Newcastle United v Liverpool (1901)

Newcastle upon Tyne
1901-11-23
Silent
2m

An Edwardian football match at Newcastle's St James' Park ground.

The score finished 1-0 to the Magpies in this First Division football match. Despite having three cameras present on the day, Mitchell & Kenyon's operators missed the goal, and the hand-cranked cameras sometimes struggled to keep up with the action in a hard-fought match. But the shots of grinning supporters, packed on to the terraces in their flat caps and bowlers, more than compensate.

M&K 121: Main (replacement) title (00.08). Game in progress. Newcastle wears vertically-striped shirts and dark shorts; Liverpool wears white shorts and dark shirts. There are large signs for Newton's perambulators, Westgate Road around the ground. Large crowds. At one end of the pitch is a long, tall industrial-looking building. The covered stand has another small, pagoda-like- stand built into the roof.

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.