A VICTORIAN scrapbook featuring the Coventry City team in 1890 is being auctioned at the weekend.
Coventry and Warwickshire’s sporting life in Victorian and Edwardian times has been captured for posterity in the unique scrapbook packed with newspaper clippings and sporting ephemera.
How life and communications were in the late 1800s and early 1900s compared to the social media world of today is underlined in one cutting headlined ‘Yesterday’s Local Cricket’.
The treasured sporting album, for sale at Hansons Auctioneers in Derbyshire on Saturday (September 30), also includes a photo of Coventry Football Club team pictured in 1890-91 – just seven years after the club was founded in 1883.
There are football, gymkhana and rugby newspaper reports dating as far back as 1888 but the vast majority of cuttings relate to cricket.
Plus, at the back of the album are several clippings relating to a plane crash in 1935 involving Lady Young and government medical officer Dr Kirby, whose father lived in Warwickshire.
The newspaper report started: “Opening his newspaper on Friday last week, Mr F Kirby, who for the last two-and-a-half years has been living at the Globe Hotel, Warwick, received a severe shock on reading that his son, Dr TFR Kirby, a government medical officer in Northern Rhodesia, was lost in the bush.”
Charles Hanson, owner of Hansons Auctioneers, said: “It’s hard to imagine now, with our smart phones and ability to broadcast live on social media, that people were happy to read ‘Yesterday’s Cricket’ and that a father found about his son’s plane crash by reading his newspaper.”
The scrapbook album is being sold together with an original letter from one of England’s greatest ever cricketers William Gilbert Grace (1848-1915). Grace played an important role in the development of the sport.
Mr Hanson said: “If you are a cricket fan and from Coventry or Warwickshire, these two items would be wonderful to own. The scrapbook brims with the area’s sporting history and heritage and takes us back to another time and place. It would be nice if this piece of history stayed in the area where it belongs.”
The letter and scrapbook (lot 877) have an estimate of £800 to £1,200.
Visit www.hansonsauctioneers.co.uk for further details.
