I am currently involved in an early football history project and some of my research has caused me to question the traditional narrative around the beginnings of Blackburn Rovers. 

As a Rovers supporter for more than fifty years, I have read or own all the books written about the history of the club and came to accept the traditional story that it was formed at a meeting of 17 people at the St Leger Hotel on the 5th November 1875. This date also fits neatly with the first reported match against Church in December of that same year and so makes sense within the timeframe of the recorded story. 

However, the more research I have carried out, the more I question that date and, as we approach the 150th anniversary of the club, it seems a good moment to set out my findings. As you will see, much of it is contradictory and, as the original notebooks and minutes of the club now seem to have disappeared, the question surrounding its formation date may never be conclusively resolved. 

The research project is primarily focused on the impact of Turton FC’s decision to begin playing only by Association rules in 1874 and the consequent spread of this form of the game to Bolton, Darwen and Blackburn. However, to develop a background to the beginnings of football in the area, I have dug into the histories of Darwen FC, Bolton Wanderers, Rovers and the many other smaller teams which sprang-up in the late-1870s. This involved numerous hours combing through local newspapers, meeting club representatives and historians, visits to the National Football Museum Archives in Preston, trips to all the local libraries and record offices and this article is based on my research.

Charles Alcock was a player in the famous Wanderers team and one of the founders of the Football Association. In the 1870s he edited Alcock’s Annual, a football magazine very similar to cricket’s Wisden Almanac, which set out the major events of the year just gone as well publishing the details of each affiliated football club around Britain. This gives the details of the chairman/secretary, club address and its date of formation and, in the case of Blackburn Rovers, has the formation date as 1874 – a detail sent to Alcock by Walter Duckworth, then listed as Rovers’ secretary.

By the mid-1880s Bolton had its own sporting newspaper The Field, which carried detailed match reports and featured a series of articles on the origins of local football clubs. In May 1885 it carried a history of Blackburn Rovers in which it gave 1875 as the year that John Lewis and Arthur Constantine issued circulars which proposed a meeting to form a new club. 

Much later, in 1923, John Lewis had ‘Fifty Years of Football’, a sporting memoir, published as a series of articles in the Topical Times. Although much of this text was about his later refereeing career, he did also write about the early years of Blackburn Rovers in which he states clearly that the club was formed in 1875 with: ‘a gathering of sixteen or seventeen’.

In 1893 local journalist Joseph Baron was the first to produce a book containing a history of Blackburn Rovers – albeit as a separate section within a footballing biography of James ‘Jimmy’ Forrest. Baron’s A Brief History of Blackburn Rovers has Lewis and Constantine sending out invitations to form the club: ‘Midway in the season 1874-5’, i.e. November-December 1874. Writing in the Blackburn Standard newspaper a year later, Baron again asserts that the St Leger meeting took place at ‘Christmas 1874’.

In 1895 the finances of the club were in such a perilous state that they held a fundraising bazaar which, amongst various fundraising activities, included the novel idea of raffling off a house in New Bank Road. As part of the project the Blackburn Rovers Football Club Grand Bazaar pamphlet was produced to mark the occasion which included a brief history of the club with the detail that the St Leger meeting took place: ‘just after Christmas 1874’. 

In The Rise of the Leaguers: A History of the Clubs comprising the First Division of the Football League (1897), Preston football journalist James Catton (who wrote under the nom de plume ‘Tatyrus’) gave the meeting as taking place at ‘Christmas 1874’ while the Blackburn Times celebrated the 50th anniversary of the club with a series of historical articles in November 1924.

However, it’s at this point that the origins story suddenly blurs. Did the club feel that they had missed the boat by not celebrating the golden jubilee in 1924 or had most of the previous resources got the date wrong? The History of the Blackburn Rovers Football Club 1875-1925 (1925) by Charles Francis seems to be the turning point when 5th Nov 1875 becomes the definitive date of the St Leger Hotel meeting, repeated from that point onwards. 

A Jubilee dinner with a good number of founders and early players in attendance was held in December 1925 which seems to seal the 1875 story. However, as late as 1948 Harry Kay produced a book containing a miscellany of facts about the club entitled Things About Blackburn Rovers in which he gives the formation as taking place at ‘Christmas 1874’. 

Harry Berry and Mike Jackman have produced a series of well researched and written histories of Blackburn Rovers, published over the last fifty years. I asked their opinion about the foundation date question. They both believe that the St Leger Hotel meeting to formally organise the club did take place in November 1875, but that the team was almost certainly playing matches before that. Both authors say that they have mentioned this possibility to the club but that officials have rebuffed the idea, probably on the grounds that it would make a farce of previous and future anniversary celebrations. 

However, the 1874 date continues to be raised in some serious studies, most notably by James Walvin in his The People’s Game: A History of Football Revisited (1994) which records the meeting as ‘Christmas 1874’ and by the academic Rob Lewis, who repeatedly claimed that the club was formed in 1874, throughout his many texts.

The November 1873 Blackburn Standard report of a Blackburn Ramblers team playing ‘Association’ against Brookhouse continues to intrigue, mainly because both sides contained men who would later form the basis of the early Rovers team including John Lewis, the Greenwood brothers, Tom Dean and John Duckworth. Was this perhaps the origin of the club? 

A possibility suggested by the University of Bolton academic Peter Swain is that Blackburn Grammar School (now QEGS) teacher TJ (Thomas Joseph) Syckelmoore may have been more influential on the club’s beginnings than previously thought. Swain’s research shows that Syckelmoore was probably at the St Leger meeting with several of his former pupils in attendance (including John Lewis) and, as an older, more experienced figure, he could have been a driving force behind the formation. 

Swain points out that before moving to teach at QEGS, Syckelmoore was an undergraduate at Cambridge University in the 1860s, where the rules of the game were developed, and I have uncovered earlier reports which show him playing football at Tonbridge Grammar School before that. Could it be that Syckelmoore’s arrival in Blackburn was the real spark which lit the formation of the club, and might that explain why so many of the early players had previously attended QEGS?