You could argue that, as a mill town at the heart of the industrial revolution, Burnley was at the very epicentre of industry and commerce in the 19th century. An example of its place in the vanguard of Victorian life is evident in that Burnley FC was one of the 12 founding clubs of what was to become a billion pound worldwide industry – the football league - so someone had their wits about them.
But there is little evidence of those heady days in a visit to east Lancashire today. With many neighbourhoods gone to seed, racism a constant concern (the BNP draw significant support here), and a feeling that, exaggerated by its proximity to booming Manchester, they’ve been left behind, Burnley gives off a strong whiff of a town with a great future behind it. As Dave Edmundson said: “low ambitions, low esteem, low horizons”.
Dave was a teacher for over 20 years during which time he worked as a freelance sports journalist in TV, radio and in the press - Test Match Special and the Daily Telegraph amongst others. His name was sufficiently well-known for him to be successful when the job of secretary of Lancashire County Cricket Club at Old Trafford came up. After five years at Old Trafford, during which time he managed pre-season trips to Cape Town and India, he spent two years at Advance, the performance gurus he brought in to help the first team squad.
His can-do attitude was probably enough to land him the job of chief executive at Burnley FC, and the huge task of not only re-aligning the club’s ambitions but also positioning the club as a central focus of the community. For his efforts he was appointed as a royal ambassador to look at change in Burnley through the Business in the Community organisation.
“I think the tea theme of your trip is brilliant. I think tea is a social connector more so than coffee. Coffee tends to be drunk more as a stimulant whereas tea is a soother, if there’s a major catastrophe you think ‘what are we going to do? We’ll have a cuppa tea first.’
I travelled five hours on a train from Georgia up to Moscow where they served tchai, they come around with samovars. It wasn’t drunk with milk but the arrival of tea was a great ritual. I’ve been to India with the cricket team where you get the tea wallahs, I know that’s a bit ‘Empire’ but there is the great ritual about having tea, and in some ways isn’t that about the fact that we have afternoon tea?
Was it the British through the Empire that spread it through the world - the cup of tea ritual tea in the morning, afternoon?
On your travels you may well find that there are other drinks that brew leaves which might be conceived as a different sort of drink but they bring the tea disciplines to it. The rooibos tea is a different leaf. What about iced tea? Do you put milk in first? How are you going to go on with these cocoa areas? You’ll have to introduce tea to them.
I’ve got more and more taste sensitive, I think, with tea, I can tell when somebody’s re-boiled the kettle. Tea has got to be boiling water, absolutely just on the boil then poured on to the tea leaves or tea bag and then it brews the best and I’ve realised you really have to be disciplined to leave it infuse because it doesn’t matter how many teabags you use, if you pour it straight away it doesn’t taste the same. I also think it does taste better in china cups. There is something about having a cup of strong tea out of a china cup – like drinking wine from the correct glass.
So Burnley is in the elite 44 of football’s pyramid but it’s a very difficult situation trying to balance all that because Burnley’s got a great name in football - it was one of the original 12 clubs in the league, it’s our 125th year. It’s always been renowned as a small town club with considerable playing achievements, winning the championship twice, in the 20/21 season and 59/60, but the area’s very depressed.
Thirty five per cent of homeowners in Burnley earn less than 10 grand a year, so trying to sell season tickets and keep your fan base is very difficult. There’s a history of low ambitions, low esteem, low horizons and I’m involved in working on that with agencies, and the football club is a focus because you infuse hopes and dreams every August – every week – you practice outreaching and engaging with that attitude and say ‘well look, come and interact with the football club’ because they feel comfortable with their football club so they will come in and do academic courses.
140,000 people go through our community programmes every year. The football club is the new church, the old social links that a church had where people went every Sunday and they returned to that little community. Maybe it was a little incestuous but certainly there was a discipline and there was an order of control and an authority so there was less of the individual ‘get what we can - wait for the handouts - O it’s all happened to me’ attitude. There was a greater get up and go, a greater spirit of holding together and having a cup of tea at times of adversity, whereas those communities have started to disperse and you wouldn’t even dream of going to your next door neighbour and saying ‘come in for a cup of tea’. So in some ways the football club is trying to provide the new village hall where you can have 365 day a year opportunities to interact. Yes, every fortnight a football match breaks out here and there are players on the pitch but what you’re doing is engaging the community for them to say, ‘well yea you can be what you can be, you can come into the football club and learn and develop and go out into the world’.
We’ve just been involved in a bid which is a government funded scheme for raising entrepreneurs and being the best you can be and coming into the football club because we’re going to have part of the stand completely refurbished into an enterprise haven that’s really to say ‘look, this is where you can start a business, you can do it’ but we’re doing it with the Shooting Stars programme. It needs to be reconnected to those great days in the Victorian era and before when those Aldermanic figures, who may well have been very pompous and very conscious of the social class, started the industrial revolution but also the football.
In this area and the north Midlands the biggest billion dollar industry in the world started and Burnley was one of the clubs. When I was in cricket and we were talking about forming a premier league right across Lancashire, so all the clubs had a pyramid system you get to the premier league like football and the rather blinkered approach was ‘O no, a premier league would never work. You’d never be able to travel from Rishton to Lancaster for a game – all that traffic’. I said ‘what? When the league started in 1892 it was a bloody long way from Colne to Blackburn’. But they haven’t got that same drive today.
When I came here people said ‘It’s different in Burnley’. Don’t tell me we can’t do something because ‘that’s what we do in Burnley’. There’s a lot of that. Sometimes people wallow in perversity but sometimes we need to reconnect to where Burnley was as a main centre: Coal, Cotton, Football. Coal and cotton have gone but football is still here, so yea it’s a fantastic place.
Looking at the regeneration of the town you see what some of the buildings could represent and you get away from that in-your-face rather run down terraced housing stock and you see the potential to turn the town around as you see in Manchester.
But it is about belief, it’s about getting that pride back. When I go all over the country and I say where I’m from Burnley they say ‘O my God it must be awful there with all the armoured cars and all that sort of thing. O, Burnley, no.’
I could go and stand in the middle of Cape Town or Rio de Janeiro and if I mention Burnley they’ll say ‘Burnley Football Club’. It’s the biggest thing the town’s got. Sometimes that’s been hard making people realise that – your jewel in the crown is a football club."
Advice for the trip?
"Keep going. Whatever happens, keep going."
September 26 It was a busy day. 
Recent Comments