HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF - PART ONE

Rather like the embarrassed father who says to his wife, “He’s your son” when his child misbehaves and “That’s my boy!” when the lad scores a winning goal for the school team, so football fans tend to have the same mentality. Thus, Grimsby Town is their club when the team is doing well on the pitch and John Fenty’s when they’re playing like a dog’s breakfast.

Of course this negation of responsibility and ownership by the fans then leads to the attitude that because it’s the chairman’s club, he should be the one putting the money in and putting things right, not the fans.

Now you’re probably thinking, here we go again, it’s another one of those give us your money preachy programme columns from those chairman-loving people at GTST. But it’s not. It’s actually a look back at over a century of Grimsby Town to show that what the Trust is doing is nothing new. It’s all been done before, several times over.

A trawl through the history books (thank you Messrs Wherry, Ekberg, Woodhead, Briggs et al) and nearly fifty years of matchday programmes reveals that Grimsby Town fans have been doing what the Trust is trying to do, i.e. support the youth system and invest money in the club, for over a hundred years.

What is now the Main Stand was paid for by the raising of 150 subscriptions of £10 in 1900. In 1960, an obviously thriving Supporters Club, which had branches in Barton, Brigg and Mablethorpe, paid £9000 for the installation of new floodlights at Blundell Park and followed it up a year later by funding the building of the new Pontoon Stand. So take a good look around you at Blundell Park, because large parts of it were paid for by people just like us. £9000 doesn’t sound like a massive amount now, but it was nearly fifty years ago.

I don’t know when the Supporters Club was originally founded** (if anyone has any information on its history pre-1960, please email me at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it or write to GTST, PO Box 421, Grimsby, DN32 9WL), but in the 1960s and 70s, they were certainly a fundraising force to be reckoned with. They were helped by having their own headquarters down Imperial Avenue, which afforded them a base at and from which to carry out their fundraising activities.

At a time when wall-to-wall football on TV wasn’t even a twinkle in someone’s eye and people weren’t so glued to their armchairs, I would imagine their whist and solo drives and tombola nights at Supporters Club HQ and their “Miss Football Queen” dances at the Cafe Dansant and Memorial Hall were both very popular and highly lucrative. Add to that a weekly lottery, which ran for years and it’s no surprise that in addition to donations given to the club towards running expenses in times of need and the subsidisation of an OAP reduced admission scheme, they also paid 25% of the £8000 transfer fee for Joe Waters in 1976 and £3000 to buy Keith Hanvey a year later. At their peak, the Supporters Club truly showed the advantage of the collaborative over the individual.

In part two – the demise of the Supporters Club, the phoenix-like Youth Development Association and a certain Italian.

** Following the publication of this article, we received information from GTFC historian Rob Briggs, informing us that the Supporters Club was in fact formed in June 1952. Those who now disapprove of supporters organisations being too close to the club would almost certainly not have liked the fact that two club directors and manager Bill Shankley were members of the committee (and they would definitely not have liked the supporters' clubs assertion that "its aims are to assist the Grimsby Town FC and not to govern it"), but clearly the fans in 1952 did not feel the same way, as the club had a membership of more than six thousand only a couple of months after its formation.

However he also told us that the first Supporters Club was in fact formed in the summer of 1920 following GTFC's relegation to the new Division Three. It was apparently encouraged after a visit to the area by Football League official (and later President) Charles Sutcliffe. This incarnation of the Supporters Club folded after only a few years, but Rob says that in November 1921 the Saturday Telegraph noted that it had given "valuable assistance" to the club during 1920-21.