SH Football Network meeting 4 May
The next, and second, meeting of Sporting Heritage’s Football Heritage Network is on Tuesday 4 May at 10am – 1130am by Zoom. To join the network please email fran@sportingheritage.org.uk with the subject heading “Football Heritage Network”. The agenda and Zoom joining details will be sent out approximately one week in advance.
At the previous meeting The Great Save undertook a few tasks – two which we have completed! These are very basic guides aimed at football supporters rather than heritage professionals and seek to make the first steps in preserving football heritage easier.
The first is what we’ve grandly called a taxonomy of football heritage. 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.
The second is a beginner’s guide to the types of entity or organisation you might set up with some real world examples drawn from our previous blog posts. It’s a downloadable PDF here.
With a little bit of help from the Football Supporters Association we’ve been working on a third – a record of ‘heritage’ contacts on a club-by-club basis. We’ve got quite a few gaps – if you’d like to respond on behalf of your club please feel free via this short downloadable form HERE.
Manchester United fan culture website
Seeing where we were with ‘Taxonomy’ we heard from Michael. He wrote, “It’s good to see fan photos have made it into the ‘much needed’ category. I only launched the United Fan Culture Archive at the end of last year, but it has been great so far seeing some of the images and hearing the stories that come with them.”
The online collection is here – and here’s one from our own personal collection.
And that site is not the only place that looks after the heritage of supporters.
The amazing Genoa museum
John Porter, who’s a regular TGS correspondent, alerted us to “the amazing Genoa Cricket and Football Club museum. It’s definitely on my list of places to visit once we can move around freely again. It’s great that there’s a section in the museum dedicated to the club’s supporters.”
Here’s the link to the museum website.
For a good overview of its contents, this is an interesting article.
This really is a fantastic example of what a mid-sized club, albeit with a long history, can achieve – though strangely no mention of the day in 1913 when Reading thrashed them (Ed).
From Australia
News of The Great Save has reached the other side of the world. Greg Warner, the founder of www.grassrootsfootballproject.com and co-author of ‘The Encyclopedia of Matildas’, says from Down Under that they face the same heritage preservation issues as we do in the UK.
“We are only now talking about, from a state and national perspective, what our organisation will look like and how we need to set up from a legal standpoint. Like the UK it is the academics and amateur historians doing the work that should be done by the FA, so we need to know where we stand from a legal point before offering ourselves as a receptacle for private collections. Our goal is simply the recording and preservation of a story that goes back 140 years and which will add a certain legitimacy in the eyes of those yet to see our game for what it is.”
The Great Save has forwarded what knowledge we have – bearing in mind the legal situation in Australia might be rather different. We’ve also had a similar enquiry from much closer to home, Yorkshire in fact, so there’s a definite and urgent thirst for knowledge and the need to bring it into contact with expertise.
To Manchester
We’ve made our first active donation to the National Football Museum of those several copies of the 1970s fanzine FOUL that recently came our way.
Club Corner – The Bristol Rovers History Group – Marc Radford, Secretary
What’s the formal status of your group?
We are the Bristol Rovers History Group. There are a select few of us such as official club historian Mike Jay, who is the driving force behind our being, as well as co-author Ian Haddrell. Hilary Lewis is the daughter of one of our greatest players, no-one less than one Harry Bamford. I am the barmy individual who tries to call order (aka the secretary) and Jamie is the one who puts everything on the website – go and check it out at your leisure here: Eliot and I help Mike to catalogue bygone days and Jamie has his own mammoth treasure trove of past programmes.
Chris has helped us overcome some massive red tape just to ‘exist’ officially. At first, and for now, we are a simple “society” but we need to firm up our Aims and Objectives, maybe in a sort of Charter so that we know where we are heading. As with all sporting clubs and gatherings, there needs to be a structure in place so we can work alongside other such bodies. For example at Bristol Rovers there is the Community Trust and the BRFPA (Former Player’s Association) and other structures that have existed for years such as the Supporters’ Club and the Club itself.
Richard is full of fantastic ideas and is our sporting history aficionado. Our next meeting is on March 25th 2021 at 1900 GMT over zoom – if you are interested in joining us, please email marcradford21@gmail.com to introduce yourself. We already have opened our doors to a good handful of prospective new members at this meeting.
How did you get started?
I suppose that the BRHG has been in its ‘infancy’ for many a decade, yet it has only become a concrete entity in the most recent of (strange) times. We have now had no less than six meetings.
The one thing that unites us all, before even thinking about ‘ethos’ or ‘raison d’être’, would be our love for our football team. Now that we are a “group”, we have decided to meet intermittently to decide how best to move forward.
How much stuff have you got?
We’ve got anything from the obvious, such as press articles, photos and match day programmes to the more obscure. We have a whole chunk of memorabilia, and we wondered how on earth to catalogue and therefore preserve this. At present there are exciting times ahead, as Bristol Rovers will soon have a “Hall of Fame” which will raise the profile of the club along with such artefacts, and make the “display” of such things more permanently on show to fans home and away alike.
How do you make it available?
The first two public showings of many of these items took place in the Supporters’ Club bar on a match day when we received support from the SC. We linked this to raising the profile of Dementia UK in the second event. That was keenly visited and a lot of interest came from former players Steve Elliot and Tom Stanton who showed considerable interest in our work.
What’s the most unusual find?
We believe this is the first ever “trophy” won by Bristol Rovers in 1888/89 season (the Gloucs FA Cup), one of many medals no doubt handed out that year but this has stood the test of time. It is tiny and cost a small fortune but it is so significant to us. Eagle-eyed Eric spotted it for sale and we swooped. He also found a long lost Black Arab photo from the 1880s. Now the medal belongs to the BRHG, along with a lot more ideas, all of a sudden the future opens up full of possibilities and adventures! The very acquiring of this medal has increased our profile no end.
A second extract from ‘Football’s Black Pioneers’
Author Bill Hern has ‘re-purposed’ some players’ memorabilia in writing his recently published ‘Football’s Black Pioneers’.
The young man above is Willie Clarke, a Scot with a father born in British Guiana. He had just signed for Aston Villa, at that time the leading club in Britain. Only the third black player to appear in the Football League, Willie (commonly referred to in the press as Darkie), became the first black player to score a goal in the Football League when he netted in Villa’s 3-2 win at Everton on Christmas Day 1901. It was a top of the table clash. Everton led the League with Villa two places behind.
Willie became the first black player to win an English Football League medal when Bradford City won the Second Division title in 1907-08. He also scored Bradford City’s first ever goal in the First Division.
The photograph above shows Willie in later life with his second wife Nancy. His first wife Ada died in 1906 leaving Willie to bring up two young daughters.
No signs of wealth or glamour in the photograph, Willie has same serious look as in his 1901 portrait. He died in 1949 and is buried in Tunbridge Wells Cemetery. There is nothing to mark his place in footballing history and even his death certificate records him as a ‘retired upholsterer’ rather than a convention-breaking footballer.
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