1875: The first recorded Villa games

[peter w]

That is great. But that would put Hughes at around 75ish at the time of writing and the flow and diction doesn't read as that of an elder gentleman of Victorian stock more as the words written in the third person.

Either way - March 1874. That'll do for me.

[dave.woodhall]

Fantastic stuff. So we now have a rough date of our founding and an exact date for our first game.

Also was it known who scored our first goal before?

The goalscorer has always been known. The date of the first match, though, is still a mystery. For a start, if it was in March 1874 that nonsense about the lamppost in October 1874 is wrong. Jack Hughes was also, apparently, want to exaggeration and a tendency to fill in the gaps a bit.

[Ron Manager]

Fantastic stuff. So we now have a rough date of our founding and an exact date for our first game.

Also was it known who scored our first goal before?

The goalscorer has always been known. The date of the first match, though, is still a mystery. For a start, if it was in March 1874 that nonsense about the lamppost in October 1874 is wrong. Jack Hughes was also, apparently, want to exaggeration and a tendency to fill in the gaps a bit.

Quite right Dave. Hughes came out with that story in 1899 in a talk with the Old Villans Society. However he tended to be somewhat economical with the truth regarding the foundation of the club . Perhaps he wanted a bit of glory but you never heard anything at all from the other three 'founders' regarding what actually happened at the very onset.

Using the criteria that the first person/s to start the ball rolling re organising a football club at the Aston Villa Wesleyan Church is the real founder of the club I am in no doubt that person is the leader of the adult male Bible Class, Henry Haynes Hartshorne, but most of the initial work in running the club was undertaken by Edward Phillips and Joseph Brigham as the first secretary. Jack Hughes certainly did his bit in later days along with the far more involved Billy Mason but he was not an actual founder of the club.

[dave.woodhall]

I thought that the talk was in 1897 (although I could be wrong or he gave two), then printed in the Argus. This was then repeated in the anniversary book of 1924, much of which formed the basis for Peter Morris's books, hence the occasional errors in the latter.

Hughes kept the early records and basically wrote the history of that time, so it's no surprise that he has a significant role in it.