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World’s Oldest Football Record

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Hi, I am a first time poster but a long time record collector and thought I would kick off my account on TAW with a question. Does anyone here have an older football (soccer) related record? The reason I ask is because I would love to know if one exists older than the one I found a few years ago and just showing the disc here may interest other collectors to get in touch.
I found it in an auction lot a couple of years ago and it dates from 1907. The audio on the link is an Englishman doing the commentary on a Scottish match on a one sided 78 that was reproduced in German 115 years ago! Curious facts include Celtic referred to as The Celts on the label and that radio football commentary didn’t start until 20 years later. I hope someone has a similar old football related record and even though I have quite a few I am always pleased to see others I don’t have.

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https://i.imgur.com/D1LDGoz.jpg

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  2. Well I’m originally from Sheffield, home of the worlds oldest football club (1857 if I remember correctly) and obviously home of ABC, Def Leppard, Heaven 17 and Human League amongst others.

    Thus, I would posit, based on very sound logic (the one that is prevalent after 3 bottles of wine amongst 5 friends) that the oldest football song was by Glen Gregory’s great great great great grandfather with his little ditty “Don’t You Want my Hat-trick”.

    I may be wrong

  3. Amazingly, this Jock bloke turns up on Discogs! Not only that, but he’s got a track (not this one) on a Bear Family 5CD set stacked full of gems like The Old Bull And Bush, The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo and The Laughing Policeman.

    All those childhood Sunday evenings when I had to put up with ‘The Good Old Days’; now I have a way to repeat the experience, albeit in the absence of Leonard Sachs, Arthur Askey and the rest. Deep joy!

    In all seriousness, this is a fascinating glimpse of a time gone by, and any of us hooting at the prospect of hearing new stuff from Viv Stanshall should be glad that it exists, and happy to see it celebrated here on the Afterword: welcome aboard @Gardener!

  4. Zonophone was at that time the budget label of The Gramophone Company, who later merged with Columbia Graphophone to become EMI, and this dates from before The Gramophone Company adopted the His Master’s Voice logo. It also dates from before the opening of the pressing plant in Hayes, with all records pressed at the Gramophone Company’s pressing plant in Hanover.

    Some Zonophone releases with X- series catalogue numbers were re-issues of material that had previously appeared on a main Gramophone Company label – Gramophone labels had different titles, with 10″ ones bearing the name Gramophone Concert.

    International Zonophone seems to have been a particular imprint for ‘world’ recording from foreign nations – presumably including Scotland.

    The matrix number of the recording may give some clues as to when it was recorded, and more.

  6. I remember begging my mum to buy me “Back Home” by the England 1970 World Cup Squad when I was 11. I loved the song and still have it in my collection. It made me smile when I found out that it was written by two Scotsmen. It reminds me of watching Brazil, who were possibly the greatest team of all time. Still haven’t quite got over England losing to West Germany in the quarter final 3-2 after being 2-0 up.

    • I would have been 8 at the time. My mum said she would buy me “Back Home”, “if they win”. I was disappointed to find out she meant the whole thing – not just the first match, (Romania I think). For some reason I know that the B side was “cinnamon stick” – a fact way too obscure for any pub trivia.

  7. I have tried (and still trying when I remember) to collect as many Football Team records. The oldest one I’ve got is Lonnie Donegan World Cup Willie from 1966.
    The oldest “Footballers singing” is England 1970 Back Home.
    Many are a triumph of hope over reality:
    Scotland 1974 – Easy Easy (it wasn’t)
    Liverpool 1977 – We Can Do it (they didn’t)
    Scotland 1982 – We Have A Dream (which didn’t come true)
    England 1982 – This Time We’ll Get It Right (they didn’t)
    Tottenham Hotspur 1991 – When The Year Ends In 1 (1971? 2001? 2011? 2021?)

  8. What a day! This morning I was woken by my own erection and now a new AW poster too..
    Salut Gardener! I’d be surprised if there was an older football record as I don’t think there are a lot of older records of any kind.
    The phrase “oldest record” put me in mind of Joe Kittinger, who I only recently discovered died last year. He’s the guy who set a record for the highest altitude jump (JK was the first human to witness the curvature of the Earth first hand) which stood for 52 years until Felix Baumgartner, backed by Red Bull and advised by Kittenger, broke the free fall height and distance record in a blaze of publicity in 2012 – only for Alan Eustace to come along two years later and quietly break that record.
    But… both Eustace and Baumgartner opened their chutes sooner than Kittenger, so Joe still holds the record for the longest free fall (in terms of duration)..

  9. thanks for your kind words folks, I do have several nice football related gems but this one tops the lot to be honest. I also have this first recording on disc of a bird, a nightingale to be precise but may have to start another post for that, it’s a HMV 78 from 1913.

  10. Let’s go the other way @gardener I’m sure you are right with the oldest. But in these days of brand consultants and training kit sponsors the footie track appears hopelessly outdated. Has to be an official release and featuring the squad – when was the last football club track released? Did Luton celebrate their promotion with a cunning earworm? Those always awful ‘official song of the fifa World Cup’ featuring Pitbull and Shakira excluded. Has to feature actual footballers. 5 mins on YouTube reveals the international tournament team
    Song is alive and well – but club songs?

  11. That’s a terrific thing to have @gardener. Could it be that this was Jock’s stage act? A small musical piece and then he re-enacts the events of the match? Perhaps he did it on stage, on the Saturday evening of the game in question? Perhaps a lot of the audience didn’t know the score and this was how they found out?

    Perhaps some people didn’t want to know the score until they saw Jock do his thing because that was more exciting than just seeing the score…

  13. Welcome on board, Gardener!

    You got me curious about Jock Whiteford. It seems he was quite a star in his day.

    Here’s a caricature from the V & A by George Cooke, who was famed for his portraits of music hall artists.

    https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O499259/caricatures-cooke-george/caricature-cooke-george/

    Here is Jock singing

    And here are the lyrics of a song that he used to perform: Adam was a Scotsman.

    https://monologues.co.uk/musichall/Songs-A/Adam-Was-A-Scotchman.htm

    The history of the music hall in Scotland! Now there’s an arcane topic which rarely gets discussed on the Afterword….

    • Sorry to go off piste, but I found an excellent article on Scottish music hall.

      https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/library/files/special/collections/STA/articles/music_hall/index.html

      “Theatre makers responsible for some of the iconic hits of post-war Scottish theatre – from John McGrath’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil and Tony Roper’s The Steamie to the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch – have all acknowledged the debt to music hall humour. And performers such as Stanley Baxter, Rikki Fulton, Jack Milroy and Chic Murray – the last generation produced by variety, whose careers carried over into television – remain lodged in the national consciousness many years after their last appearances, their influence having permeated across many different types of theatre.”

      And that of course led me to read a little more about its most famous star: Harry Lauder.

      The highest paid performer in the world and the first British artist to sell a million records.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Lauder

      He was described by Sir Winston Churchill as “Scotland’s greatest ever ambassador”, who “… by his inspiring songs and valiant life, rendered measureless service to the Scottish race and to the British Empire.” He became a familiar worldwide figure promoting images like the kilt and the cromach (walking stick) to huge acclaim, especially in America. Among his most popular songs were “Roamin’ in the Gloamin'”, “A Wee Deoch-an-Doris”, “The End of the Road” and, a particularly big hit for him, “I Love a Lassie”.

      Long before the White Heather Club, Kenneth MacKellar, Donald and his troosers, Lauder was the world’s first Scottish superstar.

      To us, Jock’s football record is a wonderful rarity. For him, it could well have been rather decent source of income.

  17. A ‘medieval troubadour’ writes.

    Harken to the tale of the leather ball,
    Kicked and punched, fought for by all!
    In the fields, the commons, an age-old game,
    A joyous sight, bring on your claim!

    In the village square, the teams did meet,
    From dawn until dusk, they played with such beat,
    With naught but bare hands, feet and wit,
    To score a goal, a triumph to fit!

    From shires and hamlets, they came out to play,
    A game of honour, a game to slay,
    The victors cheered, the losers in sadness,
    A test of strength, a test of madness!

    Oh, medieval football, a game divine,
    A memory cherished, a game of time,
    Let the ball roll, let the game begin,
    A chant in unison, a victory to win!

  19. I’ve discovered three earlier Zonophone recordings of similar football records, made anonymously by the comedian Albert Whelan in 1905. The recording engineer was William Conrad Gaisberg, who also recorded your record. The catalogue numbers appear to be higher than on yours, but it appears that the first two digits were a prefix to indicate which recording series they were released under. I’ve no idea if any copies of these survive.

    X-49265 – Football Match No 1: Newcastle United v Manchester City
    X-49266 – Football Match No 2: Manchester City v Newcastle United
    X-49267 – Football Match No 3: Fulham v Southampton

    The first two in the series were recorded on 23rd November 1905, whilst the third was recorded earlier on the 7th of that month.

    The first two recordings also seem to have been re-issued as a double-sided record on Zonophone with the catalogue number 565. This would have been no earlier than 1911.

  21. I am curious to knw how many people had gramophones back in 1905. And how many records were sold. At this point the gramophone record was something very new and was in the process of taking over from Edson’s invention. the phonograph cylinder

    This articel provides some background;

    https://typeset.io/pdf/the-world-s-greatest-sound-archive-78-rpm-records-as-a-1hvk868pi0.pdf

    “However, by 1905 the phonograph cylinder had already been surpassed by a competing
    invention, the gramophone record. Disc records were pressed into a shellac compound and,
    after some experimentation, the playing speed was standardized at seventy-eight revolutions
    per minute. Discs were easier to manufacture and handle, and their playing time was longer
    than cylinders. The gramophone record was designed for mass reproduction. It could not be
    used for home recording, but for most consumers that did not matter. For the general public,
    “records” soon became synonymous with discs. For the first half of the twentieth century, the
    standard format of sound recordings was the 78 rpm shellac disc and, by the demise of the
    format in the late 1950s, at least a million titles had been issued by various record companies
    all around the world”

    • I wonder at what point did artists actually begin to go into studios expressly to record new songs? I would say that every artist of the 1900s was an established stage performer and that was their main income. The most popular ones could record a song and people would buy it – but they’d still be treading the boards. By the time we get to the 50s rock n roll boom the performers were still essentially recording their live performances.

      Even major film stars like the Marx Brothers,Sinatra and Laurel & Hardy seemed to be perpetually on tour.

      The biopics of just about everyone involves starting on the road doing shows and getting ripped off left right and centre. Even Elvis was doing this right up to his death when, in theory, he could have made a very handsome living just on the record sales. The Beatles made the decision in 1966 not to tour but they can’t have been the first. Who was the first artist to release studio-only music without an attaching live act to perform? Delia Derbyshire?

  22. Interesting point, @Black Celebration. This article is excellent on the economics of the music industry in the 1920s.

    https://medium.com/@Vinylmint/history-of-the-record-industry-1920-1950s-6d491d7cb606

    It was a very different ball game!

    “Until the 1920s, the music business was dominated not by major record labels, but by song publishers and big vaudeville and theater concerns. In those days, sheet music consistently outsold records of the same hit songs, proving that most of the music heard in homes and in public back then was played by people, not record players. A hit song’s sheet music often sold in the millions between 1910 and 1920. Recorded versions of these songs were at first just seen as a way to promote the sheet music, and were usually released only after sheet music sales began falling.”

    Do read the whole article! Very interesting indeed. Some artists were making very decent money.

    “Popular opera singer Enrico Caruso single-handedly raised the reputation of recorded music when he signed a contract with Victor in 1904. In 16 years he made up to $5 million from record sales, getting $4000 per song recorded plus a staggering 40 cents in royalties per record (at a time when records cost $1 or $1.50.) The hoopla around Caruso’s signing, combined with growing overall sales, convinced more and more performers that records could be profitable (and respectable.)”

    So much for my idea that Jock Whiteford made any serious money from Gardener’s record. It would have been a one-off payment I suspect.

    • Patents had a part to play, too. In the US, Victor and Columbia owned the various patents that applied to the manufacture of records and record players, and these didn’t expire until 1919. Prior to then there were only a handful of other record companies in the US – most of those, like Edison, got around the patent issue by releasing incompatible records with lateral cut grooves.

      In Europe, where these patents were shared by The Gramophone Company and Columbia, they expired somewhat earlier in 1908. Hence in 1908 a large number of record companies popped up, with many using Germany as their manufacturing base.

      • Interesting stuff. Thanks @JQW. You really know this era.

        There are a lot of interesting articles about the early days of recorded sound.

        How Users Define New Media: A History of the Amusement Phonograph
        by Lisa Gitelman

        http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/legacy/papers/gitelman.html

        “After Edison invented the phonograph, competition arrived from inventors at Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Laboratory (the “graphophone”) and from Emile Berliner (the “gramophone”), prompting Edison’s own commercial development of his machine. The phonograph and graphophone were marketed by the North American Phonograph Company, incorporated in 1888, via a network of local companies operating in protected sales territories. The expensive devices were leased and later sold as dictating machines, without much success, since office workers resisted the complicated and still temperamental machinery. But one California entrepreneur cleverly adapted his phonographs into nickel-in-the-slot machines, which both gradually proved the success of recordings as amusements and gradually created a demand for pre-recorded musical records. When Emile Berliner started to market his gramophone and disc-shaped records in America in 1894, he faced competition from imitators and from companies like the Columb ia Phonograph Company and, in 1896, Edison’s National Phonograph Company, both of which sold only cylinder records at first. The market for home machines was created through technological innovation and pricing: Phonographs, gramophones, and graphophones were cleverly adapted to run by spring-motors (you wound them up), rather than by messy batteries or treadle mechanisms, while the musical records were adapted to reproduce loudly through a horn attachment. The cheap home machines sold as the $10 Eagle graphophone and the $40 (later $30) Home phonograph in 1896, the $20 Zon-o-phone in 1898, the $3 Victor Toy in 1900, and so on. Records sold because their fidelity improved, mass production processes were soon developed, advertising worked, and prices dropped from one and two dollars to around 35 cents. ”

        Those 1898 San Francisco nickel-in-the-slot phonograph machines, invented by Louis Glass and William S. Arnold were in fact the fore-runners of the modern jukebox.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jukebox

        This YT clip features some wonderful photos of early music lovers enjoying the nickel-in-the-slot phonograph.

        “The word “jukebox” came into use in the United States beginning in 1940, apparently derived from the familiar usage “juke joint”, derived from the Gullah word juke, which means “bawdy”. Manufacturers of jukeboxes tried to avoid using the term, associated with unreputable places, for many years.”

        Here’s a restored 1908 Multiphone Jukebox.

  23. Interesting stuff. Thanks @JQW. You really know this era.

    There are a lot of interesting articles about the early days of recorded sound.

    How Users Define New Media: A History of the Amusement Phonograph
    by Lisa Gitelman

    http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/legacy/papers/gitelman.html

    “After Edison invented the phonograph, competition arrived from inventors at Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Laboratory (the “graphophone”) and from Emile Berliner (the “gramophone”), prompting Edison’s own commercial development of his machine. The phonograph and graphophone were marketed by the North American Phonograph Company, incorporated in 1888, via a network of local companies operating in protected sales territories. The expensive devices were leased and later sold as dictating machines, without much success, since office workers resisted the complicated and still temperamental machinery. But one California entrepreneur cleverly adapted his phonographs into nickel-in-the-slot machines, which both gradually proved the success of recordings as amusements and gradually created a demand for pre-recorded musical records. When Emile Berliner started to market his gramophone and disc-shaped records in America in 1894, he faced competition from imitators and from companies like the Columb ia Phonograph Company and, in 1896, Edison’s National Phonograph Company, both of which sold only cylinder records at first. The market for home machines was created through technological innovation and pricing: Phonographs, gramophones, and graphophones were cleverly adapted to run by spring-motors (you wound them up), rather than by messy batteries or treadle mechanisms, while the musical records were adapted to reproduce loudly through a horn attachment. The cheap home machines sold as the $10 Eagle graphophone and the $40 (later $30) Home phonograph in 1896, the $20 Zon-o-phone in 1898, the $3 Victor Toy in 1900, and so on. Records sold because their fidelity improved, mass production processes were soon developed, advertising worked, and prices dropped from one and two dollars to around 35 cents. ”

    Those 1898 San Francisco nickel-in-the-slot phonograph machines, invented by Louis Glass and William S. Arnold were in fact the fore-runners of the modern jukebox.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jukebox

    This YT clip features some wonderful photos of early music lovers enjoying the nickel-in-the-slot phonograph.

    “The word “jukebox” came into use in the United States beginning in 1940, apparently derived from the familiar usage “juke joint”, derived from the Gullah word juke, which means “bawdy”. Manufacturers of jukeboxes tried to avoid using the term, associated with unreputable places, for many years.”

    Here’s a restored 1908 Multiphone Jukebox.

  24. Ooops! Sorry about that comment getting posted twice. If there’s an Admin around, it would be great if you delete one of them Thanks.

    This article about the early days of the record industry is a marvelous read.

    https://medium.com/@Vinylmint/48deacb4c4c3

    “By sticking to cylinders, Edison missed out on the first big boom in the sales of record players and records. Between 1901 and 1920, record players became a part of most households, whether rich, middle-class or poor. Some models sold for very cheap even for the time, while other phonographs were deluxe models for the rich only, made of fancy milled hardwood and gold or brass parts. By the first years of the century, most phonographs (or gramophones, or graphophones, depending on the brand involved) no longer had those big external horns that most people at the time found unsightly (today, these are the most valuable phonographs.) Instead, the horn was curled under the turntable, a design pioneered by Victor in their Victrola.

    Records became a big business in the first decade of the century. Overall sales went from about 4 million in 1900 to almost 30 million in 1910. They kept going up right through World War I, when patriotic songs of all kinds were big sellers (the most famous being It’s A Long Way To Tipperary). The portable phonograph was invented during the war, so that the troops could enjoy music on the front lines. After the war, portables were big sellers in spring and summer, marketed for use on picnics and vacations. Some portables were as small as a pack of cigarettes (these came with fold-out cardboard horns.)”

    So many interesting titbits of information.

    “A variety of quite strange items appeared at the turn of the century. These included novelty records pressed on very hard chocolate, which wore out rather quickly, but the idea was that once they did, you could eat them.”

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