The Birth of Football and the Origins of Manchester City
Part Four: The Saturday Afternoon Game
In December 1844 an advert appeared in the Manchester Guardian:
'Wanted a field for football, in the neighbourhood of London Road or Oxford Road.'
In between those two roads lay the Manchester Athenaeum, a society created in 1836 by members of the city's liberal elite for “the advancement and diffusion of knowledge”, and the probable author of the advert. Its imposing headquarters on Princess Street—now the home of the Manchester Art Gallery—boasted one of the city's largest gymnasiums. Built in the 1830s as part of an effort to combat disease, it was home to a Gymnastic Club whose all-male membership was predominately drawn from the lower middle classes. The club initially focused on sports such as running, throwing and boxing, but by 1849 the first records of its football games appear in newspapers.
It's unclear whether they played matches against other sides during the 1850s, and little is known about the rules they followed, except that they were likely drawn from the many public school codes. But it marks the beginnings of a new form of sport: Saturday afternoon football played under the guidance of social reformers.
The men running the Athenaeum had been instrumental in efforts to improve working conditions in Manchester, which in 1844 culminated in the unveiling of bold plans to create four giant parks in the city. More followed, and it was at these parks that the seeds of Manchester football were sown.
In 1860 a trial game at Oakwood Park in Pendlebury resulted in the creation of the city's first separately constituted football club, Manchester FC. Its players came from the country's elite schools, and were captained by Richard Sykes, a former football captain of Rugby School and a member of Stockport's wealthiest family. His grandfather, William, had introduced cotton bleaching to Edgeley in 1792, and the 21-year-old Richard would later prove he was cut from similar cloth. In the 1880s he bought 45,000 acres of farmland in North Dakota and founded five towns there, naming one after his birthplace of Edgeley and another, somewhat modestly, Sykeston.
In 1861 another group of elite young men created the Sale Football Club. Both clubs had ties to local regiments, which had been playing football since the 18th century. The Oakwood Park game was organised by two military officers, one from the 84th regiment in Ashton-under-Lyne, while Sale played some of its games at the grounds of the 40th Lancashire Volunteer Rifles at Barton Moss, where the 3rd Manchester Volunteer Regiment also played.
Working men were also playing organised games of football at this time, although these were not deemed worthy of newspaper coverage. Working-class football was still largely associated with disorder, and punishable with a fine of five shillings or more. It was also associated with labour unrest. In October 1853 the Manchester Times, reporting on a meeting of around 2,000 striking mill workers on Preston Marsh, noted that “several hundreds were engaged, both before and after the meeting, in playing at football”.
It’s unclear how widespread the working-class game was, though it was certainly popular enough to profit from. In January 1844 the Manchester Guardian reported that two men had been charged with ‘stealing several foot-ball cases from the shop door of Mr. John Clegg, shoemaker, in Deansgate’, while a decade later two boys received 14 days hard labour after stealing 11 footballs from a shoemaker's shop in Heywood and selling them on for 2d each (a fifth of their value).
By this time a reduced working week, from six days to five plus a half-day Saturday, had become the norm in Manchester (the shorter working week was introduced after research carried out in the mid-19th century revealed that reducing working hours usually resulted in a net gain in productivity, meaning that the punishingly-long working hours endured by millions of people over the previous decades had been of no benefit to anyone). This extra leisure time led to another type of football, one played on grounds attached to Manchester public houses. One such ground, near the Bow Garrets public house in Edgeley (on what is now the playing field behind the Lark Hill Nursery School) featured an early form of terracing, called “bongs” According to the National Magazine's ‘Sketch of Stockport’ from 1860:
“'Bongs' they are called, and will be, in all probability, as long as they endure for the boys and young men to assemble on in the evenings, for cricket and football. They are simply masses of irregular rocks; or more correctly, one, intersected by cuttings, rude steps, and paths, and covered with course herbage.”
The type of football played beside public houses during this period remains shrouded in mystery. Adrian Harvey's Football: The First Hundred Years has uncovered some evidence of games with codified rules, marked out playing areas and goals. He also found what may be the earliest example of match-fixing in football, in Warwickshire in May 1843, when hotly-fancied Grandborough were beaten by 100-1 no-hopers Flecknoe amid heavy betting.
By the early 1860s public house sport had undoubtedly become a popular form of entertainment. In 1863 a 20,000 capacity sports enclosure was built beside the Royal Oak Hotel, Miles Platting. Costing £2,000 the grounds included a 651yd circular track, a 750 yard rabbit course and a grandstand. Competitions offered cash prizes, bets were taken on results and alcohol drunk in large measures.
For Manchester’s social reformers, the growth of public house sport—particularly football—was viewed as a growing problem. So in September 1864 a more genteel sporting alternative, the Manchester Athletic Festival, was created at Old Trafford. A predominately middle-class crowd of between 4,000 and 5,000 paid two shillings each to watch five hours of track and field events, taking refreshments whilst listening to military bands. The only prizes were gold, silver and bronze medals (an idea copied for the inaugural Liverpool Athletics Festival earlier that year) with proceeds going towards the creation of free gymnasiums. Organised by the Manchester Athenaeum with the help of other gymnastics clubs, it was the beginnings of the Olympic movement, and the ideal of amateurism as a route to moral and mental improvement.
At the prize-giving ceremony at the Athenaeum, Manchester's mayor, John Marsland Bennett, made the first public proclamation of football being a desirable sport for the working men of the city.
“At our great public schools boys are compelled (willingly or unwillingly) to take part in cricket, football, and other manly exercises. Why then, should not that vigour which the upper classes gain by manly sports at our public schools and universities, be shared in by young men in our warehouses and manufactories?”
A new era of working-class football was about to get underway in Manchester. Firmly under the guidance of the city’s moral guardians, it would result in the creation of a church football team called St Mark’s.
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Part Four