All articles in Sport
29th May, 2025 in History, Society & Culture, Sport, Women in History
Tracing the history of the Women’s Football Association
I like to think that there is a symmetry between my query of myself in 1967 – ‘why don’t girls play football?’ – with my thought over fifty years later that the history of the Women’s Football Association needed to be written down. As I was pretty sure that I was the only survivi…
12th September, 2024 in Local & Family History, Sport
‘I Love Me County’: Waterford sporting stories
Cian Manning author of ‘I Love Me County’ provides a brief history of Waterford and its legacy. The Gentle County, Waterford, can boast a proud sporting tradition. It is as long as it is varied. It’s largest urban area, Waterford City, has witnessed bull-baiting at Ballybricken t…
26th August, 2022 in Sport
Summer of ’65: Brian Clough hits rock bottom
Context: A knee injury on Boxing Day 1962 effectively curtailed Brian Clough’s high scoring playing career. The Sunderland centre-forward played three more games in September 1964, before being forced into early retirement and taking charge of the club’s youth team. After losing…
25th September, 2020 in Sport
Seventy years of the British Grand Prix
The British Grand Prix race has an impressively long history that stretches back to 1926, when it was first held on the Brooklands circuit. It became an annual fixture by 1948 and in 1950 it first ran as an official part of the FIA World Championship calendar. Immense changes hav…
18th January, 2019 in Biography & Memoir, Sport, Women in History
Mercedes Gleitze: Britain’s empowering swimming heroine
Try to imagine living in a period when young women, especially those born into the working classes, were locked into the age-old traditional role of having first to find a husband, and then having to work exclusively in the home – cleaning, cooking and bringing up children. The b…
17th October, 2017 in Local & Family History, Sport
The Christian origins of Dings Crusaders
In Bristol in the late Victorian period there was a widespread attempt by socio-religious institutions to provide wholesome influences on the lives of the urban poor. These voluntary organisations nearly all had one feature in common: a reliance on the support of religious bodies…
24th July, 2017 in Sport, Trivia & Gift
Quiz: The title triumphs of Arsenal F.C.
If you’re an Arsenal fan with knowledge that spans the club’s 130-year history, then this quiz is for you! The Gunners have won England’s top tier League title thirteen times, but how closely were you watching those title-winning campaigns? Q1. Apart from the 2003/04 ‘Invinc…
27th April, 2017 in History, Sport
London’s first Olympics, 1908
The 1908 Olympic Games were originally awarded to Rome. Rome had been chosen in the belief that its fame and accessibility would encourage competitors to attend from all over the world, particularly as attendance at the last Olympics, St. Louis in 1904, had been disappointing. Ho…
7th September, 2016 in Sport
Dr. Guttmann and the Paralympic movement
Sir Ludwig Guttmann – the ‘father of the Paralympics’ – is credited as the man responsible for founding the Paralympic Games and the Paralympic movement as a whole. Early years Born on 3 July 1899 in Tost, Germany (now Toszek in Poland) into an Orthodox Jewish family, Guttmann st…
20th June, 2016 in Sport
A miscellaneous history of Wimbledon
For two weeks every summer, tennis fever hits the UK with the arrival of Wimbledon Fortnight. Wimbledon is not only lawn tennis’ biggest, and oldest, tournament but it is also a festival full of quintessentially British traditions – strawberries and cream, Pimm’s c…
17th May, 2016 in Military, Sport
The King’s Cup 1919
War has many unintended consequences, very few of them happy. But the ‘greatest imperial emergency’ of the Great War and the influx of Dominion troops into Europe happily made the period 1916-19 a golden age for international rugby – or at least a gunmetal one. The gilding, by ro…
2nd March, 2016 in Sport
Confessions of a Coventry City fan
Author Michael Keane offers his personal view of following Coventry City Football Club for over three decades. For football fans who have not signed up for, or subscribed to, one of the Premier League’s perennial powerhouses, the reality of following the local bunch of strugglers…