I was contacted a few weeks back by Anthony Taylor, a British-based collector of baseball memorabilia. While his collection is focused mainly on the Major Leagues, he has developed an interest in British baseball too, and he has managed to pick up a number of rare programmes from the 1930s and 1950s, such as the one for the 1939 national final between Halifax and Rochdale that is pictured to the right.
It can get frustrating at times to think of all the British baseball memorabilia that sits in private collections, never to be seen by the wider public. So I was delighted that Anthony was not only offering to digitize his collection for my perusal, but was also explicit about wanting it to be added to the Project Cobb site so that it became publicly available.
I like to think that other collections will surface over time, and that their owners will be as generous as Anthony Taylor has been. However, it may be greedy to wish for collections as extensive and novel as this one.
The collection can be found here.
7 comments
One of my favourite things about this collection is the names in the Romford Wasps versus Hackney Royals line-ups.
… You can just imagine the commentator saying:
“Lazy Bones MacPhail is taking a small lead off first as Bernie Ziff smokes the pitch past Slugger Cranston and into the mitt of Snooker Ruvinsky.”
I’m not sure how confident you’d be as a manager relying on Schoolboy Dawber toeing the rubber for you!
What a fantastic find. Let’s hope more people out there learn about Project Cobb and are encouraged to share their collections more widely, just as Anthony Taylor has kindly done here.
Many thanks to Joe Gray for the work in getting part of my collection on to Project Cobb. I continue to be amazed by what is still out there from pre-war British baseball
Without giving too many of my secrets away – a lot of the programmes came from soccer programme listings and auctions – for example, a big Leeds soccer and rugby collection was broken up and sold and I was able to pick up 3 pre-war baseball progs for games played at Headingley.
From time to time items do turn up on “FleaBay” but these do tend to be more expensive – I declined to pay £120 for a 1937 West Ham Pirates programme (I wonder who did buy it) but I did get a baseball signed by the 1936 Rochdale Greys team on a engraved stand for £30 which is one of my favourite pieces.
Joe,
There are a few things in a file in HQ which might be worthy of adding to the Cobb site.
Tim
What have you got? I reckon I missed some stuff when I last visited HQ as my eyes were glazing over after reading through every issue of Double-Play, as quality as publication as it was.
Cheers Tim,
Joe
Hi, my name is Arthur Kendal. I was a player with Stretford Saints during the 1960’s and 1970’s . I am in the 1963 Saints program that you have. I also have an original program. The last player in the line-up is Ian Glover. He is an Australin cricket player and was playing in the Lancashire professional league. He was with another Aussie cricketer who also played for the Saiints in 1963, his name is Ian Chappell. He went on to captain the Australian cricket team. Ian Glover pitched and Ian Chappell played catcher against a team from merseyside called the Mormon Yankees. Saints won the game.