At the Dorman Museum in Middlesbrough, an exhibition detailing the history of Middlesbrough FC via a collection of match-worn shirts and memorabilia recently came to an end. Robert Nichol of the Fly Me To The Moon Boro Fanzine takes us through the exhibition, which is now looking for a new home. Daniel Wales reports.
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00:00We're in the Towns Museum, the Don Museum, and we're at the Borough Shirt Museum, their
00:07exhibition that's been showing through the summer and has been extended through the autumn.
00:12And it's two guys who were collectors, and they came together to collect together Borough
00:17Shirts through the ages, and they've got a massive collection in a lock-up normally,
00:24and they were desperate to display it.
00:26We come into the exhibition past an original turnstile from the riverside, we don't go
00:31through those sort of turnstiles anymore, and some people, you know, a lot of the generation
00:35come in that post that and think, what's that?
00:39And then we were immediately struck by two sort of shirts, strips facing us, an England
00:47strip from the interwar period, worn by Mickey Fenton and his cap, and then a shirt which
00:54is said to be, reputed to be the oldest football shirt still in existence, which is a Victorian
00:59Borough Shirt, because Middlesbrough was formed in the Victorian period.
01:03I really like the way that you can marry the older and the more modern, and I love the
01:10way from, I come in here quite often and we've got like a little book that people can write
01:14things in, and I love the way that people sort of match into their particular period,
01:20and so a grandparent can take their grandkids in, and they both relate to different things.
01:27Immediately I'm looking straight over there and I'm seeing a Boxing shirt, and I'm seeing
01:31a Phillip Stamp shirt, and I'm taken back to a time when those players were playing
01:36at the riverside, or they were actually away shirts, so I'm thinking about away games,
01:40I'm thinking about Stampy playing against Manchester City in the Cup, things like that,
01:45so it transports you.
01:48Another important fact is they're all match-worn shirts, and there's Hayden Coulson's which
01:52is quite a recent shirt round the corner, and you can see the mud and the grass stains
01:56on it as well, so it's great.
01:58It's such a significant event, 1986 when the club, well they didn't nearly go bust, they
02:04did actually go bust, but before they were allowed to play again they had to repay all
02:09their debts, and everything happened so quickly that basically we couldn't even play at Ayrston
02:15Park, it was still locked, we had to appeal for a club to host us, and we played a game,
02:20a really important game at Hartlepool after they'd played their home game, and if we hadn't
02:24played that game, the Football League said we would have been kicked out of the league,
02:28so it was an incredible time, and we fought back and we got two promotions in two seasons
02:33and got into the top thrice under Bruce Riog, and it's a time that's very special to a lot
02:37of people, because they're still sort of bonded to those players, and you mentioned
02:42Fly Me To The Moon, and the captain of that team was Tony Mowbray, and Bruce Riog said
02:46to the captain of that team that, quote along the lines, if you had to go to the moon, this
02:51is the guy who would want to be beside him, so we started a fanzine off the back of that,
02:56Fly Me To The Moon, so you know the song from that.