The Football King by George Gray

Western Daily Press 24.11.96

So, you're due to play in the FA Cup Final at The Oval when you're wrongly accused of murder and arrested whilst your girlfriend is abducted by Belgian anarchists in a hot air baloon.
What happens next?
If you're Robert King Stanley of The Rovers you escape and score the winning goal in the Final. I presume he also rescued his girlfriend.
Alas this was all a fiction.
The Football King was popular in provoincial theatres for a number of years in the late 1890s.

The Dooley Fitba' Club

Fitba' is a Scottish colloquialism for 'football'. 
Within 25 years of the foundation of the Football Association, our game had evolved into a form of mass entertainment in which millions of Britons engaged to some degree, Historians often measure football against Music Hall in order to gauge lucrativeness, economic, social and cultural impact.  Music Hall was a phenomenally successful source of mass entertainment in the pre cinema era.
Music Hall and Popular Culture were synonymous.
It is not surprising that football found its way onto the Music Hall stage.
The above song is an example (according to some sources, the first). It is a Scottish dialect number concerning fanatical devotion to the game, and survived into the modern era in the form of Football Crazy, recorded by Robin Hall and Jimmie MacGregor in 1960, often played on Ed Stewart's Junior Choice when I was a boy.


 James Curran ( aka Currin) was a popular humorous songwriter. An alcoholic, he died in poverty. 

 Music Hall legend Harry Lauder described J.C McDonald as 'the leading comedian in Scotland and a tremendously popular personage throughout the length and breadth of the land'. 
Patter (where the performer addresses the audience in a spoken aside- a staple of Music Hall performances).