The formation date of Harwich and Parkeston Football Club is to be officially changed to 1875.
Andy Schooler Jr has been researching the origins of the club and here he explains exactly what has been uncovered and why the date is being changed.

If you keep your eyes peeled around the Royal Oak ground, you’ll find examples of 1877 being the club’s foundation date.
It’s on the sign next to the social club, for example.
But it’s now indisputable that this year is wrong and soon that will be changed.
When I was a young fan visiting the Oak, 1877 was widely accepted as the correct date and it went back a lot further than that. Old programmes from the 1930s clearly show 1877 as the club’s formation year.
It would appear this comes from the earliest editions of the Harwich and Dovercourt Free Press, the forerunner of the modern-day Standard.

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It reported that an internal Harwich FC game between its members took place in October of that year with the following month bringing a 6-0 defeat away to Dedham Grammar School (now Dedham Old Boys) in what was considered the first-ever game against another club.
However, in recent years, copies of the Harwich and Dovercourt Newsman – a rival publication which began life prior to the Free Press – and the Essex Standard have been located in the archives of the British Library.
These reveal that football in Harwich had actually begun earlier.
A match away to Colchester is now the earliest known to have definitely taken place – it was played on February 19, 1876, and resulted in a 2-1 victory for the visitors, who played with no fewer than seven forwards!
The Newsman also suggests a date for the club’s very first game. In its edition of November 20, 1875, it reported that “Harwich Football Club have fixed a match on Barrack Field between Army and Navy and town members this afternoon, Saturday.”
However, no report has been found, meaning the scoreline is not known and that we can’t be absolutely certain it took place.
What is definitely now known is that the club was formed in October 1875.
It was during this month that two meetings appear to have been held at the Three Cups Hotel (now a private residence, close to St Nicholas’ Church) in Church Street.
In its October 16 edition, the Newsman reported that a meeting would be held, on October 19, with the aim of establishing a football club for recreation during the winter months.
Two weeks later, it reported that a meeting had taken place on October 25 and proposals were officially passed. One of those was the formation of a three-man committee which included secretary Mr E Woodcock, of Wellington Place, who was asked to send the five-shilling subscription for membership of the Football Association.
Two days later, an internal match featuring club members – of which there were now 35 in total - took place.
Now, if you have read about the club in detail in the past, you may already know much of this story.
What you may not know is that football in Harwich went into something of a hiatus from late 1880 to late 1884 with very few records of matches taking place following some heavy defeats at the start of the 1880/81 season.
When football resumed in the town on a regular basis in 1884, it did so with a club named Harwich and Dovercourt Association FC – one which would merge five years later with Parkeston FC to form what we now know as Harwich and Parkeston.
What I wanted to know was therefore: Could the newspaper info re 1875 be double-sourced? And was the 1884 club a new one rather than a continuation of the original Harwich FC?

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The place to go for both was the National Football Museum, now based in Manchester but whose archives remain at Deepdale in Preston.
They have copies of The Football Annual, a book which was the sport’s bible in the 19th Century.
Each year, its editor, Charles Alcock, would list clubs and their details and, sure enough, the 1876 edition has an entry for Harwich FC.
That entry states the club was indeed founded in 1875. Among the other information recorded is:
Number of members – 45
Ground – Barrack Field
Dressing rooms – Queens Head, Dovercourt
Secretary – E Woodcock
Colours – Blue
It also states the ‘results of goals’ (club’s often mixed association football with rugby football in those days) as won 6, lost 3, drawn 1.
While it is not known in which month the annual was published, this info does suggest that a match may well have been played prior to the Colchester one in February 1876.
However, most importantly, the Football Annual clearly tallies with the Newsman’s story of an official formation in late 1875.
I also checked other editions of the annual to see if there was a new entry – possibly for Harwich and Dovercourt FC – but no such entry is there.
While that is not a guarantee that the club was a continuation of the original Harwich FC, it is certainly more than a hint that it was.
What is known is that a Harwich team played a Dovercourt side in 1882. A handful of the Harwich players that day had also played for the club in 1880.
This shows Harwich FC was still ‘alive’ and, at least to some extent, was a continuation of the original club. It clearly also had a working relationship with the Dovercourt team.
There is no evidence for this, but it’s not a huge jump to suggest that the two clubs later put their resources together to create HDFC.
So, while it is impossible to be 100% sure that the modern-day HPFC is a direct continuation of the Harwich FC club formed in 1875, it seems highly likely, and the reason that the modern-day club will soon be officially adopting 1875 as its formation date.
That means the club’s 150th anniversary will be coming up next year – more work to do on the history front it seems!
• The club is most grateful to Dr Andrew Senter, the National Football Museum, Abi Goodwin and, as ever, club historian Carl Allen for their help in tracing its exact origins.