The Sunday League
Bletchley and District Sunday League … it was at the start of 1966. Bill Johnson
I enjoyed the Sunday football . We all mixed together. It was a social thing, all guys our age. We always used to get together to play football and they’d hold dances and various fund raising functions. Different clubs… we’d all associate with each other. You know, it was pretty good. Tommy Flanagan (The Chequers)
In those days we had fifty-odd clubs. We had to write all the envelopes and we used to sit there folding up fixtures and going round the table. We’d have them all laid out on the table and you’d walk round the table and get one set of fixtures and staple them and put them in an envelope and then go round again basically. It was a family affair at one time because when I became secretary my daughter then became fixture secretary. Bill Johnson
One day a leaflet dropped through the door saying ‘Come down to Wolverton Rec on the Sunday… Forming a football team for Greenleys…’ That was from Derek Newlands, he was our manager then. So one Sunday I thought, ‘I’ll have a little walk round there and see what’s what,’ and that was it. There was about fifteen/sixteen blokes turned up and we just sort of played. Wally Kalek
And the Premiership was exceptionally good when you had teams like Greenleys, Stantonbury, Conniburrow. There were some good players in them teams. Staff Nash (MK Police)
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My husband Julian (Jules) Balach played for The Old Swan in Bletchley, great team. John Reed, Dave Turnbull, Dave Liquorice, to name but a few. Some real class amongst this league and never really recognised for it. So many of their players were in Senior Saturday teams, Winslow Utd, MK City, Wolverton Town (what a pitch), wish there were more photos archived
As a 13 yr old I followed the white horse in stony. Who had most of the best players thinks end before Milton Keynes arrived. I played in the reservers at 15.Team’s from then Saints,Pullmans,Newton, I played for White horse, Greenleys res, Allen Bradley’s, Conniburrow. Redbridge, a gap of tyre I ran a team BPC from work then played for Leighton before ending with NO Police at 45. (That is me in goal in the picture v primrose, Alan Blackman may well have scored). I am still involved with the league as a referee for the last 15yrs.
when local football was worth playing and tough!! Cows to move and garages to change in, pint ,cards and a laugh after game pleasure to be involved
Well I passed as a referee 1966 in Essex moved here 1968 bletchley as a railway driver went to railway club bletchley met several railway football players ray Jackson one said to him I was a referee next Sunday morning in 1968 a knock at my front door man said I’m Fred Purcell told you were a ref need you this morning 10 30 ko to ref our game newton v can’t remember ho took me to ground near bottle dump newton longvill we got the sheep of field and cow patch poop and played the game I then refereed most Sundays till 1993 when I took over Milton Keynes borough as chairman at manor fields after Denby football club folded
Memories eh! Enjoyed reading this.Sounded like fun 🙂
Just seen the comments re the Bletchley Sunday League and its brought back many old memories. When Sunday football was first allowed it was promoted as providing football for those people who wanted to play but could not play Saturday football for whatever reasons including not being good enough to get into Saturday league football teams. With this in mind 3 of us working at Westminster Bank in Bletchley decided to form a team under the name Westbank United and entered the newly formed Bletchley Sunday League 2nd Division in 1967. We soon found that rather than the expected friendly ‘kick about’ games were taken very seriously and many players were those who also played on Saturdays. Usually finding ourselves totally outclassed we lost most games but continued on for a second season often using better quality ‘ringers’ in the hope that we would not be found out but our results remained dismal!! Although we all enjoyed playing we realised that the overall standard of the league was getting too competetive and so we resigned from the league after our 2nd season. I think we came bottom one season and second bottom the other season. Our first season we were given a council pitch in Bond Avenue. The council marked out the pitch in creosote and put up a couple of goal posts. I used to use a paint brush to recreosote the pitch lines every month and we played with no football nets or even corner posts the first season. The league then brought in a rule that for the next season every team had to provide corner posts and goal nets which we borrowed. When in our second season we started seeing teams turning up with managers and doing warm up exercises (we shared a crate of beer most half times!)we knew that the time had come to reluctantly leave. Apart from having the worse playing record of any other side at that time we had one honour. That being the first Bletchley Sunday League side to be drawn against a team from another Sunday League in the new County Sunday Cup competion. We drew Stoke Mandeville Hospital. The Bletchley Sunday League even gave us a better ground to use for this cup game and several of the league organisers turned up to watch. We knew we were in for a tough time when we overheard one of the Stoke side saying he had drive up from Cornwall that morning just to play in this game. Also 3 of our players had not turned up so I quickly asked 3 youngsters who were having a kick about if they would assume our players names and turn out for us to get 11 players on the pitch! Things got worse very quickly when after only a few minutes our goal keeper broke his wrist making a save and had to go off. As we had no sub he strapped his wrist up and came on again as an outfield player. We had no replacement keeper and no one wanted to go in goal so we took it in turns! I think we said after 3 goals went in someone else would take over in goal. Well by the end of the game just about all of us had taken a turn in goal as we lost 16-1!!! Happy days!!!
In addition to the teams mentioned, Primrose FC
were a very successful side, having won the Sunday premier division and the Sunday cup two seasons running.
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