In Rovers We Trust CIC & Exhibitions

[GlennKirkwoodFanClub]

Dear all

Sorry for the long message but there is a lot to say.

As promised, at long last, we have some good news of significant progress with the Doncaster Rovers museum project: some real events you can get involved in.

Dates for our first ‘Heritage Happenings’ are:

Mexborough Library Fri 15 Aug 10-4pm
Mexborough Library Sat 16 Aug 10-12pm
Askern Library Fri 5 Sep 10-1pm
Askern Library Sat 6 Sep 10-12pm

We won some funds from ‘Well Doncaster’ and have booked 4 exhibition events in 2 locations. We are asking local people to join us in building the ‘Doncaster Rovers Football Museum’. We’re embracing the idea of a physical museum as our ultimate goal from day one because (a) that’s what we all want and the club deserves, and (b) we’re already dealing with physical items and exhibitions and that will continue. The overall idea is that taking part in such activities is beneficial for local people in all sorts of ways.

This is our big chance to kick off the ‘virtual’ museum project for real in a ‘physical’ way and then we can submit our full bid to the Heritage Fund from a much stronger position.

We want you to join us in delivering this idea to our communities and getting them on board in any way you can. For example, could you attend for part of any of the 4 events and help show people around? Could you loan items of your own? Can you publicise it in your own social networks?

We’ve based these ‘Heritage Happenings’ around a Friday preceding a home game, with a bonus event of 2 hours on the Saturday morning of the game for anyone who can’t make the Friday.

The club have been very supportive and we’ll have the League 2 trophy at the Friday events. We've been working our way through the DRFC archives over the last few weeks, so we are hoping we can bring along a number of those items (Len Graham international Cap, Minutes from Directors  Meetings of the 1930's, JPT winners medal etc) We’re also talking to other Club Doncaster volunteers about helping us.

Our bid said we would deliver 2 x 4-hour events. But we will actually deliver 4 events over a total of 13 hours. We think we can also deliver a third event later in the season if these 2 go to plan.

The format we are using is very simple. Tables of Rovers ‘stuff’ & displays spaced around a community hall,  based loosely on those 6 categories we started with. Volunteers will be on hand to chat to people and explain or discuss anything they like. People can also bring in items from their own collections and we can photograph them for the Instagram account. They can also get involved in Rovers-related art-making.

There is a lot of overlap, and with ‘Art’ added as a separate heading, there are now 7 categories to help us all think about what should go in an exhibition:

Official club history: players, matches, managers etc
Grounds, buildings and locations
Programmes
Kit
Memorabilia (everything else basically!)
Fanzone (handbooks, fanzines, anything related to fan groups and fan activities)
Funzone/Art Area (anything that’s creative and fan-led, fun and interesting with a Rovers link. Includes paintings, drawings, models, sculptures, writing, textiles, games…anything that helps with visualisation of Rovers history and gets our people involved).

There will be an art area to display and work on things that reference Rovers heritage in some way but are not historical ‘exhibits’ in the same way as a programme, shirt, history book, scarf etc. We encourage kids, young people, older people, indeed anyone who feels creative to get involved. We hope this will also bring in people who might not otherwise be involved with Rovers and they too will join the growing fanbase.

We have had a poster accepted for a conference at Durham University 29-31 July. It underlines these links between Doncaster Rovers, art and creativity. We also won a bursary to cover our costs of attending. We’ll be using the event to engage with people and organisations in museums, archives, galleries, libraries and heritage academia and learn how we can improve what we do:

https://dcdcconference.co.uk/dcdc25/

If there is any way you can help with the Mexborough and Askern events we'd love you to be there. If you have anything we could display, please bring it along or send a picture to Rich (silkscarf) or Colin (glennkirkwoodfanclub) and we can put it on the instagram page for Doncaster Rovers Virtual Museum. At present though, due to lack of space and resources, we can’t take donations or loans of items. So we’d like you to bring examples to the events so we can photograph them and chat with you about them. In a future stage of the project we’ll obviously aim to take any donated collections and loaned items from fans.

The pilot version of the Virtual Museum is now also on Facebook. Everything from the Instagram account is now immediately posted there too. So do visit, give things a like and feel free to comment. We are sure you will like what you see and it will give you an indication of the sort of memorabilia that you will see if you visit the heritage exhibitions.

As part of the marketing for the exhibitions we are having some photographs blown up to large sizes. If you have any suggestions on what pictures we should have "in big" please let us know asap. We want those things all Rovers fans would expect to see. But we also want the quirky, left field, funny, slightly odd things that only you as an individual fan would suggest.

A poster will be available for both events in downloadable format and paper versions will appear in key locations.

We now have a web presence, focused on the museum project for now. At the moment it will remain just a holding page but you can contact us there or via the VSC forum or direct to either of us:

https://inroverswetrust.org/

Thanks

Colin & Rich

[graingrover]

Congratulations ! Have you thought of the possibility of an exhibition on a concourse before a home match to ,
a) familiarise fans
b ask for memorabilia  to be donated that day at your stalls .
The bullseye of interested members of the community for the museum are fans .Good luck!
I have numerous items of club memorabilia to donate but need an address to post to you from abroad .

[Scooter]

Great work Colin and Rich

[BobG]

Yep. Massive congratulations indeed.

From what you said GKDC this is probably not for right now, but I possess rather a lot of stuff from and about the Firestarter era. Some of you will remember the role my father and I played those days. Lol. I've got all his papers as well as my own. I've  never thrown anything out. Newspaper interviews in the Times, the Independent, the Guardian. A lot of stuff from the wonderful, wonderful Brighton supporters. Stuff from all over the world tbh. There's a day by day 'Factfile' written by my Dad and I to keep track of events, and things, to remember. There's a couple of articles I had published and there's the presentation that we, and the fabulous Stephen Reasbeck, gave to World in Action. They were taking it up  - until LWT pulled the plug on the whole programme.

Nothing has been sorted. It's all simply sat, sitting. And it's yours if you want it one day. The guy who wrote 'The Longest Drop' took some of the pps as he was going to do a book about what happened. Sadly the book never happened and the pps never returned. But I've still got loads.

BobG

PS. The 'BSTR' story is still funny to this day. It was all over the back pages of the Evening Post , much to Horsecraps' later public embarrassment - which was exactly what it was designed to achieve. Useless turd.

[Silkscarf]

Congratulations ! Have you thought of the possibility of an exhibition on a concourse before a home match to ,
a) familiarise fans
b ask for memorabilia  to be donated that day at your stalls .
The bullseye of interested members of the community for the museum are fans .Good luck!
I have numerous items of club memorabilia to donate but need an address to post to you from abroad .

Thanks Graing. Yes we’re working on ideas for the next ones if these go to plan. We’ll need more funds for a longer term approach.

[Silkscarf]

Yep. Massive congratulations indeed.

From what you said GKDC this is probably not for right now, but I possess rather a lot of stuff from and about the Firestarter era. Some of you will remember the role my father and I played those days. Lol. I've got all his papers as well as my own. I've  never thrown anything out. Newspaper interviews in the Times, the Independent, the Guardian. A lot of stuff from the wonderful, wonderful Brighton supporters. Stuff from all over the world tbh. There's a day by day 'Factfile' written by my Dad and I to keep track of events, and things, to remember. There's a couple of articles I had published and there's the presentation that we, and the fabulous Stephen Reasbeck, gave to World in Action. They were taking it up  - until LWT pulled the plug on the whole programme.

Nothing has been sorted. It's all simply sat, sitting. And it's yours if you want it one day. The guy who wrote 'The Longest Drop' took some of the pps as he was going to do a book about what happened. Sadly the book never happened and the pps never returned. But I've still got loads.

BobG

PS. The 'BSTR' story is still funny to this day. It was all over the back pages of the Evening Post , much to Horsecraps' later public embarrassment - which was exactly what it was designed to achieve. Useless turd.

Thanks Bob. Yes we’d be interested in all that of course, but we can’t accept anything until we have somewhere secure and safe to put it. I’d love to donate my own stuff!

You could always take a few pics of some of it and send those to us.

[BobG]

Crikey! That'd be some choice overload. In Spades. Redoubled.

BobG

[Pancho Regan]

Fantastic work you guys, huge congratulations to you.

[GlennKirkwoodFanClub]

Thank you for the positive reaction to my rather long message. It is appreciated.

I'll try and answer the questions asked with maybe some background information.

In an ideal world, there would be space within the Eco Power stadium to have a permanent museum, but any available space gets rented out to gain income for the club. We can't argue with that, it's just business. In fact the archive that the club has got is kept in a couple of small cupboards and until we started looking at those a few weeks ago, were full to the brim. Supporters have over time donated things to the club and there are loads of programmes in there. There are also some scrapbooks where newspaper cuttings have been saved. The period when Uncle Ken was the benefactor seems well covered in that regard, however Bob G I'm well aware of the role that your father played at that time and I have no doubt that your collection from that time will be the most extensive. They are a must whenever a physical museum happens (fingers crossed) as it was a major part of the club's history(albeit a bad part) and should be preserved for years to come. We just haven't got anywhere to put them (yet). Copyright issues mean that we can't put any newspaper articles on the instagram/facebook accounts unless we get permission and generally permission will cost money we don't have.

The same applies to the very kind offer from graingrover. If it is small enough for the cupboard, we'd love whatever you have to offer. Anything large just won't fit at the moment. If you send whatever it is for the attention of Colin Harker, In Rovers We Trust to the stadium address, then I'll pick it up. It is our registered office, so I'm often in to pick up post. Unless programmes date back to the 50's and prior, please don't send them as we probably have them already.

If anyone else has items, please tell us about them. As I say, not programmes from the last fifty or so years. We'd love to be able to show some of your items at the exhibitions, but if they are large, please just loan them to us for the events.

We do hope to put something on at the stadium soon. Maybe not in a concourse as that would restrict how many people could see it, but it is something that we are talking to the club about, and the good news is that the club is completely behind what we are doing. They are looking to have permanent display in the West Reception (players entrance), and we will have input on what goes in there.   

Please keep your comments coming. Suggestions about where we could/should be going to put on further events. This is all about building the relationships with the community of Doncaster and getting the word out there that this club cares about the residents of the city.

Thanks again, all of you, for your input. Keep it coming.
Colin

[Balby Rover]

Hi Colin - Rich as you know I can't make the Mexborough event due to vacation but I will make Askern. And as you know I have spoken to the late Steve Uzelac Wife and she is going to allow me to bring some if his stuff including his scrap books etc. Thanks for organising such great events Phil RTID. 

[The Red Baron]

Hi Colin - Rich as you know I can't make the Mexborough event due to vacation but I will make Askern. And as you know I have spoken to the late Steve Uzelac Wife and she is going to allow me to bring some if his stuff including his scrap books etc. Thanks for organising such great events Phil RTID. 

A few years ago, Steve kindly allowed me to borrow his scrapbooks. They are well worth a look for anyone interested in Rovers in the 1970s.

[graingrover]

Ok I will do as you suggest .Thanks and well done !

[Silkscarf]

Poster for Mexborough event.

[Silkscarf]

Poster for Askern event.

[GlennKirkwoodFanClub]

Just a reminder that the first Heritage Exhibitions are in Mexborough Library on 15th & 16th August. The 15th is all day and the 16th has a finish at 12noon as there is a Rovers match to go to after that.

We have unearthed a seat and a couple of metal signs from Belle Vue in the last week, along with being lent some 1940's programmes, so they can be added to what is on show. I do hope as many of you as possible will be able to attend. Having received some funding from Well Doncaster to put this event and the one in Askern library 5th/6th September on, if we want to do anymore, I'm sure we will need to have shown decent visitor numbers.

If you have anything to bring along, we'd really be pleased to see what is out there especially anything that refers back before the war or Belle Vue. If you know any former players or are indeed are a former player yourself, we would love to hear your stories and pictures. Please spread the word.

Thanks
Colin & Rich

[GlennKirkwoodFanClub]

Just one final reminder. The exhibition is at Mexborough library tomorrow from 10am until 5pm but it does close for half an hour at 1pm. Then we are back again on Saturday 10am till noon. We will appreciate seeing everyone that comes along.

I'm case anyone wondered it is free and there are places to park nearby and it has a lift for anyone with mobility issues. It is right next to the bus terminus.

If anyone was thinking of getting to Mexborough via High Melton,dont. They have shut the road and put a diversion via Marr. So if travelling from Doncaster, go through Conisborough.

Hopefully see you there.

[Silkscarf]

Thanks to everyone who came today. We hope you liked it. Any feedback welcome on here or in Comments on the Instagram or replies to Facebook.

Don’t forget there’s still a chance to catch this tomorrow morning 10am-12pm. Plenty of time to get to the Wycombe game afterwards. Loads of free parking in the multi-storey by the market or at ground level towards the Old Market Hall (now a Wetherspoon). Or train into town from Mexborough station.

If you can’t make it tomorrow there’s another chance in Askern Library on Friday and Saturday 5-6 September.

After that there’s nothing else planned at the moment. But if demand is there we may be able to hold further events in future. Maybe one day a permanent base will be possible.

[Silkscarf]

Don’t forget you can visit our ‘Heritage Happening’ at Askern Library Friday 5 September 10am-1pm and Saturday 6 September 10am-12pm (plenty of time to get to the Bradford game afterwards).

This is the last one we have planned for the time being.

All welcome and completely free. If you have any interesting Rovers items please bring them along and we can photograph them for the virtual museum. But just pop in for a look round. Suggestions and feedback welcome.

Please visit and help us build the Doncaster Rovers Football Museum!

Askern Library, Station Road, Askern DN6 0LA.

The library is opposite the lake. Exhibition is on the first floor. It’s fully accessible with a lift.

Travel options: Take the 362 bus from Frenchgate Interchange. By car there is very limited parking by the lake cafe and on the main road. But your best bet might be to aim for street parking 5 minutes walk away. If you can walk via the lake then it’s even better.

See you there!

[Plumbster]

I called in when this was at Mexborough and would highly recommend

[GlennKirkwoodFanClub]

One final reminder that the memorabilia exhibition is at Askern Community Library today and tomorrow, but due to the library's opening hours we are only there between 10am and 1pm today and 10am to 12 noon tomorrow. Please come and see us. Thanks

[silent majority]

Great effort by both of you!!

Superb exhibition of the club and its history.