You tend to think that you’re alone when you’re a collector, that nobody could possibly be as daft, which is what your family constantly tells you. I don’t think this – I think that, around the world, there are thousands of people doing equally dopey things. So I was well pleased to receive from Santa a book called A History of Bradford City AFC in Objects. I have no interest or connection with Bradford City but I do love football memorabilia, the older the better, on any old club, anywhere.
The other thing collectors think is: “Goodness, my treasures, they are just so amazing that one day I will turn them into a book, oh, yes.” That way madness lies, if not bankruptcy. Yet the author of this Bradford book, John Dewhirst, aged 52, is an accountant who read PPE at Corpus Christi, Oxford, the same college as the Milibands (“Not that I am a fan of Ed’s . . . ”), so you’d think he’d have more sense. He has been collecting Bradford City stuff for over three decades, much to the despair of his wife, who is a GP, and their four children.
Dewhirst has 3,000 programmes and reckons that he now needs four times as much space to store a full season of Bradford’s programmes as he did 30 years ago. As all regular attenders know, football programmes everywhere, even in the lower leagues, are whoppers: not much more to read than in the old days but loads of glossy colour photos, acres of adverts and arse-licking about the awful sponsors.
Dewhirst reckons that at the rate he is collecting, by 2017 he will have to get rid of all his treasures. It was thinking about this that made him decide to do a book, illustrated with his collection, and then pack it in. This, anyway, is what he told his wife – that his book would, in a sense, be his swansong.
Dewhirst’s speciality as an accountant is restructuring companies and a lot of his work has taken him abroad for long periods. “I worked in Saudi [Arabia] in 2012 in a listed construction business – 15,000 employees – that was bust as f***,” he told me. “I started writing out of boredom and stress relief and by the time I came home I had the draft completed. It was probably easier to write the book from a distance. It has been as much a journey of discovery for me about the club’s history as about my own emotional attachment with the football club. Muhammad reflected similarly when he was in the desert. The heat obviously has an effect on you. When I need a shrink, I can give him the book to save the cost of the first few get-to-know-you appointments.”
On his return, Dewhirst approached several mainstream publishers and got polite refusals. So he decided to self-publish, doing it his way, inviting subscribers to put in money upfront and get their name in the hardback edition. The book is richly illustrated, the best football memorabilia book I’ve seen devoted to just one club, with 344 pages and 1,050 images, which made Dewhirst have to price it at £30.
“A lot of money for a place like Bradford,” he went on. “Ultimately those who will chunter about paying £30 will also chunter about paying £15, so I decided not even to waste my time trying to appeal to people who are not going to recognise value.”
He was a bit coy about what it cost him to produce but from various clues I guess about £20,000. He had a good Christmas and is well on the way to selling 1,000 copies. If he reaches that, he’ll be in profit – all of which he intends to give to the Bradford Burns Unit.
“It has been a gamble, a cock-on-the-block moment in my life,” he said. “But I am a firm believer that products with passion tend to be more appealing than those without. Football is about passion. So, too, are football memories.
“People in Bradford have forgotten the city’s proud history and that pisses me off. As soon as you forget your past, you lose your self-respect and identity and that applies to football as much as anything else.”
“The Beatles Lyrics: the Unseen Story Behind Their Music” is out now through Ebury Press
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