A new daily series of articles for subscribers started last week covering the 1980s. This is a seasonal journey through a truly important decade in the history of Manchester City Football Club. Today’s article is a 2,500 word feature on the 1983-84 season. Enjoy!
Subscribe to get access – Monthly
Read more of this content when you subscribe today. It costs £3 per month (cancel anytime) to access everything posted since 1 October 2022 or there’s a special annual rate below which gives greater access and works out much cheaper.
Read more of this content when you subscribe today. It costs £3 per month (above) or £20 a year (here) to access everything posted since the site was created in December 2020. This special rate works out about £1.67 a week and gives access to everything posted, including PDFs of 3 of my books.
On this day (20 November) in 1880 as Newton Heath L&Y Railway Manchester United played their earliest known game. It was against Bolton Wanderers 2nd team and United lost 6-0. In the years that have followed some have claimed they wore green and gold at this game but the contemporary references given do not say anything of the sort.
It is still repeated often that a newspaper report in the Bolton Evening News mentioned the colours of green and gold were worn for Newton Heath’s first reported match. The origin of this is unclear but the Manchester United Pictorial History and Club Record (Charles Zahra, Joseph Muscat, Iain McCartney and Keith Mellor; Nottingham: Temple Press, 1986) specifically refers to the match report on page 11 as being published on 24 November 1880 and implies it stated the team colours. It also suggests that Bolton wore scarlet shirts.
My research over the decades has included a review of every Bolton newspaper for that period and I did discover a match report in the Bolton Evening News on the date mentioned in the above book but this did not include any reference to the colours worn. This is actually the report that gets quoted. You can see there’s no mention of colours:
Like so many football clubs the early history of Newton Heath has lots of myths associated with it. The facts are that at the railway works in Newton Heath various sporting activities were established during the 1870s. In 1922 Herbert Dale, a railway worker who played football for a decade from the formation of what became Newton Heath, was asked how football became established at the works. He explained that the club when initially formed had been a cricket team (suggesting it was established in 1878), and that after some time a member of the committee bought a football from a shop on Market Street in the city centre. This appears to be in 1880 and, according to Dale, the instigator of the club was Sam Black and that the original colours were red and white quartered shirts (NOT green and gold; quartered shirts meant 2 panels on front and 2 on back with a red and a white panel on both the front and the back). Those colours may surprise some but I do provide references and explain more in a book The Emergence of Footballing Cultures: Manchester 1840-1919 published by Manchester University Press. In that I talk about all the early clubs of the Manchester area such as Hulme Athenaeum, Manchester Association and Hurst.
Black was seventeen when the club played its earliest known game on 20 November 1880 and his age then seems consistent with others, such as those at St Mark’s (Manchester City) who are known to have played in November 1880.
The was a Sportsman’s Yearbook for 1880 produced which the Newton Heath club was mentioned in. It appeared in both the cricket and football sections. Here are the details published in the cricket section:
Sportsman’s year book 1880 Newton Heath cricket section
You’ll notice mention there of the cricket whites/kit to be worn: white with a blue cord. Typically, this is believed to mean ‘white cricket shirts and trousers’ with a blue cord as belt (to differentiate between opponents). Some cricket clubs wore different coloured belts/cords; some wore specific caps with their whites and some wore badges (or even different colours).
In that same yearbook the following appeared in the football section (back then a football section had rugby and association football clubs alongside each other):
Sportsman’s year book 1880 Newton Heath football section
You’ll notice the details are simply a repeat of the cricket section and it may well be that the club had decided to be listed in both sections without thinking specifically about football, or it could even be that it was a mistake to publish in both sections. For me it does seem that having the club’s details in both sections was deliberate, afterall it says the club is all year around and not specific to the cricket or football/rugby season. But I don’t believe the colours can be trusted for the association football team, especially as Dale talks of red and white being the club’s earliest football colours. Whatever is true it is important to recognise that to date no contemporary evidence has been found saying the club wore green and gold when they played their earliest games. They did wear those colours at times later on though.
Newton Heath reformed as Manchester United in 1902, winning the club’s first major trophy in 1908 (the League).
Incidentally Bolton Wanderers’ first team beat Irwell Spring (Bacup) 7-1 in the Lancashire Cup on the same day as the earliest known game for the Heathens. A good day all round for the Wanderers it seems.
For those wondering the earliest known MCFC game took place one week earlier (St Mark’s v Macclesfield Baptists).
A new daily series of articles for subscribers started a few days ago covering the 1980s. This is a seasonal journey through a truly important decade in the history of Manchester City Football Club. Today’s article is a 3,500 word feature on the 1982-83 season. Enjoy (well, if you know the outcome of this season you can enjoy this memory refresh while reflecting on the modern day successes of the Blues!).
Subscribe to get access – Monthly
Read more of this content when you subscribe today. It costs £3 per month (cancel anytime) to access everything posted since 1 October 2022 or there’s a special annual rate below which gives greater access and works out much cheaper.
Read more of this content when you subscribe today. It costs £3 per month (above) or £20 a year (here) to access everything posted since the site was created in December 2020. This special rate works out about £1.67 a week and gives access to everything posted, including PDFs of 3 of my books.
A new daily series of articles for subscribers started yesterday covering the 1980s. This is a seasonal journey through a truly important decade in the history of Manchester City Football Club. Today’s article is a 2,500 word feature on the 1981-82 season. Enjoy!
Subscribe to get access – Monthly
Read more of this content when you subscribe today. It costs £3 per month (cancel anytime) to access everything posted since 1 October 2022 or there’s a special annual rate below which gives greater access and works out much cheaper.
Read more of this content when you subscribe today. It costs £3 per month (above) or £20 a year (here) to access everything posted since the site was created in December 2020. This special rate works out about £1.67 a week and gives access to everything posted, including PDFs of 3 of my books.
A new daily series of articles for subscribers starts today covering the 1980s. This will be a seasonal journey through a truly important decade in the history of Manchester City Football Club. Today’s article is a ten thousand word long read on the 1980-81 season. Enjoy!
Subscribe to get access – Monthly
Read more of this content when you subscribe today. It costs £3 per month (cancel anytime) to access everything posted since 1 October 2022 or there’s a special annual rate below which gives greater access and works out much cheaper.
Read more of this content when you subscribe today. It costs £3 per month (above) or £20 a year (here) to access everything posted since the site was created in December 2020. This special rate works out about £1.67 a week and gives access to everything posted, including PDFs of 3 of my books.
A new series of articles for subscribers starts covering the 1980s. This will be a seasonal journey through a truly important decade in the history of Manchester City Football Club. There will be a different season each day. Re-live the highs and lows of that decade.
If you’d like to read this series then please subscribe. Details below:
Late in 1993 Jimmy Wagg interviewed me on GMR about my new book on Joe Mercer. Next month it’ll be 30 years (I know!) since that book came out and so I thought I’d post the recording of the interview with Jimmy from that year. The quality is not great (neither are my answers at times!) but you can now hear the recording on my website.
If you want to hear why I did the book and the answers I gave back then have a listen now. Here goes (again apologies for the quality of the recording):
While you’re here why not have a look at all the other articles, interviews, videos and material on this site. Subscribers get access to everything and this includes PDFs of the entire Manchester A Football History book; From Maine Men To Banana Citizens (my first book) and Farewell To Maine Road. There are also audio recordings of my interviews with John Bond, Malcolm Allison, George Graham etc. It costs £3 per month or £20 per year. Details of how to subscribe below:
If you enjoy all the free material on my website and would like to support my research and keep this website going (but don’t want to subscribe) then why not make a one-time donation (or buy me a coffee). All support for my research is valued and welcome. It allows me to keep some free material available for all. Thanks.
The deadline for the last ever King of the Kippax fanzine has passed and I missed it. I meant to get something sent to Dave and Sue Wallace but circumstances meant I couldn’t and I really regret that. So instead I’m posting here a piece I wrote ten years ago in 2013 when there were a series of footballing anniversaries. It’s not quite what I intended but I hope it says enough of how I feel about fanzines and the role of King of the Kippax over the decades.
It’s a season of footballing anniversaries this year (2013). The FA celebrates 150 years, the Football League 125 and King of the Kippax an amazing 25 years. Of these three anniversaries KK is inevitably getting the least focus but in many ways its significance to football, or at least our team, has been greater during its first 25 years than the FA’s first 25.
The FA did little to support football in Manchester for decades and it wasn’t until Manchester’s clubs started to take the FA Cup seriously that the organisation began to matter. But even then the FA did its upmost to prevent our professional clubs from challenging properly. In 1904 when City became Manchester’s first FA Cup winners how did the FA react? They decided we must be doing something illegal and sent auditors to the club to determine if we had ‘bought’ success. Okay, so they found a few irregularities with a transfer from Glossop, but for the following year or so they relentlessly pursued our club (and to be fair did something similar with Newton Heath, who became United, and with Glossop). Ultimately, we received a devastating punishment and the club could have died. I won’t go on about how unjust all of this was – City were no worse than most sides the difference being that the FA was determined to catch us out! – but if you do want to read an account of it dig out my latest book “Manchester The City Years”.
Despite all of this the FA Cup actually gave City our first success and we should ensure we celebrate 23 April 1904 (the date of the final) every year – make St George’s Day City’s day!
The Football League was more supportive of City during those early years, but prior to 1892 the League had no involvement from either Manchester side despite the League holding its first meeting in Manchester. Our celebrations of the League should really come in 4 years’ time when it’ll be 125 years since City (as Ardwick) joined the League. Although it’s worth pointing out that Ardwick and Manchester City were two separate organisations – and stressed as such at the time – and even existed alongside each other for a short while (personally though, I see MCFC as a continuation of Ardwick in spirit if not in legal terms). From 1892 to 2002 (when City last competed in the Football League) the Football League was central to City’s life. The competition became City’s lifeblood as far as competition was concerned.
What about KK? Well, unlike the other two KK was significant to City and City fans from the start. It was born in an era when fans had much to say but little opportunity to be heard. Alongside the other fanzines born in the late 1980s KK gave us a voice and a shared understanding of what the issues at City and in football were. Before the fanzines our only real outlet was the Piccadilly Radio phone-in on Saturdays which came in to its own during the time James H Reeve was at the helm. We had no forums, blogs, tweets etc. We didn’t have phone-in shows on national radio or fan columns in newspapers. We didn’t have interaction with the club, other than via supporters clubs meetings which some fans saw as being too weak to challenge the club on key issues (I won’t get into all of that here, but it’s worth noting that some fans did feel the Supporters Club was too close to Peter Swales and, as he was often the cause of fan concerns, that caused some issues).
We did also have the Pink postbag in the Saturday sports paper, sadly no longer with us. Unfortunately, journalists on the paper in the late 80s would contact the club to get their views before publishing a controversial or critical letter (this happened with one from me in 1987 which presented evidence about an issue that mattered to fans but was ultimately swept under the carpet). Censorship and club propaganda was an issue at a time when the game was dying and fans were being treated appallingly.
King of the Kippax helped to give us a voice and helped highlight the issues. Staff at City would be sent out to buy the fanzine in its early days, while others would do all they could to limit the fanzine’s opportunity to question what was going on – proving the significance of the fanzine. I don’t want to get too giddy about what KK and the other fanzines achieved but it is important that we all understand what has been achieved. It’s a bit like the electoral system – people fought hard to get the vote in the face of adversity but today we take it all for granted. We think it’s always been like this. Now with social media it would be easy to forget what KK and the other fanzines have achieved. Many fanzines have stopped being produced, which makes it all the more important to celebrate KK’s 25th anniversary and to congratulate Dave, Sue and all the contributors over the years for what they’ve achieved. I still read KK from cover to cover and find all the regular contributors interesting. I don’t always agree with everything I read but, I guess, that’s always been the point. KK has promoted debate and encouraged fans to think about issues, and that’s how it should be.
I hope King Of The Kippax continues to provide a powerful outlet for fans for years to come. It’s important that we remember that before the fanzines we didn’t have a voice. Thanks Dave & Sue, and the others, for all you’ve done and continue to do for us.
Today (14 November) is the anniversary of the first appearance for Manchester City’s first team of Alan Oakes. Oakes is City’s record appearance holder and that all important first competitive appearance came in a 1-1 draw with Chelsea back in 1959.
The City scorer was Jack Dyson who had been out of action for two years with a broken leg and related complications. These two brief match reports suggest that Oakes had a good game.
Were you at this match? If so why not leave your memories below as comments. Thanks.
A new series of articles for subscribers starts covering the 1980s. This will be a seasonal journey through a truly important decade in the history of Manchester City Football Club. There will be a different season each day. Re-live the highs and lows of that decade.
If you’d like to read this series then please subscribe. Details below:
Gary James' Football Archive 