Kick-off times over the years

Quite the opposite Dave, men (and emphasize the word men) used to go straight to the match from work...............no "nonsey" women and kids at the game in those days!

That's why Argyle used to kick off at 3.15 so that the Saturday morning shift at the Dockyard had the chance to grab a pint and a pasty between their 2pm knocking off time and the later kick off needed to get twenty plus thousand through the Gnome Park turnstiles. Even after they had floodlights, Hartlepool stuck to their 5.30 pm tea time kick offs for early and late midweek games ~ and The Victoria Ground was literally accross the road from the ship yard. Even then they somewhat reluctantly moved to 6.30pm holding out against the more widespread 7.30s of other clubs.

I know that Newport County used to kick off at 3.15 but evening games at 7.15 to accomodate fans who had to GO to work straight from the game in the nearby steel works for a 10pm shift!

The great Torquay v Spurs game of 1965 kicked off at 2.45 to accomodate Tottenham's wish to catch the last train back to Paddington straight after the game (would it be heresay to suggest that their minds were on other matters during the last ten minutes when they conceded those sensational Stubbsy goals?) and I can recall a mid season friendly with Millwall (arranged to fill a blank Saturday of the second round of the FA Cup) kicking off at 2.30 for the very same reason.

7.45 and Tuesdays instead of 7.30 and Wednesdays have come about through lobbying from under pressure fans and managers who expressed their frustrations in getting players fit after Saturday's and battling through traffic to make kick off.................who knows what the future holds?

The gates were generally smaller on those late summer/early autumn evenings than on Saturdays (with some exceptions to the rule). It looks like, as you'd expect, the 6pm kick offs worked better than those slightly earlier:

1959/60 (first seven home games)

Doncaster - Saturday - 8608
Northampton - midweek 6pm - 7447
Rochdale - Saturday - 7369
Stockport - midweek 5.45pm - 5756
Darlington - Saturday - 7896
Stockport - midweek 5pm - 5571
Barrow - Saturday - 6760

1960/61 (first seven home games)

Shrewsbury - Saturday - 9175
Halifax - midweek 6pm - 7574
Bury - Saturday - 7011
Brentford - midweek 5.30pm - 5936
Southend - Saturday - 6256
Tranmere - midweek 5.15pm - 4317
Coventry - Saturday - 6727

If you look at that 1946-60 period you start to believe Torquay United’s problem wasn’t so much abject poverty, more a relative lack of wealth. We were doing okay but others were doing better.

As Dave says, football would have been pretty cheap to watch during the 1940s and 1950s. But that probably wasn’t the main reason people initially flocked to matches in such numbers. For, as has been mentioned in other postings, the immediate post-war years in Britain were pretty grotty and full of shortages, social dislocation, bomb sites and all manner of crises. Against such a drab, austere backcloth – and general pall of gloom – football shone out as an attractive proposition. No wonder attendances – just like cinema figures – shot up. This meant football’s post-war recovery preceded that of the wider economy by a good few years so that - to coin the phase of slightly later – the game had “never had it so good”. But did it appreciate the fact?

Although those late 1950s crowd figures still appear pretty impressive by our standards, they actually indicate a decline compared to those of a decade earlier. This, to a large extent, was due to greater prosperity as people found they had more things upon which to spend their money. Football suffered as a consequence.

Overall, I guess football finances then would have been different to all we’ve experienced since, say, 1970. Admission might have been cheap but – with average crowds of at least 6,000 at Plainmoor in every season (bar one) between 1946 and 1960 – revenue must have been healthy. Throw in the fact that player’s wages were tightly controlled – and also consider the money raised by the supporters club (and the voluntary labour it provided) – and you’ve probably got relative stability. This suggests many clubs were less-reliant on directors than they were to be in the future.

But, at Torquay United – in spite of average attendances going as high as 8,770 in 1949/50 – the truth was that just about everyone else in our division was getting better crowds. Generally speaking, from 1946 to 1956, only Aldershot were more poorly-supported than ourselves in Division Three (South). Locally, you can see this by the way that in 1949/50, for example, Exeter’s average gate was 10,117 and how it didn’t slip below 8,000 during the first ten post-war seasons.

So maybe that’s why Timbo’s programmes feature complaints about “small” crowds – ones we can hardly dream of nowadays, of course – and a general lack of community interest. It might not have been a case of the wolf being at the door but that every other team in the league – bar the Shots – was bringing in more money. Indeed, because we were by no means the weakest team on the field, we were probably consistently punching above our weight thanks to sound management and benevolent directors.