THE OLDEST PROGRAMME

Soon the oldest known football programme will be up for auction, unfortunately the programme is from an American match between Yale College and a touring Eton College side in December 1873. The programme is simply a folded card with details of the game and players and a back page where details of the match can be recorded. It was found in a personal scrapbook ten years ago. Yale played a sort of mob football at the time with 25 players per side and no time limit. The match was decided by which side scored 6 goals first. So this fixture change history in the USA.

Of course this could also mark the oldest match recorded by an English team on foreign soil. The Eton team included the 5th Earl of Rosebery (name spelt wrongly in the programme), who eventually became Prime Minister of Britain in the 1890s. The auction is on November 7th at Graham Budd.

A previously ancient programme, of the March 25th 1882 FA Cup Final, between the Old Etonians and Blackburn Rovers sold for over £35,000. The OEs won the match 1-0 and the programme was found in a box of scrapbooks owned by Sir Thomas Berry Cusack-Smith, an Old Etonian who in his later life lived in Nuthurst, Horsham. There was a diary entry of his on the day of the match remarking on the excitement of the game and the crowd of 5,000 at the Kennington Oval. The Old Etonians Club bought the programme and it now is on show in the Eton College "Museum of Eton Life".

The Eton team included Arthur Dunn who founded the Arthur Dunn Cup competition which entertained old boys' sides from 1903 after the FA Cup and the FA Amateur Cups had been "professionalised". The Dunn Cup is still played for today, by old boys from "public schools".

A programme in a single sheet marking the match between Queen's Park (from Scotland) and the Wanderers was the previously oldest programme dated 1875.

My oldest programme is from the 1948 FA Cup Final....name the two teams.