That Sheffield United v Middlesbrough programme atop yesterday’s blog seemed a bit – you know, antediluvian – but what about this one?
Forwarded by Newcastle United historian and prolific author Paul Joannou, officially a programme but more a match card, it’s from the Northern League game between Newcastle East End and Darlington on November 12 1892.
East End, by then playing at St James’s Park and formally to become Newcastle United the following month, won the game 5-0 and two weeks later put seven past the Quakers in the return.
The league had just six clubs – including Sheffield United, as yesterday’s blog recalled – dominated as it had been in the two previous seasons by Middlesbrough Ironopolis, who dropped just one point in 1892-93 and reached the FA Cup quarter-final, holding Preston North End 2-2 with 15,000 crowding the Paradise Field.
Among the stars was Bob Chatt, a Barnard Castle boy who later played with distinction for Aston Villa and was said to have “stuck to Oswald like an American post-master to his office”, a mellifluous metaphor with which we’ve had trouble previously.
The Nops were elected to the Football League the following season – other newcomers including Newcastle United and Woolwich Arsenal, the first southern side in the competition – won eight of their 28 games but were then dissolved.
*St James’s Park’s original tenants were Newcastle West End, their brief but colourful existence chronicled in Newcastle West End: the complete record 1882-89, Paul Joannoue’s ever-comprehensive history. It’s available (£15) from The Back Page bookshop, near the ground, from Waterstone’s in Blackett Street or from Novo Publishing.
*However ragged around the edges, however permanent the separation between back and front covers, that Sheffield United programme sold for£220. Nowt.
Back in 2004 but again referencing 1892, I wrote of a single sheet programme for the Liverpool v Stockton game in September that year on offer for £1,500.
“One-and-a-half-thousand quid’s quite cheap these days” said Roy Calmels of Bedfordshire-based Sports Programmes.
Stockton were one of the Northern League’s six of the best. Liverpool, it may be recalled, had been one of three teams – Gainsborough Trinity and Rotherham County the others – who’d declined the invitation to make up numbers. They opted, not unreasonably, to join the Lancashire League.
The game was on the “Anfield enclosure”, The Northern Echo reporting a 2-1 win for Liverpool with “each goal visited in turn.”
A similar single-sheeter, for the Reds’ first ever game against Rotherham County a few weeks earlier has sold for £5,000.
*Serendipitously discovered among these dusty shelves, the £1 programme for Stranraer v Ayr United, August 27 1994, may be considered positively new age.
I’d taken the bairns, as dads do, the visit made more memorable because about five men were sent off but rendered indelible by a paragraph in the Wigton Free Press.
Visiting Stranraer the previous weekend for what the Scots call a good swallee, a gentleman from Glasgow had booked into a B&B and left his falsers – Granpa Broon called them wallies – on the bedside table lest he become unwell (shall we say) before the night was out.
Subsequently found asleep in a shop doorway he was given a cell by the constabulary but upon awakening had no recall of the location of his B&B or, indeed, his wallies.
Hence the paragraph in the Free Press: “Has anyone found a set of teeth….”
*What do you call yours – if lucky enough to have one – the spare room with desk and PC where paper work is ostensibly essayed?
To some it’s the study, others the den, yet others simply the office. Ours is the study though, realistically, the glory hole. The Mistress of the House has decided that it’s due a comprehensive howking, for which purpose there are men in.
They’re noisy beggars. We flee, firstly to walk the rainy beach beneath the cliffs at Skinningrove, former ironstone mining country in North Yorkshire and then a bit further along for lunch at the Cod and Lobster in Staithes, a pub in such proximity to the sea that any closer and it would be swimming with the fishes.
It’s crowded and convivial, long famous for its crab sandwiches, blackboards additionally offering a huge range of sea food. Sharon has a couple of tempura oysters (with chips, of course.)
At least three times, most recently in 1953, the pub’s been washed away, sea wall subsequently strengthened. The board outside which long detailed the pub’s perilous history appears to have gone.
“I expect” said the lady, “that it’s been washed away, too.”
Grass Routes 