Cod Almighty | Diary

All is true

26 February 2019

It is a little-known fact that the very first online football fanzine was dedicated to Grimsby Town. The Almighty Haddock charted the irresistible rise of the Mariners through the 1920s and 1930s.

The Almighty Haddock finally folded in April 1939. The month before, Wales international centre-forward Pat Glover had been pressed into playing in goal at Charlton. Town lost 3-1. When AH, as it was commonly known, took issue with supporters who had told Glover: "You should have saved that, you sheep shagger", it was boycotted for telling fans how to be fans.

The Almighty Haddock had had a troubled existence. Publishing online some 60 years before the internet was a practice that posed certain difficulties. Its usual delivery method – moistening articles and laying them on train tracks that the wheels of a passing engine might pick them up, so readers could gather the pages at the next station – was, at best, erratic.

It also means that few AH articles have survived, but today we are proud to reproduce a few.

12 October 1925: We reproduce this item from the Hull Daily Mail as reproof to those who accuse us of copying and pasting from the Grimsby Evening Telegraph:

"A London contemporary this morning making reference to the football match between Grimsby Town and Southport refers to the former as 'the Yorkshire team.'"

We regret to say that stocks of our handsome silk waistcoats bearing the legend "Grimsby is not in Yorkshire" are now depleted. We can still offer our "Croeso i Grimsby, Haydn Price" top hats however. Sales have, we must confess, been disappointing since Mr Price returned to Tonypandy five years ago.

27 January 1926: Our earnest congratulations to Mr William Stark who was found asleep in the Main Stand after Blundell Park had been emptied following yesterday's Lincolnshire Cup semi-final. It is true that he faces a charge in the Grimsby County Police Court of being drunk and incapable but that is a small price to pay for being able to boast he was the only Town supporter who enjoyed our defeat at the hands of Lincoln City. He will surely be able to claim mitigating circumstances.

25 July 1926: Further evidence of the new enthusiasm for the Mariners engendered by team manager Mr Wilf Gillow, captain Jack Hardy and of course top scorer Jimmy Carmichael. The board has been seeking tenders to repair the roof of the new stand along the Grimsby-road: the one that will surely come to be named after the man who has done so much to make its construction possible, Alderman Frank Barrett. A tender has been submitted by one firm asking to be paid in season tickets.

It remains uncertain why the stand – less than a year old – should be in need of repair already. Our suspicion is that damage may have occurred during the final game of the season when we secured the Division Three (North) title against New Brighton. Clambering on the roof of the Barrett stand to watch Grimsby win titles is surely a practice that will die out some time within the next 50 years.