The Year of Ludd - Goodbye [mainly] to the IF for a season

This will be on the Bristol Post website soon-ish.

I will therefore be mainly resigning from this esteemed forum for a season.  I will still pop on to post up blogs, any writings, new book etc, but the rules of 'the game' are that I'm not going to be reading, commenting on all sorts of gas related things on the inter web thingie.

Does ClubCall still exist? and is it less than £2 a minute?





G is for Gas blog
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The Year of Ludd

I have to slightly apologise in advance for my Rovers articles this coming season, as they may not be quite as up-to-date as before, nor blessed with as much information of what might be going on at a modern football club.

This is because I’m doing an experiment for the coming season, where I take the life of a football supporter back-to-basics, without the internet and all the corresponding trappings that are associated with football forums, twitter gossip, and 24-hour rolling news coverage.

When I became a Gashead in 1989 we gleaned our information from a variety of sources, mainly from media output such as the match day programme, the Bath Chronicle, the Bristol Evening Post, local radio, Ceefax / Teletext, and the infamous premium rate 0898 Club Call telephone service (not that I ever used it). We also had more personal and serendipitous sources; your mates, the stranger next to you on the terrace who relentlessly held a tiny radio up to his ear, overhearing gossip in the pub or on the bus, and even the chatter of turnstile operator on your way into Twerton.

They were innocent times, when I often knew very little about the team I was about to watch, and certainly didn’t have a handle on the intricacies of player contracts, their personal lives, the latest training ground bust ups, or rumours about potential new players, and often didn’t even know matters as basic as the state of our injury list.

Whilst the quality of our sources may have been excellent, the length and breadth of them wasn’t. I will always remember the delight of promotion in May 1990 as it meant we gained a hallowed spot on the Ceefax network, with a guaranteed page of our own for every match report (about 130 words), without having to be squeezed onto a ‘Division Three round up‘ page.

This experiment is NOT a nostalgia trip though. I’m not saying it was better when we weren‘t bombarded with information, and everyone had an opinion about EVERYTHING in life - yes, I realise the words pot, kettle and black could be rearranged at this point…

No, this is simply a back to basics jaunt, without any judgement or knee jerk ’modern life is rubbish’ type crusade. It’s just as much a time-saving exercise for me, as knowing too much about the football club you support is very time consuming indeed. I’m not anti-technology, but then again nor were the much maligned Luddites. They were worried more about rapid over-reliance on labour-saving devices in their workplace rather than the talented inventors themselves. They smashed machines, not people.

I used to live in Lancashire, not a million miles from Burton’s Mill in Middleton where the British Army fought a pitched battle with thousands of local workers in April 1812. And on forays across the border into West Yorkshire I loved visiting the absorbing town of Marsden, which arguably became the centre of attention for the entire struggle, although in true football fan style they blamed the louts at Longroyd Bridge in Huddersfield as the real trouble makers!

The intriguing graves of James and Enoch Taylor lie next to the town stocks, and commemorate the brotherly smithies who invented a Cropping Machine. Although they were quite average local working men, their creativity caused a problem as it did the work of ten hand croppers. They also made sledgehammers, entitled ’Enochs’, which gave rise to the irony of their sledgehammers being used to smash factory machines, and a taunt the Luddites used - ‘Enoch made ‘em, Enoch shall break ‘em’.

The real crux of Luddism though was borne out by the fact that whilst the Taylor’s were never vilified, the mill owners who brought in the new machines with indecent haste were, and Marsden made national news when local mill owner William Horsfall, who had barricaded and fortified his Ottiwell’s Mill, was ambushed and murdered by a trio of thugs in nearby Crosland Moor. Their trial at York Castle in 1813, alongside 60 others so-called Luddites, was more of a ‘show trial’ to petrify the working class into a stony acquiescence than true justice for each individual defendant. 15 men were executed and Luddite style acts petered out.

So there you have it, I’m going to try to keep my football fandom simple this season, but still passionate, and if I accidentally slip in names like Warboys, Bamford and Tillson, don’t blame me, blame the clicking and whirling of the printing presses, trying to catch up to modern life.


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Martin Bull became a Gashead in 1989 and immediately fell in love with Twerton Park, standing near G pillar. In 2006 he wrote, photographed and published the first independent book about the artist Banksy. Having been exiled for much of his past, away games have always been special for him; so much so that he has edited and published a book about them - www.awaythegas.org.uk