The Watford Observer has again teamed with its friends at the Watford Treasury to share stories from previous issues.

Colin Payne looks back to when the age of illumination arrived at Vicarage Road from Volume 8.

Looking at today’s Vicarage Road, one can’t help but notice the array of small but powerful LED lights perched upon the roofs of all four stands, assisting the more traditional-looking floodlight pylons situated – as football-fan lore dictates – in the four corners of the ground. Ask anyone of a certain age to draw a football ground, and you can be sure the stands would be different, scales incomparable, no two remotely similar, but all would have the floodlights in each corner. Of course, times have changed – thank goodness for satnavs, because if you relied on seeking out a previously unvisited ground by searching for those towering lights on the skyline, you would surely be lost forever.

The glow of the floodlights is part of a magic which now lives within us all, the night game being a cherished part of match-going. Yet, prior to the 1950s, once the page for October had been torn from the calendar, football matches were played out in an inevitable descending darkness as the winter fixture list consisted of nothing but gloomy Saturday afternoons and bank holidays. You could play on Christmas Day, but no chance of a game kicking off after 3pm once the clocks went back!

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In a quest for greater revenues, when gate money was failing to balance the books, the Watford board of directors needed to find ways to use their stadium for more than just football on Saturdays and dog racing midweek.

In 1953 the club presented their big £3,000 investment. Installed by British Thomson Houston Co. Ltd, large single lamps were mounted upon the roofs of both the Main Stand and Shrodells Stand, while around the rest of the perimeter similar lights were mounted in twos and threes on tall telegraph poles, around eight metres in the air.

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When illuminating a pitch on a winter’s night they presented, at best, a dusk-like hue, rather than the bright simulated daylight we are used to today. However, back then it was truly magical for fans, and opened up whole new possibilities for increased shillings and pounds through gate receipts for a desperate board.

To celebrate – or more practically, help finance – the new lights at Vicarage Road, Watford played host to a raft of ‘Floodlight Friendlies’ over a three-year period. Fans were treated to such exotic delights as Rampla Juniors from Uruguay, Portuguesa des Desportos from Brazil, and not one, not two, not even three – but four different clubs taking the Trans Europe Express to Vicarage Road from Vienna.

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Moths to Watford’s newly installed burning bulbs, supporters attended in large numbers and the healthy revenues from the games began immediately to pay back the investment, capturing not just the novelty of football played ‘in the dark’, but also fans’ curiosity at seeing teams come to their local ground from far-flung locations and previously hostile nations. Attendances that were in line with competitive league matches were recorded, as over 14,000 wrapped up against the elements to see the visitors from Brazil, and crowds of 12,000 and 11,000 respectively for the matches against Borussia Dortmund and Hajduk Split.

A regional midweek league was created, after the pioneering Watford directors approached their counterparts at neighbouring Arsenal, Tottenham, West Ham, Millwall, Crystal Palace, QPR and Luton. They aimed to make use of the new scope that night-time football offered, and the league soon became the domain of London and south-eastern reserve sides. Like the friendlies against those romantic-sounding foreign visitors, these were initially well attended, although inevitably gates dropped, with the League Cup being created as a national night-time competition in 1960.

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Watford played under their original lights for a decade, and press images from the time would certainly indicate that the erection of the more powerful and illuminating pylon-mounted bulbs in 1962 was a much-needed development. Although for a large part of the fifties Watford could be gauged as stagnating with a never-changing Division 3 South status on the field of play, off it they were making radical inroads into a bright future.

Copies of The Watford Treasury are available to buy from https://thewatfordtreasury.com/collections/watford-treasury