NORTHERNERS believe it would be only right they win the Upton Park Cup at Springfield this afternoon. After all, they won the first Channel Islands club championship game 100 years ago. If they are to be believed, it was they who allowed the cup to be used for that purpose after receiving it from the long-defunct Upton Park Football Club, regular visitors to these shores at the start of the 20th century.
Although they have no official minutes to prove it, North still believe the trophy was a gift to them from the team from London.
Upton historian Frank Cusack is not so sure, however, and believes that it was the Guernsey Football Association which were given the trophy.
Over the 10 decades it has been won by 19 different clubs, six from Guernsey and 13 in the sister isle.
Cusack is putting the finishing touches to his 300-plus page tome on the competition’s history.
The retired Scot is no less fascinated with the Upton than he was with the Muratti, for which he produced the ultimate reference book in time for the centenary game in 2005.
His Upton history could be ready by the autumn and, having been lucky enough to sample the draft copy, it will be as enjoyable and informative as its predecessor, perhaps more so as it involves a wider range of players.
‘There have been many more players involved with this than the Muratti, so hopefully it will appeal to more the people,’ said the author, who needs to add only the story of the 2007 game and unearth a few more pictures for posterity before handing it over to the publisher.
It has taken him the best part of two years to research.
Among the dozens of Upton tales the book will bring back to life will be the story of North’s triumph in that first game, the no-result year of 1911 and the record score for Rangers in 1935.
Had the competition rules allowed, the first Upton would have featured the 2nd Battalion Manchester as Priaulx League champions and the 1st East Surreys, the champions of Jersey.
But service sides were not allowed to compete for the trophy and in 1907 North, one of just four Guernsey sides eligible, took their place having finished just a point behind the Manchesters.
North duly beat Caesareans 3-0 at the Track with two second-half goals from Leadbeater and one from Bruce.
Guernsey’s oldest and most successful club with 16 Upton wins also won the 1911 game at the Track, but the trophy was never theirs despite a 2-1 win over the Jersey Wanderers.Before the game, the two sides were embroiled in a row over eligibility. In those days the rule was three months’ unbroken residence.
North protested against T. Mellanby on the grounds that he had made several visits to Guernsey in that period and Wanderers countered with protests over F. Cleale and H. Stranger.
Cleale, horror upon horror, had recently returned from a short holiday, said the Jersey representatives.
Why Stranger should have been up before the footballing beak was unknown, but perhaps he had been ormering in Lihou and Jersey had got wind of it.
The ridiculousness of the episode reached new proportions when, after Cleale and Stranger scored the goals to sink Wanderers, the GFA sent off details of the protests to the Football Association, which simply washed its hands of it and bounced the problem back to the Guernsey association.
The upshot was that the game was declared null and void.
By 1933, North’s dominance of the competition had grown to nine wins and one share of the trophy.
Their support was that of no other club in the Channel Islands and that year they took a remarkable 1,800 fans to Jersey for the game against Jersey YMCA at Westmount.
It has long been the appeal of a few pints before and after the game which attracted travelling fans, but that year, led by the club president and co-founder William Bird, North had other important matters to deal with.
As originally told in Through the Years with the Northerners AC by former Guernsey Star sports editor Harry Brown, the story shows a long-lost reverence to the occasion and to those who had fought in altogether more bloody and important battles than mere football games - the First World War.
Bird told Brown: ‘One thousand, eight hundred supporters followed the team to Jersey that year.
‘Our headquarters were at the Pomme d’Or Hotel where we stationed our Upton team and the three reserve teams as well. We paid for everybody’s fare as a token of thanks.’
Bird recollects that he had received permission from the Constable of St Helier to form a procession to march to the Jersey Cenotaph, where the club wished to lay a wreath as a mark of respect to the sister island’s war dead.We set out with our Pomme d’Or party. Busty Warr [the captain] and I led with the wreath. As we proceeded, more and more supporters from the afternoon boat trip from Guernsey joined in and by the time we arrived at the Cenotaph there were 1,200 people in the procession.’
The North president spoke proudly as he remembered the impressive scene.
‘After we had laid the wreath, everyone in that 1,200 gathering of Guernsey people sang the hymn, Abide with Me.’
But that was not the most impressive scene, wrote Brown.
‘As we started back to the Pomme d’Or, still in procession, there was no shouting or singing. Men had bared their heads. No one smoked even. The atmosphere was one of meekness and complete reverence. I will never forget that,’ said Bird.
‘Nor will I forget the moment on the return journey when the Jersey police stopped the procession. I was asked to see a constable.
‘I went across to the constable, who was accompanied by the vice-president of the Jersey Wanderers, a Mr Ferguson. The latter thanked me for what the Northerners had done and spoke highly of the complete reverence shown by the Guernsey party.’
He then thanked Mr Bird for the little sermon he had delivered at the Cenotaph.
Until this point, Rangers had appeared in only two Uptons and been defeated heavily, 4-1 and 4-0.
But in 1935 they exacted revenge in remarkable style, thumping Wanderers 7-0 on their home pitch in Jersey.
On a very hot day at Westmount and led by skipper J. A. Lewis, the red-and-blacks romped home with three goals from Gurney and two apiece from Brassel and Freeman.
The nearest any side has come close to that record score was when Jersey’s St Peter thumped Sylvans 5-0 in 2001.
Over the past six weeks we have highlighted five great Guernsey Upton-winning sides covering 80 years of competition.
Just who was the best is anybody’s guess.
The futility of comparing sporting greats across the generations was never greater than a quarter-of-a-century ago when some bright spark threw the records and physical measurements of the world’s heavyweight champion boxers into a computer with the result that Rocky Marciano defeated Muhammad Ali on points.
The same dodgy computer program might conclude that Guernsey’s greatest-ever Upton side was the Colin Renouf-led St Martin’s team of 1966.
Article posted on 21st April, 2007 - 12.00am
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