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Broadside entitled 'The Football Match' |
CommentaryThis sports review begins: 'Swifts V. Macalvenny Wallopers / Written by JAMES CURRNS / Copies to be had at 192 Overgate Dundee' (probably the Poets' Box) The verse begins: 'A football match last Saturday I went to see; / To have some fun was exactly what I ment, you see'. Very little is known about either of these football teams although the Swifts were known to have been a Dundee team who played against Arbroath in 1880. That match was supposed to have decided whether supremacy lay with the city or the country. Dundee is renowned for its devotion to its football teams. Interest in football increased at the same rate as the spread of industrialisation as it was a constructive way to spend precious recreation hours. Dundee's football fascination is hardly surprising given its industrial orientation. The composer James Curran (or Currin) was a well-known Glasgow parodist. It is not clear what the connection between the different Poet?s Boxes were. They almost certainly sold each other?s sheets. It is known that John Sanderson in Edinburgh often wrote to the Leitches in Glasgow for songs and that later his brother Charles obtained copies of songs from the Dundee Poet?s Box. There was also a Poet?s Box in Belfast from 1846 to 1856 at the address of the printer James Moore, and one at Paisley in the early 1850s, owned by William Anderson. Broadsides are single sheets of paper, printed on one side, to be read unfolded. They carried public information such as proclamations as well as ballads and news of the day. Cheaply available, they were sold on the streets by pedlars and chapmen. Broadsides offer a valuable insight into many aspects of the society they were published in, and the National Library of Scotland holds over 250,000 of them.
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Probable period of publication:
1880-1900 shelfmark: RB.m.143(138)
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