Football Match Between St Stephen's Football Club and Moss Street School (1904)

Blackburn
1904-01-01
Silent
1m

The proud winners of a Blackburn school football match pose for posterity.

Despite the title, this film shows no actual football - the filmmakers seem to have decided instead to capture every child's face on camera in an orderly procession. The second shot shows the proud winners, and suggests that even junior football was a serious business in Edwardian Blackburn, as the players pose sternly in their stripy shirts, clutching ball and cup, while girls cheer behind them.

The growth of professional football at the end of the 19th century went hand-in-hand with the strength of the industrial north. Football occupied a special place in Lancashire's mill towns, reflected in the rigid ceremony (and the official-looking trophy) seen at this junior match between two schools in Blackburn's Little Harwood area. Moss Street School was replaced by Daisyfield Primary School in 1971.

Edwardian Football

The beautiful game, Edwardian style, in some of the earliest ever film of League, international and amateur football

For Blackburn-based filmmakers Mitchell & Kenyon, the attraction of football was at least as much the swelling crowds - who they hoped to lure to paid screenings - as the game itself. With only a few hundred feet of film on hand and far less mobile cameras than today's, their cameramen could only hope to sample the action on the pitch; catching a goal was a rare bonus.

The crowds' passion and energy are almost spectacle enough, but these films also survive as priceless football history - preserving, among other trophies, the earliest known footage of Manchester Utd and probably the first 'international' games captured on film.