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26 — Paul and Margaret Bartlett talk about Football in Stratford during the War:

"We come up to 1943, and I was very interested in football, my father had been taking me to Aston Villa Football Club since I was eight; anyway, I got fed up with chappies who I had known for many years since school and that, they were coming home on leave saying, no blooming football — what’s going to happen?

I said well, all the clubs have closed down because they’ve all been called up and there was nobody to run these clubs, and I thought well surely I can do something about this - I did. I bought a set of goal posts and nets, and we started off by playing in the recreation ground. Now I knew Alderman George Lea and Alderman Bob Knight, and they knew my father very well and we still hadn’t got footballs, we still hadn’t got a kit and things like that, and I got to know the Squadron Leader at Long Marston and also the Royal Engineers, and I pitched them my story about not having this, that and the other, and I wanted to re-form a facility for these chaps coming home on leave, and they said well we can help, and they did.

We had a couple of sets of jerseys, shorts and socks and even boots, and half a dozen footballs and they supplied those to us. However, come twelve o’clock on Saturday I never knew whether I’d got a team or whether I hadn’t, because they used to have to come to my house and say that they were home, any chance of a game. And from twelve o’clock until two o’clock I was scratting about trying to make up, if I hadn’t got them. But then the Air Force and the Army bailed in again by saying well, if you’re short of a bloke just give me a ring and we will come out, and they used to send a lorry with half a dozen blokes, and we made up in the positions that we needed which wasn’t very often, but the facility was there. And this went on from 1943 until 1953 when I left Stratford to work away.

For opposition we had the German prisoners of war and Italian prisoners of war to start with. It isn’t to start with because we played teams from the Royal Engineers, the Pioneer Corps and also the Royal Air force, and we had always got those fixtures, but then when they started to bring more and more prisoners - a lot of them worked on the land as prisoners of war - they started to play football amongst themselves and then I wondered what the reaction would be in playing against these sort of teams, but local players didn’t object at all, in fact they got on very, very well with them, the war was forgotten, there was no carving up on the pitch or anything like that, and the most surprising thing was that there were professional footballers from Germany and from Italy, and there were some brilliant footballers who played for their country taken prisoner of war. And we had the privilege of playing against that type of player. The only difficulty for them was, whereas they were used to a good football ground, we played on the rec. which was always flooded, and then I got to know Stan Henson who was a very good butcher, and we made him Vice President and he let us have a field on Birmingham Road and the field was just like a furrowed land, it was terrible to play football on. Nevertheless we survived there for about twelve months and then we went to Alcester Road where the current football club play, and we worked jolly hard there. We had to make it, you know, into a decent ground, but nevertheless it was the best that we had had, and we did exceptionally well during the war years, and all the players really loved the set up.

When the war finished, clubs started to emerge again, and I was left then to get a team to play in the Stratford League, which is what we do … we called the team Stratford Rangers."

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