The North English Game -
The Rises and Falls
On this site the increasingly obvious, pivotal role Sheffield (population 1870: 260,000) played from 1857 and in the decade of 1860s and early 1870s in the development of round-ball football, both through its own Sheffield Rules and of the Association game, has already been explored and will continue to be so. And so has and will be the former's, if not quite collapse from within, then fall that caused it to spend the last half of the same 1870s and most of the 1880s in first at very least a major stutter and then only gradual recovery.
And now we turn our attention to the other area of England that would have a similar role, but a decade later and without the cliff, i.e. North-West Lancashire with in 1880 a population of 300,000, similar to what Sheffield's has been a decade earlier. The Lancashire Football Association would be formed in 1878, by clubs mainly from that specific corner of the county. But football there, outwith the folk-game and not yet the Association variant, had been around since at least 1865. That was when a quartet of mill-owner sons, aged eighteen to twenty-two, came together to create what might be called "Blackburn-Rules", said to be a mix of those from Harrow and the Eton Field Game.
And the arrival of Harrow's rules was to replicated in 1870 in Darwen with the formation there of its cricket and football club and also in 1871 at Turton, north-east of Bolton. There John Kay, sixteen years old and fresh from the school, literally teamed up with twenty-six year old Blackburn-born, local national teacher, William Dixon, to form a club that inevitably require working men from the village to give the numbers. And it seems to have been the first to have in 1874 turned to the Association game, although there is a hint of an encounter in November1873 to its rules, more or less, and between Blackburn Ramblers and Blackburn Brookhouse. Church by Accrington would do the same and that year too, as would Bolton Wanderers. Darwen would not do so until 1875 as also in Blackburn there were the foundations of Rovers and Witton. Eagley F.C., in a village just a short distance from Turton, also came into being at that time too.
In fact 1874 in the quadrilateral formed by Blackburn, Padiham, Bacup and Bolton no fewer than eighteen had been formed by 1876 and twenty-six clubs existed in 1879 with Bacup and Oswaldtwistle being the last. And as confirmation in 1878 at the foundation-meeting of the Lancashire Football Assocaiation in a pub at Bromley Cross ,just south of Turton, of the twenty-eight or twenty-nine clubs present twenty-four had come from the area.
So where does the much discussed Scottish influence in Lancashire's North-East fit in? The answer, to repeat more or less verbatim from a previous article of ours, is that, "whilst Bacup was formed by two Scottish brothers, the Rankines, said to have played for Vale of Leven but more likely to have done so for Renton, the story of its arrival had probably been got back-to-front.
In 1875 at the age of just twenty-one Darwen-boy William Kirkham, a textile colour-mixer to trade, seems to have taken himself north to Glasgow for work. It was also the year Partick F.C. had been formed, one of half-a-dozen or so clubs that had sprung up that year and Kirkham, with no known indication of previous involvement in Lancashire, joined. In fact in that summer he had been a founding member, was in the team and with Darwen/Partick already playing their initial cross-border fixture on 1st January 1876 was the obvious link.
It would be the first of seven such trips South with Partick only losing for the first time in 1880 by when at least two of its players has been recruited to the English club and one, Fergus Suter, to the English game more permanently. Both had made their moves in the winter of 1877, James Love first as he turned twenty-one himself and faced business bankruptcy at home, with Suter following on having lost his work in Glasgow as a stonemason and also about to reach the then age of maturity. The personal stories of both men have now been uncovered and told in detail. (See: Andy Mitchell's Scottish Sports History),. Their place in football is said to be that as two of three, with Archie Hunter of Aston Villa, of the first professionals in the Association form, although even that is in doubt. It appears that being paid to play was not an offence under Lancashire Rules until 1882 ad may not have been against London and Birmingham Rules ever.
And at this point it might have been expected that there would have been something or a flood or at least a strong flow of Scots player being attracted to the Lancashire game. In fact if anything the numbers dropped until starting to climb once more and counter-intuitively in 1882 as Preston started to recruit, its clubs being formed from 1880, and the Bolton area, with a flurry of clubs founded in 1878, followed suit just as the other teams in the quadrangle also stepped up their demand. In 1884 town Preston had fourteen Scots recruits on its clubs books, fifteen in Bolton and the Colne valley from Blackburn to Burnley, founded in 1882, had thirty-one.
So the question is why and there are perhaps tthree reasons. The first two were numbers and success. Between 1876 and 1884 club numbers had increased two-fold and a half. In 1876 there had been no North-West teams in the FA Cup, in 1877-8 only Darwen, it in 1878-9 reaching the quarter-final only to be beaten by the eventual winners, Old Etonians, away in a second replay. But by 1884-5 there were twenty-four and Blackburn Olympic had already taken the trophy. And then there was the proselytising of James Gledhill. In the Darwen team on January 1st 1879 he was, aged twenty-four, there as a centre-forward. And he was there again in 1880 as Darwen won the Lancashire Senior Cup with Suter at full-back. Born in 1854 in Manchester with an English father, a coach-builder, and a Scottish mother Gledhill had been brought up by Preston, was a Student Teacher, had gone to London to study medicine, there playing football, and in 1878 returned north, joining Darwen, where also newly-arrived Suter and Love were team-mates.
However, his next move took him to Glasgow to train as a Surgeon and there he turned out for Partick, after which on returning to Lancashire in 1883, now aged almost thirty and perhaps his playing days over, he is said to have begun to tour Lancashire lecturing on how he thought the game should be played. Given his time in Scotland in the first golden era of football North of the Border it is unlikely to have been any other way than ours."
How much Gledhill's work had effect is difficult to ascertain. No club cites him as its inspiration. Nor was a surge of formations (see table left) in or around Darwen when he was there as a player or when he returned in 1883 from graduating as a Surgeon on the Clyde. Nor even was there were surges of note in the wider North-East Lancashire area.
But there was between 1883-4 and 1884-5 a notable increase in the number in the county of Scots, so Scottish players, i.e. players with the Scottish game . In the former season the number was twenty seven and the latter seventy-four. The number had almost tripled indicating possibly that Gledhill's advice had been taken on board, not so much in Preston, where by 1880 and certainly 1882 Sudell had perhaps already been convinced but around Bolton and in the valleys of the Colne and mow the Calder; so in Clitheroe.
And all this has to be compared with the Sheffield of a decade earlier. Thanks to brilliant work done in the Yorkshire city we know, in comparison to the six North Lancastrian clubs in 1875 and forty-six in 1885, there were across The Pennines some twenty-two clubs in 1865 and fifty-four in 1875.
(Total Sheffield area clubs formed but without dissolutions deducted.)
However, here, whilst the similarities between the two similarly industrial areas seemed to continue, in fact there was divergence. Sheffield would in the 1870s produce just four players, who went on to feature at international level for England; first the two Clegg brothers and then Jack Hunter and Billy Mosforth. Yet in the 1880s from North-West Lanacashire in would come twenty-five (including two Scots, John Goodall and Weir)), admittedly from three times plus as many fixtures so adjustment required but nevertheless a significant multiple, in terms of men and, still more, caps.
Moreover, whilst the 1880s proved for Sheffield a decade of disaster, with only two of its clubs surviving and success, and only in the 1890s, first achieved in terms of national trophies with the importation of Scottish talents, in North Lancs, whilst some club- consolidation would occur, at least a half-a-dozen of the orginal clubs remain to this day and Scots-aided success continued to the Second War with Preston and beyond with Burnley.
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