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The Friends' latest purchase for Gloucestershire Archives is this new microfilm reader. It is now safely installed in the search room where it is proving to be a useful asset.

Horsley House of Correction Records

Gloucester Rugby Football Club Community Heritage Project

Volunteers Needed

Gloucester has a rich cultural identity, and an important part of that for the past 135 years has been the honour and history associated with the City’s rugby heritage. Many of the citizens of Gloucester and Gloucestershire relate to rugby, and one trip to Kingsholm on match day is enough to understand the immense sense of pride and passion they have in relation to the game of rugby.  

This substantial level of local support for Gloucester RFC recently led to the construction of a fine new stand to increase the ground capacity and improve facilities for supporters.  To make way for this, the old wooden grandstand, which had been in place for 75 years, was demolished.  During the demolition, it was discovered that boxes and files of old papers had been stored under the stand over the years, and fortunately Gary Little of GRFC  intervened as these were about to disappear into a skip, and asked the Gloucestershire Archives if they might contain items of interest.  A quick trawl through this material revealed that there was indeed much of historic interest, with documents dating back to the formation of the Club in 1873, and many team photographs.  The material was removed to GA for safe keeping, where it remains on deposit.  

It was agreed by GRFC and GA that this should form the basis of a project to create an archive devoted to Gloucester Rugby, and Malc King (formerly secretary of the Friends, and a season ticket holder at Kingsholm) was invited to become project manager.  The original idea of an archive gradually expanded into a project which would seek to make the history of GRFC more accessible to the community and to involve the community in building up the archive.

Thus was born the “Gloucester Rugby Football Club Community Heritage Project”.  The project will gather, collate, interpret, share and celebrate 135 years of GRFC heritage, including its impact on the local/wider community.   It will make publicly available a wide range of archives and some artefacts relating to GRFC.  Heritage items will include:

1.  The GRFC archive, preserved at GA;

2.  Photographs and articles from the Gloucester Citizen archive, preserved at GA;

3.  Documents and photographs donated or loaned by organisations and individuals;

4.  Artefacts belonging to GRFC and loaned by individuals;

5.  Audio and video recordings of interviews with current and past players, officials and supporters;

6.  Video recordings of GRFC matches.

Access will be enabled by:

1.  Publishing detailed descriptions about the items in the GRFC archive on GA's online catalogue;

2.  Producing a sustainable online digital archive;

3.  Producing and installing displays at GRFC, comprising the digital archive, interpretative panels (images and captions) and artefacts;

4.  Associated learning and outreach activities, including materials for schools tied to Key Stages of the National Curriculum.  

This project will raise awareness of the need to share and preserve unique material relating to GRFC and its traditions.   In addition to working with known materials, members of the community will be invited to extend the GRFC archive by loaning or donating personal memorabilia and oral histories.   This will create opportunities for GA to help preserve archives that are presently scattered within the community, and could otherwise be at risk through poor storage or loss over time.  By capturing oral histories the project will be able to complement and enrich the value of the existing written and photographic archives for current and future generations.  The project will enable the whole story to be brought together and will create a community heritage resource that will continue to grow.  

Although GRFC, GA and the Friends have been fully supportive of the aims of this project from its inception, the expansion of the scope of the project made it evident that there would be a serious funding shortfall, so it was decided that the Friends should make a bid for support from the National Heritage Lottery Fund.  This bid was put together by Malc King for the Friends, Gary Little for GRFC and Jill Shonk for GA.  Towards the end of last year, this bid was approved to the tune of £49,950, the first half of which has already been paid to the Friends, so that the project could start.  Together with financial and manpower contributions from GRFC, GA and the Friends, the necessary resources are now in place, and the project was formally launched at an event at Kingsholm, kindly hosted by GRFC.  It is planned that the project will be completed within 3 years, but that the physical and digital archives will continue to grow thereafter.

GRFC's own archive has been deposited at GA, but it is presently a jumble of unlisted material, and therefore not readily accessible to the community.  Drawing on their knowledge of the Club, project volunteers from the Friends have produced a preliminary listing of this material, and will be undertaking training in CALM in order to convert these lists into full descriptions of each item, which will then be added to GA's online catalogue.  Other documents and artefacts owned by GRFC are currently dispersed and inaccessible to the public.   These will be gathered and listed by project volunteers and will be used to help generate content for the displays at GRFC and the online community archive.  

Radio Gloucestershire have also been very supportive of the project, and it has already featured on their breakfast programme, which generated a good level of listener interest.  As the necessary arrangements are put in place, the project will be widely publicised and will invite other organizations and individuals to donate or loan archive material.  GA will accept such material for permanent preservation, but for those items which are not donated to GA, advice will be offered to owners on how to best conserve their archives and artefacts.   Original material will be scanned so that images can be added to the digital archive.   

People's memories are a crucial part of the heritage and they will be lost forever unless they can be recorded.  The project volunteers will contact, interview and record a wide range of people to create an audio-visual history that will complement the written heritage items.  The original digital audio-visual recordings will be preserved permanently at GA.  They will be used extensively in the online community archive and will inform the proposed displays.  

The project will thus raise awareness within GRFC and the wider community about the importance of preserving heritage resources relating to the Club and to rugby in Gloucestershire.   It will provide a variety of opportunities for both the Club and the wider community to celebrate this aspect of their shared heritage.   Several aspects of the project will help deliver this.

The project is heavily dependent upon volunteer effort marshalled by the Friends, and will provide specific training for volunteers in aspects of cataloguing, indexing, conserving, handling & packaging heritage items.   This will increase awareness of how archives and museums go about identifying, describing & looking after heritage collections.  Volunteers will also be trained by Radio Gloucestershire to gather oral histories following best practice guidelines.   They will gain a better appreciation of the role of oral records in contributing to our heritage and learn how these can be best preserved for the future.   Volunteers will be recruited from FoGA, GRFC supporters, schools & the Kingsholm community.

Project partners will work with the local media to publicise project activities in the wider community.   There will be specific celebrations to mark stages of the project and a series of opportunities for people to become involved.   The extensive space in GRFC's new stand will provide a venue for interpretative displays and a base for events.   Access to this and tours of the site will be free to groups of school children, conferences delegates, guests at events and members of the local community.

The freely accessible online community archive will facilitate better understanding of the special place that GRFC has occupied in the local culture for many generations.  Unfortunately, the company which we had intended to use for the online archive has gone into liquidation, but fortunately before the project had made any financial commitment – the search for alternatives has thrown up some useful options, and a decision on the way forward will be made soon.

Primary/secondary teachers will help to develop/pilot/publish National Curriculum linked activities for schools in Gloucestershire. Schools using the pack will be invited to tour the Kingsholm site and displays.   GRFC staff will use the finished resources to deliver taught sessions in schools.  GRFC also hosts a DCFS Playing for Success Centre, which aims to improve attainment levels of children underachieving at school.  Attendees will be able to access and use the project displays and learning materials.

Adult and Family Learning events will be held at GRFC, GA et al, some linked to annual initiatives e. g.  Gloucester Heritage Open Day, Adult/Family Learning Weeks and the Big Draw.   We shall seek to work in partnership with Adult Education services and other relevant organisations.  

GRFC has the largest following of any sporting venue within 40 miles of Gloucester (with c. 9000 season ticket holders, and about 15,000 normally attending matches).  Visits to the GRFC website reveal worldwide interest; the Club has a database of 3 million purchasers of match tickets.   This proposal has generated interest amongst archivists, rugby fans and schools.   It has already secured the enthusiastic support of GA, GRFC, the “Citizen” and Radio Gloucestershire, all of which have demonstrated their commitment by agreeing to make materials available for the online community archive.

We know that many of the existing heritage items are not well looked after at present; individual memories and experiences will be lost if they are not recorded.   From our initial discussions with potential supporters of the project, and indeed with an HLF advisor, it is clear that our project offers great potential to create an exciting and lively community heritage resource that will appeal not only to rugby and sports fans, but also to the local community interested in finding out more about the history of their area.

From previous archive projects that FoGA and GA have been involved in, we know that there is increasing public interest in volunteering for local history projects.   Our proposal includes a range of different activities for potential volunteers; tasks will include manual skills e. g.  packaging archive items, as well as those requiring skills in listening and communication, research, data inputting and computer literacy.

Archives, museums and libraries nationally report that there is increasing demand for online access to information about heritage; this project will provide a web-based virtual archive rich in detail and images.   We also know from reports of other projects that there is great scope to produce worthwhile, inspiring learning resources based on local heritage collections.  

Now we have only to deliver, but progress has been good in these early days, and some interesting material has already been identified, such as:

-   There are manuscript notebooks covering many of the early seasons giving details of every match.  The Club played its first few games at Deans Walk, but soon secured a pitch at Gloucester Spa.  We have the programme for the first match for which admission was charged – in the third season v The Flamingoes, a team of London stars, who so enjoyed the post-match entertainment at the Ram Inn that they failed to return to London for 3 days!

-   A floodlit game was held at the Spa in 1879 v Rockleaze of Bristol, which drew a large crowd, but resulted in the Club being given notice to quit because of the damage they did.  The Club survived that threat, but in 1891 they liberally applied salt to a frozen pitch in order to let a match go ahead – the match against Swansea was played and won, but the grass subsequently died, and the Club was invited to leave.  

-   Supporters reacted by forming a company to buy the present Kingsholm ground from the Castle Grym estate (the archive contains some original share certificates, and the company annual reports and accounts for many years thereafter), and the first match was played there in October 1891.

-   To raise additional funds in the 1890s, the ground was hired out for other purposes, including a French aeronaut and his balloon, and for grazing sheep and one (presumably lonely) horse.

-   A match away in Toulouse (the itinerary is in the archive) was won, but it took almost a week to travel there, play the match, and return to Gloucester (but much more fun than Easyjet).

-   In response to the award of an international match, England v Wales in 1900, stands were built most of the way round the Kingsholm ground, but the anticipated financial bonanza did not materialize, which led to much correspondence and accounting (which is in the archive) and it took the Club 20 years to pay off the debt.

-   A fire in Bertram Mills’ Circus in the Club car park in 1933, spread to the grandstand which burnt down to the sound of lions roaring and horses bolting – the replacement lasted until a couple of years ago.

If you would like to volunteer for any aspect of this or any other project, please contact the

Friends of Gloucestershire Archives

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