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Shortwood United versus Port Vale

Stuart Butler

Wednesday, November 6th, 2013

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 18th Century Rural Direct Action
versus 19th Century Industrial Capitalism

2 Leave a comment on verse 2 0 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

3 Leave a comment on verse 3 0 A normal feature of my teenage years

4 Leave a comment on verse 4 0 Was hours spent queuing for football tickets,

5 Leave a comment on verse 5 0 But this autumn’s trip down memory lane

6 Leave a comment on verse 6 0 Was not through Swindon’s red brick terraces,

7 Leave a comment on verse 7 0 But up high to bosky, sylvan Shortwood –

8 Leave a comment on verse 8 0 With an 1883 OS map for guidance.

9 Leave a comment on verse 9 0 Shortwood United versus Port Vale FC,

10 Leave a comment on verse 10 0 Handloom weavers and water powered mills

11 Leave a comment on verse 11 0 Against the myth of Arnold Bennett’s ‘Five Towns’ –

12 Leave a comment on verse 12 0 A forest of giant kilns and chimneys;

13 Leave a comment on verse 13 0 Meadowbank, home of Shortwood United,

14 Leave a comment on verse 14 0 Against Vale Park, ‘The Wembley of the North’,

15 Leave a comment on verse 15 0 Port Vale of the Potteries, Tunstall and Burslem,

16 Leave a comment on verse 16 0 A club not named after town or city

17 Leave a comment on verse 17 0 Against a club named after a hamlet,

18 Leave a comment on verse 18 0 But both part of our working class heritage;

19 Leave a comment on verse 19 0 ‘The sedate reddish browns and reds of the composition, all netted in flowing scarves of smoke, harmonised exquisitely with the chill blues of the chequered sky. Beauty was achieved, none saw it’;

20 Leave a comment on verse 20 0 Bennett also described a ‘Bursley’ match:

21 Leave a comment on verse 21 0 ‘Around the field was a wide border of infinitesimal hats and pale faces, rising in tiers, and beyond this border, fences, hoardings, chimneys, furnaces, gasometers, telegraph-poles, houses and dead trees.’

22 Leave a comment on verse 22 0 How can Shortwood battle against this heritage?

23 Leave a comment on verse 23 0 What chance can this quaint Cotswold backwater have?

24 Leave a comment on verse 24 0 Well, remember 1766,

25 Leave a comment on verse 25 0 When the esteemed Sheriff of Gloucester,

26 Leave a comment on verse 26 0 A master-clothier, wrote of that year’s riots,

27 Leave a comment on verse 27 0 The locals, he said, had shown ‘wantoness and excess; and in other instances some acts of courage, prudence, justice, and a consistency towards that which they profess to obtain’

28 Leave a comment on verse 28 0 (That consistency was affordable food),

29 Leave a comment on verse 29 0 and how ‘On Friday last a Mobb was rais’d in these parts by the blowing of Horns &c consisting entirely of the lowest of the people such as weavers, mecanicks, labourers, prentices and boys &c… cutting open Baggs of Flower and giving it & carrying it away.’

30 Leave a comment on verse 30 0 What chance can Port Vale stand against such traditions?

Notes

Editor Note: High on another hill, above Nailsworth Shortwood United take on Port Vale in the FA Cup 1st Round on Monday a stone’s throw from Forest Green , right here in the heart of the Cotswolds.

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/shortwood-united-versus-port-vale/