James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
Following on from our look at Billy Graham’s 1955 address to the BWA at Highbury, Phil Wilson (Doveson2008 of Flickr) sends word of colour FILM of Highbury in the form of a British Pathe newsreel from 1956. FOOTBALL BALL MANUFACTURE (aka FOOTBALL STORY) <p>Your browser does not support iframes.</p> <p> Also featured are Webber Bros…
Here’s another surviving piece of pre-War colour film, one of precious few to come down to us that feature the old country. From the look of it, I’d say it was a well-preserved example of the Dufaycolor process (some remaining Dufaycolor has darkened very badly indeed). But Dufaycolor didn’t come onto the general market until…
This isn’t strictly speaking to do with sport – but it is to do with what might very well have been. In 1998, my cousin by marriage Walter Murch was asked to help in the restoration of the first synchronized sound film. This was a product of Thomas Edison’s studio, as you might expect, and…
In some senses, this film is not for the football historian: the A1 Great North road is a cyclist’s route, going through rugby country. The large conurbations and urban industrial centres that gave birth to professional football were in the west of England and Scotland – Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Preston, Blackburn and Bolton. But this…
One of the great frustrations attending (relatively) early film is the reluctance of the cameramen to venture too far off the London tourist track. Mitchell and Kenyon were northerners, filming relatively small towns and cities where heavy industry was not only unavoidable, but was the sole source of a mass audience. London was a different…
The tragedy of the 100+ Mitchell and Kenyon films is in their length, or lack of it. Getting a real idea of what an Edwardian soccer match was like from any one of them or all of them is next to impossible. This example, Newcastle United v Liverpool at St James’s Park in 1901, is…
If you’ve come across Humphrey Spender’s "Worktown" series of Bolton photographs from the ’30s (see his Bolton Wanderers sequence here) then you’ll enjoy this multi-part documentary about Tom Harrison, whose fault the whole Mass Observation thing ultimately was. Nosiness will never be the same again: Part One: Part Two: Part Three: …
A 1985ish Scotsport documentary on Alex Ferguson, the manager of Aberdeen, in three parts. It’s now ten years since the publication of Ferguson’s “Managing My Life” – if that doesn’t make you feel old, at the fag end of another year… Part One: Part Two: Part Three:
In 1981, Manchester City, a club in Salford whose big spending hadn’t brought results, allowed in the television cameras. Not entirely by coincidence, he chose the same period to sack championship-winning City coach Malcolm Allison in favour of John Bond, who’d take them to the FA Cup Final. Twenty years earlier, Bond had been a…
So many forward-thinking men in English football in the Fifties: Matthews and Finney after seeing Brazil in the 1950 World Cup, Malcolm Allison after watching Austrians train in Vienna in 1946, Joe Mercer and Don Revie in the wake of the Hungarians. It took England four years to go from the Magyars to once again…