8:00pm Friday 6th November 2009
By Tom King
THE year is 09, and Southend United football club’s fortunes are blooming. The club is awash with money and first class players.
Prospects for the club, both on the pitch and in the boardroom, have never looked rosier. The mood is jubilant. No, this isn’t some sweet dream wafting through the mind of the current chairman. It is a fair description of the club 100 years ago, in 1909 rather than 2009.
SUFC was just three years old at the time, and a youthful mood of carefree optimism ran through it. This mood is caught in the club’s first official handbook, published in 1909.
But the handbook was a flimsy piece of ephemera, and no copies were thought to have survived.
Then, earlier this year, a copy was discovered in a loft in Marine Parade, Southend.
The survivor booklet lacks a cover, but is still an invaluable find.
Southend United fans will soon be pulling facsimile copies from their stockings, courtesy of Desert Island Books, the Southend publisher, which is bringing out reprints for the Christmas market, complete with a new introduction setting the handbook in its historical context.
You don’t even need to be a Blues fan to enjoy a wallow in this little time capsule. Publisher, Clive Leatherdale says: “One of the great pleasures of the handbook comes from the advertisements.”
The book contains 24 full-page advertisements, sitting alongside portraits of footballers and managers.
They add up to a revealing piece of social history and a guided tour through the everyday life of Southend in the Edwardian era.
Here, for instance, is Mr Holloway, provider of artificial teeth, whose “painless extractions” were “known throughout Essex”.
Nowhere, though, does Mr Holloway use the term dentist, or refer to any professional qualifications.
Some of the language used, clearly expresses the more deferential society that existed back then. For instance, Mr Stillman the butcher promises to “wait on families daily”.
In other respects, advertising hasn’t changed. Howards Dairies uses humour to mask a wild claim with the statement: “This milk produces the finest footballers.”
These prosperous tailors, seed merchants and checkers of sanitary conditions of domestic properties also explain why Southend United was such a confident institution. It was people like Mr Dunmore the sanitary specialist and Mr Stillman, butcher to the gentry, who had funded and organised the launch of the town’s FC.
Already the notion of a permanent football stadium at Roots Hall formed part of their game plan for the town’s future.
These were self-made men whose lives revolved around Southend, hence their fierce determination to field a football team that would enhance the pride and fame of the town.
Every one of the advertisers in the 1909 handbook was a homegrown family business. No national or international companies figure in the list. A century later, those local businesses have faded into history.
Howards Dairies was the last to go, absorbed into Dairy Crest in the Seventies. The proprietors of these businesses must, in many cases be the forebears, of present day families in Southend.
“It would be wonderful if we could trace the subsequent history of these advertisers,” says Mr Leatherdale.
“Does anyone have memories of these shops? The people who ran them? When and why they finally closed their doors?”
He would also like to know the answer to a mystery. What is represented by flower-like symbol depicted in, for instance, the ad for Messrs Bridger’s “famous bread”, or that of Mr Dunmore, plumber?
Does it represent some masonic-like link between Southend traders?
Anyone with information or reminiscences about these advertisements is invited to write to Clive Leatherdale, Desert Island Books, 7 Clarence Road, Southend, SS1 1AN. E-mails to tom.king@nqe.com l The Southend United Centenary Handbook 1909-10 will be published, priced £12.99, in time for Christmas.
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