The first thing to note here is that this set of "Football Club Colours" include Rugby too, eleven of them, and we have one of those clubs here.
This card mentions "internationals" on the back and though it is not mentioned, the internationals were the Home Nations and Five Nations Championships. Percy Stout and Frank Stout played in the 1898 Home Nations Championship, being chiefly remembered for both scoring tries in the same game, England vs Wales, a fact which would not happen again until Tony and Rory Underwood managed it almost a hundred years later in 1993. C. Smith has not yet been tracked down. Nor has C. Hall. But D.R. Gent turns out to be David Robert, or Dai Gent, who was in the 1910 Championship, by then called the Five Nations, for France was playing. And Arthur Hudson was in the 1906 Home Nations Championship. He took part in the opening game, England vs. Wales, on the 13th of January - and scored a try - as well as playing for England vs. Ireland on the 10th of February.
This set is catalogued in our original Ogden`s reference book (RB.15, published in 1949, as :
86. 51 FOOTBALL CLUB COLOURS. Fronts lithographed in colour. Backs in blue, with descriptive text; cards are known with backs very dark blue, almost black. Cards Nos. 1-50 are inscribed "50 in a Set". Card No.51, inscribed "51 in a set", represents the Captain of the South African Team in England for the season commencing autumn 1906. The latter card seems to have been added after preparation of the series of 50. Home issue 1906. Similar series issued by Churchman and Franklyn Davey.
These two other versions, just like our Ogden`s version, were produced by Mardon, Son and Hall. However they were issued a bit later, both of them arriving in the packets in January 1909, and neither of them have that additional fifty-first card -presumably because it was a topical extra, and, three years on, it was all forgotten.
The backs of the three versions of this set are different: the Churchman looking the same as Ogden`s, and being numbered identically, but being printed in brown, and the Franklyn Davey being neither numbered nor descriptive. The Franklyn Davey set is also the most valuable, probably simply the fact of supply and demand, those cigarettes being less easily obtainable than the others.
The Churchman cards were definitely the easiest to acquire, and they were also the first to be illustrated - in Cameric Notes and News, Vol.1, issue 6 and Vol.3 page 90.
In the London Cigarette Card Catalogue of 1950 the Ogdens version is split into a set of fifty cards, retailed at between 1/9d and 5/- a card for odds or £12 a set, and then a separate line for card fifty-one which was available at 10/-. In comparison the Churchman set was retailed at between 4/- and 12/- a card for odds or £30 a set, and the Franklyn Davey at between 4/6d and 15/- a card for odds or £37 a set.