Bees United – we’re bringing Brentford Football Club heritage to you on-line
Part of our vision and our purpose at BU is to promote and protect the history and heritage of the Club, which is not only our club but it’s the people and the area around our Club. Our hope is to make all those stories come alive to you online. Our ambition is bold: working with the existing committed, passionate network of fans who are have been devoted to BFC heritage over many years, we now want BU to be the go to place for BFC Heritage!
There’s already a brief version of our own short history on our website on the “Vision” tab above and there’s even more about our beginning as we say a fond farewell and goodbye to former Club Chair, Eddie Rogers this month.
As you know, our story started with the meetings of the Brentford Rowing Club, at the Oxford and Cambridge pub, in the late 1800’s when our Club was founded. Now, we are back by the river, very close to that Kew Bridge site.
Believe it or not, back in 1889, it could have been the oval ball …..
Custodian role
The first big step as part of this ambition is that we have become the custodian of the Club’s collection of memorabilia. We have signed an agreement with BFC (at the last BFC Board Meeting in August) confirming our status as the “Custodian” of the Club’s collection of items going back to the late 1800’s. The Club is happy, Matthew is happy and we at BU are delighted with this arrangement and the next phase of our BU Vision of heritage is already under way!
But what do BU know about heritage? Is BU the right organisation to be trusted with this?
We think yes! We recognise that how heritage is archived, catalogued, presented and stored is a specialist area. We have sought advice from the Gunnersbury Museum (whose help was kindly offered and freely given) and we have our small team of BFC Heritage enthusiasts with advice from a football Museum professional (also a season ticket holder in the West Stand). We do appreciate all of the professional advice and support we have received but we also know that we would not have gotten where we are today without a huge amount of heavy lifting (in some cases literally as boxes have been lugged and shelving built!) and expert help from some very well known Brentford historians. The fans who have been at the initial forefront of this initiative have been Rob Jex, Paul Briers and Paul Stembridge but we are in touch with many more noting valuable input from Dave Twydell and now Jonathan Burchill – and more, and we will explain more in an article coming soon.
So, what is BU doing now – and what is next?!
Tidying, protecting and repairing all the collection started in May. We are now making a long list of everything that will sit under our future website to help fans and local historians or local schools search our history. We want fans to be able to easily see what we have and we have already commenced the first phases of a huge scanning exercise of our items which is being paid for out of BU funds.
We did say online didn’t we!
We think you’ll like the occasional pop-up exhibition (when we co-hosted the Farewell to Griffin Park exhibition at the Steam Museum there was a special celebration of Black History Month) so watch this space and we hope to tell you more in a match day programme (many of you may well have seen the first of these in the Bournemouth edition).
Helping BU (Please help BU!)
As always it is worth noting that BU is a volunteer organisation – nobody giving their time or being paid – and we can always do with additional help so if you have skills that you think might help BU (we would be interested in anyone who is an amazing web designer, or who is used to editing web sites right now!) then please drop us a line right now!
Stuart Hatcher