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 reason the Rams came so close to achieving promotion but also the unintended reason why they failed by the smallest of margins.

It had been a steady start to the season, the club lying in 6^th place, 3 points behind leaders South Shields. There had been 4 wins in the opening 8 games but one of those had been a trip to Bristol City on September 29^th and a remarkable 8-0 victory, 4 of those from Harry Storer. Next up was another away game, this one at 16^th placed Hull City who had won just once so far.

The Tigers played at the 16,000 capacity Anlaby Road at the time (they wouldn’t move to Boothferry Park until 1948) and, for the match, issued a splendid 12 page programme costing 2d. The wording on the cover suggests this was the 17^th season the club had issued a programme.

The editorial on pages 2-4 features ebullient praise on Derby’s win at Ashton Gate and the potential for the Rams to be challenging for promotion. Team line-ups are on the centre pages (players numbered 1-22 as was standard for the time). The “Dribbles” feature on page 9 is a precursor to the pen-pictures so prominent in programmes of the 40s and 50s. The H/T scoreboard on page 10 is unusual in that it has a mixture of football and rugby league fixtures included.

As for the match, it was a much closer affair than the previous week but a single Harry Storer goal earned the Rams the two points in front of a crowd of 9,000.

Back to Jackie Whitehouse, though. With two games of the season remaining – and Derby locked in a tussle with Bury and Blackpool to decide who would be promoted alongside Leeds, he was injured in the 1-0 win at Coventry and would miss the final two games of the season – the first time that season he would be absent from the team. The games were a double-header against Leicester and apparently Whitehouse was greatly missed as the first game at Filbert Street resulted in a 0-3 defeat. Though the Rams rallied to win the return 4-0, they would end up missing out on promotion by 0.014 of a goal. The press were quick to conclude that, had Whitehouse been on the pitch, the one goal the Rams were short of might well have happened.