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First Football Stories: Bradford Park Avenue knew its place |
In 1863 the world’s first underground railway opened – The Metropolitan Railway – in London, and Yorkshire County Cricket Club played their first home match at Sheffield’s Bramall Lane.
It was a momentous year for association football: The Football Association was formed and adopted the Cambridge Rules of the game – first drafted at Cambridge University in 1848 – with some additions, to form the bedrock of the game across the world.
It was also the year in which Bradford FC came into being.
A century later I remember watching rugby league’s Bradford Northern on the television on Saturday afternoons playing the likes of Wakefield Trinity, Featherstone Rovers and Rochdale Hornets, while Eddie Waring provided the commentary. The second half coverage was part of the BBC’s Grandstand programme and preceded the all-important Teleprinter (later the vidiprinter) where that week’s presenter would read out the football results, which would include those from Bradford (Park Avenue) and Bradford City.
So, what happened to Bradford FC in the intervening years and how were those clubs from different codes of football ever connected?
In fact, an examination of the origins of Bradford FC gives us an insight into football’s wider sporting roots and, as well as connections, plenty of divisions in the football history of first Victorian and then Edwardian England.
Bradford – the seventh-largest city in the UK - was originally part of the West Riding of Yorkshire (now West Yorkshire) and had thrived during the Industrial Revolution on the back of textile production. Before its decline in the mid-twentieth century it had been known as “the wool capital of the world.”
Park Avenue was a sports ground on Bradford’s Horton Park Avenue playing host to 306 first-class cricket matches from 1881 to 1996. I can clearly remember watching Yorkshire County Cricket Club playing Northamptonshire there in May 1983, having travelled up from my then home in Sheffield. Like the County Ground at Northampton and Bramall Lane, Park Avenue was shared by cricket and football teams. Yorkshire have long since stopped using Park Avenue as a regular home venue for cricket, though plans have been muted to invest in it and bring it back to cricket life.
The Bradford club was formed to play rugby football and, playing home games at Park Avenue, duly won the Yorkshire Cup in 1884. Across the city in Manningham another Bradford rugby club – Manningham FC – was formed in 1880, playing first at a field in Whetley Hill, known as Carlisle Road, but moving to the Valley Parade ground in 1886. A fierce rivalry grew between the two teams.
Rugby – along with cricket – was hugely popular in the north of the country in nineteenth-century England. In Yorkshire and Lancashire in particular, clubs – often featuring working-class players – were beginning to dominate the rugby landscape; resented by their counterparts in the south.
Many of those same players in the north could either forego their daily wages when playing rugby or seek some kind of compensation for their financial loss: these became known as “broken time” payments. Without financial support, accompanied by a lack of job security in many cases, many were simply unable to play, especially as the number of scheduled matches was increasing all the time to maximise gate receipts.
However, the Rugby Football Union (RFU), of which Bradford was a member, was dominated by those same southern members whose players and committee members often had their roots in the public school origins of the game in England, and who were keen to (and could better afford to) preserve its amateur status. Publicly they saw broken time payments as being little more than a move towards professionalism in the game. Privately, northern members of the Union were finding it increasingly difficult to travel to committee meetings in London, which the RFU resolutely refused to shift.
In 1892 – despite proof that England’s rugby players who toured Australia four years earlier had been paid, the RFU accused players in Bradford and near-neighbours Leeds of flouting the rules by paying compensation to their players. The following year, the RFU committee voted down demands for broken time payments to be allowed.
All of this came to a head in a meeting at the George Hotel, Huddersfield in August 1895, when 20 clubs from Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire agreed to secede from the RFU and, with two others, form the Northern Rugby Football Union instead. In 1922 the Northern Union was renamed as the Rugby Football League and the term rugby league to depict that code of rugby has been used ever since.
It may have been that rugby’s breakaway after the great split was inspired by the formation of the Football League – the world’s first professional association football league – seven years earlier, in 1888, featuring 12 inaugural member clubs from the Midlands and North of England.
So where did that leave rugby in Bradford and when did the next split occur, leading to association football in the city?
Manningham FC also joined the Northern Union in 1895 and became its first champions in 1896 – effectively rugby league’s first ever championship-winning side. Following a subsequent relegation and a period during which only a successful archery competition kept the club afloat financially, the decision was taken in 1903 to abandon rugby and adopt association football instead. The club changed its name to Bradford City AFC and joined the Second Division of the Football League, finishing 10th in their first season in 1903-04.
Bradford FC continued to play Northern Union rugby at Park Avenue, winning the championship themselves in 1903-04 after a play-off against Salford, and beating Salford again to win the Challenge Cup trophy in 1906. Since the great rugby schism in 1895, though, Bradford FC had also built a side to play association football, alternating each Saturday with the rugby side at Park Avenue.
The football team joined the West Yorkshire League and in 1895-96 tied for the title with Hunslet from south Leeds. In April 1898, Hunslet would beat Harrogate Town in the West Yorkshire Cup, in front of 3,400 football supporters, in the first competitive football match ever to be played at Elland Road – shortly to become the home ground of Leeds City and now of Leeds United.
Although football was growing in popularity in West Yorkshire, Bradford FC’s success did not continue. Joining the much more competitive Yorkshire League in 1897, they struggled and, after briefly moving to the Birch Lane ground and finishing fourth from bottom in 1888-89 with just nine points, the club’s rugby committee decided to end Bradford’s first foray into professional football.
However, despite the rugby team’s success, and mindful of the rise of Bradford City, the Bradford FC committee decided, in 1907, that the club should return to association football on a permanent basis. To distinguish itself from Bradford City, Bradford (Park Avenue) AFC was created. A major driver in this conversion was benefactor Harry Briggs whose father - Edward -was a successful local businessman and mill owner, and who had been a founder member back in 1880 of the Bradford Cricket, Athletic & Football Club (BCA&FC) at the Park Avenue ground. Harry Briggs had initially muted the idea of Bradford FC and the new Bradford City club amalgamating, fearing that the area could not support two clubs financially. However, still mindful of a competitive past, this was rejected by City and Briggs pressed on with his plans to convert Bradford FC to soccer. The switch of codes has gone down in local folklore as ‘the great betrayal’ and resulted in Bradford’s rugby place in the Northern Union being taken by a new club – Bradford Northern.
Bradford Northern played their home matches initially at the Greenfield Athletic Ground for one season, then at Birch Lane from 1908 to 1934, before moving to Odsal Stadium. In 1996, in rugby league’s Super League era, the club changed its name again, to Bradford Bulls. The Bulls won the championship title a year later - with a record run of 20 victories in succession from the beginning of the season - and celebrated their centenary year as a rugby club in 2007.
As per their name the football club returned to Park Avenue where renowned Scottish architect Archibald Leitch – who had worked on major football stadium developments in Glasgow (including Hampden Park, Celtic Park and Ibrox Park) and London (including Highbury, Stamford Bridge and White Hart Lane) was called in to redevelop the ground, eventually providing for a capacity of 37,000 spectators.
Like Bradford City, Bradford (Park Avenue) applied to join the Football League in May 1907 but were rejected. Instead they joined the Southern League with their nearest away fixture being at Northampton Town, some 130 miles away.
Bradford had replaced Fulham in the Southern League and, at the end of their only season in that league – in another astonishing example of management committee brinkmanship during these times - other London clubs Queen’s Park Rangers and Tottenham Hotspur announced that they were quitting the Southern League.
Bradford also left and were allowed to join the Football League’s Second Division. QPR eventually stayed in the Southern League while Tottenham’s application to also join the Football League hung by a thread. They received the same number of votes as Lincoln City, but the Football League’s management committee eventually voted them in by five votes to three.
Bradford’s first match in the Football League was a home derby against Hull City, which Park Avenue won 1.0. While Tottenham would be promoted in second place to the First Division in their first season, Bradford finished 16th (out of 20). In 1913-14 they too finished second and had a season in the First Division before football was suspended because of World War One. In that 1914-15 season they finished in ninth place – their best ever league finish and just five points behind league champions Everton. Perhaps more importantly, they also finished one point ahead of Bradford City.
After the war, Bradford (Park Avenue) got to the FA Cup Quarter-final in 1920 and enjoyed two more seasons in the top-flight before they finished bottom of the league in 1920-21 and were relegated, never to return to the First Division. Finishing 21st in Division Two the following season, they then joined Division Three (North) where they stayed until 1927-28 when they won that league – their only championship-winning season – and returned to Division Two. Goals by Ken McDonald who was the club’s top scorer for three consecutive seasons undoubtedly made the difference.
There were of course some great results in the club’s history including an 8.2 win against Manchester City at Maine Road in the Fourth Round of the FA Cup in January 1946. They also beat City’s rivals United 6.1 at Park Avenue in a Division Two match in October 1933. As Roses victories it probably didn’t get much better than these. Generally, though, it felt as if the club’s best years as an association football club were behind them.
The club eventually slipped back to Division Three (North) and then to its replacement, the Fourth Division. After selling a young and free-scoring Kevin Hector – who had been top scorer for the club for four consecutive seasons, and who hit 45 in his final season at Park Avenue - to Derby County for £34,000 in 1966, the club did not invest wisely. They finished in the bottom three of the Fourth Division for four seasons in a row before, in 1970, they failed to gain re-election to the Football League and were replaced by Cambridge United.
Over 100 years since their formation, committees of men with vested interests still held sway over the club’s future. Joining the Northern Premier League and after selling Park Avenue in 1973, the club briefly ground-shared with Bradford City before going into liquidation in 1974.
(A Sunday League team was formed in 1977 and then a new club ahead of the 1988-89 season. Bradford (Park Avenue) currently play at Bradford’s Horsfall Stadium in Conference North – the sixth tier of the English football pyramid).
It was a momentous year for association football: The Football Association was formed and adopted the Cambridge Rules of the game – first drafted at Cambridge University in 1848 – with some additions, to form the bedrock of the game across the world.
It was also the year in which Bradford FC came into being.
A century later I remember watching rugby league’s Bradford Northern on the television on Saturday afternoons playing the likes of Wakefield Trinity, Featherstone Rovers and Rochdale Hornets, while Eddie Waring provided the commentary. The second half coverage was part of the BBC’s Grandstand programme and preceded the all-important Teleprinter (later the vidiprinter) where that week’s presenter would read out the football results, which would include those from Bradford (Park Avenue) and Bradford City.
So, what happened to Bradford FC in the intervening years and how were those clubs from different codes of football ever connected?
In fact, an examination of the origins of Bradford FC gives us an insight into football’s wider sporting roots and, as well as connections, plenty of divisions in the football history of first Victorian and then Edwardian England.
Bradford – the seventh-largest city in the UK - was originally part of the West Riding of Yorkshire (now West Yorkshire) and had thrived during the Industrial Revolution on the back of textile production. Before its decline in the mid-twentieth century it had been known as “the wool capital of the world.”
Park Avenue was a sports ground on Bradford’s Horton Park Avenue playing host to 306 first-class cricket matches from 1881 to 1996. I can clearly remember watching Yorkshire County Cricket Club playing Northamptonshire there in May 1983, having travelled up from my then home in Sheffield. Like the County Ground at Northampton and Bramall Lane, Park Avenue was shared by cricket and football teams. Yorkshire have long since stopped using Park Avenue as a regular home venue for cricket, though plans have been muted to invest in it and bring it back to cricket life.
The Bradford club was formed to play rugby football and, playing home games at Park Avenue, duly won the Yorkshire Cup in 1884. Across the city in Manningham another Bradford rugby club – Manningham FC – was formed in 1880, playing first at a field in Whetley Hill, known as Carlisle Road, but moving to the Valley Parade ground in 1886. A fierce rivalry grew between the two teams.
Rugby – along with cricket – was hugely popular in the north of the country in nineteenth-century England. In Yorkshire and Lancashire in particular, clubs – often featuring working-class players – were beginning to dominate the rugby landscape; resented by their counterparts in the south.
Many of those same players in the north could either forego their daily wages when playing rugby or seek some kind of compensation for their financial loss: these became known as “broken time” payments. Without financial support, accompanied by a lack of job security in many cases, many were simply unable to play, especially as the number of scheduled matches was increasing all the time to maximise gate receipts.
However, the Rugby Football Union (RFU), of which Bradford was a member, was dominated by those same southern members whose players and committee members often had their roots in the public school origins of the game in England, and who were keen to (and could better afford to) preserve its amateur status. Publicly they saw broken time payments as being little more than a move towards professionalism in the game. Privately, northern members of the Union were finding it increasingly difficult to travel to committee meetings in London, which the RFU resolutely refused to shift.
In 1892 – despite proof that England’s rugby players who toured Australia four years earlier had been paid, the RFU accused players in Bradford and near-neighbours Leeds of flouting the rules by paying compensation to their players. The following year, the RFU committee voted down demands for broken time payments to be allowed.
All of this came to a head in a meeting at the George Hotel, Huddersfield in August 1895, when 20 clubs from Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire agreed to secede from the RFU and, with two others, form the Northern Rugby Football Union instead. In 1922 the Northern Union was renamed as the Rugby Football League and the term rugby league to depict that code of rugby has been used ever since.
It may have been that rugby’s breakaway after the great split was inspired by the formation of the Football League – the world’s first professional association football league – seven years earlier, in 1888, featuring 12 inaugural member clubs from the Midlands and North of England.
So where did that leave rugby in Bradford and when did the next split occur, leading to association football in the city?
Manningham FC also joined the Northern Union in 1895 and became its first champions in 1896 – effectively rugby league’s first ever championship-winning side. Following a subsequent relegation and a period during which only a successful archery competition kept the club afloat financially, the decision was taken in 1903 to abandon rugby and adopt association football instead. The club changed its name to Bradford City AFC and joined the Second Division of the Football League, finishing 10th in their first season in 1903-04.
Bradford FC continued to play Northern Union rugby at Park Avenue, winning the championship themselves in 1903-04 after a play-off against Salford, and beating Salford again to win the Challenge Cup trophy in 1906. Since the great rugby schism in 1895, though, Bradford FC had also built a side to play association football, alternating each Saturday with the rugby side at Park Avenue.
The football team joined the West Yorkshire League and in 1895-96 tied for the title with Hunslet from south Leeds. In April 1898, Hunslet would beat Harrogate Town in the West Yorkshire Cup, in front of 3,400 football supporters, in the first competitive football match ever to be played at Elland Road – shortly to become the home ground of Leeds City and now of Leeds United.
Although football was growing in popularity in West Yorkshire, Bradford FC’s success did not continue. Joining the much more competitive Yorkshire League in 1897, they struggled and, after briefly moving to the Birch Lane ground and finishing fourth from bottom in 1888-89 with just nine points, the club’s rugby committee decided to end Bradford’s first foray into professional football.
However, despite the rugby team’s success, and mindful of the rise of Bradford City, the Bradford FC committee decided, in 1907, that the club should return to association football on a permanent basis. To distinguish itself from Bradford City, Bradford (Park Avenue) AFC was created. A major driver in this conversion was benefactor Harry Briggs whose father - Edward -was a successful local businessman and mill owner, and who had been a founder member back in 1880 of the Bradford Cricket, Athletic & Football Club (BCA&FC) at the Park Avenue ground. Harry Briggs had initially muted the idea of Bradford FC and the new Bradford City club amalgamating, fearing that the area could not support two clubs financially. However, still mindful of a competitive past, this was rejected by City and Briggs pressed on with his plans to convert Bradford FC to soccer. The switch of codes has gone down in local folklore as ‘the great betrayal’ and resulted in Bradford’s rugby place in the Northern Union being taken by a new club – Bradford Northern.
Bradford Northern played their home matches initially at the Greenfield Athletic Ground for one season, then at Birch Lane from 1908 to 1934, before moving to Odsal Stadium. In 1996, in rugby league’s Super League era, the club changed its name again, to Bradford Bulls. The Bulls won the championship title a year later - with a record run of 20 victories in succession from the beginning of the season - and celebrated their centenary year as a rugby club in 2007.
As per their name the football club returned to Park Avenue where renowned Scottish architect Archibald Leitch – who had worked on major football stadium developments in Glasgow (including Hampden Park, Celtic Park and Ibrox Park) and London (including Highbury, Stamford Bridge and White Hart Lane) was called in to redevelop the ground, eventually providing for a capacity of 37,000 spectators.
Like Bradford City, Bradford (Park Avenue) applied to join the Football League in May 1907 but were rejected. Instead they joined the Southern League with their nearest away fixture being at Northampton Town, some 130 miles away.
Bradford had replaced Fulham in the Southern League and, at the end of their only season in that league – in another astonishing example of management committee brinkmanship during these times - other London clubs Queen’s Park Rangers and Tottenham Hotspur announced that they were quitting the Southern League.
Bradford also left and were allowed to join the Football League’s Second Division. QPR eventually stayed in the Southern League while Tottenham’s application to also join the Football League hung by a thread. They received the same number of votes as Lincoln City, but the Football League’s management committee eventually voted them in by five votes to three.
Bradford’s first match in the Football League was a home derby against Hull City, which Park Avenue won 1.0. While Tottenham would be promoted in second place to the First Division in their first season, Bradford finished 16th (out of 20). In 1913-14 they too finished second and had a season in the First Division before football was suspended because of World War One. In that 1914-15 season they finished in ninth place – their best ever league finish and just five points behind league champions Everton. Perhaps more importantly, they also finished one point ahead of Bradford City.
After the war, Bradford (Park Avenue) got to the FA Cup Quarter-final in 1920 and enjoyed two more seasons in the top-flight before they finished bottom of the league in 1920-21 and were relegated, never to return to the First Division. Finishing 21st in Division Two the following season, they then joined Division Three (North) where they stayed until 1927-28 when they won that league – their only championship-winning season – and returned to Division Two. Goals by Ken McDonald who was the club’s top scorer for three consecutive seasons undoubtedly made the difference.
There were of course some great results in the club’s history including an 8.2 win against Manchester City at Maine Road in the Fourth Round of the FA Cup in January 1946. They also beat City’s rivals United 6.1 at Park Avenue in a Division Two match in October 1933. As Roses victories it probably didn’t get much better than these. Generally, though, it felt as if the club’s best years as an association football club were behind them.
The club eventually slipped back to Division Three (North) and then to its replacement, the Fourth Division. After selling a young and free-scoring Kevin Hector – who had been top scorer for the club for four consecutive seasons, and who hit 45 in his final season at Park Avenue - to Derby County for £34,000 in 1966, the club did not invest wisely. They finished in the bottom three of the Fourth Division for four seasons in a row before, in 1970, they failed to gain re-election to the Football League and were replaced by Cambridge United.
Over 100 years since their formation, committees of men with vested interests still held sway over the club’s future. Joining the Northern Premier League and after selling Park Avenue in 1973, the club briefly ground-shared with Bradford City before going into liquidation in 1974.
(A Sunday League team was formed in 1977 and then a new club ahead of the 1988-89 season. Bradford (Park Avenue) currently play at Bradford’s Horsfall Stadium in Conference North – the sixth tier of the English football pyramid).
