An Annual Event- The Boys Book of Soccer 1948

The Boys Book of Soccer. Even the title seems to come from a distant age; a homage to a period where girls apparently didn’t like football, or perhaps more to the point weren’t allowed to be involved. The FA having banned the women’s game in 1921 and in 1948 were still another twenty three years away from allowing it once more (and sixty years away from apologising for banning it in the first place).

If you have young children at present, you may have some of the 2021 Football Annuals around you, perhaps piled up at one side of the living room waiting for the day when Playstation 5 becomes rather boring, or you have a power cut. If you take a look you’ll find that they are made up generally of glossy colour pictures, whereas the annuals of the forties, fifties and sixties, apart from their obvious male bias, are distinguished mainly by their lack of images. These were books you could immerse yourselves in for hours- the one we’re looking at today has one hundred and ninety pages and even includes the laws of the game. It also has five quizzes, six stories, four crosswords, and three pages of puzzles. Luckily nobody has attempted to complete these; the previous owner of the book patently wasn’t one of those philistines who writes in football programmes and should therefore be locked up for crimes against classic literature. It also has some jokes, and anyone who sat through Mrs Brown’s Boys on Christmas Day will testify that humour hasn’t progressed all that far in the subsequent seventy two years.

As with all Annuals, it is pre-dated for the year after it was published. Released for Christmas 1947, it was published by Evans Brothers Limited of Russell Square, London, and apart from the cover, and a game inside the cover called ‘Football Transfers’ (which has very complicated rules but seems essentially to be Draughts with added football-or soccer, as our beautiful game is continually referred to), it is entirely in black and white.

1947 was a difficult year in a UK still trying to recover from the ravages of war. At its start, the government nationalised the coal industry- mining still being a large employer in the country, and still fraught with danger, as was proved later in the year when one hundred and four people died in the Whitehaven Pit disaster in Cumbria. Later we saw the independence of India and Pakistan, a collection of anti-Jewish riots, flooding and a big freeze which saw much of the football programme postponed. In more light-hearted news, Princess Elizabeth became engaged to and then married to Lt. Philip Mountbatten, Tommy Lawton became the first twenty thousand pound footballer (something missed by the book as it had already been printed when he moved from Chelsea to Notts County in November) , Charlton Athletic won the FA Cup, and the post-war baby boom continued with the arrival on the planet of Elton John, David Bowie, Ronnie Wood, Brian May, David Essex, Marc Bolan and- away from the world of music- Emlyn Hughes and Peter Osgood.

It’s first feature is on the FA Cup Final, which, as mentioned, was won by Charlton Athletic, who defeated Burnley one-nil after extra time in a match “so pathetically poor that neither side deserved to win” (Paul Irwin, page 5). You might note that they describe Charlton as “The Haddocks”- it would apparently be a crime against the English language to use the term “Addicks” which fans themselves would actually prefer. By the way, whilst it is generally suggested that “Addicks” is a derivation of Haddocks, there is also a school of thought that the phrase is instead just a derivation of Athletic. But who knows? After a round up of International Fixtures- although, in truth, only England’s international fixtures, it seems that the book wasn’t interested in the other home nations unless they were playing against the English- it moves on to feature two sides from the Isthmian League- Leytonstone and Wimbledon- who competed at Highbury in the FA Amateur Cup Final.

We’ll let you read the report, but Leytonstone won the match by two goals to one in front of a crowd of forty seven thousand- and later completed a League and Cup double, as they also won the Isthmian League, the Dons a distant eighth. Dulwich Hamlet were second, Romford third, Kingstonian sixth and Corinthian-Casuals propped up the rest.

Amongst the “Strange Facts about Soccer,” we take a trip to Bournemouth, where we learn that the grandstand was originally a restaurant at the 1925 British Empire Exhibition; and that Ben Fenton of Millwall “uses two pairs of football boots. He has a light pair for playing in home matches (the pitch at The Den is well-drained and particularly dry), and a heavier pair for away matches. Incidentally, his hobby is the breeding of racing pigeons; his birds have won many prizes.” We later have seven pages explaining the “Secrets of Attack and Defence,” before a small article which suggests that a young man from Bolton named Nat Lofthouse might turn out to have a great future in the game. Whatever happened to him?

An article asking “What is a Player Worth” describes the “general feeling in Soccer circles that transfer fees are now becoming too large.” It mentions the £15,000 that Derby County agreed to pay Greenock Morton for Willie Steel, the £13,000 spent on Len Shackleton and Albert Stubbins, and the “14,000 that Chelsea paid for Lawton when he moved from Everton. You might wonder what the writer- who gets no credit, by the way- would make of today’s transfer fees?

But we’ll leave you with two useful articles. The first allows you to learn some useful soccer terms in other languages, which will be useful if you fancy a trip to France, the Netherlands, Norway or Czechoslovakia (as it was then known). Perhaps these were included because 1947 saw restrictions on foreign travel lifted for the first time since 1939. Perhaps you might be able to practice some of these and use them when our restrictions on foreign travel are finally lifted!

The second, for all you managers out there, allows you to guess what is- or isn’t- offside. Don’t worry, we’ve included the answers!