Recently I’ve been dipping into The Book Of Watford, a lavish publication that my friend Stuart found in a second-hand shop and gave me for my birthday last year. Subtitled ‘A portrait of our town’, it’s a collection of historical photographs of Watford accompanied by extracts from the local papers, and it makes for fascinating reading.
But while the details of the evolution of the town are lovingly covered (with particular emphasis on roads and buildings), there are some glaring omissions. In the entire section on the 1960s, for instance, there’s only one mention of the local football team (a cup tie against Liverpool towards the end of the decade – and not even the most famous one, though admittedly that took place in 1970).
It doesn’t get any better in the 70s and 80s. I may be biased, but I was under the impression that Graham Taylor’s propulsion of the club from Division 4 to Division 1 helped to put Watford on the map, giving the town a recognisable identity to people who previously only knew it as the last town on the railway line before London, or the first major junction on the M1 heading north. At one point in the 80s, the local tourist board was even marketing weekend minibreaks in Watford, with a trip to Vicarage Road as the focal point.
But apart from a brief mention of the celebrations that followed the 1984 FA Cup final, all this goes unrecorded in the book, which seems quite bafflingy. I don’t think it’s just that I’m so wrapped up in my support for the Hornets that I’ve lost all sense of perspective. The fact is that, even when the team weren’t doing so well, 10,000-odd citizens of the town spent alternate Saturdays at Vicarage Road, their moods rising and falling with the fortunes of the team. How can you create a ‘portrait of our town’ and not take that into account?
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