My Football Programme Obsession

As I write, we are three months into the lockdown imposed as a result of the Coronavirus outbreak. It seems to have slipped into our everyday lives and although Premier League football is coming back next week, a return to what we previously thought as ‘normal’ seems a LONG way off.

Different people have taken different things from this enforced period of inactivity. I manage a local Village Hall and after we were forced to close, I realised that this was a fantastic opportunity to sort out my programme collection. Using the hall meant I could spread things out and, more importantly, leave it all out overnight. My amazing (and incredibly understanding) wife tolerates my programme collection but has drawn the line at my suggestion that we wallpaper the walls with a collage of old Brighton programmes.

So how did this all start?

Like most young kids growing up in the 1960s, collecting things was an important part of my childhood. Most of my mates at School had their bags stuffed with all manor of random stuff, all lovingly collected. I dabbled with all sorts of things. Stamps came and went, as did bus tickets and the various collector cards that came with a little stick of bubblegum. Nowadays of course, these things would be worth a few quid but at the time, as I moved onto the next big thing, I just threw them out.

As the 60s drew on, football had become my all-consuming passion and it was natural that my collecting focus would have something to do with the beautiful game. I became fascinated by the different styles, sizes and designs of football programmes. In the 1950s and 60s, as post-war austerity gave way to a more plentiful supply of raw materials, the programme grew from something little more than a teamsheet, into a more substantial offering.

They were a million miles away from the 100-page monsters we see today, but for a young boy obsessed with football, the programmes I collected provided a window to a world that was largely inaccessible. This was 30 years before the internet became available to the masses and bar the odd glance at my parents’ newspaper, I had little contact with the football world.

My Dad passed away last year after a long battle with the effects of Dementia. One of my fondest memories of him (I have quite a few so there is a lot of competition) is my very first ‘live’ game of proper football. Dad was a PE Lecturer at a teacher training college so sport was a huge part of our lives. I spent every Saturday on the playing fields, watching the Bognor College of Education football team doing battle in the West Sussex League Premier Division.

My First game

My Godfather’s brother played for Torquay United and on August 28th 1968, they were playing Brighton and Hove Albion at The Goldstone Ground in Hove. My Dad and Godfather took me to the game for my 9th birthday, which had been the day before. The programme from that match is one of my most treasured possessions and the game also marked the start of my lifelong love affair with the Seagulls, a relationship that was to shape my collecting habits in the years to come.

The proliferation of football magazines in the late 1960s provided much of the information about the wider football world that I craved. Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly, Shoot!, Scorcher & Score, Goal! and many others, were an absolute goldmine for me, desperate for information on the game that I loved. These magazines also helped me fuel my growing passion for programmes. I couldn’t get enough of these small pamphlets of joy, snapshots of life at a football club. The classified pages in the magazines devoted huge amounts of space to the hobby.

I have a copy of Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly that has no less that 26 separate adverts for programmes, as well as a double-page list of collectors wanting to swap their doubles.

“Can offer a large selection of Rochdale homes. Will swap for Man Utd aways or similar”

This reads like a grossly unfair trade but to the collector, this is the bread and butter of the hobby. There would be someone, somewhere, sitting on a pile of Rochdale programmes. The classified adverts provided a means by which the lad could trade his products of the Spotland programme shop for similar offerings from Old Trafford.

After poring over these offers, I made many trips to the Post Office in Bognor Regis High Street, to buy that essential item of currency, the Postal Order.

Four shillings, or 20p in today’s money. Enough to buy a decent bundle

The Postal Order was the staple currency for the collector and along with the required stamped addressed envelope, this was the gateway to the hobby.

I started by buying lots of ‘bargain bundles’ and soon assembled a decent collection of programmes from Arsenal to York City. I quickly realised that some sort of specialisation was needed. It’s impossible to collect EVERY programme from EVERY club and apart from that, my pocket money would only stretch so far.

My first task was to collect at least one programme from every club in the football league. The bargain bundles helped but my task was only finished after lots of correspondence with clubs like Barrow and Southport.

Into the 1970s and I started going to watch Brighton more regularly, travelling on the train from Bognor to Brighton (change at Barnham. Did I mention I also had a brief dalliance with trainspotting?). In 1972/73 we had a season in the (old) second division and a glamour FA Cup tie against Chelsea, but order was soon restored and Albion reverted to their role as ‘perennial third division also-rans’.

That wasn’t the only reason for my trips. In the north-west corner of the ground, nestling between the clanking turnstiles and the rancid stench of the hotdog stand, was the Albion Programme Hut. Like everything else at the Goldstone, the hut was a bit ramshackle but it was my Aladdin’s Cave, full of programmes from places like Blackpool, Carlisle and Rochdale. I was thirteen years old and this place was fantastic. I was desperate to get my hands on as many as possible, but always with the need to enhance my collection. Brighton programmes dominated the shelves and sensibly (but almost by accident) Albion became the dominant club in my collection.

The period from 1975 to 1980 was a golden era, both for Albion and me. Two promotions, Peter Ward and the arrival of first division football for the first time in our history, provided the backdrop. For the first time I could add Manchester United and Liverpool programmes to my collection.

Wardy dances through the Blackpool defence in April 1978

The late 70s also brought me out of School and into full-time employment. This, in theory, gave me more money to spend on programmes. I was conflicted by the need to lavish equal amounts of money on beer, vinyl records and my bumbling attempts at chatting up girls.

Trips to the Goldstone increasingly involved more time in the Pub and less in the programme hut. I progressed to just buying programmes from games I attended. For Brighton, this was home and away and I developed a habit I stick to today. I always bought two programmes – one to read, one to keep (in a plastic sleeve, protected from bending by a piece of cardboard, obviously).

In a miraculous development in the Autumn of 1977, I managed to persuade a young lady to go out with me. The added bonus was that she was an Arsenal season-ticket holder and for a while, Arsenal homes alternated with Albion games. I’ve always harboured an irrational dislike of Arsenal. This was nothing to do with the subsequent collapse of my teenage infatuation but when we did split up, I wasn’t too upset. Maybe it was because our first game in the first division was a 4-0 home hammering by The Gunners.

As the 1970s drew to a close, I was beginning to play a lot more sport. I had played Sunday football for a few years but when Saturday football came calling, I gave up my weekly treks across the country. My time with Bracklesham FC in the West Sussex League enabled me to hone my drinking skills, as we travelled to far-flung villages in Sussex to play on pitches better suited to ploughing competitions. I realised that playing football was more important than watching. A friend of my Dad once said to me “You’ll have years to watch from the terraces after you stop playing, make the most of your fitness while you can”. Wise words.

I still made occasional trips to The Goldstone, mainly for midweek games but that changed when my employers Midland Bank, kindly moved me to Jersey in 1983. Most of my possessions went into storage (my parent’s loft) including my programmes.

Programme collecting was rooted in my DNA but it was to be a few years before I was able to revisit my collecting habit.

If you’ve managed to stick with this until now, thank you. I’m going to come back to the next stage of my collecting journey at a later date.