The Perils Of A Comma.
I had planned, this Halloween week, to release a blog about Dracula and the Whitby Vampires. It was a brand new finding, never before reported on, that would have added an extra dimension to the story of the link between Dracula and the town of Whitby, and boy was I excited.
Alas, as happens sometimes in historical research, it all went wrong and I was undone…by a comma. Here’s the story of what happened…
The Whitby Vampire
Bram Stoker set some big moments in Dracula in Whitby - the Demeter runs ashore here with a large dog (perhaps inspired by local legend the Barghest) leaving the ship, running off into dark night, and the town beyond and Lucy and Mina holiday there, and passages provide picturesque descriptions of the town that set the tone for the spooky gothic tale. Bram Stoker, we know, holidayed in the town in 1890, and whilst there saw a red light in two windows of the church, which inspired the red eyes of the count. His time in the town also gave rise to Mina and Jonathan Harker’s name, and the location 7 The Crescent, and his time spent at the town’s library allowed him to learn the name Dracula, copied from a borrowed book, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820). He also learned of the Dmitri, a ship that ran aground a few years earlier (it’s unclear whether a similar black dog tale was associated with the Dmitiri too).
As you can see, Whitby, the physical location, the people of the town, events that took place there, and local legends all make their way into Dracula, and with that, the book becomes entirely intertwined with the town - from plenty of places to buy Dracula Cluedo, to Dracula walking tours, to vampire fancy dress world records. So, when I discovered the Whitby Vampires I began to wonder if there was an added part of local Whitby life that had inspired Stoker. A part missed by Dracula scholars.
The Whitby Vampires?
As you may, or may not, know I’m a big fan of Cray Valley (PM) FC, and can often be found cheering them on. A nearby rival claims to be the oldest surviving football club in London and , recently, I was doing a little research to see if I could work out if it was true or not. Whilst scrolling through nineteenth-century newspapers as part of this task, I spotted the Whitby Vampires FC. A fun name, and presumably capitalising on the popularity of Dracula, I thought. Until I noticed the date of the paper, 1893, four years before the book was published.
On Friday 1st September 1893, newspapers across the country were excitedly reporting about a new football competition, the Association Football Amateur Challenge Cup, that was being launched in the upcoming season, in which teams from outside of the professional leagues were invited to participate. The competition, which ran until 1974 was huge, with up to 100,000 attending the final at Wembley, particularly after World War Two. Ahead of the 1893 season however, it was still just an idea. So when the list of participating clubs was released, newspapers across England were keen to announce that ‘rather contrary to expectation, it was found that no fewer than 73 clubs had signified their intention of competing for the trophy’ (Northern Echo (Darlington, England), Friday, Sept. 1, 1893). Amongst these teams were the Whitby Vampires.
Interestingly, the ‘Vampires’ name disappeared from Whitby after this initial announcement, with the team being called just Whitby despite other teams keeping their ‘nicknames’ (looking at you Saltburn) and in that first iteration of the competition they joined a division of Scarborough Rangers, Saltburn Swifts, Southbank Club, Southbank Blue Star, Lofthouse, Scarborough, and Skelton Rovers. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find much more about the first year of the competition from a Whitby perspective, but on 12 November 1894 the York Herald carried a short report of their game in year two of the competition, this time against Saltburn Swifts:
In a later report, we learn more about Whitby, the town, and the team. Just before Christmas in December 1894, a severe gale battered the North East of England, with reports of falling buildings collapsing on people, including in Whitby. It seems that our Vampires were impacted too, with a report of Whitby v Middlesbrough on Christmas Eve telling us that ‘the match should have been played at Whitby, but owing to the gale football was out of the question. The field was flooded with heavy rain, and the wind was blowing a hurricane, whilst the covered stand was demolished beyond recognition’ (York Herald (York, England), Monday, Dec. 24, 1894).
What’s in a name?
Something that gets a little confusing when thinking about football in Whitby, particularly given that reporting seemed, for some reason, to immediately drop the Vampires name, is that there seems to be four Whitby teams listed as having existed overtime, and here my research took me on a bit of a journey, thanks to a report from 1900 that details a match played against Scarborough that took place at Upgang-lane Ground, Whitby (York Herald (York, England), Monday, Feb. 26, 1900). It turns out that Whitby Town FC (now nicknamed The Blues or The Seasiders) still play their games at Upgang lane, and their history was able to shed a little light on the history of the club. According to their wikipedia they were founded as Streaneshalch Football Club in October 1880, soon after changing their name to Whitby Church Temperance. In 1882 they changed their name to Whitby Football Club. From what I can work out (though there is some disagreement on their wikipedia page), after the First World War the town had both the Whitby Whitehall Swifts and Whitby FC, who amalgamated and became Whitby Utd in 1926, who then finally changed their name to Whitby Town in 1945, so I assume that at some point Whitby FC changes their name to Whitby Utd (which perhaps explains the gap that is filled by the FA Cup results listed here).
The Case of the Disappearing Comma
So, by this point in my research, I was pretty psyched. I’d discovered a new vampire link to the town of Whitby that might have inspired Stoker; I’d charted the evolution of the team (finding something they seemingly didn’t even know about themselves); I’d also learned a little about some social events in the town and how it had impacted the local football team. I hadn’t been able to find out much about their first season in the competition, but I had spotted a book called The Complete F.A. Amateur Cup Results Book by Richard Samuel. Never one to pass up the opportunity to buy a book, I thought I’d give it a go and see if it added anything to the blog…and boy did it. You see, I opened the first page to see a fixture between Tottenham Hotspur and Vampires. Just Vampires, no Whitby. And a few lines up, a separate game played by Whitby. But this can’t be, can it? A quick google found a few different matches played between Spurs and Vampires, so they were definitely a team.
Then, I remembered. That list from 1893…it was carried across a few different newspapers. At least one had a comma…didn’t it? A comma I’d decided must be a typo because of course there wasn’t a team just called ‘Vampires’ was there, it must be the Whitby Vampires. So back I went to the source material, and there it was. The comma I’d ignored, staring me in the face. ‘Whitby, Vampires’. Nightmare.
So there you have it. Whitby was a team. The Vampires were a team. In fact, the Vampires are still a team, it turns out, though now playing as the Crouch End Vampires following a merger in 1897. So, to be honest, even though a comma had destroyed my hopes of making a footballing Dracula based historical discovery, as a non-league football fan I was pretty excited to learn that the team is still going over 140 years later.
If you’d like to go see the one, the only, the original Vampires play during spooky season their first team has two games coming up against a team called Albanian:
Saturday 1 November: Away to Albanian (Finchley Catholic High School, N12 8TA)
Saturday 15 November: Home to Albanian (Muswell Hill Sports Ground, Coppetts Road, London N10 1JP)
