Why Was The Club Created?
It’s amazing how many times a story is so often repeated that it becomes unquestioned fact.
The three stripes on City’s badge is a good example of that. They represent Manchester’s three rivers, right?
Except that every work on heraldry I’ve consulted lists them as “bendlets”, representing the metal strips that strengthened wooden shields in the Middle Ages. According to Harold Ellis Tomlinson’s The Heraldry of Manchester, the colours are taken from the coat of arms of the de Greilley family, the first lords of the manor of Manchester.
The story of a vicar’s daughter who created a football team in order to lure the young men of the district away from gang-fighting known as “scuttling” is also now a well established one. In a 2015 interview, City's head of infrastructure, Pete Bradshaw, described the club's origins as a “crime diversion programme”, while City's CEO Ferran Soriano went into more detail in this 2022 podcast.
The claim about Anna Connell being the club’s founder first appeared in an unpublished history of the club in the 1970s, but was based on the false assumption that the team sprang out of men’s meetings she organised in 1880. However, Paul Toovey’s 2009 book, The Birth of the Blues, revealed that these meetings had no connection to the football team.
The scuttling story first appeared in Peter Lupson's 2006 book, Thank God For Football, which examined the church's role in the creation of eleven Football League clubs. But his chapter on City's origins didn't contain any evidence linking St Mark's to scuttling. Instead, the claim was based on the twin assumptions that social conditions in the poorer parts of Manchester were also present in West Gorton, and that this must have been the reason for the team's creation.
In reality, West Gorton in 1880 was a thriving iron district where foundry workers enjoyed wages that were double the national average. Local newspapers contain no reports of youth crime in the area at this time. Indeed, the area's police superintendent declared at the end of that decade that “he did not believe there was a township anywhere of the same population so free from real crime as Gorton”.
In fact, the St Mark's players were the posh kids of the area. Their first captain was a university student (an exceptionally rare thing in those days), while most of the others were sons of respected community figures such as the church organist and the manager of the area's largest iron works.
So was there any other reason for St Mark's to start a football team?
On 6 November 1880, St Mark's rector Arthur Connell attended a keynote speech by Manchester's Bishop Fraser. It revealed that young men were now five times less likely to be confirmed into the Manchester Church than young women. Fraser called on his clergymen to dispel “the notion that religion was unmanly”. Later that day a St Mark's rugby team played its first recorded match at West Gorton. A week later, a St Mark's association football side played their first known match.
While it is impossible to be certain about the exact motivations of people now long dead, it does appear that the creation of a football team at St Mark's is an example of what was then called “muscular Christianity”. Connell was certainly on the evangelical wing of the church, from where the strongest supporters of “muscular Christianity” were drawn.
So were we formed in order to make men good Christians?
Well that depends on what your definition of a football club is.
City’s story can certainly be traced back to 1880. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s when the football club started.
So let’s get on to definitions. Most would agree that a football club has a unique identity, an ownership structure and rules, and profit and loss accounts. Its primary aim is to be successful at football, and to grow.
But as St Mark’s has none of these characteristics, it can’t be classed as a football club.
So when did the actual football club that we now support come into existence?
Well, that’s a subject I’ll be getting into another time.
If you’re interested in discovering more about City’s origins I have a book on Amazon that covers the period 1880 to 1885. You can buy it here.
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I’ve been posting new information about City’s rise to League status on Twitter all this week. You can view it here.