Quakers in crisis: is it news? (From The Northern Echo)

Quakers in crisis: is it news?

8:16pm Friday 30th December 2011 in Echo Memories By Chris Lloyd, Deputy Editor

THE proper journalists on The Northern Echo are preparing tomorrow's front page about the latest crisis to hit the Quakers. I'm, as ever, stuck in the back copies researching Wednesday's Echo Memories.

I was looking for the death notice for a British captain who was killed on September 11, 1916, on the Somme - extraordinarily, I've just spoken to his daughter, who is 100 in April.

My eye, though alighted on the attached headline from September 15, 1916: "Darlington FC faced with extinction." It is in the Northern Evening Despatch - the Echo's former sister paper.

"The Quakers' Football Club is threatened with extinction," says the article. "Indeed, such an unfortunate occurrence seems inevitable."

The club was officially formed in 1883 - although I have newspaper reports from 1865 telling of the exploits of Darlington Football Club - and turned professional in 1908. That was at the basis of the 1916 crisis: professionalism allied with the war had caused the club to run out of money. £300 was owed to the bank, and another £188 was owed to sundry other creditors.

At the annual meeting in September 1916, the newly-elected chairman, George Zissler (I guess from the family of butchers) said: "I believe we are in such a position that we must consider the question whether we want to carry on the club or not. Personally, I think it would be advisable to bring the business to an end now. We cannot get ourselves into better circumstances by going on."

The report ends enigmatically. As ever with the Quakers, there's a shadowy figure in the background. In 1916, it was a Mr Whitwell. The board agreed to put "certain suggestions" to him, and to adopt a "certain course". Details, though, "were were withheld for the present from the press".

Mr Whitwell obviously agreed to the certain suggestions and so the club lurched onto the certain course. I wonder how many other journalists in this building have written the phrase "extinction seems inevitable" in the 95 years since?