FOOTBALL’S FIRST APPEARANCE IN SUNDERLAND?

Just recently evidence has come to light that football may have been played in Sunderland prior to the establishment of the local rugby club in 1873. This has long been considered the first organised appearance of football in the then town. The world-famous Sunderland AFC was formed some six years later. Throughout the summer of 1861, the Reverend George Iliff  (1833- 1878) placed a series of advertisements for his boarding school – the Grange -  in the local Sunderland Herald. This newspaper has just been placed online in digitised form. The school was based on a site slightly south of the modern Sunderland travel Interchange. Part of the advertisement referred to the provision of ‘tickets to admit pupils at once to the Cricket and Football Field’. A year earlier George and his father – also the Reverend Frederick Iliff ( dates 1799 -1869) had put an advertisement for the school in the Carlisle Journal (18 May 1860). Part of it read -

The playground is large and well drained, and the Gymnasium, Ball Ground, Bowling Ground and Garden add to the opportunities for healthful recreation.

The Grange School was already established when Frederick senior had taken over in the summer of 1847.  A year later he showed an interest in sport when he became one of the patrons of a cricket match between the local Bishopwearmouth team and the famous professional All England XI. Earlier still the same Frederick had advertised the school and alluded to a role in it for his son  Frederick (junior)  who was ‘also of Trinity College, Cambridge’.  Further sleuthing reveals that Frederick senior had been closely tied to Trinity College throughout the 1820s and 1830s while Frederick junior’s name turns up in the 1840s and 1850s. In fact records show that the Iliff connection with the college stretched back to the 17^th century. This is significant because this college was a hotbed of early football long before the establishment of the Association Rules (1863) and Rugby Union laws (1870s). There is evidence of football activity there as early as the 1830s as well as valiant efforts to lay down universal rules/laws in the 1840s and 1850s. There is even  a fairly solid argument that the college had a ‘club’ before Sheffield F.C. – long recognised as the oldest football club in the world.   Both the Iliffs must have been aware of the existence of a form of ‘football’ as a game/pastime and this may well explain why the school they ran had a ‘ball ground’/ ‘football field’ certainly by the early 1860s. If football histories are correct, it is unlikely that pupils would have played teams from other schools but  would have chosen different ‘pick up’ sides from within their ranks each time they played. In all likelihood this was similar to the way in which many of us first played football in the school yard and how football under the rugby rules first came to Sunderland on Boxing Day 1873.

The Iliff family continued to take an interest in football with Frederick senior’s grandson Leonard. In the mid-1880s, he played under the rugby rules against a local school team featuring future England international, Barbarian and British Lion Howard Marshall . Later in the same decade he turned out as a prop forward for Sunderland RFC’s 1^st XV and is featured in a badly faded 2^nd XV photograph still in the club archives.

Leonard's name appears on the top row ( about 1886). Sadly the picture on the reverse is too poor to reproduce