When the ground rang out to the chants of thousands

DO you remember the great season of ’48 to ’49?

Harry Clarke, Albert Quinn, Tom Varty and Ken Bower were knocking the goals in for fun as the Quakers finished fourth in the table.

The crowds that season – in the days of football special steam excursions and sporting pinks – were the highest Darlington has ever seen. A staggering sell-out of 17,978 crammed into Feethams 50 years ago tomorrow to see championselect Hull City squeak past the Quakers 1-0.

That season Rotherham United, who finished second, attracted more than 14,000.

The visits of Hartlepools United and New Brighton drew more than 12,000, and Gateshead, Southport, York City and Stockport County were all watched by fivefigure crowds.

1948-49 is the only season in Darlington’s 88-year league history that the total attendance has topped 200,000 and that average attendance has beaten 10,000.

In fact, only in 11 seasons since 1921 has the crowd averaged more than 6,000.

The last of those was 40 years ago.

Yet previous owners and administrators have all said that now the club needs an average crowd of more than 6,000 to take its 25,000-seater stadium into profit.

Break even is said to be between 5,000 and 6,000 – a feat that has only been achieved a further 15 times since 1921.

Nearly all of the Quakers’ bumper crowds were in the Forties and Fifties, during football’s golden age. Those were still factory days when men in their thousands finished their shift in the shops at noon on Saturday, had several beers for lunch and made it to the ground for the 3pm kick-off.

Special football trains brought hundreds more in from County Durham’s pit villages.

There were fewer competing attractions such as televisions, cars or MetroCentres.

There was only football. It mattered not where Darlington finished in the league. More often than not in this golden age, they bumped along the bottom, but Feethams was invariably well attended.

In the Seventies, as society changed and the yobs took over the beautiful game, attendances plummeted.

Times were tight, and a correlation developed between the league position of the Quakers and the size of the crowd.

In 1972-3, the Quakers finished bottom, watched by a paltry average of 1,699. In 1984-5 when they won promotion, a relatively healthy average of 3,738 came to each home match.

Football has reinvented itself since the early Nineties with the formation of the Premiership and Sky TV’s money. Attendance at Feethams has crept up, from 1,960 in 1992-3 to 3,312 ten years later.

Then in 2003 came George Reynolds’ supersized stadium. Attendance jumped to 5,023 in the first season, but despite jostling for the play-offs regularly since, average crowds have dwindled to last season’s 3,818.

There are several reasons for this. The stadium’s novelty, for both locals and groundhoppers, has worn off as its dislocation has grown.

Football has grown more predictable. Rarely are Darlo up against a big club in the league. For example, Hull – once the largest conurbation without a top division club in Europe – always brought good crowds to Feethams.

In 1981-2, the average attendance was barely above 2,000 until the penultimate game of the season when table-topping Sheffield United drew an averagebusting 12,500.

Derby matches are also vital to raising attendance figures. But Darlington don’t have any derbies any more.

In 1986-7 they were briefly in the same division as Middlesbrough. That season, 46,843 paid to come through the Feethams turnstiles.

Nearly 10,000 – 21 per cent – came to watch that one derby with Boro (and went home disappointed as Boro won 1-0).

Hartlepool were always guaranteed to double or treble Darlington’s crowd, but they too are now in a higher league.

York and, to a lesser extent, Scarborough drew decent crowds, but their financial predicaments have driven them into lower leagues.

So we look over the Pennines to Carlisle and find them in League One.

This lack of derbies means about 7,500 fewer fans will pay to come through the Quakers turnstiles this season: lost ticket revenue of £135,000, plus drinks, pies and programmes.

Darlington’s average attendance since it joined the Football League in 1921 has been 4,311 per match.

Perhaps more relevant is the figure over the past 40 years. Since 1970, an average of 2,924 have watched each Darlington home match.

This makes this season absolutely average, at 2,966 per match so far.

That average has put the club into administration as it is nowhere near the 6,000 needed to turn in a profit.

Can you spot yourself?

Do you recognise yourself in a packed Polam Lane End at Feethams on December 2, 1984, when the Quakers beat Swindon Town 1-0 on their way to promotion?

Click on the image above to enlarge it and let us know where you are in the picture by leaving a comment below.