This being half term week, we didn’t have our usual fixture with the children.

Instead, our two visual artists, Jo Chapman and Ellie Rodwell, spent a couple of days at the Long Shop Museum, exploring documents and objects as they researched the many links between the workers and football.

Jo was particularly taken with drawings—from the blueprint of the drawing office general rules to the layers of plans and tracings and the precision ink pens they used.

Ellie loved the wooden moulds used to cast the various machine parts and the different casting methods used to produce everything from massive boilers to the most delicate of silver ‘buttons’ and plaques.

Leiston Town Football Club 1912/13

The Club won three cups this season. According to accompanying notes, the team included Walter Bedwell, at one time ‘an expert chicken breeder, son of George who was a famous footballer and pigeon fancier and breeder’ and Frank Frost, who worked on a lathe in the Threshing machine department.

There was also a teacher, a ‘sometime landlord’ of the White Horse Hotel, and the brother of George Airey who was, for many years, the Boiler Shop foreman and was capped three times for Suffolk.

Drawing Office General Rules.

Rule II is that all drawings should be made on the size of paper known as double elephant, i.e. is 40” x 27”, also 20” x 27”.

Rule III is that tracings must be filed flat, not doubled up and creased.

This is a detailed drawing of a cross rail index collar locking screw with a fine knurl.

It is one of hundreds of similar drawings, each specifying precise measurements and instructions—and all with the advice that, if in doubt, ask.

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