CLIFF HAGUE can remember vividly the first time he saw a football match at Hampden Park.
“It was 1968, Scotland v Austria, and Scotland won 2-1,” he recalls. “I was used to big matches, I’d been to Wembley - but Hampden in those days was something else, with crowds of 130,000 and more.
“It was awe-inspiring, and of course infused with history, and that night another Scottish legend, the peerless Denis Law, scored with a trademark flashing header at the backpost....”
He grins: “Cue delirium all around. The programme lists the Scottish forward line that night - Jimmy Johnstone, Charlie Cook, Denis Law, Bobby Lennox and John Hughes. It was a good time to move to Scotland.”
The story behind this match programme, along with many more, feature in Cliff’s new book which traces the development of football amidst wider patterns of social change after World War II.
Programmes! Programmes! Football and Life from Wartime to Lockdown is based on Cliff’s collection of more than 2000 programmes, taking in everything from big Old Firm cup finals to a 1968 Clyde v Raith Rovers programme laden with adverts for sugary drinks.
“I started collecting when I was a boy growing up in Manchester,” he explains. “Some were given to me by adults, others I’d write to the clubs and ask for, and you could swap with pals at school or with other collectors through a page in Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly magazine.”
Cliff, who is now an urban planning academic, consultant and author living in Edinburgh, moved to Glasgow, to work for the Corporation’s planning department, in 1968 and his collection continued to grow. His son Euan also started buying programmes.
“He did it much more strategically than I did, so he’d buy Cup Finals, or odd things like Wimbledon’s first game in the Football League. When he went to the US to study, he didn’t take his programmes with him.”
He laughs: “So we had a lot of programmes, or ‘junk’, as my wife would call it. To protect them from going in the recycling, I began to catalogue them, and I was drawn into the times, the places and the people they represented.
“There were so many fascinating stories - they are a slice of popular culture that reveal how my generation experienced life here, but also in some other countries, notably in Eastern Europe, where I used to visit for research in the 1980s and 1990s.”
There are many gems in the collection – a 1950 Hearts v Partick Thistle programme, contains an article which explains how important Scotland’s industrial and mining villages were to the development of the first stars of Scottish football.
READ MORE: When Celtic Park was lit up for the first time - and other Old Firm memories
From the days when paper was rationed and getting a team out depended on army leave, to today’s fat, glossy match day magazines showcasing global stars, the programmes reveal a great deal about the evolution of football and of the lives of players and fans, grounds and towns.
It is bound to rekindle memories for generations of fans and there are tons of funny, quirky and moving stories – everything from what was needed to persuade a ref to take the players off during an air raid, to the first time women started to appear in British programmes...
Programmes! Programmes! Football and Life from Wartime to Lockdown, from Pitch Publishing, is out now.
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