Sunderland AFC E-Book

Rob Mason

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 527

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The definitive history of Sunderland AFC. Formed by a group of teachers nearly 150 years ago in 1879, Sunderland AFC have a long and storied history in English football. The club has won six top-flight titles, only five other teams have won more, and they have lifted the FA Cup twice - once in 1937 and once in 1973. The Black Cats are renowned for having one of the largest and most loyal fan bases in the country, and records have regularly been broken for attendance figures at the Stadium of Light. After hitting a nadir with back-to-back demotions from the Premier League down to the third division in 2018, the club is now back on the ascendancy and plotting a return to the top-flight. Drawing on interviews with key players, managers and staff members, esteemed club historian Rob Mason delves into Sunderland's 150-year history, charting the glorious highs and the ignominious lows to trace how the Black Cats have come to dominate football in the North-East.

Leseprobe

 

Published in 2024, this book gives some records as up to 2023, 2024 or even 2025. This varies depending on whether a record could be broken or not within twelve months of publication.

 

 

Published in the UK in 2024 byIcon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPemail: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-183773-016-2eBook: 978-183773-017-9

Text copyright © 2024 Rob Mason

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India

Printed and bound in the UK

CONTENTS

1.Beginnings

2.The Team of All The Talents

3.The Greatest Season

4.Almost Roaring Twenties

5.Raich and the Thirties

6.The Bank of England Club

7.Browned Off

8.Stokoe’s Stars

9.Murray’s Vision

10.Niall’s Taxis

11.Short Changed

12.Sunderland ’Til I Die & Beyond

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

About the Author

1

BEGINNINGS

How James Allan brought the round-ball game to Wearside 1857–90

On 9 October 1857, fifteen days before the creation of the world’s oldest association football team, Sheffield FC, James Allan was born 259 miles away in Green Street in Ayr, on the west coast of Scotland. Allan would one day bring the game of association football to Sunderland, ultimately leading to the creation of Sunderland AFC. Yet this founding father would later fall out with the club he had created to such an extent that he formed the rival Sunderland Albion, and at one point was assaulted when representing Albion back at Sunderland AFC. This drama and intrigue are emblematic of the story of Sunderland AFC, as we shall see.

SAFC became an early giant of the game and has remained so ever since, even if for long periods it has been more accurately described as a ‘sleeping giant’. The history of the club intertwined with the passion of its vast support have allowed Sunderland to maintain this status despite the relative lack of recent success compared to its early years in the Football League.

Renowned throughout the football world, Sunderland’s support stems from a mixture of the industrial heritage of the city (Sunderland was awarded city status in 1992, a year in which the club played in the FA Cup final) and the enormous early success of the football club, which was bankrolled by some of Sunderland’s shipyard owners. This success saw Sunderland proclaimed ‘World Champions’ in 1895, a year in which they were Football League champions for the third time in four years, providing the base for Sunderland to always be included in any conversation about historically significant clubs. As the Second World War began in 1939, no club had been English champions more than Sunderland. With the relegation of founder Football League members Aston Villa and Blackburn Rovers in 1936 (a year in which Sunderland were champions for the sixth time), for over two more decades, until 1958, only Sunderland could proudly claim to have never played at anything other than the top level. Until Queen Elizabeth II passed away in 2022, only Sunderland could claim to have won a major honour during the reign of every monarch from Queen Victoria to the present day.

When James Allan was an Ayrshire baby, Sunderland was enjoying a fairly prosperous time, explains Marie Gardiner, author of Sunderland, Industrial Giant:

With shipbuilding booming; at the start of the decade the Sunderland Herald had dubbed the town the greatest shipbuilding port in the world. Its residents were benefitting from the newly opened Mowbray Park, and with new sewers being built and two cholera epidemics now behind them, things were starting to look a little healthier too! Those wanting to cross the river might have found themselves inconvenienced by maintenance going on to repair the Wearmouth Bridge by engineer Robert Stephenson, who added the motto, Nil Desperandum Auspice Deo.

This Latin motto, meaning ‘When God is on our side there is no cause for despair’, had been adopted by the town of Sunderland eight years earlier. Of course, whenever the football team has a run of games without scoring the Nil Desperandum part of the motto can seem only too apt – not least in 1976–77, when the team incredibly went ten league games without scoring a goal.

In May of the year of Allan’s birth in 1857, the town’s premier park – Mowbray Park – had been opened by John Candlish, the Liberal MP for Sunderland whose statue now stands in that park. The Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette did not begin life until 1873, but on the day of Allan’s birth, a Friday, on Wearside the weekly issue of the Sunderland and Durham County Herald newspaper was published. Amidst much news of the Indian Mutiny – a rebellion against British rule that had begun that year – and reports concerning Sunderland-born Henry Havelock (who has statues in Mowbray Park and London’s Trafalgar Square), there were lots of domestic advertisements and snippets that give a flavour of life in the place James Allan would eventually call home.

You could travel from Sunderland by ship to Hamburg for 15 shillings (75p), while a typical advert offered treatment for deafness. Headed ‘Deafness and noises in the head’, the advert ran:

Mr. Smith, Aurist in Sunderland from five to eight o’clock every evening at Borough road, opposite Smyrna Chapel. A son of Mr. J. Anderson of Smyrna Place who had been deaf eight years has been perfectly cured by Mr. Smith. Also a daughter of Mr. Atkinson, Station Master, Tynemouth, deaf from infancy and Mr. Spence, 6 Middle Street Tynemouth, deaf five years. N.B. Mr. Smith attends at his usual hours ten to three daily: Sundays to one at 4 Albion Street, Newcastle.

Oddly enough, the Smyrna Chapel was only a goal-kick or so away from what in 2024 is known as the Norfolk Hotel, which in 1879 was a place known to be visited by James Allan after his arrival in Sunderland and which played a key role in the earliest meetings of what would become Sunderland AFC.

James Allan was educated at Glasgow Training College before spending a year studying medicine at university in Glasgow. He then took the decision to become a teacher rather than a doctor. Allan was an early student of the game of association football. Busby, Oxford, East Kilbride and the 3rd Lanark Rifle Volunteers FC were among the clubs he played for in the Glasgow area. The latter of these – which became better known simply as Third Lanark from 1903 – were one of Scotland’s highest-rated clubs at the time. The future founding father of Sunderland reached their second XI.

At this time in Sunderland, rugby and cricket were the pre-eminent sports. The Sunderland Rugby Club began in 1873, the first game taking place at the home of the local cricket club, which was then in Holmeside. Association football in the town had not yet started, but Sunderland had already made a significant contribution to the game. The world’s oldest association football competition, the FA Cup, had started in November 1871, with the final in March 1872. The competition was the brainchild of Charles William Alcock. He was not only born in Bishopwearmouth on 2 December 1842, but in the very same street – Norfolk Street – as the aforementioned Norfolk Hotel. On 14 April 1841, his brother John Forster Alcock had also been born in Sunderland. Like his younger brother, John Alcock was a leading light of early football. In 1863 he represented the Forest club at meetings that led to the formation of the Football Association. Forest went on to become known as Wanderers – the first winners of the FA Cup.

The creation of the FA Cup was just one of the younger Alcock brother’s achievements: he also came up with the idea of international football and Test cricket. Charles Alcock was educated at Harrow School after leaving Sunderland as a boy, having had a spell living at 17 John Street as well as in Norfolk Street. The Alcock family moved south between the 1851 and 1861 census, with Charles Alcock enjoying a privileged education. An obituary of C.W. Alcock in the Yorkshire Post on 27 February 1907 pointed out that while it was his brother, rather than Charles, who was at the inaugural meeting of the FA, Charles ‘did more than any other individual … to establish it [the game of association football] firmly’.

Charles Alcock captained the first ever FA Cup winners in 1872 and even had a ‘goal’ disallowed in the final, in which his Wanderers team beat Royal Engineers 1–0. Alcock went on to referee the cup finals of 1875 and 1879 in a glittering career that saw him hold a series of significant administrative posts within both football and cricket. He also captained England against Scotland in his one official international football appearance in 1875, getting on the scoresheet in the process. Five years earlier he had also captained an England side against Scotland in what was the first unofficial international football match in history. In the first ever official international football match each country named an umpire to assist the referee, with Alcock being his country’s umpire for a match with Scotland, which ended goalless. Alcock played in all five games between England and Scotland before the first officially recognised international. The first five games are classed as unofficial because the players representing Scotland in those games were all based in England.

This stellar contribution by a son of Sunderland to what has become the planet’s most popular sport was almost entirely unknown and unheralded in Charles Alcock’s birthplace as the sport grew. It would be James Allan rather than Alcock to whom Sunderland owes its footballing origins.

The ninth of thirteen children born to William Allan (a shoe-maker) and Helen Ronald, James Allan grew up in Tarbolton in South Ayrshire, a place that was also once home to the Scottish bard Robert Burns. Indeed, Burns’s 1780 poem ‘The Ronalds of the Bennals’ is about the family of James Allan’s mother, Burns having once been romantically linked to Anne, a member of the Ronald family from two generations earlier. Burns’s brother Gilbert was also linked with Jean Ronald, who apparently rejected him due to his poverty. Both Jean and Anna Ronald are referred to in Burns’ poem, and Bennals was the name of the Ronalds’ 200-acre farm.

From 1 April 1879, Jimmy Allan became second assistant master at Hendon Board School at a salary of £60, rising to £90 per annum. Having enthusiastically played association football for several teams in Glasgow, Allan was evidently disappointed to find that the dribbling game – rather than the handling game – had yet to arrive in Sunderland.

Allan arrived in a town that was still on the up, as it had been when he was born. ‘A new museum, art gallery, and winter gardens was opened in 1879, after the foundation stone was laid two years prior, watched over by former US president Ulysses S. Grant,’ Marie Gardiner wrote. ‘The Elephant Tea Warehouse and Grocers – or the Elephant Tea Rooms as it would later become – designed by architect Frank Caws, had recently been finished, and so the town was starting to take shape in a way we can recognise today. Horse-drawn tramways were an exciting new way to get around, running from Monkwearmouth to Roker by the Sunderland Tramways Company.’

James Allan did show some interest in rugby as a spectator member with Sunderland Rovers. They played at the Blue House Field in Hendon, which would become the first home of soccer in Sunderland. However, rugby was never going to satisfy the sporting demands of the young teacher.

Bringing a round football back to Wearside with him after his first trip home to Scotland, Allan began to introduce the game to his teaching colleagues and friends. Among those believed to be involved with Allan in learning about the game were Walter Chappel, who was assistant master at Hendon Board School around this time, William Elliot, a teacher at Thomas Street Board Boys’ School in Monkwearmouth, Robert Singleton, headmaster at Gray School and John Coates of Rectory Park School, as well as John Sewell, who taught at Herrington Wesleyan School. Sadly, Sewell would pass away on 28 October 1888 as a result of a swimming accident in Gatton, a town in Queensland, Australia, where he had emigrated in 1886. Sewell had studied at Westminster Training College in 1877–78 and was one of the early players likely to have had some experience of the round ball game while at teacher-training colleges or public schools in the south of England.

Some debate exists concerning the earliest days of what we now know as Sunderland AFC. A case has been made for the club to be dated from 25 September 1880 instead of the long-accepted date of October 1879. This is a matter of defining the difference between the words ‘formed’ or ‘founded’.

What is certain is that its existence was formally announced to the wider world on 25 September 1880. On that date there was a meeting of the Sunderland and District Teachers’ Association, which was not called for the purposes of announcing a football club, but James Allan and his associates took advantage of the chance to announce that they had formed a football team.

This was reported in the Sunderland Echo on 27 September 1880. However, was this the very start of what we now know as Sunderland AFC? Does a relationship begin when it is announced to the world in the formal setting of a marriage or even an engagement – or does it commence when the couple meet, are attracted to each other or go on a first date? What preceded the announcement of the football club to the world in September 1880? Clearly the people making the announcement did not do so on a whim at that moment. Where had this desire come from?

Having brought a round ball to Wearside, Allan began to introduce friends and colleagues to the sport of association football. As with any new sport, this took some time as players developed new skills and learned new rules. It certainly wasn’t as if one day a team started and soon after they played a proper game. Clearly they would not be anywhere near ready for that, and in any case it was not as if the area was teeming with other clubs looking for fixtures. To begin with, the early life of what grew into the club we know today involved kickabouts with a group of teaching colleagues. Imagine a modern-day pre-season where players train and get fit before even thinking of playing a friendly, let alone a competitive match. In comparison, this period can be seen as a giant pre-season, but in terms of preparation for the future development of the team and the game.

One of Allan’s colleagues was John Grayston. Born in Halifax on 21 March 1862, he arrived in Sunderland in 1877 as a pupil-teacher at Hendon Board School. Only since 1870 had children aged between five and ten had to go to school, and as records of school meetings show – when they weren’t discussing football – attendance was often very poor. Most teachers in these day schools were unmarried women, which is why even to this day female teachers are almost invariably addressed as Miss, regardless of their marital status. It also meant James Allan didn’t have an awful lot of male teachers to call upon for football. As a pupil-teacher, Grayston was teaching younger pupils as well as continuing his own education.

Grayston not only had an aptitude for learning, but also for recording the history of the club, and while some of his later memories are known to be chronologically inaccurate, were it not for many of Grayston’s articles even less would be known about the club’s earliest years.

Writing in the Sunderland Weekly News in 1931, by which time he was approaching seventy and remembering things from when he was seventeen, Grayston recalled experiences at Hendon Board School yard: ‘This is the actual and spiritual home of Sunderland Association Football.’ Acknowledging his own fallibility of detail, he added, ‘and though all the memories of later and more scintillating years may come between, my clearest memory is of my first game in the play yard’. Accepting Grayston’s hazy memory as an old man, his ‘clearest memory’ of the ‘spiritual home’ nonetheless seems key to the earliest origins of the club.

It is likely, although not definite, that James Allan was one of seven new members admitted to the Sunderland and District Teachers’ Association at their quarterly meeting recorded on 13 September 1879. This would have given Allan the opportunity to sound out any interest in playing association football. An obituary of Walter Chappel in 1898 stated that Chappel, a fellow teacher at Hendon Board School, was the first gentleman approached on this subject.

As interest in the game developed, along with the proficiency of those playing in Sunderland, the possibility grew of staging games against other teams. This was not a simple task. As Grayston noted they ‘found difficulty in getting fixtures, many of our Saturdays being spent in practises.’ Not that it seems Allan’s troops were ready for stern opposition. ‘I must confess that we needed these Saturday practises very much, but we were very conscientious in our training.’

However, an advert published in the Athletic News on 22 September 1880 made clear when they were ready. This pointed out that the closing date for entries to the first season of the Northumberland and Durham Cup was on the 25th of the following month. Three days later, at the Rectory Park Schools meeting, came the announcement that Sunderland had a team with elected officials.

This is a significant date in the history of the club, but not necessarily the beginning of the club. The Sunderland Echo of 9 October 1880 records the ‘first practice match of the season’ rather than the ‘first practice match’ or ‘first practice match ever.’ This match at the Blue House Field in Hendon was staged between a captain’s XI and a vice-captain’s XI, with the vice-captain’s side handsomely winning 5–0.

There is no record of Sunderland playing a game against another club until 13 November 1880 against Ferryhill, but that is not to say football was not being played. It is possible but unlikely that a formal full-sized game was played against any other club prior to that Ferryhill game. Even in practice matches there were unlikely to be sufficient players to make eleven-a-side games possible. If any did take place, they are likely to have been the exception rather than the rule.

On Monday, 8 November 1880 it was reported that the draw had been made for the first round of the inaugural Northumberland and Durham Football Association Challenge Cup. Ferryhill were drawn against Darlington Grammar School, only for the latter to withdraw and therefore hand Ferryhill a bye into round two. Now without a fixture for 13 November, Ferryhill arranged a friendly with Sunderland at the Blue House Field for what was Sunderland’s first known match, which was 40 minutes each way. Losing the toss, Sunderland faced a strong wind in the first half but soon scored their first ever goal, or ‘point’, as it was recorded – only to have it disallowed. Given that in years to come the club would be docked the first ever points they won in the Football League, this disallowed ‘goal’ would seem to be a prelude for many a disappointment, at least in the modern era.

Sunderland’s line-up in this match was: Robert (Bob) Singleton in goal (captain), John Thomas Taylor and Adam Shearlaw as backs, Joseph Lake Gibbons and John Anderson as half-backs and a six-strong forward line of Edward Guy Watson, Matthew Barron, Peter Dove, Frank Woodward, Walter Chappel and James (Jimmy) Allan. All except Dove, a merchant’s office clerk, were teachers by profession. For the record the Ferryhill side was: W.J. Kitching, E. Latheron, J. Hodgson (captain), J. Soulsby, J. Barry, T. Field, J. Mann, F. Devine, J. Oliver, J. McCutcheon and M. Carney.

Match reports in both the Sunderland Echo and the Newcastle Journal fail to mention that the Ferryhill match was Sunderland’s first ever game, but both do state that Sunderland were without their five best men. Quite possibly the reporters had been fed this information by a club official, but if this was a first ever game how would anyone know who the five best men were? A report in the Athletic News does state that Sunderland staged its first match, but this is not completely clear as to whether it is a first match ever, a first match of the season or most likely a first match against a different club. Notably, no fewer than four of the members present at the September 1880 announcement – Grayston, Sewell, Elliott and Coates – were not in attendance for this game, and if it was a very first match would it not be more likely that, having put so much effort into getting a team up and running, they would be there and eager to play?

It was Ferryhill that scored the solitary legitimate goal of the match. Although the scorer is not recorded, Geoff Wall, a local historian from Ferryhill, speculates that it may have been J. McCutcheon, one of Ferryhill’s six-man attack, who two years later would play regularly for Sunderland. Wall also suggests that the game with Ferryhill might have come about through Sunderland player Adam Shearlaw.

‘Ferryhill at that time were in what they called the Palatine League,’ says Wall. ‘There were two players who played for Sunderland at the time who were prominent names in Ferryhill, so that may have been the connection for the game to have been arranged in the first place. The oldest house in Ferryhill was owned by a family who came from the Sunderland area. One of the players was a guy called Adam Shearlaw. He was a teacher at an orphanage in Ferryhill which was where his house, the Manor House, was, and he might have been the connection with the teachers’ team at Sunderland. I can’t be 100 per cent about this but it is feasible. There had to be a connection somewhere and especially in terms of arranging a game in those years, because we’re not talking about just jumping in your car to get there, are we?’

Adam Shearlaw and John Anderson both hailed from the same Berwickshire village and had moved to Sunderland to be teachers. Anderson appears to have been a lodger with James Jardine, a Scot who was a Sunderland Echo reporter and who played a couple of games for Sunderland in the first two seasons. Perhaps this connection is how some of the club’s early games are well documented in the Echo?

Despite many mentions in the press over the following couple of decades, when the formation would have been fresh in the minds of so many, the original date of 1879 was not questioned. For instance, following the death of Councillor Robert Singleton, the club’s first captain and treasurer, in 1895, an article in the Sunderland Echo stated of Singleton:

He presided over the first meeting held for the purpose of forming a club, the other gentlemen present being Messrs J. Allan, W.C. Chappel, E. Watson and W. Elliott. The meeting took place at the British School, Norfolk Street in October 1879. A club was then formed under the title of, ‘The Sunderland Teachers’ Association Football Club’.

It would appear from this that the October 1879 meeting was ‘the first meeting held for the purpose of forming a club’. Quite possibly further meetings were held, perhaps informally to discuss the progress being made with playing the new game, until the stage was reached in September 1880 when they were ready to take part in organised competitions. The Rise of the Leaguers by the editor of the Athletic News, James Catton, published in 1897 states that ‘a number of schoolmasters and pupil teachers resident in Sunderland formed a team for their own amusement’.

While it is believed the original name of the club was in fact the Sunderland and District Teachers’ Association Football Club, the date of the initial meeting stated in the Echo article does not appear to have been challenged at the time. Nor was it challenged a decade later in a book by Alfred Gibson and William Pickford called Association Football and the Men Who Made It – published in 1905. The opening sentence on Sunderland says: ‘It was in the year 1879 that “The Sunderland School Teachers’ Association Football Club” was formed with no more serious purpose than to provide amusement for the members who were drawn from the schools in the town.’

A report in the Sunderland Echo of 25 May 1879 indicated that the four districts of the Sunderland School Board consisted of: A – East and West End of Sunderland; B – South Bishopwearmouth; C – North Bishopwearmouth; and D – Monkwearmouth.

Gibson and Pickford’s explanation that the initial purpose of the club was simply to provide amusement for the town’s teachers backs up John Grayston’s recollections from 1931. It would seem that as interest in the sport developed, it was decided to take this interest further.

Even before James Allan brought a round football from Scotland to Sunderland, there was a team playing in Sunderland by the name of Bishopwearmouth Mutual Improvement Association Football Club. They took on Sunderland Rovers rugby team in March 1879, the very team of which James Allan would later become a spectator member. However, a report of the game in the Sunderland Echo of 24 March 1879 lists fifteen players in the Rovers team, indicating a game of rugby rather than soccer, with the report noting that Rovers scored three touches down. Previous Echo reports of the Bishopwearmouth Mutual Improvement Association Football Club cement the belief that the club were indeed playing rugby. A report of a game against Fulwell in the Echo of 11 March 1878 clearly uses rugby terminology, and Bishopwearmouth Mutual Improvement Association Football Club were undoubtedly a rugby club rather than a soccer outfit.

As association football took its first tentative steps there was plenty of confusion over its rules, blurred as they were with those of rugby football. Remember that in the game of football that we cherish, the early days of the sport were very different to the game we know now. Even now, in the twenty-first century, the game is constantly changing. Think of the recent introduction of VAR, goal-line technology and constant alterations of the offside rule, for instance. Until 1912 goalkeepers could handle the ball anywhere in their own half, and until two years earlier wore the same unnumbered shirts as outfield players. In the first three seasons of the Football League, which commenced in 1888–89, there were no goal nets or penalties, and when penalties were introduced they could be taken anywhere from along a twelve yard line that stretched across a pitch with very different markings to those we are familiar with in the modern game.

Within the developing game of association football there were differences in rules that needed resolving. These were described in a letter from J.F. Hall, the treasurer of the Sheffield Football Association in the Field, dated 3 March 1877:

For many years past Mr. Alcock on the part of the London Association and Mr. Dix and myself on the part of the Sheffield Association, have been trying to assimilate the two codes of rules, which only vary in two points. The one is that London play three men ‘offside’ and we only one. The other is that London throw in the ball from touch in a straight line, and we kick it in any direction.

Hall goes on to say that C.W. Alcock ‘has perhaps done more for Association football than any other man in the kingdom’ and bemoans the fact that Alcock, Hall himself and others including ‘the Scotch Association’ had been outvoted on key matters by people representing far fewer players, before he concludes: ‘but of this I am certain, that before many years are over most of those gentlemen of the opposition will regret that such a good opportunity for bringing about one code of Association rules was lost’.

While this has to remain conjecture, it is perhaps possible that embryonic attempts at the new game of association football did take place prior to Allan’s arrival in Sunderland. In the Sunderland Echo of 25 March 1878, a report headed ‘Football’ stated: ‘SUNDERLAND V WESTOE – A match between those teams was played on the Chester-road ground on Saturday, when Sunderland were victorious by four goals to none.’ This was undoubtedly rugby, but it is worth noting that immediately underneath in an article headed ‘INTERNATIONAL FOOTBALL MATCH’ the report says: ‘A match between the selected teams of Scotland and Wales was played at Glasgow on Saturday. The Welshmen were completely overpowered, Scotland winning by nine goals to nothing.’

On 23 March 1878, Scotland did indeed beat Wales 9–0 at association football at the first Hampden Park. Scotland were certainly the leaders in ‘soccer’ at this time, due to their ability to play as a passing team rather than as a set of individuals. The previous month on the same ground they had thrashed England 7–2 with a completely different Scottish line-up to that which featured in the Wales fixture.

Completing a trio of stories under the generic heading of ‘Football’, the article continues with ‘RECTORY PARK SCHOOLS V MONKWEARMOUTH COLLIERY SCHOOLS’, and says: ‘An interesting match between the teachers and scholars of these schools took place on Saturday morning in the field of the Mutual Improvement Association, Chester-road, and resulted in a victory to the former of four goals to one. The team from the Colliery Schools, though inferior in weight to their opponents, played very bravely.’ It is absolutely not provable that this schools game was a soccer game rather than a rugby match, although a score of 4–0 with no references to touchdowns would suggest that it could have been a game under association rather than rugby rules, albeit at this stage there was considerable bafflement over the rules or laws of the new game. The reference to one team being ‘inferior in weight’ perhaps points to the game in question being rugby.

At the time goals applied to both codes. In rugby a touchdown led to a ‘try’ at kicking the ball over the posts and making it into a goal. The historian of Ashbrooke Rugby Club, Keith Gregson, says: ‘In the very early days I think only goals counted in the rugby code, so you could have, say, five touchdowns/tries unconverted to none and it would still be considered a draw.’

Another example of the game developing but not being played in a way we would recognise now occurred on 20 September 1884, when a combined Sunderland and Bedes XI lost to Castle Eden at Monkwearmouth by a score of two goals and three posters to one. Mike Huggins, the president of the European Congress of Sports Historians, explains:

Before the centralised organisations like the FA gained much influence and standardisation emerged, lads in a town starting a team would draw on the multiple rules they learned at schools or where they grew up. Quite often even within a team there would be lads arguing about whose rules they should follow, and when they wanted to actually play someone else they’d have to negotiate with the other team, who had their own ideas. So sometimes first half one rule, second half another.

Mysteriously, and quite possibly erroneously, there is also a mention in the Sunderland Echo of 14 August 1939 of a Hendon Teachers’ Football Club, which ‘was started before the Town club’. The ‘Town club’ would seem to be Sunderland. Perhaps there was a previous attempt by Allan to set up this team? The 1939 article claims this club became defunct during the war ‘when the field was dug up for trenches’. Presumably this was the First World War. It is known – and reported in the Sunderland Echo – that in 1916 trenches were dug in Fulwell Dene, but whether trenches were dug in the Hendon area in that period is not known. If there was a Hendon Teachers’ Football Club ‘started before the Town club’, the chances are high that this would be Allan trying to get the sport off the ground, but if it continued until the war surely more would have been known of the club? Nonetheless, this fleeting mention raises another fascinating lead into the origins of football in Sunderland.

As to 1879 being the start date of the club, it is worth considering the recollections of William Thwaites Wallace, the club secretary in the 1880s. In 1929 he began a series of highly informative and entertaining columns in the Sunderland Football Echo. In his ‘Peeps from the Past’ of 14 September 1929 he stated:

I must again place on record the extent to which lovers of the game are indebted to Jimmy Allan and James McMillan. These two players were really the founders of Association Football on Wearside, and the former, by virtue of his profession as a schoolmaster was in a unique position for training the ‘young idea’ of these days in the rudiments of the game. It was in 1879 that James Allan, a native of Ayr and a student of Glasgow University, came to Sunderland to take over the position of second master at Hendon School and afterwards was transferred to Thomas Street School where he remained till 1888 when he was appointed head master of Hylton Road Schools, a position he held until his death in 1911 … Shortly after his arrival he gathered a few friends around him with the intention of forming a football club for the teachers. As a result of his enthusiasm the Sunderland Teachers’ Association Football club came into being in 1879.

From its beginnings following the arrival of James Allan on Wearside, through the embryonic stages of Allan introducing local schoolteachers to the game throughout 1879 and 1880, up to the formal announcement of the club on 25 September 1880, the early days of the club are a fascinating if hazy period. Whether you see the start of the club as being dated from 1879 or 1880 is down to your own interpretation. The view of the club, the descendants of club founder James Allan and myself as club historian is that the club started in 1879 before officially announcing itself to the world in 1880. Regardless of which year you choose to see as the start, once we start to examine the period when games were played against other teams and duly recorded, we can trace more accurately how the club grew.

Like so many new organisations, sporting or otherwise, the early years of the club were fraught with financial difficulties. In his Football Echo column of 14 September 1929, W.T. Wallace tells us:

To start a new type of sport is always difficult and the new club had many ups and downs in its early years. Funds were always low and the duties of the treasurer were practically non-existent. In fact it is on record that on one occasion the exchequer was so empty that one of the members offered a green canary as the prize in a raffle and in this way the sum of seventeen shillings and sixpence was realised.

This would be between 87 and 88p in today’s money, the equivalent of about £140 in 2024. Two weeks earlier, in his ‘Peeps into the Past’ column in the same publication, Wallace had explained that in the club’s very early days, players paid subs to play and provided their own ‘jersey, boots and other gear’, with some players having to pay their subs by instalments if they could not meet their full subscription outright. It would be 1884 before any entrance money was taken at a Sunderland match.

We do know from a report in the Sunderland Echo on 27 September 1880 that when the club announced its officers, Robert Singleton was appointed as captain and treasurer, with James Allan as vice-captain. The likelihood is that Singleton was captain ahead of Allan due to his being a headmaster, holding a post at Gray School from May 1877 to December 1884, when he was appointed Superintendent of the George Hudson Charity. On 14 August 1879, Singleton had been initiated as a Freemason into the Palatine Lodge in Sunderland, becoming an auditor of the lodge just four months later. Two years later he was appointed as the Worshipful Master of the Lodge, and three years after that became Director of Ceremonies. This was a position he held until 1894, a year before his death at the age of only 42 due to – according to the doctor at an inquest into his death – alcohol poisoning. Both Singleton and his wife were believed to be heavy drinkers. Their son, Robert Clifton Singleton, also met an early end. Seven when his father died, he spent some time in Sunderland Orphan Asylum and later emigrated to Canada, but was killed in the First World War at the beginning of June 1916 in Ypres.

Both of James Allan’s sons would also be killed in the world wars: Walter Allan aboard the SS Halifax in December 1917 and Wallace Allan on the SS Kirkdale in February 1940. Walter’s son Arthur was also a victim of the Second World War, losing his life with the sinking of the SS Deptford in December 1939.

A goalkeeper or back who played in all of the known line-ups in Sunderland’s matches between 1880 and 1882, Bob Singleton was a Lancastrian from Garstang, where he was born in July 1852. In Sunderland he lived at 12 Peel Street in Hendon, a house that still stands to this day and is within walking distance of both Norfolk Street and the Blue House Field.

In addition to Singleton and Allan, the club’s committee at the September 1880 meeting was listed as Messrs Gibbons, Chappel, Coates and Sewell, while the secretary was Mr Elliott of 4 Rudland Terrace. By the time of the 1881 census, Elliott, a 23-year-old teacher, was lodging with Singleton. Rather like Sunderland’s team of 2024, Sunderland’s committee of 1880 was a very young affair. Joseph Lake Gibbons had just turned eighteen. Born in June 1862 in Sunderland, he was a pupil-teacher at Rectory Park School late in 1880 before becoming a student at Carmarthen training college in April 1881. As mentioned earlier, Walter Chappel was assistant master at Hendon Board School and was 26 at the time, 23-year-old John Coates was a master at Rectory Park School, while John Sewell was a 22-year-old teacher at Herrington St Wesleyan School.

Shortly after deciding to enter the new cup competition, the schoolteachers, who had been practising among themselves for over a year, decided to open up the club to people from outside the teaching profession and to change their name to reflect this. In a meeting after a practice game on 16 October 1880 it was agreed to drop ‘and District Teachers’ from the club’s name, thereafter being called simply Sunderland Association Football Club. Subsequently, in the Sunderland Echo from 5 to 11 November of the same year, a series of advertisements appeared appealing for new players:

SUNDERLAND ASSOCIATION F.B.C, – WANTED, YOUNG GENTLEMEN to join the above. Grounds Blue House Field, Hendon. Address to honorary secretary Mr. Wm Elliott, 4 Rudland-terrace.

Having reached the stage where they felt able to take on other teams, Sunderland’s matches against other clubs began to be reported. A fortnight after playing Ferryhill, they entertained Ovingham on 27 November 1880. Secretary Elliott scored Sunderland’s first ever known goal against opponents, something he may well have had pleasure in recording as Sunderland won 4–0, with James (Jimmy) Allan getting two of the goals and Ted Watson the other. Two weeks later Burnopfield held Sunderland to a 2–2 draw at the Blue House Field in the Northumberland and Durham Cup.

The Blue House Field was not so much a ground as just a pitch to play on when Sunderland called it home. It wasn’t an enclosed venue, so admission money could not be taken, and in any case who would want to pay to see a team taking its first steps in a new sport? While the club’s first headquarters in Norman Street are long since demolished, there is still a football pitch where the Blue House Field was: it’s now Valley Road Academy School’s pitch.

In 2010 I took it upon myself to organise blue plaques to mark all of the grounds Sunderland called home prior to the 1997 move to the Stadium of Light. I enlisted the support of then chairman Niall Quinn and the city council, financial support from the Sunderland Supporters’ Association led by George Forster, and then I had to approach the owners of the properties that occupied the sites, some public and some private. In the case of the Blue House Field I enjoyed great support from the school’s deputy head of the time, a Mr George Stobart, who already knew that when they played, his school team were following in the footsteps of Sunderland’s first footballers.

Those footballers wore blue rather than red and white. Perhaps selected as club colours due to the first home pitch being at the Blue House Field, blue remained the colour until 1884, at which point Sunderland switched to red and white, although stripes took another three years to emerge.

Having drawn in the cup with Burnopfield in 1880, Sunderland travelled for a replay, which was won 2–0 a week before Christmas. The next round of the competition on 12 February 1881 took Sunderland to St James’ Park in Newcastle, meaning that they played at this venue long before Newcastle United, who didn’t come into being until 1892 through a merger between Newcastle East End and Newcastle West End.

Sunderland’s first match at St James’ brought a heavy 5–0 defeat at the hands of Newcastle team the Rangers and, of course, elimination from the cup. A week earlier Allan, Singleton and Roberts (one of the first non-teachers to play for the club, who had learned to play football in Bangor, Wales) had gained representative honours at Middlesbrough, playing for the Northumberland and Durham FA, but were on the receiving end of a 10–0 thrashing by the Cleveland FA. The same trio had been chosen for another Durham game a week earlier, along with teammates John Sewell and John Coates, only for the game to be postponed.

The season ended with a return friendly at Ferryhill at the beginning of April, which finished goalless. Given that there was a seven-week gap between the end of the cup campaign and the friendly at Ferryhill, it seems possible that other games might have been played in between only to go unreported. The sport within the North East was still in its very early stages of development and not yet attracting huge public interest, so there would be no great need for local newspapers to report on games. The local paper was first and foremost a shipping gazette, and if something more newsworthy was taking place, particularly at sea, sports reports would be squeezed out of the newspapers, sometimes never to be published.

On the other hand, a group of educated men looking to develop their club might well have ensured any games played did receive some publicity. As it is, we know of the trio of cup games and the Ferryhill and Ovingham friendlies in 1880–81, and these may have been the only games played, with perhaps plenty of in-house practices taking up the rest of their time, as they had from 1879.

In the following season thirteen games are known to have been played, again featuring an early home fixture against Ferryhill, this time eliciting a 1–0 win at the start of October. Interest in the Northumberland and Durham Challenge Cup was ended at the first hurdle with a 4–0 loss at Sedgefield later the same month. Seven of the thirteen games were defeats, with one draw and five victories, one of which came at Whitburn Cricket Club, where North Eastern were beaten 2–0 in February.

Life for Sunderland as an up-and-coming football team was fraught with difficulty in those early years. Money being tight was just one of the issues, with another being the search for a new place to play, not least because rent for use of the Blue House Field was ten pounds per year. Numerous fields were turned into pitches, one such playing field near to the Cedars and off Villette Road in Grangetown being used and included in the Blue Plaques trail. This pitch was only around half a mile from the Blue House Field. Evidently, at times they were also struggling for players. In October and November 1882, three of the first four games of the season were played with just ten men. The team were evidently getting better, though, as draws were managed in two of these games despite the numerical disadvantage, with the only defeat coming away to the Rangers of Newcastle, who also had just ten players.

At the beginning of November in 1882, a 2–1 win over North Eastern became the first game played at the new home of Groves Field, which is part of the Ashbrooke home of cricket and rugby in Sunderland, though the match was abandoned due to disputes. Groves Field only staged five Sunderland soccer matches, but its claim to club history was assured by one of these being the club’s record win in a competitive fixture: a 12–1 win over Stanley Star in the Northumberland and Durham Challenge Cup on 20 January 1883. This started a sequence of five successive victories in a season where one of just three defeats from eleven games played came in the club’s first cup final,a 1–0 defeat to Tyne at Brandling Park, Newcastle, on the last day of March.

That summer Sunderland not only moved home again, but left the south side of the River Wear, where they had originated, to move to the north side. The club have never returned to the south of the Wear after this 1883 move from Groves Field to Roker, although, as we shall see, James Allan would later set up another club there. When Sunderland were leaving Roker Park in the late 1990s there was a move to Ryhope (south of the river) briefly mooted, but it was never a likely prospect.

The new Roker home in 1883, however, was not Roker Park. The arrival there was another decade and a half away, and there would be three north side home venues before Roker Park became home to SAFC. The new home in 1883 would be known variously as the Dolly Field, the Clay-Dolly Field, Cooper Street or Horatio Street. It was through this initial move to the area that Sunderland’s nickname of the Black Cats was born.

The story originates from almost three-quarters of a century before football started in Sunderland. Joshua Dunn was at work in the year 1805. At the time there were fears that the French navy might attack Britain, and Dunn was stationed at a gun battery on the sea front at Roker, where he was on the look-out for enemy ships. One night, as Dunn was on duty, he thought he heard a baby crying. When he went to investigate he found that the noise he had heard was not from a baby, but a big black cat. Maybe before going on duty Joshua had been drinking. He was so scared of the cat he thought it was the devil. Dunn was teased about this for the rest of his life, until he died in 1850 – so much so that the area where it happened became known as the Black Cat Battery.

Once Sunderland played near the river the nickname the Black Cats began to be associated with the team – although the Black Cats has only been the club’s official nickname since the year 2000 (ironically after the move away from Roker Park to the Stadium of Light). As long ago as 1905 there was a cartoon drawn of a black cat with Sunderland chairman F.W. Taylor, while when Sunderland first played in the FA Cup final in 1913 many supporters wore black cat badges. A black cat has always been the emblem of the Sunderland Supporters’ Association, since it was set up in 1965. In the 1930s Sunderland’s match programme had a black cat on the cover. These days, Sunderland’s mascots Samson and Delilah are black cats, while the Stadium of Light has black cats on its walls and the club’s administration building is called Black Cat House.

The new ground in 1883 was situated near a brickworks and claypit. The pitch at the Dolly Field was regularly heavy to play on. Nearby stood the Wolseley pub, which was used for getting changed. The pub still stands and is a regular stopping-off point for occasional guided tours of Sunderland’s former homes. Long-since built over, the site of the Dolly Field is now occupied by Givens Street and Appley Terrace.

Sunderland Rugby Club historian Keith Gregson offers some thoughtful speculation as to why Sunderland Association Football Club moved across the river from south to north, and also why the club first incorporated the word association into their name: ‘I have references back to December 1873 and January 1874 in other local papers to Sunderland Football Club (which is still the rugby club) and its formation at that point. Post-move to Ashbrooke in 1887 all printed material had Sunderland CC and FC stamped on it (CC is the Cricket Club and FC the Football – rugby – Club). At some point someone stuck an R in (possibly late-twentieth century) so it became Sunderland RFC, but I checked recently with Twickenham and its records still have the rugby club as Sunderland Football Club. I have often mused as to whether SAFC had to put in the A more frequently than other association clubs because there was already an established Sunderland Football Club. Moving on to the 1880s, there were a number of rugby clubs south of the river, of which Sunderland was the most successful (and on the national stage). Ashbrooke was a very middle/upper-middle class area, so perhaps the association side’s move across the river might have been due to the dominance of rugby in the south of the city?’

Gregson’s suggestion sounds entirely feasible, although we cannot be certain. Nonetheless, having crossed the Wear, the club only stayed at the Dolly Field for a year. Just as Groves Field staged what in 2023 remains Sunderland’s biggest competitive victory, the Dolly Field was Sunderland’s home when they won their first trophy – although the Dolly Field did not stage the final and, in fact, there was no trophy! The cup in question was the new Durham Challenge Cup, but the Durham FA did not have sufficient money to pay for a trophy initially, so Sunderland subsequently received it eight months after actually winning it.

The separation of the Northumberland and Durham FAs was significant in that Sunderland have always seen themselves as County Durham’s club. Notwithstanding that in years to come Durham City and Darlington would play in the Football League and that clubs such as Bishop Auckland and Crook Town would go on to have magnificent records in amateur football, it is Sunderland who have always represented the apex of association football in the county. Sunderland was part of County Durham until the creation of Tyne and Wear in 1974, and regardless of that new metropolitan county, Sunderland have continued to play in the Durham Challenge Cup. To 2024, Sunderland’s 22 wins in the competition are more than any other club, although in many years Sunderland have not entered. Nineteen of those wins came before 1930, with most achieved by Sunderland’s second team, most recently in 2020, when the Under 23s shared the trophy with Spennymoor. The fourth of these Durham Challenge Cup triumphs in 1890 would be the last time the trophy was won by the first team, as by that time they were about to enter the Football League.

The opening Sunderland game at the Dolly Field was an 8–1 win over Castle Eden in a friendly on 29 September 1883. Newly acquired supporters at the club’s new home quickly got used to success, as the first ten home games were won and there were triumphs in not one, but two competitions in this season. Fifty-five goals were scored and just six conceded in those first ten home fixtures. These included 7–2, 5–2 and 3–1 wins in the Durham Challenge Cup against Milkwell Burn, Jarrow and Hamsterley Rangers, before a tempestuous climax to the competition away from home.

The semi-final with Hobson Wanderers took place at Whitburn, as did a 6–0 replay victory after an initial goalless draw. However, it was the final that showed that, even in these early days, the passion of the Wearside public for their football team was already strongly in evidence. The match with Darlington was staged in Sunderland, but not at the club’s home ground. Hosted at the Monkwearmouth Cricket Ground on Newcastle Road, the match was won 4–3 by the Wearsiders, with John Grayston one of the scorers, only for the Durham FA to order a replay to be held at Birtley after complaints were upheld about supporters’ behaviour. An estimated crowd of between one and two thousand represented the first time an attendance figure had been reported for a Sunderland match.

Determined to win the trophy, not least after having won it on the pitch already, Sunderland rested four key players, including captain James McMillan, in the one game played before the replayed final. This resulted in a first home defeat at the Dolly Field, but the move paid off when Darlington were beaten again in the replayed final, this time 2–0, with two of the rested quartet, Joyce and McDonald, getting the goals on a pitch that had a cinder track running across its centre, a considerable danger to the players.

Credited by W.T. Wallace as being one of two players – along with Jimmy Allan – who were ‘really the founders of Association Football on Wearside’, James McMillan was born at 22 Howick Street in Alnwick on 28 April 1863, making him just sixteen when association football started in Sunderland, where his family had moved to when he was three. The son of a stonemason, McMillan captained the club as well as serving it administratively. In late January 1884 the Sunderland Echo reported that he had been elected as honorary secretary of a new Sunderland Lacrosse Club, which was being formed ‘under the auspices of Sunderland Association Football Club’. As a player he started as a right-back and played for the club during the years they frequently moved grounds, until retiring from playing in 1887. He would have only been in his mid-twenties then, but, as we shall see, at that time Sunderland’s standards stepped up and Scottish players began to be imported and paid.

McMillan’s influence at the club only increased at this point, though. Having captained the team and represented the county, he did as much as anyone to promote the club in its early years, becoming treasurer, secretary and then succeeding James Marr as chairman – all this while running the master stonemason’s business he had inherited from his father on Hudson Road in Hendon. Both McMillan and Marr were also involved with Sunderland Cricket and Rugby Club too, making significant contributions across the generations, mainly as players. Two of McMillan’s sons played rugby for the club, while James Marr was the father of John Lynn Marr, who played rugby well into the twentieth century.

Summer football is seen as a modern-day aspect of the game, but in 1884 Sunderland played four games on their way to winning another competition in June. This was a North of England Temperance Festival tournament held on Newcastle’s Town Moor. After winning three games, including two that took extra-time, Sunderland met Newcastle East End in the final on 25 June. A first meeting of Sunderland and East End had taken place at Heaton Cricket Field on 3 November 1883, when Jock McDonald was the scourge of the Tynesiders with two of the goals in a 3–0 win.

In winning two trophies in a highly successful season, Sunderland won the vast majority of games they played and scored over 100 goals. There are records of two other games in December and one in April, which were advertised in the local press but without any reports being published, as far as is known. This highlights the earlier point regarding other prior games that may have been played but of which there is no record – who knows, this could even include one or more before the first known meeting with Ferryhill in November 1880.

Although Sunderland were already dominating games in their own region, they came a cropper when, for the first time, they ventured outside of the North East. Proposed fixtures against Blackburn Rovers and Blackburn Olympic failed to materialise, but they did play a game against Great Lever from the Woodside area of Bolton on Monday, 25 February 1884. The Blackburn clubs were early giants of the game. Olympic were the English (FA) Cup holders, while Rovers would replace them as cup winners in 1883–84 and retain the trophy for the next two years, having been finalists in 1882. Sunderland met Great Lever in a match that had been arranged by Reverend Robinson Hindle, who had a brother who ran a hotel in Accrington. In years to come Reverend Hindle would play a leading role in helping Sunderland to join the Football League. A curate in Monkwearmouth at the Venerable Bede Church, and later vicar at Eppleton, he was very interested in sport and, like many young clergy at the time, encouraged his parishioners to share this passion. Hindle became involved in the club, playing when he could, for instance turning out in a match in Dumfries in April 1885. He would also sometimes officiate at games, and he became an important figure behind the scenes, often being seen as a trustworthy figure when writing to officialdom on behalf of the club. When he later left the area for professional reasons, Reverend Hindle was presented with a framed photograph of the team.

The match in Lancashire was an education for Sunderland after they were smashed 11–0 by Great Lever. They were a leading side of the time who, at the start of the season, had brought in so many quality players that, rather like the elite clubs of today who have such strong squads, they could virtually have a ‘league team’ and a ‘cup team’. Great Lever had a side they used for local games, and another, stronger team they fielded in friendlies, or challenge matches, as they were more accurately described. Funded by local mill owners, Great Lever’s side included future England captain John Goodall, who scored five times, and Thurston ‘Tot’ Rostron, who played twice for England as a seventeen-year-old. They also fielded Jimmy Trainer, who went on to play for Wales (and, like Goodall, became a member of the great Preston North End team later in the decade), as well as Jack Switherby, who scored twice and became the first man to captain the USA. He moved there to play for a mill owner who was investing vast fortunes in the mill business and setting up football and cricket teams in and around Newark in New Jersey.

No doubt embarrassed by the margin of the defeat, Sunderland tried to brush this loss under the carpet. Despite this season bringing about the club’s first annual general meeting, neither the trip nor the trouncing were mentioned. In Lancashire, match reports referred to Great Lever hammering Durham rather than Sunderland. Were it not for Alfred Grundy, the chairman of the Durham FA, making it clear in the Athletic newspaper a week later that it was Sunderland and not his Durham side that had been beaten 11–0, perhaps the defeat might have been kept secret. Clearly, Sunderland still had a long way to go to be able to compete with the best, despite the silverware already on show.

Looking to grow, and having witnessed the standard of Great Lever, Sunderland moved home again for the 1884–85 season. Significantly, the move to Abbs Field in Fulwell – where they had agreed to share the pitch with St Bede’s FC – enabled them to play in a completely enclosed ground for the first time. This meant that admission could be charged to see games, boosting the finances of the club as the sport’s popularity increased.