Cod Almighty | Diary

Away days in 1926

15 September 2022

Middle-Aged Diary writes: This won't really be a diary.

We've a new date - 8 November - for the Crewe game postponed from last Saturday. Speaking as both an exile and a card-carrying republican, it is strange how I felt I was missing out on the rituals surrounding the death of the Queen before Tuesday's match.

The Under-18 team appear to have made a decent start to their season. Some detective work (basically using a popular and well-known search engine, but let's pretend my old skills as a librarian were at their sharpest) shows they have won two games out of three in their pool in the Youth Alliance League and yesterday beat Preston North End in the Youth Alliance Cup, having previously lost to Bolton.

Chris Parker's account of his travels to and from Newport reminded me of an article I found in the microfiches of the Grimsby Telegraph in the library, dating back to 1926. Town had only just been promoted out of Division Three (North) so having to travel to the southern third of Britain was a novelty, and the fixture list had not done us any favours.

After playing at Darlington on Saturday, we had to get to Swansea for a Monday game. Immediately after the first match, the players had to catch a train to London where they spent Saturday night, before travelling on to Wales by the slow and unreliable Sunday services. After two nights in Swansea, the players got back to Grimsby on Tuesday evening, completing a round trip of over 1,000 miles.

"Blundell" travelled with them, but not many other Town fans were at either game. Two supporters wealthy enough to have their own cars were at Darlington: one had motored down from Aberdeen to Darlington and another, the son of Grimsby's chief constable, was also the chief medical officer in West Hartlepool. So not much away support for Town, but the Swansea fans applauded generously when Grimsby scored in a 1-1 draw, just as fans at Blundell Park had sportingly acknowledged the Welsh team's superiority when the teams had met the first time, two weeks earlier.

The travelling party, as well as the players and "Blundell", included the club chair, Joseph Stookes, no doubt another director or two, and, for one game only, the manager, Wilf Gillow. There were no substitutions then, and any team talk would have been delivered by the captain or a coach, so the manager was likely to think it a more profitable use of his afternoon scouting a potential signing rather than watching the team he had picked earlier in the week. Gillow joined the team when the train stopped at York, and did not know that they had won. He claimed he'd not been able to find a newspaper; "Blundell" suspected he'd been too nervous to buy one.

The club looked after the players. On the morning before the Swansea game there was a trip to Mumbles Bay where they could watch Stookes, a keen swimmer, take a dip in the sea, and afterwards they had seats at the Swansea Empire Theatre, where the comedian George Robey was performing. One of Town's players, Jack Pugsley, was from Cardiff. When the train had stopped there on Sunday, he'd been greeted by a small crowd of family and friends on the platform, and he was given leave to spend a day or two back home after the game.

The boredom of the long journeys was also alleviated by coming upon other teams on the same trains: there was a "footballers' soiree" in the dining car on Saturday night when they met the Reading players. On Sunday, they were held up for an hour at Swindon while they waited for a connecting service, carrying the Swansea players they'd be up against next day. "Don't wait. We won't need 'em tomorrow" was the inevitable joke. Even so, when their coach arrived, there were warm greetings and handhakes on the platform before Swansea were ushered away to their own coach.

So much has changed, but Chris's account reminded me that the comradeship of sport persists.