August 2026 Newsletter

August Newsletter

The new season really feels like it’s started with many of us either going to, or watching on TV, the various friendlies, including the one at Darmstadt. Our first competitive games against West Ham and then QPR are now only a few days away and like John and the squad, we are really busy at your Society. Lets start with our forthcoming events:-

1) A Memory Morning With John McLaughlin. John played for us from 1979 to 1984 and helped us to win promotion twice during that time after being transferred in from Swindon. The morning will start at 10.30am in the Legends Lounge on Thursday 20th August and be led by Johnny Moore and Colin Farmery with John telling us all about playing under Frank Burrows and Bobby Campbell during his 170 games for the club. Tickets are free for members and the link to get your tickets follows:

2) Our special tour of the Mary Rose on September 24th at 11am. Ticket sales have been good for this so far so please secure yours soon if you want to attend as ticket numbers are limited to 60. The price is a bargain £15 for members and their guests and the tour will be a very special one. It will be led by Greg Hills, a PHS committee member who is also a Mary Rose guide (and loves dressing up in Tudor costumes as you can see below!). Greg tells us that "the money from the ticket sales will go towards the upkeep and preservation of the museum and the tour in September is normally £25 over and above the normal entry ticket price which makes it even more of a cracking deal as the £15 covers both entry to the dockyard (just for the Mary Rose) and the tour itself”. It’s a great opportunity.

The link to get your ticket follows:

3) Our AGM. This will take place on Thursday October 8th starting at 7pm with the bar opening at 6.45pm. After a session on the years results and a chance to ask questions of the Committee and the Trustees, we have a session with Michael Saunders and Colin Farmery on the history of the Fratton Park stadium, continuing the presentation they started at the Simon Inglis event last year. We are also trying to arrange for one of the ground staff to join us to talk about how the pitch has changed over the years. The link to get your tickets will be in our next newsletter.

4) The 2026 Hall of Fame Dinner. We have been waiting for Sky to tell us what games they are taking for their channel and now that they have done so we can slot this into the diary. More detail will follow.

5) Ray Crawford has agreed to do a “Memory Morning” so more details will follow when we have agreed a date with him. 

Other things to mention are:-

Membership of PHS

Many thanks to Phil Armstrong, Peter Weekes, Stephen Hatcher, Blaise Tapp, Stephen Tyrie, Matthew Whiting, Simon Denyer, Steve Briant, Steve Neill and Chris Ebbens for subscribing for membership over the last month or two.  Not forgetting also Alan Biley, who was afforded honorary membership after his tremendous evening event.  Thanks also to all members who have renewed.  The rate of renewal has been extremely encouraging and leads us to think we are getting most things right with the membership offer.  However, suggestions are welcome for future events.  To those members still to renew, there is still time to do so, preferably via the online facility on the website. We’re keeping the membership at a tenner for 2026/27 but please do remember to tick the “Gift Aid” box on the on-line form so that we can claim gift aid from HMRC. Thank you to all our members for supporting your society.

Our Purchase Of The Women’s National League South Trophy

You will recall that our fundraising efforts were successful and we can now order the trophy. When it is ready we will arrange some kind of presentation of it to the club on loan from PHS and then put it on display in the club trophy cabinet where those on a stadium tour will be able to view it. We will also bring it to one of our events. 

Our Purchase Of Memorabilia

Your membership fees and other fundraising all help us purchase selected items that we think will add to our collection and at some stage can be put on display at the club, the City Museum or in time, at our own museum. Mick Hall is the committee member who looks after this for us and has been busy. A while back a guy contacted the club and offered to return some old club ledgers in his possession to us. In the end he decided to auction them instead and Mick was successful in obtaining them for PHS at the Nesbitt’s auction in Southsea last week. The bundle of old ledgers was worth getting as it included the cashbook for 1912, the time when the old club went bust and the new one formed. It therefore lists every payment in and out of the club at that time such as the payments to reconstitute the club legally, the loans from the Directors to get the new the club going and so on. It’s a fascinating record of that period from 1912 and through the war years when the Directors did a super job by keeping the club going when no income from professional football was allowed, and right up until 1921 when we had just joined the Football League. It was one of those items that we just had to get back to Fratton without fail. When we do get these sort of items, we always try to put them on display if we have a suitable opportunity but we start by scanning them using our own scanner and then they are stored for us in a secure, temperature controlled archive in the city until we need them back. So if anyone needs to look at them, the scan should be used first to save the originals being damaged in any way. 

Also in July we were offered Steve Finnan’s match-worn FA Cup Final shirt from 2010. An Irish buyer had secured Steve’s shirt collection a while back and now wanted to sell so offered us the shirt after already selling Steve’s 2010 Semi-Final shirt. The seller told us he had sold it to a Pompey shirt collector "who then couldn’t afford to buy the Final shirt”. However, the price for the Cup Final shirt was far too high for us, above what we felt was a prudent price, so after some negotiation we decided not to buy it. But then in much better news, we have instead secured Guy Whittingham’s 1992 match-worn shirt from the FA Cup Semi-Final against Liverpool. It is in excellent condition and Guy was happy that the money went to charity so Rowan’s Hospice in Purbrook will now benefit by a substantial amount.

The PHS Digital Magazine

Our latest edition of the PHS magazine will be out during the week commencing August 10th. It will contain a number of fascinating items on things like the Community Singing Movement of the 1920s and the songs before the 1939 FA Cup Final plus articles on George Ley and Kenny Jackett. An image of the front cover is below and we will send you a link to it next week.

Our PHS Express FM Past Chimes Radio Show

A number of you have asked where this has gone. The monthly show resumes in August with Colin Farmery in the chair and Richard Atkins-Grieg should be back, fit and well, from October.

Pompey100 - City Museum Display Of PFC Memorabilia

We’re still working hard on this, ready for an end of October launch at the City Museum. We’re a major part of their Pompey100 display covering the last 100 years of our city life  and various club items will be on display such as Jimmy Dickinson’s England shirt purchased last year. Many thanks to the team working on this at PHS. It will be worth visiting, they expect a lot of people to go round the full exhibition, so do keep time free in your diary for a visit after it opens.

Help Needed

We have a challenge with the amount of storage space that we have at PHS so we are keen to scan all of our Football/Sports Mails from the 1940s onwards so that we don't need to keep the original newspapers locally. We have the scanner but need someone to operate it so if there are any volunteers out there who fancy helping us do this please do let us know. Training will obviously be given. 

That's all for now. 

Play Up Pompey!