Sporting Heritage’s Football Heritage Network (FHN) Launch
Geoff Wicken and Roger Titford from The Great Save attended by Zoom the inaugural meeting of Sporting Heritage’s Football Heritage Network on 18 January 2021. There were about 30 guests in attendance and unsurprisingly most came from museum and archivist backgrounds – the receivers of ‘stuff’ rather than the givers of ‘stuff’.
So it was good that TGS was able to add the grass-roots perspective: what do fans who want to donate and preserve material do in the current climate? There are four areas where we’d love to see progress before the next quarterly FHN meeting
- A ‘Dummies’ guide to the pros and cons of the several different types of club heritage body that are already operating, e.g. Charitable Trust Collection, Community Interest Company, formal association with local museum, with football club, with supporters trust, stand-alone digital.
- A ‘taxomony’ of football stuff – a list from the most valuable (e.g. unique copies of official club records) to the least valuable (e.g. late 20th century programmes) – that can be shared with all clubs and supporter organisations.
- A database of useful club-based heritage contacts – club museums, archivists and historians, historical fan websites, heritage groups, etc. TGS has already started one which we’ll share with Sporting Heritage, and we’ll try to use the reach of the Football Supporters Association to help fill the gaps. Roger, for reasons other than TGS, is now a FSA National Council member so that might help!
- A helpful guide to temporary physical storage options – sometimes supporter collections need rescuing at short notice and no-one seems to quite know where to put them.
Overall we felt it was a very encouraging start and it gave us some new and useful contacts.
Saved from the skip – Eight FOULS in the box!
FOUL was the UK’s first football fanzine – appearing intermittently in the early and mid 1970s and often hard to find in newsagents. In total there were probably under 40 issues.
A collector got in touch with TGS this month, wondering what to do with eight issues he’d kept since then and having just re-read them one final time. We know the National Football Museum doesn’t have FOUL listed in its archive so we think we’ll send them on there.
But it’d be good to get more FOULS in our box so if anyone else out there has spare copies please let us know.
Treasures from a player’s family archive re-purposed
Author Bill Hern has ‘re-purposed’ some players’ memorabilia in writing his recently-published ‘Football’s Black Pioneers’. Dennis Walker was the only black Busby Babe. In 1962, still only 17 and just under one year away from his first team debut, he and other Manchester United starlets took part in a Youth Tour of Switzerland and Germany. Above is Dennis’ copy of the tour itinerary and a picture of the group boarding their flight.
Every squad member would have been eager to impress, yet it must have been with some trepidation that the party boarded the plane with the recent memory of the Munich air disaster, which claimed 23 lives, fresh in their minds.
Dennis had a good career but made only one first team appearance for Manchester United. He had greater success at York City and Cambridge United but no one else can ever claim the mantle of the only black Busby Babe.
Dennis Walker is featured twice in Bill Hern’s book, co-written with David Gleave – as the first black player for both Manchester U and Cambridge U.
The importance of not being earnest – preserving old football cartoons?
Here we’re talking about the resident cartoonists in weekly local newspapers. Between say 1900 and 1970 every local newspaper seemed to have one. We think they may well be important because, in an era of formal match reporting and no fanzines, websites or phone-ins, they were a singular, recorded, informal voice. They used players’ nicknames, symbolic representation of opponents and a sense of humour varying from the goading to the macabre.
Many years ago the Reading Chronicle threw out decades of AREFF originals but enough notice was given for a few collectors to hurry down to the town and pick up a few – now treasured – copies.
Here’s a sliver (above) copied from newsprint and another example (below) from Hartlepool which was saved and framed.
What do you think? Are these works important enough to be saved, preserved and shown again in another format as a jovial take on club history and fan culture? In a way we’re amazed nobody’s already written a book about these – or maybe we’ve just not heard of it.
Sharp shots revealed from 1955
Few local newspapers retain on-staff photographers today. Their downsizing often also means moving to smaller offices with less storage space, with the need to get rid of ‘stuff’. The Watford Observer recently passed several boxes of 1950s photographic plates to Watford Museum; digitising them reveals some very sharp high-quality football images, many never published. These three shots come from Watford’s game at Reading’s Elm Park in September 1955. One presents Watford’s Bryan Atkinson emerging for what was his debut, ignored by newspaper-reading and pipe-smoking spectators. No shouts of “Who are ya!” in Division 3 South in those days.
The second shows the home side on the attack against a backdrop of stadium advertising for local firms: Huntley & Palmers biscuits and the West Reading Laundry.
In the third, Reading’s Brian Kirkup heads home past Maurice Cook, the second of three Watford goalkeepers used that afternoon in Reading’s 6-1 win.
National Library of Scotland, Football Collection
At the very start of The Great Save we raised the question of ‘why not have a National Football Library?’ Little did we know, sequestered as we are in remote south-east England, that such an entity more or less exists in Scotland.
Raising the question again at the SH FHN launch gave us the contact to the National Library of Scotland and here, briefly, is what they had to say about their football collection.
“Football is seen as Scotland’s national game and books about Scottish football give information not just on sport but on Scottish culture and society. Collecting the printed record of Scottish football and making it available to the public and researchers is a key aim for the Library.”
“Our aim is to try and collect as much printed material on Scottish football as we can whether it be programmes, club histories, club publications, ephemera such as tickets and posters, biographies, fanzines or magazines. In fact, anything printed and distributed about Scottish football.”
“We greatly appreciate and welcome donations although we only accept material that we don’t have in the collections already. So, for example, if someone was to offer us programmes we would need to have a list or at least an idea of what they were offering us. We would then check this against our holdings and accept only the ones we don’t have.”
We’re delighted to hear that this exists as a source of preservation and public access to key elements of Scottish football memorabilia. The link to the collection is here The NLS can be contacted via the curator Ian Scott i.scott@nls.uk and it acts as an inspiration for TGS to bang the drum again for an English equivalent.
Strides on Twitter
TGS is making strides on Twitter on the past couple of months with several key influencers now following us. Which is great. But we do see The Great Save primarily as an informative and campaigning blog best viewed on something other than a mobile phone!
So, we’re very happy to take feedback and additional information through any of these three channels: via the Comments section on this blog, by email to thegreatsave@btinternet.com or Twitter @TheGreatSave1
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