19th century football pioneer diaries secured at The Crucible
The Crucible Theatre is better known for its association with snooker, but it was recently the location for the handover to public ownership of one of football’s most treasured manuscripts. During the mid-1800s, Nathaniel Creswick kept a diary and on 24 October 1857, wrote: “I have established a foot ball club to which most of young Sheffield come and kick.” Jointly with William Prest, Creswick formed the world’s oldest football club, Sheffield FC, and established a model which has since been replicated many thousands of times across the world.
Creswick’s diary was in the ownership of his great grand-nephew Geoffrey Norton, and Norton was determined to preserve it for the benefit of the community. The diary is now in the safekeeping of Sheffield Archives and the intention is to create a digital version which will be available online.
Also, with his wife reading the document, Geoffrey Norton is currently transcribing the carefully penned diary which provides a detailed social history of life in Victorian times.
The choice of the Crucible for the handover was not by accident. The Crucible stands on the site of the former Adelphi Hotel, which was where many of Sheffield’s sportsmen and women met to establish and organise clubs. The Adelphi was the location where the 1858 Sheffield Rules were signed off, and where Bramall Lane, Yorkshire Cricket Club, and Sheffield Wednesday FC were inaugurated.
Creswick is not well known outside Sheffield but was highly influential in the development of early football and ‘his’ Sheffield FC were very committed to spreading the enjoyment of the sport by travelling around the country and playing games against local opposition. When Creswick’s diary is transcribed and digitised it will, hopefully, provide further insights into the development of the beautiful game.
You can read more of this story here from the Sheffield Star here
This piece is from TGS regular John P Wilson.
Two important Sporting Heritage dates of interest
23 September – Football Network meeting – 10am-11.30am
If you think you are eligible to attend this meeting but are not part of the current Sporting Heritage e-list, please contact Fran Stovold at fran@sportingheritage.org.uk.
20-21 October – SH Annual Conference – delivered digitally. Building on the success of last year’s digital event, this year’s conference will take place online on Wednesday 20 and Thursday 21 October. Bookings are now open alongside the first look conference programme.
To secure your place please see here:
Saved from the Skip – 1908 Watford Player’s Contract
Rescued within a bundle of Edwardian-era Watford FC paperwork now safely at Watford Museum is a draft player contract from 1908. It was prepared for Joseph Moffat, a Scot who had been signed from Kilmarnock for the 1908/09 season.
It makes interesting reading. The agreement lists his pay at £3 per week throughout the season, with an initial signing-on sweetener of £8, but explicitly states his pay will not cover ‘locomotion expenses in taking up his residence in Watford’. Also, the contracted player would ‘not be allowed to reside at an Hotel or any place Licensed for the sale of Intoxicating Liquor or Beer… or be allowed to be a member of or frequent any club… [where] intoxicating Liquors are sold’. One imagines this clause was included as a standard precaution, perhaps necessitated by the previous conduct of some of the club’s players.
For his part, Joe Moffat began his senior career with Scottish Division 1 side Abercorn before playing at amateur level for Bo’ness and Wishaw Thistle. After impressing at Football League Division 2 Walsall, he would play in the top tiers of the Football League (for Manchester City), the Scottish League (for St Mirren, Kilmarnock and Aberdeen) and the Southern League (for Watford). A true journeyman, Moffat made no fewer than nine cross-border transfers in his career. He would spend only that one season at Watford, making 18 appearances, before transferring back north to Aberdeen in 1909 and subsequently emigrating to America.
This piece is from TGS supporter Tom Brodrick.
The Great Save in Australia
Greg Werner looks like he’s making some interesting progress. “This is looking like a national initiative; it is now at board level of both the national and state federation. Awaiting an update from the board meeting in mid-September. We are also talking to the Google Arts & Culture Project who will supply us with the photographic and digital storage space we need. Worth a look here … “
National Sporting Heritage Day 30 September
Sporting Heritage offered grant funding to support events on National Sporting Heritage Day – which is Thursday 30 September 2021. Events will be happening right around the country so do look out for something near you.
Two supporter groups were successful with their bids. Plymouth Argyle Heritage Archive are putting on an evening with former BBC commentator and Argyle fan Mike Ingham, but unfortunately this has had to be postponed to the New Year.
Supporters Trust At Reading, in conjunction with Reading Museum, are putting on a three-part event at the museum. It opens at noon with a Football Antiques Roadshow that invites fans to bring in objects and memorabilia for assessment and possible inclusion in the upcoming 150 Years of Reading FC Exhibition. There follows an intergenerational Players Panel featuring a current player, a magically resurrected Victorian footballer and former Reading stars Neil Webb and Adrian Williams talking about football in their day. And it concludes with the premiere of a short film based on unseen fan-shot footage of the old Elm Park ground.
Club Corner – Derby County, Part Two
In the last blog Andy Ellis told us about the Derby County Collection. Andy has a great deal of experience in saving, curating and displaying memorabilia. In this second section he shares with TGS his thoughts on current concerns and topics.
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.
The Great Save resources
We hope our resources might be useful to you. We’ve created what we’ve called The Great Save ‘Taxonomy of Football Memorabilia’. In other words, a list – of the kinds of items we believe are more or less valuable in terms of requiring preservation and / or making a collection. It’s a downloadable PDF here.
We’ve also compiled The Great Save ‘Beginner’s Guide to the Different Types of Football Heritage Entity’ you might set up with some real world examples drawn from our blog posts. It’s a downloadable PDF here.
And finally …
We’re very happy to take feedback, reader contributions and additional information through any of these three channels: via the Comments section below, by email to thegreatsave@btinternet.com or via Twitter @TheGreatSave1
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