Results and Teams, 1908-39

RESULTS AND TEAMS, 1908-39

From this page you can use the links below to look at Bedford Town’s first team competitive results and, where known, lineups, from 1908/9 to the beginning of World War 2. 

There are also brief details of first team friendlies, and, for 1939/40, the wartime UCL competition.

To access any season, click on the appropriate seasonal link in the box at the bottom of this page (egTeams 08.09X.xls  for 1908/9). The relevant MS Excel file will then open but you may need to use the zoom control , or click on "Google Sheets", to read the detail. When you are finished the back button on your browser will bring you back to this page.

 I have been surprised at the amount of detail I’ve been able to find out for these seasons-much more than I expected. Press coverage was in some respects more comprehensive than in the 1970s-especially as regards team lineups. Out of a total of 1,019 competitive first team matches, there were only 79-7.75%-where I was unable to find a complete Eagles’ lineup. Many of these were midweek, end-of-season matches which were not reported in much detail, or any detail at all.  And of 2,702 Eagles’ goals scored in those matches, only 47 –or 1.74%-are not attributed to a known scorer. 

It has been necessary to hunt down some of these results and lineups in various newspaper sources and these are abbreviated in the Notes to the right of the sheets

-BT means Bedfordshire Times, BR means Bedford Record, BM means Bedfordshire Mercury and ET means Evening Telegraph (Kettering), the weekday version, or Pink’Un which was the Saturday evening football version of the same paper.

Wherever possible I’ve also give the opposition lineup but these are, inevitably, less comprehensive. 

Various short notes on points of interest appear in the right hand margin. 

At the bottom of the sheets appear relevant League tables. In one or two cases these can’t be exactly reconciled with the results but the differences are small and don’t affect final positions. 

Notes on the layout appear below-they follow the same format used elsewhere on this site for later years. 

NOTES ON THE "RESULTS AND TEAMS" PAGES 

For each match the opponents are shown in upright type, eg RUSHDEN TOWN, for home matches and italics, eg RUSHDEN TOWN, for away matches.

The competition and attendance, where known, are shown to the left of the opposition name. Details of the abbreviations used for competitions appear in the  top right of each sheet. 

Attendances have been taken from press reports where recorded, but these are few and far between. Where given they are often clearly estimates. Where the press report described the crowd as “more than” or “just under” a ball-park figure, I have shown this with a + or – sign, eg “2,000+” will be a crowd reported as “over2,000”. More often I have had simply to quote the reporter’s subjective description, “large”, “small”, etc. Where a financial gate was reported, it is in the right hand NOTES column.  For more thoughts about this see the section on “Finance, wages, attendances and similar stuff” under Various topics, 1908-39

The teams are then set out in shirt number order, 1 to 11, with Bedford in bold and the opposition in unbold. In a few cases it was only possible to find the line-up that was scheduled to play, and not the actual eleven that played-this is denoted by Sched to the left of the names. 

Where press accounts disagree on a team line-up or goalscorer, I have taken the “home” version as definitive, i.e. the Bedford press if it involved a Bedford player and the “away” press for opposing players, but the discrepancy is noted in the right hand margin. 

Where complete lineups are not known I have listed the players mentioned in press reports: in these cases the position shown for each player is normally only a guess on my part. Occasionally no opposition players are named at all, in which case the line appears blank. And there are a few matches where no lineups or scorers at all are known. 

Under the line-ups, in italics, are set out, in the following order, Bedford scorers; opposition scorers. Referee [where known]. Scorers are given in the order in which the goals were scored if this is known.  Referees are named quite often in reports up to about 1930, but only rarely after this.