Starting today: A new series of features on Manchester City in the 1890s! Ever wondered how MCFC came into being and what happened to Ardwick AFC? Well, now’s your chance to find out. This series covers the final years of Ardwick and the birth of Manchester City. It starts with the second half of the 1889-90 season for Ardwick and includes a story of a floodlit game.
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A new series of features starts tomorrow. This series provides a season by season account of Ardwick AFC and Manchester City FC in the 1890s. Some are 2000+ word articles, others are a bit less, but each adds to the story of how the club evolved. So, if you’ve ever wondered how MCFC came into being and what happened to Ardwick AFC, here’s your chance to find out. This series covers the final years of Ardwick, the birth of Manchester City and Manchester’s first national title.
For well over a century football has been a crucial and popular aspect of Mancunian life. It’s been part of the city’s identity. So for today’s piece I’m taking a look at football’s early years. Here is a 1800 word overview of the major Manchester clubs that existed before today’s giants, followed by the origins of Newton Heath and St. Mark’s, who both played their earliest known games in November 1880.
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On this day (April 22) in 1899 Manchester City became the first side to gain automatic promotion when they won the Second Division title after a 4-1 victory over Blackpool. Goals from Meredith (2), Gillespie and Ross gave the Blues the win.
A series of test matches, similar to play offs, had been utilised in previous seasons. The Blues were also the first of the Manchester teams ever to earn promotion and the football season ended with Manchester City as comfortable champions of the Second Division. This meant they were the first Manchester team to win a national League competition too.
Near neighbours Glossop were also promoted that day. Here’s the final table:
Subscribers can read about the final game and other information from that season below:
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Read more of this content when you subscribe today. It costs £20 a year (here) to access everything since December 2020 or for £3 per month (below) you can access everything from 1 October 2020.
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On this day (17 April) in 1888 the first meeting of the Football League was held in Manchester. The following report names the clubs accepted and the others who wanted to join the League. It has often been written in Manchester United related books that Newton Heath applied to join the League in 1888 but didn’t receive enough votes to be accepted. That is completely untrue as no one actually had to apply nor was a vote taken. Clubs were asked and some tried to push to get included but Newton Heath were neither asked nor were they pushing for acceptance either. Nor were Ardwick or Manchester Asoociation who, to be frank would’ve been the most famous Manchester club at this time.
Bolton Wanderers were the only team from present day Greater Manchester to be asked/selected for the first League season.
Manchester Courier, 18 April 1888
The plaque is positioned on the corner of Mosley Street and Market Street/Piccadilly in Manchester.
I was recently interviewed for the Christie Scanlon podcast and the video has now been posted. I talk about origins of both City and United, City’s badge consultation, chants and much more. It lasts about one hour and you can watch it on Christie’s channel here:
I enjoyed doing this and Christie’s a good interviewer and host. It looks like Christie’s used an automated captioning software that has made a few typos with names etc. – that’ll be because of my accent – but listen and watch. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.
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).
Today (3 November) is the anniversary of the first ever Manchester derby played in the Football League. The match between Manchester City and Newton Heath was played at City’s Hyde Road ground today in 1894. You can read the story of the game (with all the stats, background etc.) here:
Recently I’ve been contacted by someone who had in their possession a couple of Manchester City match programmes from 123 years ago. These were from the first season the club did its own official match programme (there was an earlier joint effort between 2 rugby and 2 football clubs that was described as official from the 1890s – see below – but 1900-01 was the first for MCFC on their own). He sent me scans of them and one programme was produced for a match played on this day (29 September) in 1900. Here are some images and details from it.
This was a special game for City, though the programme was not produced because it was a special game. This was the fifth issue of the season and contained eight pages, like the others. The significance of the game however was that Arthur Balfour MP was a visitor that day. Balfour would become Prime Minister in 1902 and was still in that role when City won the FA Cup for the first time in 1904 (he wore a City rosette at the final!).
The back page talks about Balfour’s visit. Both the front and the back pages are quite difficult to read as they’ve faded. It is interesting that the club felt able to make light of Balfour’s lack of enthusiasm for ‘socker’ (yes, socker or soccer as we grew to call it, was an English word for association football before the Americans became recognised for their use of it). Balfour preferred golf (after the 1904 FA Cup final he called himself a football ‘ignoramous’. Bob Hulmes, who sent the programme scans to me, managed to transcribe the wording regarding Balfour:
Says Balfour: “What shall I do with the sphere?”
We have specially desired fine weather today as the Right Hon. Arthur James Balfour is due to make his first appearance on the Hyde Road Football enclosure this afternoon. Some little decoration will be made, for the most pleasing sight to the hon. gentleman will be a mighty crowd of enthusiastic well wishers. It is not often that we have a leader of the nation at such functions, and the occasion is historic as far as Manchester is concerned. No doubt our honoured guest wishes he had the opportunity to open a game of golf instead of socker but we are ready to excuse a “miskick” on this occasion. We are grateful for kind acceptance of our invitation. Mr Balfour and Lord Rosebery have patronised the Palace ground, now the former honours the Manchester City ground.
Surely the City Team will rise to the occasion and cause some of the rampant enthusiasm to be showered upon them by a dashing display.
It’s worth noting some of the advertisements. There’s one for Joseph Alexander’s coaches and carriages (the Alexander family business. Note: The Alexanders remained key members of City’s management/directorship/shareholding for most of the 120 years that followed!). There’s also the Wellington Hotel, Stockport Road, which was run by the ever popular City official Joshua Parlby, and the Matlock House Hydro – one of City director John Allison’s business.
The game was against Stoke and they are wearing their then home colours of ‘claret shirts and blue knickers’.
Bob also nudged me towards page 8 which included a wry comment about the previous Wednesday’s friendly at Newton Heath (United):
Did anyone try to count the spectators at the match with Newton Heath on Wednesday? If so, did they succeed in getting past double figures?
The official attendance was estimated by Newton Heath as 600 (I wonder if they had a mickey-take name along the lines of Emptyhad for United’s games at Bank Street?
Before the 1900-01 season there was an official match programme produced for both Newton Heath and Manchester City, alongside a couple of rugby clubs. It was first ‘mocked up’ in May 1898 but went into production for the 1898-1899 season. It continued into the 1900-01 season by which time City were producing their own official programme. Both programmes were in competition throughout that 1900-01 season.
From 9 May 1898 the first Manchester football programme was a mock up based on Everton Liverpool programme
Thanks to Bob Hulmes for allowing me to us images of his match programme. The programme belonged to Bob’s grandfather. He lived in Ardwick, near Hyde Road, and he followed City until his death in 1964. Bob found two programmes from 1900 lining a drawer when his grandfather died in 1964, which shows exactly how rare these images are. It’s a pure fluke in many ways that they survived and fortunately the family looked after them over the decades.
Today (17 May) in 1892 at the Queens Hotel in Sunderland the Football League accepted two aspiring Manchester clubs into its competitions. Newton Heath applied and were accepted into the First Division and Ardwick applied and were accepted into the new Second Division of the League. Ardwick did not apply to join the top flight and it is believed the two Manchester clubs had an agreement not to go up against each other as in other votes two clubs from the same city had occasionally taken votes from each other. Had they gone head to head it may well have been that either one or no Manchester club would have gained admittance to the League.
Gary James' Football Archive 