Stevenage FC with Lloyd Briscoe
What is the formal status of your activities regarding the heritage of football?
I am the Stevenage FC club historian and I contribute a regular feature in the match-day programme concerning anecdotal historical “stuff”. I tend to focus on ancestral clubs such as Stevenage Town and Stevenage Athletic, where a general knowledge and understanding of these clubs appears to be rather thin on the ground.
How did you get started?
About 15 years ago, an elderly club official passed away. As I (thought I) knew him well, I was contacted by the local press to contribute to an obituary. From what I knew of him, the newspaper duly published my comments. As time progressed, I learnt more about this individual, so I decided to undertake more research. I was quite taken aback about what I had discovered and how influential this chap had been in Stevenage football, particularly between 1940 and 1970. I felt more than a tad guilty that my contribution to his obituary fell well short of what he had actually achieved. It was then that I felt challenged to establish a documented database of my town’s footballing history – a task which I was surprised to learn hadn’t been considered by anyone before.
What has your research consisted of?
Initially, it involved talking to long-time supporters of the club and establishing what they knew. This was easy for me as I am also the chairman of the Stevenage FC Supporters’ Association. Newspapers in the local library were consulted, which then led me to the British Library repository in Colindale. Many, many hours were spent here, right up until the site closed down in 2013. Research now continues at their St Pancras site.
How much stuff have you got?
In a word – “lots”. My own collection of programmes since 1980 is 95% complete and I have a significant amount of club administration material from the early 1980s. I have scanned and printed most of our local newspaper photographs of Stevenage Town from the 1920s to the 1960s.
How do you share your ‘stuff’ and make it available for public use?
I once gave a talk at the Stevenage Museum about the history of football in Stevenage. In no time at all I was “on the circuit”, visiting a variety of community groups and delivering variations of the talk, supplemented with artefacts. On behalf of the Stevenage Supporters’ Association, I also man a ‘pop-up’ stall which visits all the fetes and open days in North Hertfordshire during the summer months, exhibiting some of the collection.
What is the best / most unusual memorabilia find?
One of my old school-friends donated a clock which was awarded to his father by the club back in 1949, commemorating his wedding. I have a red and white painted wooden rattle from the 1950s and a club blazer badge from the 1960s. I have the hand-written minutes of the very first meeting of the Stevenage (Borough) FC which was formed in 1976. However, my most treasured possession is a turnstile which was in regular use at the ground up until last season when new electronic contraptions were introduced. “My” turnstile dates back to the early 1900s when it was newly installed at West Ham Utd. It still has remnants of the claret & blue underneath years and years of brushed-on scarlet red paint. (There was quite a transfer market in old turnstiles. Ed).
What frustrates you most about your objectives / aspirations?
Whereas I am passionate about local history and that of my football club, it’s evident to me that there are many in my community who, sadly, are not. I therefore tend to gravitate to those who are empathetic, particularly my counterparts at other clubs. It is likely that every club in the country has an individual who does care about its heritage, but I feel that there should be a national ‘umbrella’ body to whom such people can turn to for help and/or advice.
It is at this point that I would register my disappointment with the National Football Museum (NFM) in this context. I have attempted to broach the subject with the NFM in the past, but to no avail. In my opinion, the NFM seems more focussed on marketing itself as a venue for schoolchildren and the casual visitor to Manchester rather than as a repository or destination for serious students of football.
What enthuses you most about your objectives / aspirations?
I take much personal gratification from discovering something from the hidden past and highlighting it via the medium I use (i.e. the Stevenage FC match-day programme). I am pleased that there are other like-minded individuals within my own social circles who are undertaking similar detailed research – albeit for the present Stevenage FC. This is most welcoming.
Recently, I was pleasantly surprised to ‘discover’ other like-minded football historians and archivists on the webinar hosted by Will Barrett of Exeter City. I learnt a lot from that experience, and hope that this was just the first of many.
What plans have you now, moving forward?
Hitchin is the next town up from Stevenage. It’s just five miles away. It was also home to the world’s very first football museum. The brainchild of Hitchin FC’s secretary, Vic Wayling, it was opened in 1956 by Sir Stanley Rous. It closed in the early 1970s, but how many of you reading this knew that fact? Now virtually every Premier League club now has its own museum – which is really fantastic, but who of you has ever heard of Vic Wayling?
My own club, Stevenage, launched its own Heritage Project back in March, and I was busy contacting most of the surviving Stevenage Town players for a reunion also scheduled for last March. Sadly, Covid-19 put the kibosh on all that, but I am committed to resurrecting this initiative when the situation improves.
Lloyd Briscoe Lloyd@SFCSA.co.uk