For those who spend all their time in the forum and who might not always spot the stories on the front page....
Liverpool colours 50's style
Clearing out our loft the other day I came across a box with 15 Liverpool shirts in. Not a full team strip but all different colours and sizes, evidence of the lucrative market in kid’s replica kits bought for and by our boys over the last 10 years. And as I looked at them I had a flashback to the time of stitch-on-numbers, home-made rattles, rosettes, knitted scarves, bobble hats and those wonderful flags that brought together the combined artistry of half the street.
The cheapest of those shirts in the box in the loft must have cost near on £25 but they are all there, the Candy shirt to fit a two-year-old, a Crown Paint shirt, the green away kit with the white flashes, the other green away with a granddad collar, a gold away and on and on. And there are the socks and shorts to go with them.
In the fifties there were no sponsors keen to put their logo over every bit of kit. There was no mass market in football merchandise. The majority of us made, or got someone else to make, our colours. There were no souvenir shops other than the proey shop and the blokes selling badges and scarves outside the ground.
My first Liverpool kit was bought from TJ Hughes in London Road. It was a plain red shirt with white edging. The number seven, Ian Callaghan’s number, was stitched on with pieces of white blanket cut to size by my mum. The Liverpool badge, a big oval white shape was from the same blanket and the Liver bird was painted on with something left over in the shed. You never bothered about matching shorts and socks in those days.
Then there was my scarf. Knitted by my gran over months and months, a masterpiece of design. She managed to create alternate bits of red and white each with the letters spelling out LIVERPOOL FC in alternate colours. It was a fantastic scarf and was given to me at Christmas 1962. I was nine and a half. I kept it for 18 months before it was nicked on the way home from one of my first Liverpool matches.
The trouble was in those days people weren’t nicking things you could easily replace. No one could replace that scarf. My gran could have another go and spend the next few weeks creating another but it would involve a trip to the wool shop on Bedford Road and all the design work would need to be done again. I never did get a replacement and was without a scarf until the 1965 coming home parade when Liverpool beat Leeds United 2-1 in the FA Cup Final at Wembley. Then I was allowed to buy a new ‘machine knit’ – that was the big slogan in those days – a ‘machine knit’ scarf from one of the blokes outside St George’s Hall.
The rattle was a treasure, a particular favourite possession of mine. My granddad created it from bits of wood he kept in the Anderson shelter at the back of the house. These were the small tin shelters built to run to during the Blitz when the Luftwaffe dropped tons and tons of bombs on Liverpool. My granddad had turned the shelter into a shed with a workbench. From there he produced my go-cart and my Liverpool rattle.
The rattle was a fairly simple construction and for those who have never seen them they looked like the letter ‘L’ upside down. You held the handle and swung it and ratchets caught onto bits of plywood and the faster you swung it the louder the row. It was a fantastic rattle. It was painted red and white. The same red that made up the Liverbird on the white badge on my Liverpool shirt.
I have no idea what happened to the rattle but I do remember it became more difficult to take them into the ground in the late 60’s – perhaps they were considered to be weapons.
The rosette was perhaps the most individual of all the items you’d wear to the match in those days because it was something you could create yourself as a kid. You didn’t need someone who could knit or someone who could saw wood. You just needed paper, scissors, some glue and bits of red and white ribbon and a black and white picture of St John or Roger Hunt from the back page of the Liverpool Echo. Those rosettes were real works of art.
And then there was the flag. Ours was special. Loads of us ganged together to make it. Actually it was crap. It was so bad that from a distance it just looked like a dirty bed sheet after a bad nose bleed. But we put so much effort into creating it and designing it. And of course ‘we’ meant our mums who did all the sewing. And we kept adding bits until it was the most majestic heartfelt tribute to the Mighty Reds I have ever seen. No marketing executives or design gurus could come up with such a masterpiece. And we honestly thought that when the players warmed up and we unfurled it and held it over our heads that we actually made a difference to the performance of the team.
I don’t know where the scarf, the rattle, the rosette and the flag are now. What is certain is that they are best where they are. They would look totally out of place on the Kop today when kids view wearing last year’s kit as naff. But they were special and a tribute to the days when the terraced houses of Liverpool formed the production line for Liverpool colours rather than the designer label factories of today.
