Post by Deleted on Dec 31, 2011 20:32:24 GMT
As we await Jon’s revelation of the date of this report, it’s worth pondering over that long-ago Torquay of 30,000 souls and how fertile a place it was for football playing or spectating. There was a tourist trade at that time but it was generally for the well-heeled. The Lincombes and Warberries had been developed by the late 19th century but that must have been a very middle-class (or even upper-class) community. Working-class Torquay would have largely constituted Ellacombe (dating from around 1860) and various other areas around the town centre, Torre and - maybe - the older part of Chelston. St Marychurch and Babbacombe were relatively affluent – in a different way to the Lincombes and Warberries – and would also have had communities of quarry, marble and pottery workers.
Sufficient scope you’d have thought for various sports clubs organised, as was the way of the times, along class lines. Indeed, in earlier posts, we’ve touched on how football (of whichever code) was played by lads from the posh schools. We don’t seem to know as much about football the “wrong side of the tracks”, surely the most likely ground of all for the development of the game.
Pontificating about this elsewhere recently, I argued that for a football club to grow on commercial lines – and to fully capture the imagination of a community - it probably needed a sufficient number of working-class people to be living within easy reach of the ground at a given time in history. Maybe Torquay didn’t quite score highly enough on this formula, although you’d suspect that Plainmoor was a good a location as any in this respect. You may also contend that professional football arrived slightly later in Torquay than might have been expected. Exeter City, after all, joined the Southern League as early as 1908. In many respects this meant we missed out on winning the hearts and minds of the pre-Great War generation at the time of football’s massive popularity boom during Edwardian times. Only today I saw a quote from Association Football and the Men Who Made It (1906) that described the game as “a pervasive virus from which no man is immune”. Torquinians, perhaps, were more immune than many others.
Another part of my theory says that football support flourished the most where there were large workplaces, industrial or otherwise. Such places – even in medium-sized towns there were often firms employing a couple of thousand people – would have been proverbial “hotbeds” of support. We know about Devonport Dockyard but, up the road as well, Willeys – who made gas meters – employed over a thousand workers at their factory in Exeter. Where were these big employers in late Victorian and Edwardian Torquay? I’m none too sure of the numbers employed by Watcombe Pottery, Longpark Pottery or Jenkins Marble Works but would imagine they weren’t massive. But we do know the original Torquay United encountered teams from Torquay Tramways and Longpark Pottery prior to 1910. Does this point to a burgeoning football culture in the larger local workplaces?
Spiralling forward, older readers of this site would have grown up in a South Devon with employers of the size of Standard Telephones and Centrax. I wouldn’t be sure but I believe these businesses were at their largest when a hugely-successful Torquay United were so well supported in the late 1960s. I wonder if anyone has memories of these workplaces being full of Torquay United supporters and whether people were attracted to supporting the club because of the enthusiasm of their workmates? Did following the club help people be part of a workplace community?
Sufficient scope you’d have thought for various sports clubs organised, as was the way of the times, along class lines. Indeed, in earlier posts, we’ve touched on how football (of whichever code) was played by lads from the posh schools. We don’t seem to know as much about football the “wrong side of the tracks”, surely the most likely ground of all for the development of the game.
Pontificating about this elsewhere recently, I argued that for a football club to grow on commercial lines – and to fully capture the imagination of a community - it probably needed a sufficient number of working-class people to be living within easy reach of the ground at a given time in history. Maybe Torquay didn’t quite score highly enough on this formula, although you’d suspect that Plainmoor was a good a location as any in this respect. You may also contend that professional football arrived slightly later in Torquay than might have been expected. Exeter City, after all, joined the Southern League as early as 1908. In many respects this meant we missed out on winning the hearts and minds of the pre-Great War generation at the time of football’s massive popularity boom during Edwardian times. Only today I saw a quote from Association Football and the Men Who Made It (1906) that described the game as “a pervasive virus from which no man is immune”. Torquinians, perhaps, were more immune than many others.
Another part of my theory says that football support flourished the most where there were large workplaces, industrial or otherwise. Such places – even in medium-sized towns there were often firms employing a couple of thousand people – would have been proverbial “hotbeds” of support. We know about Devonport Dockyard but, up the road as well, Willeys – who made gas meters – employed over a thousand workers at their factory in Exeter. Where were these big employers in late Victorian and Edwardian Torquay? I’m none too sure of the numbers employed by Watcombe Pottery, Longpark Pottery or Jenkins Marble Works but would imagine they weren’t massive. But we do know the original Torquay United encountered teams from Torquay Tramways and Longpark Pottery prior to 1910. Does this point to a burgeoning football culture in the larger local workplaces?
Spiralling forward, older readers of this site would have grown up in a South Devon with employers of the size of Standard Telephones and Centrax. I wouldn’t be sure but I believe these businesses were at their largest when a hugely-successful Torquay United were so well supported in the late 1960s. I wonder if anyone has memories of these workplaces being full of Torquay United supporters and whether people were attracted to supporting the club because of the enthusiasm of their workmates? Did following the club help people be part of a workplace community?
