On the Edgeley
Regular TGS reader Marcus Heap sends news from Stockport about a possible museum and history group:
“Discussions with Stockport County are currently difficult to hold due to the crisis, but the new owners are definitely fully committed to celebrating the Club history. It was really encouraging to see the recent announcement about the relocated and refurbished Museum that is being built. I am hoping we can have a proper conversation with the Club about their appetite to help us create a create an archive and what support they can offer. There are some ambitious plans to redevelop Edgeley Park and this might provide an opportunity to create more display space and possibly storage/offices as evidenced in the outline plan.
I am currently talking to the main Supporters group (Co-op) to discuss the formation of a History Group at County. At this moment this is just an idea to see if we can bring together various people who have an interest in the Club history but who have never yet met, to discuss if we have a shared goal. Like most clubs we have a mix of collectors (some specialise in match worn shirts, others badges, etc), stattos, historians and it will be good to see how much interest there is to work more closely.”
This is encouraging news from a club where the supporters have suffered more than most over the past decade. About 25 years ago County were in the second tier but currently reside in the National League. TGS wishes Marcus and his colleagues all the best and looks forward to hearing more.
Premier League promotion bonus?
Whether it’s to do with Watford being back in the Premier League we don’t know, but there’s good news for two members of the Watford Treasury team. They have been pushing a digitisation project forward and have now been given some ‘start-up’ funding from Watford FC. The club has committed enough to cover the building of a website (using the services of a small web design business that specialises in heritage sites) and associated training. After that the guys will have to do the uploading themselves, but it will be into a properly structured environment.
Football Heritage Network
The second meeting of Sporting Heritage’s Football Heritage Network took place on 4 May 2021 by Zoom. We heard from the national football museums of England, Scotland and Wales on what support and advice was available.
This was timely because the accompanying update on current funding from National Lottery Heritage Fund wasn’t great news. One member’s recent bid was turned down and the general sense was of a flood of new applications and a shift in NLHF priorities towards engaging more with communities.
Useful points were:
- The first draft of the Sporting Heritage toolkit for volunteers and enthusiasts will be available in 4-6 weeks for network members to test, then a roll-out is expected in the autumn.
- National Sporting Heritage Day will be Thursday 30 Sep 2021, and led by the National Football Museum with a theme of inter-generational activity.
- The Scottish Football Museum has a stock of 3,000 books, not all of which are Scot-focussed – and it includes a good collection of FA Annuals etc, complete run of IFAB minutes, etc.
This last point touches positively on another TGS quest, and relates to some academic work we’re also engaged in, which requires match statistics from printed sources. Whilst internationals, FA Cup and Football League stats are all largely available by standard reference books / numerous websites, there are other categories of significance – pre-Football League matches, ‘friendly’ or charity matches, ‘minor’ leagues (like the Southern League pre-1920) and indeed women’s football pre-1939 – which are not.
In theory they can be culled from FA Annuals (Alcocks), Athletic News Annuals, Gamages Annuals and individual club histories but in practice it’s impossible to find these in a single location, be it the National Football Museum, the FA, or the British Library. We’re working on it …
TGS is also part-way on producing a directory of club historians and club-based heritage resources. We’ve had a decent but so far incomplete response and we’d be grateful for more additions via this easy-to-fill form that’s downloadable HERE.
What was it about 1963?
Philip Larkin had a view but we won’t go there! At STAR (Supporters Trust At Reading) we continue to be amazed at the high proportion of press cutting scrapbooks and programme collections that start in or just around 1963.
Over the summer, writes Roger, we’ve had yet more offers of programmes especially and scrapbooks from supporters downsizing or clearing out as a consequence of the pandemic. Scrapbooks, yes, but these solid collections of programmes from the early 1960s (never earlier) through to 2000 – we just don’t know what to do with them or how to advise people now. We’ve collected at least three sets for our own use and donated a master set to the Berkshire Record Office, and have a notion if we can get funding for a digitising project. But what to do with these other duplicate and valueless collections, well, it’s not heart-breaking but it’s not great either. Suggestions welcome. Or has their time simply passed?
Spotted on eBay…
Many of us spend time noodling around football heritage items on eBay, sometimes with gratifying results. Geoff recently picked up a section of pages from ‘Black & White Budget’. This was an illustrated weekly magazine in the 1890s and 1900s, whose subject-matter included the royals, London theatre and sport. Pages from this edition, dated 2nd November 1901, carry pictures from the previous weekend’s Southern League match at White Hart Lane, when Watford succumbed 8-1 to Tottenham Hotspur. They are the earliest-known Watford match images, so are of historical interest in their own right.
They’re also noteworthy for the identity of one of the Watford players. Jack Cother (in front of the goalkeeper, top right, and by the goalpost in the larger picture) is believed to have been the world’s first Indian heritage professional footballer, and – after Arthur Wharton – the second-ever non-white professional. He represented Watford in the Southern League from 1898 to 1905, becoming the first player to rack up 100 competitive appearances for the club.
A local man, popular with the home crowd, he was described in the local newspaper as ‘a tough-tackling right-back, fearing nothing and rarely coming off second best’. After his playing career he served in the Great War, and would later sell matchday programmes at Vicarage Road. His descendants are Watford followers today.
Have you picked up anything interesting on eBay which we could feature in a future blog? Or saved anything from the skip? Please let us know!
Club Corner – The Derby County Collection with Andy Ellis
The Great Save is very pleased to hear from Andy about the Derby County Collection which is probably years ahead of most of us in terms of progress and scale as a heritage group. In the next blog – June / July 2021 – Andy addresses the key issues facing an established group, but for now here’s how they arrived at this point:
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.
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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