Ards FC, The Official History: A Preview by Andrew McCullough

Choose a handful of Ards supporters on any Saturday afternoon and ask them for the lasting memory they have of Ards Football Club, and the responses will vary widely.

While some will talk of the solitary League Championship win of ’58, others will recall perhaps the most famous victory of all, that over Standard Liege in the 1973 UEFA Cup. Some younger followers may point to the heartbreaking Irish Cup Final defeat by Bangor in 1993, or perhaps the First Division title victory two seasons ago.

There is certainly a lot to choose from; a hundred years of material in fact, and one man has been collating all of it for the past nine months in his quest to write the Official History of Ards F.C. And while that may seem a daunting task for most of us, to Ivor Edgar it is the ultimate climax to a labour of love that he has indulged in for many years of his life.

"I have no writing background, as such," remarked Ivor when asked how he became involved in the idea. "I was just a supporter who was compiling, for interest purely, notes on the club, and then was approached within the last year to put them together and produce a history of Ards." He is certainly one of few men qualified for such a task. Born and raised in the town, he stood on the terraces as a young boy during that famous championship-winning season and envisioned years of domination by this club who had put on the greatest show for a new supporter.

"As a boy, somewhat naïve, I thought we were always going to be up there with Linfield," he remembers, "But I came to realise that this is a small-town club, and this book will be written as the history of a small club, one that has always been fighting against the odds. Financial crisis after financial crisis seems to have been the story since the twenties. In the late thirties at the annual general meeting, apparently there weren’t even enough present to form a committee with the club thousands in debt, a huge sum at the time… but they’ve always survived."

The now Dungannon-based schoolteacher has been extensively researching and collating material for the book for some time now and expects to be taking part in the book-signing sometime next year. He has spent many hours locked inside the newspaper archive in Belfast, extracting information from the pre-war years. "What I’ve done is compile virtually every result and team sheet from 1923 onwards, which I don’t think has been done before. I would like the book to contain those team sheets if that’s feasible, or I might eventually make those available on disc."

Of course statistics aside, a story of Ards needs to be constructed and for that Ivor has been collecting the thoughts of a number of participants who have been involved with Ards over a wide period of time. "I have talked to ex-players such as Mick Lynch, Billy Humphries, Billy McAvoy and Raymond Mowat and quite a number of veteran fans, the likes of Sam Brown and Addie Donaldson, both of whom are now in their eighties and whose memories go back to the 1930s.

"Obviously it’s exciting to go over successful years, 1973/74; 57/58 when they won the league; Eastham’s era with trophy after trophy and apparently a reputation for good football."

Ivor himself was present on that famous European night when the Billy Humphries led Ards side defeated Standard Liege and also attended the European Cup tie in 1958 against Stade de Rheims, a club he tells an interesting tale of. "Rhiems do not exist anymore; as far as I know the club have completely disappeared off the face of the Earth, and yet they competed in two European Cup finals. The year they beat Ards they went on to loose to Real Madrid and two years earlier again they’d lost to Madrid in the final.

"They had seven players playing for them that night at Windsor Park who had played for France in the World Cup that summer. Apparently Ards competed very well with them for half an hour and scored three goals against the team that was going to be the second best in Europe that year. So the 10-3 aggregate was no disgrace."

The research for the book has also brought to life many eras, which Ivor was never able to witness himself and he recalls a number of stories that he has uncovered because of his work on the book. "Going way back, I found the Andy Bothwell story a dreadful tragedy. A player with five caps for Ireland, while playing with Ards, who was taken into hospital on a Monday and was buried on the Saturday. His appendix had burst and in those days of no penicillin, there was little that could be done for him.

"Another interesting figure from the inter-war years was a fellow called Bob McGee, who had only played one match in his life for Celtic, but it was against Rangers and he came to Ards and played for eight years and was an outstanding centre-half and centre-forward. It was said at the time that if only he were Irish, he would be playing regularly for Ireland. So McGee and Bothwell are two heroes of mine, even though I don’t actually remember them."

So keep an eye on the bookshelves around Ards as Ivor completes his project and looks forward to the next century of Ards Football Club with the hope that "maybe the good times will come back".

first published 4th November 2002