Welcome to our website
Welcome to a new website "Birth of the Saddlers", created to partner the book of the same name, published in November 2014 by Chase Publishing and written by Mike Bradbury,a Walsall man, using only first hand records and information gleaned from Victorian newspapers and sports periodicals from all over the Midlands in the Victorian Era.
In an attempt to exclude the hundreds of errors-some of them substantial-in other books already on the history of Walsall FC, no other books were consulted or even read in the writing and research of this new book.
Other books have serious errors- eg photos of 'Walsall Swifts' which are NOT
photos of 'Walsall Town' which are NOT
photos of 'Walsall Town Swifts' which are NOT etc,etc
We have not made up people's names, but have checked birth census records.
We have not guessed or assumed when people in the book have died- we have checked the death records,and even gone to their gravestones.
We have not repeated tales, stories, made up events or otherwise, without checking them out with 140 year old newspapers or descendants.
What we HAVE done, is to write the true history of football in the town of Walsall, and by the end of the book, you will see that I have virtually written the whole history of football in Walsall, having included the stories of over a dozen early teams which both Walsall Swifts and Walsall Town had to overcome before, in 1888, they too, amalgamated their forces to become the modern team of Walsall Football Club.
The story does not begin in 1888; there is a whole set of stories to tell of the development of the game in Walsall before that; indeed the year 1888 comes after page 100.
The book is endorsed by Walsall FC of which it was said "this book needed to be written"
Wayne & Allan Clarke jointly said " this book is full of fascinating facts which we never knew about and is an absorbing read"
Buy the book and find out about what happened to the original Walsall Cup trophy, why a team called Rushall Rovers were interwoven with the Walsall Town club, why Walsall Swifts and Rushall Rovers would never play each other,and from where exactly did both the Swifts and Town teams come from.
Available from Waterstones, Walsall FC on-site bookshop and Amazon in early 2015.