Scottish Football Museum event: 19 November
The Accies Trust would like to thank Richard McBrearty, of the the Scottish Football Museum, for his excellent talk at the Trust event on the 19th of November.
Richard spoke for over an hour, showed some fascinating slides of Scottish football and Accies memorabilia and told some great stories of the Scottish part in the globalisation of football. We also had a great display of supporters memorabilia – programmes, photos, magazines etc, and some were of considerable antiquity. There was lots of interest in the display.
Peter McLeish made a welcome appearance with some great old photos and a host of memories.
We would also like to thank everyone who turned out on what was a very stormy night.
The Trust remains very grateful to Alex and Ross White at Chambers Catering for their outstanding support of the event.
Richard has kindly written a piece on the Hamilton Academical collection the Scottish Football Museum holds; which we have produced below.
“As one of Scotland’s oldest senior football clubs Hamilton Accies have an important place within the Scottish Football Museum. The museum has built up a significant collection of items relating to Accies but it is an ongoing policy to collect objects which will help us to chart the history of the club since it’s inception in 1874. The records held by the museum are very impressive and date back to the mid 1870s.
A significant resource for anyone wishing to trace the early history of many of Scotland’s senior football clubs are the Scottish FA Annuals.
The museum has a complete set of them stretching from 1875/76 to 1899/1900. These annuals provide fascinating information on clubs affiliated to the Scottish FA as the annuals provided contact details and club information for match secretaries and enabled club officials to contact each other in order to organise friendly matches (particularly for the years prior to the introduction of league football in Scotland when most games would have been friendlies). The club’s entry in the annual of 1876/77 can be seen below.
Image courtesy of the Scottish Football Museum
For supporters who are thinking of researching the club’s history, the museum’s archive is a very useful tool. Our newspaper archive starts from around 1875 and runs until 1990. Articles relating to the Scottish Cup finals of 1911 and 1935 can be found within this collection.
The SFA Player and Club registers are also held by the museum and these date from the advent of professionalism within the Scottish game (1893). Players who have signed for the club can therefore be traced by consulting this important resource.
Items belonging to individual players and managers add a distinctive quality to the Accies collection. An early 20th Century football medal awarded to Stanley George Baxter, who was the club’s match secretary, features within the collection. Baxter, in his role as match secretary, can also be seen in an early Accies team line up which is held by the museum. Colour has been added to the black and white picture giving the familar hooped strip the rather unusual tint of cerise and french grey.
Image courtesy of the Scottish Football Museum
There are many collectable cards which feature Accies players from the early to mid 20th century. The image on the right is a notable example of a ‘cigarette card’, and features an Accies legend of the period, Jock Davie.
A Lanarkshire Cup medal and players contract relating to John M Paterson and dating from 1924 forms part of the collection while football shirts relating to Accies players from yesteryear also feature. Our earliest Accies shirt, currently on display, dates from the 1960s and was acquired at auction while a Kevin McKee shirt dating from the late 1980s and signed by the full squad is also held by the museum.
Thanks to the recent addition of the Scottish Football League Collection under a long term loan agreement many Accies programmes are now cared for by the museum. The vast majority date from 1980 until 2000 as every home programme for each season was collected by the SFL over this period. The museum has built up a small collection of Accies programmes from the 1970s but this is an active collecting area as there is an acknowledged weakness in the Accies programme collection prior to 1980.
Image courtesy of the Scottish Football Museum
Photographs on the club also feature within the museum’s collection. Perhaps the best photographic record of the club is the Charlie McBain collection. From the late 1950s to the early 1990s Charlie, a press photographer, captured matches at Douglas Park. The image on the left is taken from an Accies v Third Lanark match from the early 1960s. As a football image it is of course fascinating for supporters but there is also wider civic and social history significance to the photograph. The County Buildings were being constructed at the time of the match and cranes can be seen in the distance.”
Richard told some horror stories of individuals and clubs throwing away memorabilia. If you have any memorabilia relating to Accies or Scottish football then please contact Richard via this link.
Please click here to view these images enlarged on the Accies Trust’s Flickr page.
Links
Scottish Football Museum
Accies Trust on Flickr
