TRAMS, FOREIGN and FOOTBALL

The First Finalists

The story of Rotherham United

and the first ever League Cup Final

BY Adrian Booth

Not even the most fanatical supporter of Rotherham United Football Club would claim that the 'Millers' are numbered amongst the country's most successful teams. Yet the team reached the final of a major national cup competition, the inaugural Football League Cup in season 1960/61, against Aston Villa. It is getting on for half a century since the Millers famously battled through to that final and, in the long intervening period, no Rotherham United side has ever come close to emulating that great feat. It was a wonderful campaign and this book outlines aspects of football in that era, provides details of the competition itself and Rotherham United's run to the final, and profiles the sixteen Millers players who were involved. A riot of 1950s and 1960s nostalgia, 6d programmes, mud and haircuts, a time when a foreigner in the team came from the next county.

By the time the British railway enthusiasts discovered the narrow gauge railways of Portugal in the late 1960s the various companies operating the lines had long since been assimilated into the national system of broad and narrow gauge railways under the aegis of CP (Caminhos de Ferro Portugueses). This happened on 1 January 1947, a year before similar events in Britain. Apart from the occasional – and it seems very occasional indeed – visitor on business or en passant by boat to other climes who might find the narrow gauge terminus in, say, Porto (anglicised Oporto) the railway enthusiast was absent. There was one notable exception in Mr John Gibbons who sampled the Sabor line soon after its final extension was opened and so impressed was the editor of The Railway Magazine with his description that he published it twice (April 1940 and August 1940) the second time in greater detail than the original.

Therefore this album relates to CP days post-1960, its purpose being, on the one hand, to give those enthusiasts not lucky enough to have visited the country the sight of things they have missed and, on the other, to evoke a nostalgic response in those who were able to see the narrow gauge even if it was in the autumn of its existence. Apart from opening and closure dates (month and year only) there are no chunks of history to wade through. Rather, such will have to be winkled out of the captions. Likewise, no lists of locomotives or rolling stock neither heights or lengths of bridges and so on appear; all those are comprehensively dealt with in the definitive volume Narrow Gauge Railways Of Portugal by W.J.K. Davies. So, just turn the pages and wallow in the pictures!

The author’s first evocation of the Trams of his boyhood, LEICESTER’S TRAMS, was published by Irwell Press in 2000 and sold out long ago. This new account is compiled from all new material - an unrivalled further sequence of photographs and Leicester streetscapes, from the long-distant days before the Great War to the petrol-rationed times of austerity after the Second. Beautifully painted and kept in excellent order the Leicester Trams fought a long rearguard until 1949 – they were the Great Survivors of the tram world. By the 1930s, tramways had been abandoned in every East Midlands municipality, with one notable exception – the City of Leicester.