Last Time the Football Programme was Suspended

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paul49

UTC Legend
This was on account of the weather. The Big Freeze of 1962/63. We had a blizzard on Boxing Day with six feet of snow and continued low temperatures afterwards and there was still snow on the ground right into March.

It put paid to the Boxing Day programme and our next game was on the 23 February when we beat the league leaders Northampton 3-0. I remember a photo in the Charlie Buchan's Football Monthly of the players clearing the snow from the pitch with Bill McGarry sat in the driver's seat of a dumper truck with the grab full of snow and the players grouped around.

When we did get back to playing I remember away trips to Brighton and Swindon where the pitch was all sand and the only grass was inside in the back of the goals as both clubs had used road tar melting equipment to melt the snow and ice and this had killed off the grass.

Looking in my Definitive AFC Bournemouth to catch up we played seven games in March, seven in April and the last six in the first 18 days of May. We finished a respectable fifth and unbeaten at home winning eleven and drawing twelve.
 
School cancelled in the first week of January. Returned the second week and there'd been burst pipes, no heating so another week off school. Happy days.

3-4' piled high snow up Charminster Rd with a narrow path dug out for you to walk up.
 
Had great fun pulling a toboggan to Queens Park Golf Course to go down the slopes. The pond was frozen to such a depth that people were skating on it!
 
Remember when my father, an army friend of his and myself were going down Christchurch bypass on the way to the game when we heard it had been called off.

Found this article referring to that Winter.

Winter has suddenly and not entirely expectedly descended on England this week and, predictably, it is playing merry havoc with the football schedules on the last Saturday before Christmas. At the time of writing, thirteen matches in the Football League have already been postponed, and it is likely that more will follow. Some may view this as a welcome opportunity to get in some Christmas shopping, but others will undoubtedly grumble at having nothing to do this afternoon. Those that are unhappy at postponements and cancellations should, however, pause for thought and consider the 1962/63 season, when winter arrived with a bang at Christmas and didn’t budge for two months.

Forty-seven years ago was several lifetimes in terms of the evolution of the game and in some ways it could be argued that the 1962/63 season was the last season of “old” football. Within two years, regular television coverage would come in the form of “Match Of The Day”, and the 1962/63 season was the last season in which none of the current Champions League Four of Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal or Liverpool finished in the top four in the First Division. A couple of Football League clubs still didn’t even have floodlights in the autumn of 1962. A couple of the names in the basement of the Football League (Division Four was in its fifth season) – Workington and Southport, for example – have a feintly archaic ring to them. Hartlepools United still described themselves in the plural, Swansea City were still Swansea Town and AFC Bournemouth were still Bournemouth & Boscombe Athletic.

http://twohundredpercent.net/the-196263-season-when-winter-came-and-stayed/


Going back further to Christmas Day 1914, pic below on link of our game Boscombe v Pompey.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/z4y847h
 
I don't believe the season was suspended. It was just that games were postponed because the pitch was unfit.
Torquay on the so called English Riviera pitch thawed out a lot quicker than ours re-started their games a lot earlier than us and were able to play 6 home league games in succession.
Nor did we have to wait until 23rd February to see the first team in action at Dean Court, because the first team to come out to play a Football Combination game against Coventry reserves, I believe. I was part of a bumper reserve gate of over 2000 to see us win.
 
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