HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF – PART TWO

In part one of this mini history of supporter groups and associations connected to Grimsby Town Football Club, I wrote about the glory days of the Supporters Club, which for nearly three decades raised enough money to pay for floodlights, build stands, buy players and always help the club out in times of need. Having read a little deeper, I have discovered that in the nineteen years following its formation in 1952, it handed over £150,000 to the club. This is a staggering amount and, at a conservative estimate, would be the equivalent of several million pounds these days.

Sadly, all good things must come to an end and it was no different for the Supporters Club. By the late 1970s, a look back through the old programme columns reveals that in 1977 the Supporters Association, as it was now known, was unable to give anything to the club towards covering summer wages, having already forked out £3000 for Keith Hanvey and paid £100 towards the junior team’s trip to Holland. A year later, they reported having made a £250 donation to the club but that it was “not as much as we would like”. Lottery sales were falling, the AGM provoked “the usual small attendance” and income was now down to a few thousand a year. By the 1979/80 season, the Supporters Association programme columns had ceased and presumably so had the association, as a fundraising organisation at any rate.

The Association of Mariners Supporters (AMS) was launched in a blaze of glory by the club in 1981, offering all kinds of benefits, including away travel and from what my brothers tell me, the AMS and a supporter-run travel club both ran buses to away games for several years. Then at the start of the 1984/85 season there was a major falling out when a large number of fans were left at Manchester City by the AMS bus and as a result many supporters migrated to the unofficial (but presumably less forgetful) travel club.

The club entered the Lyons era and went into decline, the AMS fell by the wayside and so the Grimsby Town Supporters Sports & Social Club emerged as the sole surviving supporters association (apart from the Handicapped Supporters Club). For a number of years, the sports and social side was relatively active with football, pool and domino teams being run by the likes of the excellent Bernard Morley, but eventually this petered out and it became the organisation it is today, a travel club, which strives to provide transport to every away game for those who would otherwise have no way of getting there. No easy task, given the costs involved and the impact a bad run of results can have on passenger numbers.

I meant to cover the Youth Development Association and the Ivano Bonetti campaign in part two, but I’ve run out of space and to be honest the history of youth development at the club is probably important enough to have its own column, so I will cover it (and hopefully our chicken-hating Italian friend too) in the next issue.

Before I finish today, there is one piece of Trust housekeeping news to give you. Due to the fact that it is no longer cost effective, we will be cancelling our P O Box address from mid-February. If you wish to write to us, please send any future correspondence to:

GTST, 26 Humberstone Road, Grimsby, DN32 8BP.

In addition to saving the Trust money, this change will also mean that post is dealt with more quickly than may previously have been the case.