Derby County Memories

The mid-50s saw Derby drop to the third tier of the game for the first time in their history. Despite scoring 110 goals and recording 18 home wins, the fact that only one promotion place was available meant finishing second, five points behind title-winners Grimsby, condemned the Rams to another season at this level. For season 1956/57, manager Harry Storer stuck with the players who had come so close the previous season with no major signings announced. Initial results were…

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The winter of 1947 was one of the coldest on record in British history, with February the coldest month since 1895. Snowfall led to widespread disruption across the UK including the postponement of Derby County’s match against Arsenal at the Baseball Ground on Wednesday, February 5. On the day of the postponement the Derby Evening Telegraph reported that: ‘One look at the Baseball Ground this morning satisfied Referee W. E. Wood, of Luton, that it would be impossible for Derby…

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Take any club in the country and ask a representative section of its adult supporters to list that club’s “Ten Top Players of All Time” and you would probably end up with many players who would receive a mention, a smaller group of players who would be in multiple responses and, finally, a handful of players who would stand head and shoulders above the rest. Any club legend’s career, however, has to start somewhere and so this article looks back…

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Derby were due to play at Spurs in a Division One fixture on Saturday 28 February 1953 but the game was postponed because of Tottenham’s involvement in the FA Cup quarter final at Birmingham that day. Only 13,933 spectators watched the rearranged game on 12 March as it was a Thursday afternoon so many would have been unable to leave work. The low attendance explains why the programme, below, is scarce. In comparison, 59,543 were present at Spurs’ previous home…

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Though not lifting the trophy until 1946, Derby’s FA Cup record in the 1930s was generally very good but it also threw up more than its fair share of tough away ties at lower-division clubs and when the draw for the Third Round in 1934/35 was made it sent the Rams to Bootham Crescent to face York City of the Third Division (North). At this point, York were a relatively new club, having only been formed in 1922, and were…

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It used to be tradition in England that a full League programme would be played on Christmas Day with the fixtures reversed on Boxing Day. Derby County’s last ever Christmas Day match was in 1957 where they lost 2-1 at Bristol City. Just 24 hours later though, the Rams beat Bristol City 5-2 at the Baseball Ground. 95 years ago Derby’s Christmas Day and Boxing Day 1929 Division One fixtures saw George Jobey’s team face Leeds United. The Rams went…

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Though they weren’t to lift the actual trophy itself until 1946, Derby’s Cup record in the 1930s was more than respectable. Although they had been on the receiving end of a giant-killing act at Exeter City in January of 1931, the Rams had reached at least the 5th Round in the four subsequent seasons and had been handed a 3rd Round home draw against non-league Dartford in January of 1936. That tie proved more problematic than expected and, though Derby…

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On 23 February 1921, Division One leaders Burnley visited the Baseball Ground on a run of 24 consecutive league games without defeat. Derby were bottom of the table with only two league wins all season: a 3-0 home win against Manchester City in October, and a 2-1 win at home to Huddersfield on New Year’s Day. Just 11 days earlier Derby had visited Turf Moor and were on the end of a 2-1 reverse, Bill Paterson scoring for the Rams….

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Relegation from the First Division in 1921 had been followed by two successive mid-table finishes for the Rams. The previous season had seen attendances begin to drop below 10,000 so the summer signing of inside-forward Jackie Whitehouse from Birmingham, who had won a Second Division medal there 3 years earlier, was intended to improve the club’s goalscoring record which had averaged barely a goal a game in the previous season. It certainly achieved that, however Whitehouse would, ironically, be the…

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One of the rarest post war Derby home programmes is from the game against arch rivals Nottingham Forest on Saturday 30 January 1971. At the time the Rams had been struggling to establish a consistent run of form, winning only four league games since the end of August. The previous game, however, had seen the team beat Ipswich 1-0 at Portman Road thanks to a goal from John O’Hare. According to Andy Ellis’s The Derby County Programme Guide (2021), bad…

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