HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF – PART FOUR

If the demise of the Grimsby Town Junior Club (as covered in the Dagenham programme) was a waste, then what happened to the Grimsby Town Youth Development Association not once, but twice, was bordering on the criminal.

Back in 1971, the club was in deep water financially and applied to the council for a loan from the £460,000 Fish Dock Fund, which had been built up by the interest on loans, which the council had made towards the cost of building the No. 3 Fish Dock in 1934. The Club asked for a loan of £40,000 over a three-year period, so that they could build a real youth team on which the club could rely for the future. The council turned them down. (Extract above from "The Mariner" - 14th August 1971)

Two years earlier, the Grimsby Town Colts, which had presumably been axed as part of not very forward thinking cost-cutting measures, were reformed and then manager Bobby Kennedy let his intentions be known that he wanted to get a successful youth policy underway in the town. A few months later, local fish merchant Rowland Drewery, who had joined the GTFC Board in November 1969, was appointed Youth Director, and the Ancient Mariner’s column in the matchday programme on 10^th January 1970 announced a “Catch ‘em Young Campaign” by Town.

However any large scale plans to maintain a serious and sustainable youth policy were hamstrung by the club’s dire financial straits. Back in March 1968, Ancient Mariner predicted drastic cuts in playing staff and stated that the club was “now paying the penalty of the squandermania of those days when things were going very right with the club.” Sound familiar? Think ITV Digital and £13,000 a week for a certain Chinese gentleman.

Later in the year, it was stated that average gates of 7000 were needed if the club was to pay its way and pull out of the financial slump of the previous season. Fat chance of that. Having been relegated from the old Division Two in 1964, the slump continued, with relegation to Division Four in 1968 and then 23^rd place in the bottom league in 1969. Gates rarely came even close to the 7000 and the average crowd was probably not even half that.

By March 1971, and despite the less spendthrift Board’s best efforts, the club was losing £750 a week, relying on handouts from the Supporters Club to pay summer wages, purchase players and make essential ground repairs and was “on the floor as far as fluid capital is concerned.” The council’s rejection of the GTFC’s application for a loan was therefore a massive kick in the teeth for a club already on its knees.

So it was then, that with the club’s plans for a “real youth team” scuppered by its not-so-friendly local councillors, the Grimsby Town Youth Development Association (YDA) was launched in August 1971. As GTFC Chairman Paddy Hamilton commented not long after the YDA’s creation, “There is no activity more worthwhile in football than the encouragement of progressing young people and I am sure the Association have much to contribute to the future of GTFC”. 

How right he was on both counts. So why did the YDA cease to exist after ten years, rise phoenix-like from the ashes five years later, only to disappear once again? As one of our guest writers will be taking up the pen for the MK Dons match, there will be more on that in the Barnet programme.