up a group like yours?
Work closely with the club – the supporter liaison officer, media, marketing and community teams – those who can help with advertising, advising of upcoming club events that you add value to, and providing a natural place for fans to bring items to donate.
You need to take time to decide your own catalogue structure and sub-categories, and numbering sequences which will drive everything. This needs to be done at the start with a laptop, scanner and proper marking pens, depending on what you are registering.
There will always be people who will criticise what you are trying to do, or how you are doing it, and questioning why the football club doesn’t spend hundreds of thousands of pounds buying memorabilia and building a museum without appreciation of the building, access, heating, lighting, display cases, staff, etc.
What are the current issues?
Finance – how do we generate funds without selling ‘the crown jewels’ to pay storage costs, buy new storage materials, web-site, backup disk storage for all the images and pay for display boards for exhibitions.
Time – if we are working full time, everything is condensed into weekends and evenings which extends the time to achieve any medium or long term goals.
Whilst we have a few thousand programmes, tickets and a library of general football books to sell, they are very hard to shift as there fewer and fewer new collectors who are interested, and they take up a lot of space. This is also a problem when we need to attract local fans with an interest in the history of the club (not just the last 10 years, but going back to the 19th century) and who can relate items to specific events or years and appreciate their relative worth.
Our current collection is ‘at risk’ – as most of the practical, collectible, most used material belongs to just one person (in a similar way that the Everton Collection belonged to David France) and what happens when that person retires, no longer wants to continue, or even dies and the family decide to sell the collection to unlock the decades of collecting value? It would be unlikely that any individual could or would want to afford to purchase it as a whole in these challenging times. The club, similarly, may not wish to do so with no in-house expertise to call upon. It is an area that causes concern and needs a solution that works for everyone.
Is a museum the right way to go?
People get very excited about the prospect of a museum…my views have changed over time. With so much material available to display, as with any museum, there will only be a small portion of it on show at any time. With modern stadia being out of town, how many people will travel to look round a display during the week (restrictions would probably mean it can’t be open on matchdays)? Ask yourself how often have you been to your local city museum, and do the displays change?
Wouldn’t it be preferable to have everything on-line, searchable with descriptions and context that can’t be achieved in a static display without full-time staff that is available 24 hours a day and to anyone, anywhere? Some things (Board Meeting Minutes) can be put behind subscriber firewalls and photo prints can be ordered which would raise funds for physical storage and preservation of more fragile items.
In the years prior to that, it had been noticed that various items of memorabilia, obviously club-owned, including pennants exchanged with European opponents, framed items and minute books, appeared for sale across various auction houses as far away as Germany.
Clearly this needed to be stopped, inventories taken and controls put in place, but with no club staff available or experts in ephemera or even the club’s history, there was a gap that needed to be filled.
Visit here: Derby County | The DCFC Collection (wixsite.com)
April 2021