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Post by Deleted on Jan 4, 2013 16:29:34 GMT
Torquay as a "middle-class club". That's an interesting concept, Wildebeeste, I wonder what that was based upon?
But, before I postulate my various theories about Wildebeeste's initial class-based assessment of our club (cue "cheeky northern git" and similar terms of abuse), I will apologise for being about to make an veritable Everest out of the molehill of Wildebeeste's passing comment. That's because I sense there are grounds for a possible discussion regarding the links between social class and football. And, more's the point, how these are altering as society changes. Or not, depending on your point of view.
So, to start with friend Wildebeeste, are we witnessing a traditional northern prejudice - sorry perception - which suggests we are all middle-class/posh/Tory-voting shandy-drinkers or whatever?
I'll be generous about this and admit it works both ways. Only last week, when visiting friends "within the M25", was I treated to a few age-old prejudices about the north of England. All I can say really is that it's nice to enjoy London and, at the same time, circumvent the metropolis and live my life on a SW-NE axis (a neat geographical arrangement that Wildebeeste is probably also starting to discover).
Did Wildebeeste make the assumption that seaside resorts are predominantly middle-class places? Well, I guess they are to an extent. But they're complex places - shifting populations, one-dimensional economies and all that - and often perform badly on deprivation indicators. There again, over an extended period of time, they also have a nasty habit of electing rather too many blue-rosetted politicians (for my liking anyway). "Nowt as queer as folk by the sea" as they say. Or has there been something of a "self-improvement" mentality that has attracted people to move to the seaside, set up a business and vote Conservative? Some of the best patents I ever had fell into those categories.
Maybe Wildebeeste, as a small Grockle - with funny accent, bucket and spade and scabby knees - once approached Plainmoor from the direction of Babbacombe as opposed to either Ellacombe or Plainmoor itself. That, as we've hinted previously, would have provided an altogether different impression of our club's social-economic milieu. It's rather like, as Wildebeeste would appreciate, the direction from which you chance upon the city of Sheffield.
But Wildebeeste is an educated man and I'm sure he did his homework and piled masses of sociological data into a computer. Then, after nights poring over columns of figures, he reached the conclusion that, judged by the relative proportions of local residents in each of the social classes (A, B, C1, C2, D and E), Torquay United didn't quite cut the mustard as a sufficiently proletarian club in the true Marxian sense. Thus, in the spirit of North East Derbyshire's famed class solidarity, there was little sympathy as the Grim Reaper arrived at Plainmoor via, ironically, 1980s socialist Czechoslovakia.
At which point I must pause lest I imitate Alpine Joe any further. But the serious point remains that, historically anyway, the socio-economic composition of local populations impacted upon the fortunes of football clubs. Clearly people of all classes - however these may be defined - supported the local club. Yet, at the same time, it was traditionally helpful if your club could draw proportionately more on what may be called the "football watching classes." And, in short, I believe Torquay United were at a disadvantage in that sense.
Which begs questions about future directions. We are, for example, regularly told that Britain has become a more classless - or alternatively an "increasingly middle-class society" - in recent years. There's plenty of evidence, and argument to the contrary of course and the recession is challenging many of these conclusions. But, when listening to my London friends' view about the north, I could only conclude that the different parts of the country are becoming more alike in the work we do (or not), the lives we lead and the environments in which we live (for better or worse). Increasing similarity may also be true for football crowds where I observe the workless are largely absent and the typical fan is veering towards being in employment, earning a middling-salary and living in their own house. A kind of - and I know this expression has different meanings to different people - "Middle England" world.
Now that may surprise my friend from "within the M25" who has been talking about watching a game at Newcastle United where he was first taken as a boy during a family holiday in the mid 1960s. He remembers Newcastle as a "rough, tough working-class city". I suspect he'll be taken aback by the crowd he finds at St James Park. It won't be as he remembers from the days of the Mighty Wyn. It could easily remind him of a better-behaved and rather more respectful version of Stamford Bridge.
So might Wildebeeste inadvertently be drawing our attention to something unspoken? Will it be the case that the same "middle-class clubs" (to coin his expression), which he saw as ripe for culling (excuse the liberty being taken), will be the ones to thrive in future as the game becomes increasingly "classless" or how ever you wish to describe it?
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Post by Deleted on Jan 4, 2013 16:46:10 GMT
Sheer laziness and prejudice on my part, BD, but my belief that Torquay United were a middle-class club was based on:
1 An old article in Football League Review by a 92-er who referred to the "middle class ambience of Torquay and Southport"
2 The number of votes Labour candidates pick up in General Elections in Torbay
3 Getting off the train in the late 1980s and strolling in the rain to my hotel on Avenue Road (I think). I got the impression that every house in town was holiday accommodation
4 Lack of hooliganism at Chesterfield v Torquay games. After your town has been invaded by fans of Rangers, Sheffield Wednesday, Cardiff, Millwall etc you notice the difference when gentle souls from the South West turn up and mind their Ps and Qs.
I take Barton's point (if I have grasped it correctly) about football becoming middle class and there is some truth in that, I feel. Match prices are certainly excluding the poor from going to games but in our division I still think football is a working class game even though it includes teams from more middle class places, eg Barnet, Wimbledon, Southend and Torquay (sorry) as opposed to Hull, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield.
The atmosphere at Chesterfield is certainly never tranquil and definitely not middle class. No prawn sandwiches there; the fans' attitude tends to suggest they have fed on raw meat washed down with several pints of ale before the match.
Of course, the classless society is a myth and if anything the divide between the Cleeses, Barkers and Corbetts is greater now than it was when they performed that classic sketch. I doubt that any of the tribunal members I met today are football fans but if they are they probably sit in executive boxes to protect them from the great unwashed. On the other hand my client told them he had turned down a free ticket to a match because of his back pain and poor mobility. I asked him whether he was a Derby supporter. Big mistake. You don't ask a Forest fan a question like that!
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Post by lambethgull on Jan 4, 2013 18:04:07 GMT
There's probably something in the idea that a town full of hotelliers and shop owners produced more than its fair share of Basil Fawltys. But have workers in Torbay ever been outnumbered by shop or hotel proprietors? I doubt it. Working class Devonians haven't always been minding our Ps and Qs, doffing our caps to our betters and voting Tory mind. Devon actually has a rather interesting history of food riots and disturbances related to the challenge of authority
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Post by Deleted on Jan 4, 2013 18:11:02 GMT
Sheer laziness and prejudice on my part, BD, but my belief that Torquay United were a middle-class club was based on: 1 An old article in Football League Review by a 92-er who referred to the "middle class ambience of Torquay and Southport" 2 The number of votes Labour candidates pick up in General Elections in Torbay 3 Getting off the train in the late 1980s and strolling in the rain to my hotel on Avenue Road (I think). I got the impression that every house in town was holiday accommodation 4 Lack of hooliganism at Chesterfield v Torquay games. After your town has been invaded by fans of Rangers, Sheffield Wednesday, Cardiff, Millwall etc you notice the difference when gentle souls from the South West turn up and mind their Ps and Qs. On the contrary, Wildebeeste, this is probably as good an analysis as I've seen. Mind you, I'm not sure if it would have passed muster at the hands of the Economic and Social History Examination Panel. I doubt that old Sidney Pollard would have regarded the Football League Review's findings as sufficiently academically rigorous. But, as anecdotal evidence, it's worth a shot. I love the idea of Avenue Road as some sort of barometer of life in Torquay. You'd be right in concluding that it is home to relatively few labour-voting, football hooligans. Not along the bottom half below the traffic lights anyway. I have a theory that crowds at lower division games are more "traditional" in their make up than at premier league games. I guess that's due to a combination of pricing, all-seated stadiums (notwithstanding their increasing prevalence lower down) and the alternative means of watching your team on TV on an almost weekly basis. Maybe there's a cultural angle as well: the lower divisions still appeal in an old-fashioned way; the top flight increasingly attracts those who like "big time sport" - be it cricket, rugby, tennis - or simply relish being at an "event". I know that's simplistic because Premier League teams still have plenty of old-fashioned fans. But I suspect the balance has shifted. To illustrate this, I'm struck by two images from visits to Manchester. The first is from the day of our play-off game at Old Trafford which didn't quite manage to overshadow the small matter of Manchester United playing Barcelona in the Champions League final that evening. The souvenir stalls around Old Trafford were full of MUFC tack; the pubs were filling with Manchester United supporters. Were these people who couldn't get tickets for Wembley? Had they baulked at price tags of up to £225 a seat? Or was this how they now watched their team anyway? The old-style fan who now watches at the pub partly because - I'd suggest - it's rather more fun and earthy. And cheaper. The second image was of Piccadilly station coming back from Ashton United on Tuesday: London-bound trains filling with a multi-national cast of "football tourists" wearing their brand-new Manchester City scarves. I'm not knocking that but you couldn't fail to notice them. A question: what makes the Chesterfield crowd different to that at Torquay? I ask because I'm sure you're right in what you say about the respective grounds. Is it because - in a vague sort of way - we suspect Chesterfield is more of a "football town"? Or are the people "different" in some way? Now that's probably an intangible thing to record as I would suspect both groups of supporters may measure similarly in terms of employment, house ownership and possibly wages (with Torquay's being the slightly lower paid?). Is it to do with previous generations - and what they did for a living? - linked to a general self-perception (and sense of community/locality) that results in different behaviour at the ballot box? It's a strange one, isn't it? In an economic sense not many people in Chesterfield are employed in the tourist industry. Nor are the majority of people in Torbay. Working in B&Q - or a care home or in a customer service role or driving a van - in one town can't be too different to the other. The two towns, you'd imagine, are becoming more similar as opposed to less. Will this impact on who supports each club? Or is the "cultural" thing still making us distinctive? And, another little aside. Who watches those non-league clubs which I am busily visiting this season? I'm not sure really but would venture "enthusiasts" rather than "fanatics". It was interesting when we recently discussed Frickley for I had noticed two things about the crowd: (a) they mainly arrived by car in a place that's small enough for nearly every resident to walk to the ground (b) the cars were very nice. Now, taking the train to Leeds on a regular basis, I've started to realise that many former pit villages are becoming commuter dormitories as new houses are being built on former mine workings. But I suspected most of the crowd at Frickley were more of the enthusiast-type who appreciated a decent standard of football. The "community" would appear in force for a big game but is probably largely indifferent in the normal run of things.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 4, 2013 20:12:01 GMT
A question: what makes the Chesterfield crowd different to that at Torquay? I ask because I'm sure you're right in what you say about the respective grounds. Is it because - in a vague sort of way - we suspect Chesterfield is more of a "football town"? Or are the people "different" in some way? Now that's probably an intangible thing to record as I would suspect both groups of supporters may measure similarly in terms of employment, house ownership and possibly wages (with Torquay's being the slightly lower paid?). Is it to do with previous generations - and what they did for a living? - linked to a general self-perception (and sense of community/locality) that results in different behaviour at the ballot box? What an interesting question. I honestly don't know the answer but I suspect Barton is very close to answering it by reference to previous generations. Football fans tend to follow the teams that their dads supported and most dads up here would have worked in coal mines, engieering factories, steelworks etc; in masculine-dominated industries where every sentence in a conversation has to include the F-word at least twice and arguments tend to be settled by threats of violence. Funny thing is, though, for people of my generation, rough and ready as our dads were they behaved themselves like gentlemen when they were at football matches, but perhaps that was more to do with the 1950s/60s culture in which being obnoxious in public was taboo. That's no longer so. It's not just at football that you hear aggressiveness and a lot of swearing; you'll come across it walking around the attractive cobbled market place as well, but there's no doubt in my mind that Chesterfield FC attracts the very dregs of the town's population regardless of class. You can sit in front of the executive seats or in the Kop End and things are much the same in either. The ground is seen as a place where men are men; you only have to sit next to a row of semi-drunks in their replica shirts to literally smell the testosterone. And yes, Chesterfield, more than Torquay, is a football town. The team pulled in 20,000 crowds in the forties and fifties when Saturday afternoon was the beginning of the weekend for most workers. I don't know enough of Torbay's working history to be able to draw a contrast but I'm sure some of you can fill me in. It could be though, perhaps, that on their day off the men of the Bay were more likely to go for a walk or for a bracing paddle in the sea. I really don't know. I am aware that there are some pretty rough folk in Torquay. I've met some of them, but I get the impression that unlike in Chesterfield they are not the section of the community that goes to Plainmoor. I don't want to embarrass you all but I'd say the level of intelligence of the average Torquay supporter is greater than it would be at Chesterfield. That would not be true of all the citizens in the two towns, obviously, but I do think it's true of the ones who go to football matches. In Torquay nice folks tend to go to the match, in Chesterfield they are more likely to give it a wide berth. All of the above is unscientific and based on observation only. It will be interesting to hear what the rest of you feel. Good thread, Barton.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 5, 2013 9:10:35 GMT
And yes, Chesterfield, more than Torquay, is a football town. The team pulled in 20,000 crowds in the forties and fifties when Saturday afternoon was the beginning of the weekend for most workers. I don't know enough of Torbay's working history to be able to draw a contrast but I'm sure some of you can fill me in. It could be though, perhaps, that on their day off the men of the Bay were more likely to go for a walk or for a bracing paddle in the sea. I really don't know. That's got me thinking and it's something we've touched on before in a different way That time we discussed the absence of local large-scale manufacturing companies where a more intense "football culture" could have flourished amongst the hundreds or thousands of people working together. And, as Wildebeeste says, those places knocked off at Saturday lunchtimes shortly before the football started. Torquay had small factories and works so I guess they were likely to have worked Saturday mornings at one stage. It also had quarries, marble works and potteries which may have kept similar hours. Other than that people worked in shops, offices and the usual places. The bigger employers would have been the council, utility providers, post office and bus and tram companies. I don't think the larger factory employers came on the scene until some of the developments in Paignton and Newton Abbot after that war. Those places became more viable for Torquay people with increased car ownership. One other difference between Torquay and Chesterfield would be the numbers employed in hotels in those days. There would have been many more hotels than now in Torquay, they would have been incredibly labour-intensive with potentially awkward shifts for the football fan. Some offered all-the-year round employment; others more seasonal. As for what the "working man" might have chosen instead of football, another poser. Nowhere, of course, was every working man interested in football. That's a myth but it's true that a remarkable number did watch the game on a regular basis. Around Torquay, Wildebeeste is right in saying a bracing walk was an option - not unlike the working class rambling tradition around Sheffield and Chesterfield. Indeed I think there was once something of a Dartmoor walking club craze amongst ordinary people. But Torquay would also have had its allotments and bowling greens (a history to be explored there with South Devon being a notable bowls area). And, whisper it quietly, it also had Rugby Bloody Union. And, of course, fishing! Any fishers on here?
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Post by gullone on Jan 5, 2013 16:28:19 GMT
Um excuse me, "had rugby union" how very dare you ! It wasnt that many years ago Torquay Athletic were rubbing shoulders with Exeter RFC and just look at what they have turned into. And in my short interest in fishing as a teenager i once caught after a massive struggle the filthiest greasy five foot fat eel on the banks of the old Totnes bacon factory. Oh and Plymouth are losing.......long may that continue.
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chelstongull
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Post by chelstongull on Jan 5, 2013 16:36:34 GMT
Oh and Plymouth are losing.......long may that continue. As results stand they are second from bottom with the mighty Bristol Rovers bottom. That would learn them.
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Post by tufc01 on Jan 5, 2013 17:50:12 GMT
Oh and Plymouth are losing.......long may that continue. As results stand they are second from bottom with the mighty Bristol Rovers bottom. That would learn them. I'd settle for finishing 3rd from bottom if those two stayed where they are.
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Jon
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Post by Jon on Jan 5, 2013 18:25:05 GMT
Devon actually has a rather interesting history of food riots and disturbances related to the challenge of authority Quite right Lambeth. We are a disgraceful bunch of hooligan rowdy radicals here in Torquay. We've got banners and tin trumpets and everything. Torbay News December 1912.
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Post by rjdgull on Jan 5, 2013 18:52:02 GMT
That's interesting, Sir Edward Carson had become leader of the Irish Unionists in February that year and opposed home rule in Ireland. I see that he established the Ulster Volunteer Force with 80,000 armed men based in Belfast to oppose home rule if passed.
Went on to serve with the Bristish Government in World War 1.
Was home rule an issue in Torquay? Why did he feel the need to come and speak here? Did we have a large Catholic community then violenltly opposed to his cause? Obviously the writer favoured with Carson.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 5, 2013 20:40:37 GMT
Torquay a hotbed of Irish republicanism? That's hard to imagine but you never know. Or perhaps the Torquinians who shouted him down were fans of Oscar Wilde. It was Carson's cross-examination, acting as the Marquess of Queensberry's advocate in his libel trial, that led to Wilde's downfall.
Unlikely though. Being an Irish republican was certainly less of a stigma than being homosexual in the early 20th century as Roger Casement found to his cost. All sympathy for him after his arrest aboard a German U-boat quickly evaporated with the publication of the Black Diaries.
That could be an interesting addition to the debate. I can't imagine ever coming across a gay Chesterfield supporter at a match but I could see it being a possibility at Plainmoor. Anyone like to come out live on the TFF?
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Post by lambethgull on Jan 6, 2013 15:51:29 GMT
Interesting stuff there, Dave, but you've not given sources for your quotes again. Without knowing anything about the circumstances referred to in your post, the Salvation Army's mix of reactionary politics and condescending paternalism has a history of rubbing workers up the wrong way. It has a particularly unpleasant history in North America, especially in the early 20th century, which is why many labour and union songs dating from that period in the US were created as a reaction to the Salvation Army band's repertoire. The food riots you mention are of much more interest, and I have a couple of books discussing these that I will dig out if I can remember where I put them. Barton's post is also intriguing. Banners and tin trumpets? We can't have any of that!! It's probably fair to say that copies of the Daily Mail have always exceeded those of the Daily Worker in Torquay. But the latter was read in at least two homes in Torbay, and I should know because by grandfather's and great grandfather's homes were two of them!
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JamesB
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Post by JamesB on Jan 6, 2013 17:16:47 GMT
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Jon
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Post by Jon on Jan 6, 2013 23:10:30 GMT
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