We might all be locked down, shielding and zooming to various degrees but we’re glad to say there’s still stuff going on in our general arena.
Celebrating our football heritage workshop (Exeter)
The Great Save was honoured to be part of the virtual line-up on 4 November alongside Football and War Network, the Football Supporters Association (FSA), the National Lottery Heritage Fund and our hosts the University of Exeter / ECFC Museum Trust.
All five talks are being made available online here. We were first on the schedule.
The Great Save’s message was that we need to go beyond creating awareness to stimulating action, and find ways of bringing fans and fan-groups more into the picture. There is lots of formal heritage advice out there, but we need more accessible routes in, and bite-sized tasks achievable in the short-term. Through this workshop we’re building links with the FSA, as we are with Sporting Heritage by attending their annual conference.
This virtual event replaced the planned programme of regional workshops cancelled due to Covid-related issues However, the ECFC Museum team would like to do more of this type of event in the future in order to build and maintain some momentum, so may well look at putting something together in the New Year.
Sporting Heritage Conference – October 2020
This year’s Sporting Heritage Conference had to be held online rather than in Stirling for obvious reasons; support from the HLF meant that delegates could attend free of charge. A wide range of presentations were laid on over the two days, and the presentations can be viewed either in video or Powerpoint format via the Sporting Heritage site here:
The Great Savers in attendance particularly enjoyed learning from Tim Edwards, of the Ipswich Town Heritage Society, about some of the uses to which heritage items can be put in partnership with other organisations. In the ITHS case this includes a touring exhibition next year to mark the 40th anniversary of Town’s 1981 UEFA Cup win. This should also serve as a means of collecting memorabilia from fans who attend exhibition events.
More news from Ipswich
Liz and Tim Edwards from the ITFC Heritage Society have become sleeve sponsors of the Ipswich Town women’s team – nickname The Tractor Girls, of course – as a means of helping to promote the heritage of the club and their activities.
Saved from the ether?
We haven’t got a ‘saved from the skip’ story this time, but we are conscious this Covid-impacted 2020-21 season is passing by in an unusually intangible way. There are no fans and therefore no attendance figures or tickets. Not all clubs are producing physical match programmes, so for the continuity of collections you might have to look out for and download club-produced team sheets.
Whilst modern programmes contain a lot of fluff and blather, they do exist as a convenient, physical and permanent record of the club’s day-to-day life. If collectors and curators are not careful in preserving somehow the digital record of 2020-21, we may come to regret an awkward historical gap. And club-branded face-masks will not bridge it.
An old collector lets go
Hunter Davies, 84, the well-known journalist, wrote a piece in the New Statesman magazine/website on 28th October 2020 on disposing of his memorabilia. Sadly news of The Great Save had not reached him. He says his attempt to donate up to 2,000 objects to the Tottenham Hotspur museum was rebuffed and so it went in 20 lots to auction, including some very old football books for which he believed there was less of a market than when he bought them. We believe the auction has now happened and hope that the collections found a good home.
Funding opportunities
It’s not just football that’s been closing down: the National Lottery Heritage Fund closed its doors in late March to new applications for funding for at least nine months. Other funders followed suit. Sporting Heritage has posted a link to a funding finder linked to potential sporting heritage activity which could be of use here:
Club corner – 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
If you’d like you or your group to be featured in Club Corner next time please get in touch via thegreatsave@btinternet.com – that’s all for this edition, thanks for reading and keep saving!
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