Bury v Torquay United.14/02/61.

As much as I’ve enjoyed Timbo’s collection of Plainmoor programmes this season, it’s also been a real pleasure to view away programmes from that wonderfully mysterious time before I started watching football in the mid 1960s.

This 1961/62 Bury programme is no exception starting with the Latin motto shared by club and town. Vincit omnia industria – industry overcomes all things? work conquers all? (over to Jon for the scholarly verdict). Perhaps there is work to be done on the history of Latin mottos in football which, to me, would appear to be part of the same Victorian legacy as public schools, municipalisation and muscular Christianity. Indeed, there’s also something quaint about the programme notes being headed “Gigg Lane Gleanings”.

And so to the adverts…the Bury Masonic Hall and the Art Cinema Café’ may well have been the haunts of two distinct groups of the citizenry (few of either probably signed up for that diesel excursion to Doncaster)…did any of our more-fashionable supporters take up the offer to shop at Sydney Goldstone?...could there really have been too many addresses in the whole world (outside of Bury) which laid claim to being the home of the Bury pudding?

Forward to 1967/68, this game being the opposite fixture to the famous 3-0 win at Plainmoor discussed so often on this forum. Major Horridge is now club president and there’s a jaunty little song called “Show us the way to Gigg Lane”. Not sure if it ever caught on but the memory recalls several rather dubious versions of that old standard in the 1960s and 1970s including:

Show them the way to go home
They’re tired and they want to go to bed
Cos’ they’re only half a football team
And the rest are ****ing dead!

Bury keeper Neil Rambottom went on to play for Argyle but, apparently, he wasn’t from Ramsbottom just up the road from Bury. And, if Bury were to play Bury Town in next season’s FA Cup it wouldn’t be a local derby. Why?