The academic Peter Swain uncovered a long history of
various forms of football played within Lancashire’s Bolton-Darwen-Blackburn
triangle dating back to the Eighteenth Century. His research features numerous newspaper
reports of matches and includes a retrospective account of an 1830 fixture
between Turton and Darwen with eyewitness testimonies. It also has newspaper
stories of football played by girls, boys and men at church and school outings,
alongside fines for football played on Sundays which support his claim that the
game was common throughout that period. Although these reports rarely carry
detailed descriptions of the games, some do give a sense that there was
organisation to the matches by the middle of the Nineteenth Century. For
instance, an article in the Preston Chronicle describes Blackburn’s
Brookhouse Gymnasium, built in 1841, as constructed with a ‘walled outdoor
football pitch’ and in an 1860 issue of the Blackburn Standard, a letter
from a church deacon highlighted the positive social impact of football teams
on the town. As part of a broader ‘revisionist’ approach, Swain’s research
changed the previous historical narrative - that football was lost in the 1830s,
legislated against due to its unruly nature, and then re-introduced by
returning public school boys in the 1870s. His work illustrates a continuous,
unbroken thread of football played within Lancashire, by people of all social backgrounds.
What was once a county of isolated towns and villages, whose
people largely existed through subsistence farming and handloom weaving, Lancashire
went through one of the most dramatic and rapid changes experienced by any modern
civilisation. As technology quickly improved and textile mills became
increasingly mechanised in the Eighteenth Century, thousands of workers and
their families shifted from rural to urban, also driven by the impact of
enclosure, which forced many from the land. As a result, most lived and worked
in extremely poor conditions where poverty and disease were rife. However, as large
numbers of people now resided much more closely, they also began to form
societies based around common interests. Initially focused on the practical – basic
education, work skills and self-learning - the Factory Acts of the 1870s
increased leisure time and in response clubs developed to include pastimes,
pleasurable pursuits and sports. Concurrently, a small elite of mill owners
gained enormous wealth from the textile industry. Some, like the Hornby family,
had made at least part of their initial fortune (which they then invested in
textiles), through the ‘ownership’ of enslaved peoples in the Caribbean.[1] Many more made huge
profits by using cheap, imported cotton, picked by the enslaved workers of
southern US states, and from paying Lancashire mill workers low wages to
process the raw material into products sold around the world – often throughout
the British Empire. This enormous enterprise brought vast wealth into the hands
of a small number of mill-owning families, many of whom moved away from the
increasingly polluted area due to the industrial processes from which they
profited.
From a relatively humble background, James Kay, originally
from Entwistle near Bolton, entered the textile trade in the late Eighteenth
Century, initially running mills in Chorley and Preston. What changed his
fortune, and the future of the Kay family, was his invention of the ‘wet
spinning process’ which, for the first time, produced fine linen from flax, a
method which he patented and then leased to mill owners around Britain and
Ireland. With the large income that his discovery generated, he purchased and
renovated the medieval Turton Tower, able to retire at a relatively young age,
and devote himself to antiquarianism. His son, also James Kay, used the family
wealth to buy shares in Liverpool shipping and invested in a company which
constructed a railway line connecting Blackburn, Darwen and Bolton (and the
villages in between, including Turton) with the city of Manchester. Many mill
owners financially supported local infrastructure improvements to develop
better business links - rather than for altruistic reasons. Textile magnates also
funded the construction of the Leeds-Liverpool canal which aided the much
easier movement of raw material to, and products from Lancashire via barge and they
paid for upgraded roadways between cotton towns. These developments also allowed
the much speedier movement of and communication between the people of towns
connected via textiles. So, the large numbers of people within the
Bolton-Darwen-Blackburn triangle employed in textiles or connected engineering industries,
had a common language and a reason to make use of it, which would eventually go
beyond the commercial.
John Charles Kay, the son of James Kay and grandson of
inventor James, was born at Turton Tower on April 21st, 1855, and
grew up with two brothers (another James and Robert Arthur), three sisters
(Annie, Mary and Emily), their parents and two uncles. Initially home-schooled
by a governess, John Charles went to Harrow School in 1868 where he lived with
house master and future Bishop of Durham, Brooke Foss Westcott. Although his
school records appear to show that he didn’t play any representative sport, a
later newspaper portrait claimed that he ‘distinguished himself in the 100
yards [sprint] and Quarter Mile Hurdles, representing Harrow at cricket,
football and rackets’.
Originally from Livesey, on the outskirts of Blackburn, in
1862 WT Dixon attended Battersea College in London. This was Britain’s first
teacher training college, an institution co-founded by Rochdale’s socially
liberal James Kay Shuttleworth, formed to encourage teachers to work in less
wealthy areas and foster a sporting ethos amongst their pupils. By coincidence,
the first ever football match played by London Association rules (the rules
broadly by which we now play), took place in Battersea Park in January 1864.
So, when Dixon became a teacher at Turton’s St Anne’s School, he brought this
sporting knowledge and idealism with him.
On his return to Turton Tower, John Charles was ‘full of
athletic fire’ and, together with Dixon, they organised a village football
team. At an initial meeting in December 1871, 48 signed-up as Turton Football
Club members, John Charles elected captain and Dixon the treasurer. As Swain asserts,
48 members of a village of just 300 is an extraordinary number of players as a
percentage of the population. He speculates that having what would have been almost
all the playing age adult males of Turton join the club, signifies that football
was already popular and therefore not a new sport, introduced by the Kays. Evening
training games were played by moonlight, using lanterns as goal posts with
‘Johnnie’ (John Charles) and ‘Jimmy’ (his brother James) playing and often
paying for post-match drinks in the Chetham Arms if their side won – which
remarkably, they always did. The pub, conveniently sited next to the team’s
playing field, also became their de-facto club house, an upstairs room used as
a changing room.
That John Charles Kay, whose family had hugely benefitted
from textiles, attended Harrow, is part of a broader story of how some of the wealth
generated by the mills was used. From the 1860s a new generation of cotton baron
sons were sent to public school, often to Harrow which had a strong sporting culture.
In 1863 WH Hornby sent his son, Albert Neilson to Harrow and, on his return, he
formed Brookhouse Football Club in Blackburn. Between 1864-68 James and Charles
Walsh, sons of Darwen’s Orchard Mill owner Nathaniel Walsh, attended the same
school – returning to form Darwen Cricket and Football Club in 1870. These
young people had the wealth and social standing to make the organisation of
sporting clubs relatively easy. John Charles’ father gave use of the Turton
Tower Smoke Room for club meetings, funded a Reading Room to be fitted out in
the village for the use of the team and he almost certainly paid a small
stipend to players, covering the cost of travel to games and a meal when
necessary. Brookhouse FC was supported by AN Hornby’s father WH, who allowed
the use of the fields adjacent to his mills and, when AN proved himself
incapable of running the family business, gave him a substantial trust fund
which allowed time to play first class football, rugby and cricket, captaining
the international sides of the latter two sports.
However, as Swain has shown, it was the organisational
abilities of the new lower middle class which made these clubs a success. Another
tangential by-product of the textile industry’s growth was the opportunity for often
self-educated, working-class people to train and work as mill administrators,
bookkeepers, accountants, teachers and publicans, forming a new social strata. Many
of these families sent their sons to be educated in grammar schools to
stabilise or improve their social position. Richard Birtwistle, the son of a
mill-owning family, attended Blackburn Grammar School (now Queen Elizabeth
Grammar School), and then formed Cob Wall Cricket and Football Club in 1870,
later becoming one of the founders of Blackburn Rovers. At Turton FC it was the
teacher WT Dixon who became its treasurer while another school master, John
Mangnall, was the goalkeeper and captain of nearby Eagley. Accountant Thomas
Hindle ensured that Darwen was run successfully, and it was coach builder John
Lewis who guided Blackburn Rovers through its initial years. Based on this, my
analysis is that to attribute the origins of early football in the triangle either
purely to returning public school boys or to a continuous history of ‘folk
football’ is to over-simplify a complex story. Swain’s evidence proves that,
despite previous narratives, the sport continued through the Nineteenth
Century, played widely in Lancashire. It was indisputably ex-Harrow pupils –
Hornby, the Walsh brothers and the Kays – who instigated the early clubs within
the Bolton-Darwen-Blackburn triangle, however it was the new ‘administrative
class’, which then ran those clubs successfully, in financial and
organisational terms. It was the combination of a long-standing sporting
tradition mixed with the nebulous impact of the industrial revolution, which
fostered the generation of early organised football in the area.
There are indications that AN Hornby’s Brookhouse FC began
playing as early as 1865, but the first newspaper reports of matches against
Rossall School, Stoneyhurst College and Preston Grasshoppers were not until the
late-1860s, and these show that they were rugby, the Harrow Game or even an
amalgam of both. By the time Darwen, Cob Wall and Turton FC formed, there were pre-match
meetings to decide by which form to play, resulting in games using different
rules in each half, home and away matches under alternate codes or even, in
some circumstances, no matches played at all, if an agreement could not be
reached. Dixon’s History of Turton FC (a pamphlet produced in 1909),
confirms that Turton FC’s first competitive matches, in the 1872-73 season,
were played under the rules of the Harrow Game, which allows some handling of a
large ball ‘shaped like a cheese’, with flattened sides. We also know that Turton’s
very first fixture was against Brookhouse, played on Saturday 30th
November 1872. According to Dixon’s report, the game was extremely violent,
several Turton players suffering injuries so severe that a return match was
refused. We also know from Dixon that Turton FC played Darwen later in that
inaugural season and were surprised to find Hornby appearing for the opposition,
but who was then ‘given pause’ during the encounter by Robert Kay while Darwen’
FCs very first match was also against Brookhouse and almost certainly played under
Harrow rules.
Albert Neilson 'Monkey' Hornby
Other teams were slow to develop in the early 1870s with
Bolton’s St Batholomew’s/Great Lever side forming in 1873 and, according to the
Blackburn Standard, in the same year a Blackburn Ramblers eleven played
Brookhouse FC at ‘Association’ which some have speculated may have been the
town’s first match played by those rules. The newspaper report makes for an
interesting read as both the Brookhouse and Ramblers teams contained players who
would later form the core of the Rovers and Olympic sides including John
Duckworth, the Greenwood brothers, Tom Dean, John Lewis and James Edmondson. By
1874 Christ Church, Livesey United and St Mark’s from Blackburn had entered the
fray while in Bolton another Christ Church team alongside others from the
nearby villages of Egerton and Entwistle had begun to play. A Lower Darwen side
was also operational, but matches were few and far between as the disparate
rules played by local teams made the organisation of regular fixtures
difficult.
The turning point was a well-attended Turton FC club
meeting on Monday 3rd August 1874. A motion from Henry Haworth senior, seconded
by fellow player John Booth, proposed that the team should play only by the
rules of the London Football Association, the first Lancashire club to do so.[2] Dixon had previously
written to Charles Alcock, then chairman of the FA, for guidance on the rules,
which were circulated to other clubs in the area, and Turton became the hub for
local teams adapting to these laws, players visiting the village to learn how
to play the game - most notably Christ Church FC, which developed into Bolton
Wanderers, learnt the rules through a couple of visits to Chapeltown. Some
clubs attempted to continue playing by other rules (Darwen reverting entirely
to rugby for a period) but as Turton now insisted on playing only Association, the
players of Darwen were eventually forced, by the end of 1875, to go down that
route too while Brookhouse disappeared entirely.
Several of the 17 founding
players of Blackburn Rovers were former pupils of Blackburn Grammar School.
Thomas Joseph Syckelmoore, a teacher at the same institution, was almost
certainly part of this founding group, possibly even the spur behind the start
of the club. As Swain has pointed out, Syckelmoore was older than the other 16 by
some years and had attended Cambridge University in the 1860s, where the
original rules (later developed by the FA) had been formed and, before that, he
is reported to have played football for Tonbridge Grammar School. Although most
recent histories of Blackburn Rovers use the meeting to formally organise the
club in November 1875 as the moment of its formation, the majority of earlier reports
give its foundation as being 1874 when, although no records exist, it is
believed that the team was already playing matches. Some accounts, written in
the Nineteenth Century, also assert that the original meeting to form the club
was in late 1874. Whichever date is correct, newspaper reports from
the time support the assertion of John Lewis, that there were still only a
small number of teams playing purely Association rules in the area when Rovers
began.
Another element of Peter Swain’s research is in
highlighting a long history of sporting competition for prize money within the
Bolton-Darwen-Blackburn triangle. He uncovered many Nineteenth Century
newspaper reports of games played for sometimes substantial prize money often
combined with organised side-bets, with many arranged by publicans as a means
of attracting custom. These include forms of athletics – running, walking and
jumping alongside trials of strength and endurance - with stakes, bets and
prize money held at a local hostelry for distribution after the competition.
This became more organised when Lancashire cricket clubs employed a
professional to compete in matches at which a public collection would be held
to pay their wages. By the 1870s there were regular five and six-a-side
football tournaments for prizes, often held as charity fund-raisers, with an
entrance fee forming a donation. Although winning this money would not feed a
family it would have been a substantial addition to a weaver’s income and made
life easier for some and, in combination, these long-formed traditions
normalised professional sport in Lancashire. However, amongst those ex-public
schoolboys who formed many of the earliest Association clubs in London and
South East England, there was a very different sporting philosophy to that
which had developed in Lancashire. The Old Etonians, Harrovians and Corinthians
believed in amateurism – that is, not just sport without payment, but
competition played in spirit purely for its own enjoyment, untarnished by prize
money, and this ethos was formalised by a rule against professionalism within
the FA Cup competition. Initially, these two very different approaches to sport
co-existed but, as teams from Lancashire began to enter the FA Challenge Cup,
these cultures would inevitably clash.
The expanding industries within the triangle not only
brought workers from the surrounding villages but also from much farther
afield. In Darwen, a substantial Scottish expatriate community formed which
maintained strong ties with the mother country where, like London and the South
East, football had developed into an increasingly advanced sport. As early as
January 1876, Darwen played Partick FC, a team which included Fergus Suter and
James Love, with Scottish sides becoming regular visitors to Lancashire. There
is still mystery surrounding Suter and Love’s relocation to Darwen. Tom Hindle,
chairman of Darwen FC, denied any part in their move south but they were
playing for his team by the end of 1878. Suter claimed to have relocated
looking for work as a mason but found the local stone ‘too hard to work with’.
Hindle also denied paying either player but there were strong rumours that this
was the case and, as we shall see, they were certainly paid by Turton and
played as guests of other local sides including a Darwen Cooperative Employees team.
According to Harry Berry’s history of Blackburn Rovers, another Scottish connection
was Tom Mitchell, a regular visitor north of the border, and who played a part
in bringing Scottish footballers to Lancashire, Glasgow Rangers player Hugh
McIntyre arriving in Blackburn not long after.
The rapid growth in Lancashire football is also, in part,
tied to the story of success in the FA Challenge Cup. In the 1877/78 season
Darwen were the first triangle team to enter what was then the only national
football competition, beating Manchester 3-0 in the first round but then eliminated
by Sheffield in the next. In the following year’s cup Darwen were joined by the
Eagley team, both getting a bye in the first round and then playing each other
on the 7th of December 1878 at Darwen, resulting in a 0-0 draw. Against
the rules of the competition, the Darwen team by this point contained
professionals Suter and Love. The replay, again at Darwen on the 21st
December, was a much more decisive 4-1 victory to Darwen, Love scoring two of
those goals. Progressing to the fourth round, effectively the Quarter-Final,
they were drawn to play the Old Etonian side – all matches at that point in the
competition played in London. This tie was the spark which ignited an enormous
fascination with Association and the FA Cup across the triangle, played
ironically by one of the teams resistant to the rules introduced by Turton. In
the initial match, although 5-1 down at half time, Darwen made a remarkable
second half recovery to level the game at five all and force a replay, again played
in London. Not only were the matches widely covered in both the local and
national press, so was the public subscription in the mills of Darwen,
Blackburn and Bolton to pay the travel costs of the Darwen players. Local
newspapers carried details of the collections which show that Lancastrians of
all backgrounds donated generously to the fund as did rival clubs and players. After
a second replay, the Darwen team were eventually beaten 6-2, but by then
everyone in the triangle was aware of this remarkable achievement and would
have seen what was possible for other clubs and players. Controversially, Suter
and Love moved from Darwen to Rovers soon after, causing much anger amongst
Darwen’s supporters, who fought with Rovers fans at their next fixture held at
Alexander Meadows cricket ground in Blackburn. Suter again denied that any financial
inducement was offered for his move but, like McIntyre, he was given a public
house to run, presumably as cover for payments by BRFC.
The research of football historian Andy Boocock, further
developed by my own work, has found, using newspaper reports of the period,
that by 1877 there was an extremely rapid expansion in the number of teams and
players across the triangle. In 1876 there were still only around 18 clubs but,
by the end of the next year, the number had reached 48 and, in 1878 that increased
to 122, peaking at more than 200 teams by the end of the decade, the majority
of which were operating in Blackburn. From the same match reports, I have
compiled a list of players which stretches to more than 1500 names but, as many
of the 200 teams had both first and second sides, the numbers of those playing
the game would have been considerably more. However, it should be noted that although
my research discounted any matches obviously played under anything other than London
Association rules, not all reports were detailed enough to make out precisely
which form was played. Players were also not tied to appearing for just one
team, often representing several different clubs even in the same season. John
Lewis, for instance, appeared for Brookhouse, Darwen and Blackburn Rovers while
Richard Birtwistle, the founder of one of the first teams - Cob Wall - played
for all the sides Lewis did as well as Turton FC. So, analysis of this data
does need to be treated with some caution, although it does illustrate that a
huge number of men took up the game in just a relatively short period.
The large pool of players developing across the triangle in
the late-1870s meant that larger teams recruited the more talented footballers
from across a wide range of smaller, less well-funded sides. Great Lever was repeatedly
accused of using inducements and/or paying players to attract men from
surrounding districts. The St John’s School and team in Blackburn was known as
a particularly fertile nursery for producing better players, who invariably
ended-up at Rovers or Olympic. Although in this pre-league era fixtures would
have remained a haphazard affair, the sheer number of teams available for
matches created (as evidenced by newspaper reports) an increasing volume of
weekly fixtures. These matches were both competitive and played in a more
technical style; the import of Scottish and Sheffield players introducing a
modern, passing game. Although it would be into the next decade before this footballing
environment would fully bear fruit, the groundwork for later success was
underway.
There is already a good deal of existing research into the
social circumstances of the early players of the better-known clubs: Christ
Church/Bolton Wanderers, Blackburn’s Rovers and Olympic, Turton and Darwen FC. My
research into the backgrounds of the players across the triangle throws up some
interesting connections and contrasts between places and highlights changes
through time. As Turton FC initially contained virtually all the playing-age
males, we know that the side contained a good cross-section of village life
which, alongside a teacher and the two young Kays, had agricultural labourers,
a publican, mill workers and a blacksmith. The Great Lever side, from outer
Bolton, likewise contained a wide range of professions including textile
workers, brick makers and a paper mill packer alongside an accountant and a
jeweller while Bolton’s Christ Church consisted of iron and tin workers,
carpenters and mill employees. Although Darwen FC could be said to have (at
least in part) been started by ex-public schoolboys, its team was made up
almost entirely of weavers, paper mill workers and warehousemen but other teams
from Darwen were socially very different. The Singleton Papers at Darwen
Library, which hold the minute and subscription books of Darwen Rangers FC,
show that the club featured almost entirely middle-class men - accountants,
managers, businessmen and administrators.
There has been much made of the contrasting social
backgrounds of the Rovers side which, initially at least, consisted of players
from the wealthy middle class, and those of the Olympic side, notionally of working-class
origin. Certainly, most of the first Rovers team were from the wealthy,
mill-owning families of the town – the brothers Greenwood and Richard
Birtwistle, for instance. However, the first side also contained teacher TJ Syckelmoore,
whose parents were tailors, Arthur Constantine, a legal clerk and the
commission agent Arthur Thomas. The truth about who played for Olympic is a
little more complex. For instance, goalkeeper Thomas Hacking, who had
previously played for Blackburn teams Billinge and Griffin Perseverance, was a
dentist, a solidly lower-middle class profession. Thomas Gibson worked as an iron
dresser - but at the foundry of Sidney Yates, who used his business to fund the
Olympic team, and would probably have allowed Gibson time-off to train. Player
coach Jack Hunter was effectively a professional footballer from Sheffield who brought
with him a progressive, passing form of the game and was (like Suter and
others) given a pub to run as a cover for his professional status. John ‘Jack’
Yates worked in a mill and played for several Blackburn sides before joining
Accrington and then Olympic while William Astley was a weaver as was Thomas Dewhurst
who had earlier played for Black Prince. Joseph Beverley, who would later join
Rovers, was apprenticed in working class trades including iron (presumably for
Sidney Yates) but, by the mid-1880s, was not working at all, so was almost
certainly being paid in some way to play.
In the other Blackburn teams of the 1870s, unlike in the
rest of the triangle, almost all the players who I have identified were middle
class. Brookhouse was made up of young men from the families of cotton
manufacturers while the other early sides of Cob Wall, Christ Church, Livesey
United, St Mark’s and Griffin Perseverance consisted of players who were
publicans, accountants, engineers and of managerial roles in the engineering
and textile trades. For instance, the Christ Church team contained mill manager
John Ashton, print compositor John H Penswick, William H Aspin bookkeeper and
William Hindle Shorrock whose occupation is listed as ‘brush maker’ but was
also secretary of Blackburn’s Orange Lodge. What is perhaps most remarkable
about the large numbers of players and teams in 1870s Blackburn is that so many
of them came from such a relatively narrow social strata. Perhaps football was
seen as golf later was by the middle class, as a means of making business
connections while also socialising.
What is particularly interesting about Christ Church FC and
connects it with several other teams across the triangle, is that the team
featured Christ Church School headmaster J Rostron. Like WT Dixon, John
Mangnall and Eagley’s star striker George Sharples, Rostron had attended
Battersea College. The headmaster of St Andrew’s School, John Ettock, who
played for Cob Wall, was also a Battersea alumnus, as was Griffin Perseverance player
and teacher John Slater. The influence of Battersea College’s diffusion of
‘muscular Christianity’ on the early development of British sport is already
well-established academically but it is interesting to see how much it impacted
on Lancashire’s early football scene too. The social profile of players in
Blackburn began to change towards the end of the 1870s, more players from
working class professions taking up the sport and it is almost certainly not a
coincidence that by the early 1880s, this transition brought with it success.
My research also shows that many of the teams across the
triangle were related to churches and often affiliated schools, a situation at
least in part, connected with the spread of Christianity through sport as
described above. These were largely Church of England but also included Methodist,
Baptist, Unitarian and a just a small number of obviously Catholic teams –
which is unusual given that, even during Reformation, Lancashire retained many
Catholic worshippers. The Christ Church Sunday School team became Bolton
Wanderers, but All Saints, Emmanuel, and Holy Trinity were also protestant
teams in the town. St George’s, St John’s, St Mark’s and several others in
Blackburn were C of E sides while St Alban’s and St Mary’s represented Catholic
churches and their schools in the East Lancashire borough. The Primitive
Methodists, Central Weslyan and Darwen Baptists show that the small town
featured teams related to protestant churches beyond Anglican. Many sides were
based on their geographical location, with road names and districts widely
represented while there were a small number of political groups (Conservatives,
Reformists, Liberal) with their own sides and the Temperance and trade union
movements also had teams. In the 1870s there were only a small number of
employee elevens (Appleby’s Millers, Greenwood’s Corn Millers, Darwen
Co-operative Employees, Belgrave Paper Mill), but this expanded greatly later
in the Nineteenth Century, while other sides chose patriotic names - Wellington
Heroes, British Fleet and Young Nelson - reflecting the popular figures of that
era. Considering the number of players who were pub and beer house managers, it
is surprising that the only obvious teams which represented public houses were
the Rising Suns of Blackburn and Darwen. The research also shows a substantial
number of Blackburn players were freemasons and at least one of the teams,
Griffin Perseverance, related to the masonic lodge of the same name in that
district of the town. This may though just reflect the fact that most Blackburn
teams at that point were full of players whose professions – accountants,
managers, publicans, administrators, small businessmen – were most likely to
become masons, rather than there being a broader connection between teams,
players and the area’s lodges.
The archival research of Steve Tate highlights how the
game’s rapidly expanding popularity in the late 1870s is also evidenced by local
newspaper football reports and adverts for shops selling ‘uniforms’, footballs
and goal posts in Blackburn and Bolton. Although the Blackburn Standard
and Times, Darwen News and Bolton Evening News began to
carry brief match reports from the middle of the decade, it would be a few
years before these became anything like comprehensive or more detailed than
just a couple of lines. Darwen newspaper proprietor JJ (Joseph John) Riley saw
an opportunity offered by the increasing demand for sport reports and in
response launched, edited and wrote the text of the East Lancashire Cricket
and Football Times, in which he described the game’s expanding popularity
in the region as a kind of ‘football madness’. His publication carried detailed,
lengthy match reports, player and team profiles all written in a deliberately
provocative style, and it had a letters page which reflected how his articles
sometimes hit a nerve with players, officials and supporters. For instance, in
the April 23rd, 1879 edition, Riley claimed that: ‘The Turton
gentlemen may write and say what they please about not paying other players to
strengthen their team, but we have all but absolute proof that this has been
the case, and, under the circumstances, ought to be put down’. In the same
issue John Lewis, then honorary treasurer of Blackburn Rovers, had a letter
published refuting the ‘very nasty slur’ that the Scottish player Hugh McIntyre
had been brought south and employed by the club as a professional (which we now
know was the case). Although only seven issues of the East Lancashire
Cricket and Football Times remain (of what appears to have been a run of
just 13 during 1878/79), these provide a valuable insight into the early
football scene. By the end of the 1870s the other local newspapers had
caught-up with reader demand for football news and they began to publish these
in much greater detail which might explain the rapid decline of JJ Riley’s
publication – although Bolton sports paper The Field successfully
launched and ran just a few years later.
The Turton player, journalist and FA official JJ (John
James) Bentley later admitted that many Lancashire clubs had paid players in
the 1870s, claiming that cash was left in players’ shoes for their return to
the dressing room after the match. Even a decade later, after professionalism
had become permitted, the subject remained a difficult one. In The Clarion
newspaper of October 8th, 1892, Blackburn Rovers player Johnnie
Forbes repeatedly refused to answer questions about professionalism, despite
being pressed to do so several times to the point of mockery by the journalist.
The issue of clubs paying players became extremely contentious in Lancashire,
accusations and counterclaims were repeatedly made by teams against each other,
regulations which restricted the fielding of non-local players introduced in an
attempt to prevent it. In 1884, the Great Lever and Burnley sides were disqualified
from the FA Cup for playing professionals. A short-lived breakaway group of
clubs (ironically without Rovers and Darwen), calling itself the British
Association, formed in protest, which forced the FA to rethink its approach. A
series of meetings between club representatives and FA officials attempted to
find an agreement, Dr ES Morley of Blackburn Rovers at the forefront of these
discussions, a resolution to the issue achieved in 1885, which allowed
professional players in the FA Cup competition.
Sir Lees Knowles, writing in the early Twentieth Century,
claimed that the idea of forming a Lancashire Football Association was first
generated in discussions at the Turton Tower Smoke Room. However, the only
written account by a participant – that of WT Dixon - highlights how, in Autumn
1878 Thomas Hindle, secretary of Darwen Football Club, met with Dixon and
Blackburn Rovers’ John Lewis at the Volunteer Inn near Turton, to discuss the
viability of a Lancashire FA. Newspaper reports from the time claimed that it
was Hindle and other members of Darwen FC who instigated the meeting to discuss
the possibility, sending out a circular to other local clubs. This coverage
also confirms that the organisation formed at a meeting in Darwen’s
Co-operative Hall on Saturday 28th of September 1878 and, of the 29
clubs initially represented, 24 were from the Blackburn-Darwen-Bolton area, which
indicates how strong the game was in the area as compared to the rest of the
county – players in Preston and Burnley then still largely focused on rugby. At
the initial meeting Hindle was appointed secretary and Dixon the treasurer,
probably in recognition of their part in its formation. The reasoning behind
organising the association was to provide a more settled season of fixtures, as
an alternative to a hotchpotch of individually arranged friendlies, in the
period before the formation of a league. It was believed that a Lancashire Cup
competition would give some structure to the season, club subscriptions paying
for a trophy and a proportion of gate receipts going back into the Lancs FA
coffers.
By the much-expanded 1880/81 FA Cup, Darwen and Eagley were
joined by Turton and Astley Bridge from Bolton and Blackburn’s Rovers and
Olympic, Darwen again reaching the Quarter Final. In the following season’s
competition Rovers were the defeated finalists, beaten 1-0 by the Old Etonians
in a match played at the Oval in front of a crowd which contained a few
supporters from Blackburn. However, it was the 1882/83 FA Cup which saw the
first real breakthrough for a triangle team when Olympic won the trophy and
were received as conquering heroes by a huge crowd on their return to
Lancashire. Some consider this win by Olympic, beating the Old Etonians in the
final, to be the turning point in the sport’s move from its initial public-school
amateurism, largely dominated by teams from southern England to the more
pragmatic but increasingly sophisticated style of northern teams, containing
what were thinly veiled professionals funded by industrial wealth. That the FA
Cup stayed in Blackburn for six of the ten years between 1881 and 1891 was
certainly an indicator of this huge shift in power which was also reflected in
the structure of the initial Football League. When Aston Villa’s William
McGregor chose which clubs to invite to form the twelve founders in 1888, this
cup success was surely at the top of his mind when half were from Lancashire.
Another, perhaps less obvious result of the rapid
development of Association football across the triangle, was the corresponding
influence of officials from the area at a national and international level over
the next thirty years. John Lewis became vice president of both the FA and the
Football League while also working as one of the world’s most respected
referees, officiating at the Olympics. JJ Bentley of Turton, Bolton Wanderers
and then Manchester United became president of the Football League, a member of
the FA Council and was on the selection committee which then chose the England
team. Dr Morley of Blackburn Rovers was vice president of the Lancashire FA and
then, as a national FA committee member, guided the transition towards the open
admittance of professionals in 1885. However, the least known administrator,
Daniel Burley Woolfall, was probably its most influential. Initially
representing Blackburn Rovers at the LFA, he became its president before
joining the FA board, as honorary treasurer, where he used his financial
experience to turn the coffers of the organisation around. In 1906 he became FIFA
president in a period when England’s participation in international matches was
limited, negotiating the acceptance of four individual countries (England,
Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) rather than one single UK membership –
thus ensuring four FIFA member votes for the home countries. Woolfall instigated
the acceptance of FA rules as those to be used in all international matches and
he introduced football to the 1908 London Olympics, effectively the first
international tournament. Although unsubstantiated, it has also been suggested
that the World Cup was Woolfall’s idea, later picked-up by Jules Rimet, with
the first competition in 1930. Woolfall continued as FIFA president until his
early death in 1917, at the age of just 66.
Within just a few years of the introduction of the London Association
game at Turton, a huge and rapid expansion in the numbers of football teams and
players from within the Bolton-Darwen-Blackburn area began a period of remarkable
football domination. In part, as Swain has shown, this was due to a
long-standing tradition of playing football, often for money, which seeded the
normalisation of a professional sporting culture in the county. The wealth
brought by the textile trade to Lancashire helped to facilitate the initial
organisation of clubs by wealthy sons returning from Eton and the new lower
middle-class which made the clubs a success. Part of the new social strata, teachers
who believed in a muscular Christianity, diffused the game amongst local
communities, which assisted its rapid expansion. The importation of players and
thus new styles of football from Scotland and Sheffield were the final key to
the success of teams through the following decade in the FA Cup. Administrators
from the area were then central to the modernisation of the game, bringing
professionalism into the sport and fostering an international outlook, which
would ultimately lead to the formation of the World Cup. Perhaps these
developments may still have taken place without Dixon and Kay forming Turton FC,
and the club’s subsequent insistence on playing purely by Association rules,
but the small village team were right at the centre of a remarkable era in
early football history which shaped the game’s future over the coming decades.
[1]
See Legacies of British Slavery website (www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs)
John Hornby – father of William Henry Hornby and grandfather of AN Hornby.
[2]
Note use of the term: ‘London Association rules’, as opposed to just
‘Association rules’. This is because there were other forms of ‘Association’
played in that era. It wasn’t until 1878, when the Sheffield Association rules
were amalgamated with London Association, that a truly unified Association game
existed.
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