Card of the Day - 2022-04-16

So how did we get to Shakespeare?

Well Clue Number One was our Saturday Soccer Star which showed William Stage of Bury, giving us both “William”, Shakespeare’s Christian name, and “Stage”, representing the theatre, and his famous words “All the World's a Stage”, the starting words of a celebrated and oft-quoted monologue from the Shakespeare play "As You Like It”, written in 1599.

William Stage was a prominent player at Bury, and our card says it was “under [his] captaincy Bury won their way back to membership with the First Division of the League.” Once more it was almost certainly the case that the First World War affected his career for the worse, losing him the youthful years that he could have shone so brightly. He actually has a page devoted to him at a website for Southampton Football Club where it tells us he made just four appearances for them, and scored a single goal. That period of his life is not mentioned on the Gallaher card but the picture shown on that website is very similar. 

The fronts of our cards were printed by letterpress and there was more than one printing, the two easiest to acquire have either a grey or brown backdrop around the head of the subject. The other two are harder to spot, one is on a blue grey tinted board and has a creamier back, the other is on a normal board but still has the creamier back. In our original Gallaher reference book, RB.4, issued in 1944 the sets are not numbered, hence no short code exists. It does tell us that cards 14 ([David] Rollo [of Blackburn]) and 46 ([William] Gillespie [Sheffield United]) can be found "... with both a large and a small head". Having never, luckily, seen a footballer with two heads, let alone ones of different sizes, I can only presume it ought to have read "as either a large or a small head". And thankfully the Cartophilic Exchange website  has a picture of David Rollo that shows I am right. 

These cards were printed by Tillotsons Ltd of Bolton, one of the major printers of cigarette cards, and they also printed the follow up set of fifty colour cards the following year, not just colourful, but accurate, as the footballers wear their club colours.