Victorian Football Ephemera

The following article was printed in the Cray Wanderers matchday programme for the game against Maldon & Tiptree on Tuesday 2 September 2014 in a Ryman Isthmian League Division One North match. After Cray had been relegated from the Ryman Isthmian League Premier Division at the end of the previous season, the league officials decided in their infinite wisdom to place the Wands in the northern section of the competition. That meant enduring long distances to play the likes of AFC Sudbury, Wroxham, Needham Market and Dereham Town. They had to put up with two seasons of extensive travelling to away games before the Isthmian League relented and placed Cray into the much more user-friendly Division One South.

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Back in 1887, a toy shop owner in Bradford, Yorkshire, introduced football cards which depicted professional players of the day. John Baines owned a dolls' hospital in North Parade and he possessed a horse-pulling cart. By all accounts, Barnes also had a monkey that he perched on the horse's back. He used the horse and cart (and primate!) to deliver his football cards.

Unlike the more regular cigarette-card shape of later years, Baines designed his cards in the style of a shield. They showed not only drawings of players of the time but also teams in their appropriate kits. He also added an air of excitement, by producing special-issue versions of some of his cards, thus inducing football supporters to become avid collectors of his footballing memorabilia.

As soon as Baines had delivered new batches of his cards to his local outlets, usually confectioners and newsagents, swarms of youngsters would wait outside the shops, hoping to be the first to purchase the 'must have' cards for their growing collection. If they doubled-up, they would simply do swaps with their chums, similarly to how it was to be done with trading cards in schools up and down the country in the years and decades that followed.

It was not too surprising that the cards that Baines introduced became very popular. But that invoked competition from other aspiring entrepreneurs, most notably from a fellow Bradfordian called W. N. Sharpe, who muscled in on the virgin cards territory with a series of cards called 'Play Up'. Sharpe's alternative cards displayed substantially more players and teams.

Additionally, it wasn't too long before cards were appearing inside of cigarette packets, the collection of which soon became a keen pastime for grown-ups. Marcus & Company of Manchester produced the prototype set of cigarette cards showing the sport of football in 1896. If you can even find a set, or even a single card from the set, the Marcus company's 'Footballers and Club Colours' cards are not only very rare but extremely valuable too.

As well as football cards, whether they were sold inside or outside of cigarette packets, children's comics and periodicals introduced football graphics towards the end of the 19th century. Packed with illustrations of footballers and what we would nowadays term 'action shots (but drawn, rather than photographed), they went a long way towards increasing the popularity of a game that was already becoming 'the sport to follow'. These also became popular as not only collectables but also provided talking points in pubs and clubs, in very much the same way as Match of the Day may be scrutinised in local recreation ground changing rooms on a Sunday morning.