The ITFC Charitable Trust is after stories and artefacts from the club’s past for its new Ipswich Town Football Archive project. The project, which has received funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), catalogues and uses Town’s already extensive collection of football artefacts, programmes, trophies, historic documents, visual images, audio recordings and other memorabilia to encourage learning and participation.
Trust chief executive Terry Baxter explained how the project works: "We are delighted to be working with the club and the HLF to bring the archive alive, and to make use of it to support our learning programmes and offer new volunteering opportunities.
"The Trust works hard to improve the lives of people living in our community. Over the past decade we have helped over half a million people across Suffolk by using the 'power of football ' to make a difference and improve lives.
"By sensitively using the Ipswich Town Football Archive in our education programmes we can develop new approaches to learning, encourage people to learn and help tell the story of the club in an innovative and exciting way.”
Local heritage experts Oakmere Solutions Ltd are leading the project for the Trust with director Dr Peter Funnell adding: "The project will build on the passion and work of Pat Godbold [Town’s archivist and secretary to the club’s managers from Scott Duncan to George Burley], extend the existing archive catalogue and develop a curation plan for the future sustainability of the archive.
"It will also support a range of learning initiatives with the Trust, particularly in numeracy and literacy where the stories that surround items from the archive will offer a strong and exciting motivation to learn.
"We will also be capturing oral histories on topics and themes thrown up by the archive, researching local history and staging exhibitions from the archive online, within the Portman Road stadium and elsewhere."
Lifelong supporter Russ Pope has been volunteering on what he says is a fascinating project: "It’s been exciting to see so much of the heritage of the club and it’s encouraged me to find out more about individual items and the stories they tell.
"Surprisingly, it’s sometimes the small things, a match ticket or a player contract from the 1930s that help reveal something which for me as a supporter is new and fascinating.”
Russ has selected a number of items from the archive which may be of general interest, which can be found here.
Do you have any stories or artefacts to share? If so email trustarchive@itfc.co.uk and the project team will get back to you. The team are particularly interested to discover more about the history of Portman Road around the world wars, including match programmes during the period 1936—1939 and stories relating to the move towards professional football in Ipswich during the 1930s.