This film is part of Free
No Parlour Pastime!
It's Upstreeters v Downstreeters in a messy - and very wet - game of street football in 1920s Chester-le-Street.
Overview
This Newcastle edition of the Topical Budget newsreel shows Chester-le-Street's annual Shrove Tuesday football match, a boisterous street game dating to medieval times. The film gives a fantastic sense of the game's scale, with hundreds of flat-capped players (Upstreeters v Downstreeters) charging through the streets, and, of course, ending up in the river. The game was finally banned in 1932.
Shrove Tuesday is traditionally a day for robust sporting activity - presumably to work up an appetite for the time-honoured pancake feast. Similar street football games still take place in Ashbourne in Derbyshire, and Alnwick in Northumberland. The winners are decided by whichever half of the town the ball ends up in at the end of play.
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