First Explorations into Business History: Forfar Athletic Year Book 1961-62

In the first of an occasional series of articles about Forfar Athletic, Kevin looks at one of his earliest publications...

The 2018 FIFA World Cup has ended and the Scottish League Cup Group Stages are the main game in town! The Scottish League 1 Club Forfar Athletic hit the headlines on Sunday after winning 4-5 on penalties against East Fife, in the group stages of the Scottish League Cup.  This gained attention south of the border as it fulfilled a famous tongue twister allegedly invented by Eric Morecambe to tease his friend James Alexander Gordon, who read out the football results on BBC Radio for many years.  The joys of Scottish lower league football are little known south of the border; most English fans have probably only heard of clubs such as Forfar, or their Angus rivals Brechin City, Arbroath and Montrose via the football results. Indeed, Jonathan Meades called a 2009 documentary on small-town Scotland The Football Pools Towns in reference to this phenomena.

But these clubs and indeed these lovely little towns do have an existence outside of the teleprinter and the classified football results.  I discovered this as a history undergraduate at the University of Dundee, when a friend with a car decided we should start going to some lower league matches. We went to Station Park, home of Forfar for a Tuesday night fixture against Queens Park which the Loons won 3-0, and I and another of my fellow students kept going back.  And back.

This new addiction led to me contributing a few times to a fanzine, The Loonatic, and here is one of my first attempts at business history - a review of the club's 1961-62 yearbook, published in the summer of 1961:

Click images to enlarge

Perhaps it is time for some more business history on the topic of the Loons, or at least Scottish football as a whole?

For all their summer optimism, the Loons' hopes that Mr Christie might help their young team get promoted came to nothing, as they finished the second division in 16th, the 'Bully Wee' winning the championship and 'Doonhammers' being runners-up. But at least Brechin were bottom and Angus bragging rights maintained!