SPIRALLING WAGES! A THREAT ONCE AGAIN TO THE BEAUTIFUL GAME?

Have I heard this before?

Manchester City have taken over from Chelsea and Man Utd, and are now certainly being a 'pain in the backside' to the poorer clubs in the Premiership.

I feel this inequality will cause some clubs to overspend and possibly we could well see a number of clubs going into administration.

I saw this comment in a local paper last week and because as of yet; I hadn't mentioned The Wanderers in my posts I thought the following insight into my favourite team and the state of the game of yesteryear might interest some of you.

A quote from a leader column in the Express and Star dated August 28th 1901.

'The huge wages which first class association football players have been in receipt of, have impoverished many of our leading clubs and if not the subject been dealt with in a bold manner by the fixing of a wage limit the continued drain would have brought about the collapse of many of our best clubs.

As it was this bogey was threatening the very existence of the first division of the league and the subject was tackled just in time'

HOW TO MAKE THINGS PAY

(Cartoon from the Birmingham Argos Series in 1946)

IN 1908 MR SYDNEY HAS TO STEP IN AGAIN

On may 30th 1908 the Annual General Meeting of the Football Association was held at the Holborn Restaurant.

Lord Kinnaid being absent, Charles Crump as senior Vice-President took the chair. It was an important meeting, for Mr Clegg was to propose the abolition of any restriction on wages and bonuses. The existing regulations, he said, were being flouted.

But Mr Sidney of the Wolverhampton Wanderers, and former member of the league Management committee, opposed the suggestion. The present rule he argued worked excellently, and Wolves had no trouble in re-signing their players.

Every thing in football must not be sacrificed to money, and clubs with little money, but any amount of enthusiasm must have a chance to carry off the highest honours of the football field.

Supported by the representative of Preston North End, Mr. Sidney carried the meeting with him, and the motion was defeated.

(Just weeks after Wolves' 1908 English Cup Victory)

Sydney went on to say -

'Today we find many old established clubs in anything but a sound financial position and the directors of these combinations are now taking advantage of the rules in place related to the payment of players in the hope of being able to steer their barques away from the sands of financial disaster'

It strikes me that these words although over a hundred years old, ring true once again today.

THE MARKETS

The original market place as you probably know was in High Green, which is now Queen Square; and was long a nuisance to the inhabitants and a great trial to the health of the Butchers, green-grocers etc, who possessed the stalls.

So in 1848, the newly elected Town Council agreed that a new General Market Hall was necessary for the town. This was opened in march 1853 alongside its aspiring neighbour; the Exchange on the west front of St Peters Church, where it remained for 100 years.




If I tried to describe the feeling I had every time I entered the old retail market in Cheapside with my mother during the war, you'd think I was talking about entering the Coliseum in Rome, because it was certainly built on a similar grand scale.

On its two main fronts, the east and west ones, the entrances were enriched with many Corinthian and Doric columns. The pictures here can only give you a glimpse of this magnificent interior so full of variety and atmosphere, with a bustling spirit of life.

But every one over fifty will have their own memories of the markets I just hope my pictures will help to take you back a bit.


In 1953 the handsome structure pictured on the right celebrated its Centenary, and who would have dreamt it would be gone in just ten more short years, but Sainsburys had just recently opened the first supermarket in London and for the days of the old traditional markets, the writing was on the wall.



A learned gent said, at one time 'There are no good old days, nor bad old days, just changing times where the new benefits are always at the expense of losses in other ways'.

Take the varieties of fruit and veg available nowadays in the supermarkets, you might say, we are spoilt for choice, if you want strawberries at christmas you can have them, but this has come at a cost. And just to give you a little idea of what we are missing today this was Jim Goughs pre-war fruit stall .

I can honestly say, I think myself most fortunate to have seen the markets in their prime. full of atmosphere, and pageantry. Stalls passed down through generations of the same families, selling every variety of household needs., the likes of which I doubt we will ever see again.




Its hard to believe now, that our parents and theirs before them, trod this same ground, purchased at these same stalls from different generations of the same family. So perhaps this was the factor that made a visit to this market something more than a shopping expedition, a tour of the market in those days was indeed a happy and social occasion.