To coincide with the 150th anniversary of the founding of Middlesbrough Football Club this season, we are pleased to present this website entitled Victorian Boro for the perusal of all fans of the club who are interested in ascertaining information about its initial development and formative years. It is hoped that correlated data will be published in book form in the future.
The overriding motivation for undertaking this research was to address the completely neglected void in the early history of Middlesbrough Football Club. We also very much wanted to acknowledge the contribution of those unheralded early local football pioneers, both on and off the pitch, who had established Middlesbrough as a major national football force within a couple of decades. They created a side that was strong enough to win three F.A. Amateur Cups in the 1890s and then gain admission to the Football League by the turn of the 20th century.
Many references have been made over the years to the club’s inception at a mythical tripe supper in 1876 and that the first official game against Tees Wanderers was played on 22 February 1877 at the Archery Ground. However, nobody has tried to catalogue the 2,000+ unaccounted for matches played by the club’s teams throughout the whole of the Victorian/Edwardian era from 1877 to 1903.
This website hopes to provide the first tentative steps in recording the results of those matches played in league, cup and friendlies, together with documenting the participating players, their opponents, and the grounds on which the games were played.
The early development of Middlesbrough Football Club not only reflects the expeditious industrial growth of the town during the late Victorian era but also mirrors how the expansion of the railways enabled teams to travel much further afield to play fixtures and rapidly make football become a truly national game.
It must be clearly emphasised from the outset that this website is simply a starting point in recording the growth of the club during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. It is by no means a complete or definitive record of their endeavours at that time and will possibly never be so. Other keen (and much younger) archivists will need to continue the diligent work that has already been undertaken here, by unearthing additional match information, further data about players and officials, and correcting the errors that will bound to have occurred during the compilation of such a complex statistical publication.
To that end, if anybody has any additional material that will supplement the Victorian Boro website we would be very grateful for any contributions. Most of the information accumulated has been painstakingly researched from established newspapers and publications of the day. All matches included on the website are underpinned with specific hard evidence, such as a match report, of where and when they took place. Without meeting that strict criteria, they were omitted from the text for the time being.
We hope you enjoy the journey as much we have putting it together.
Forever Boro
John Wilson
Andrew Morgan
Steve Roberts
