Clubs unite to honour their founding father

Jul 3 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

Service of Celebration and Recognition of the Rev Ben Swift Chambers, Shepley Methodist Church, Huddersfield.

BLUE and Red were joined in friendship yesterday in a service of rededication over the grave of a man whose religious faith made him the father of two great football clubs.

The officials and players of Everton and Liverpool have met so many times before, during one of the most keenly contested rivalries in British football.

The city has witnessed hundreds of matches, grand receptions and, of course, those funerals when the clubs have, together, mourned the passing of great and loyal servants.

But yesterday’s gathering, amid the headstones and noble inscriptions of a Pennine village churchyard, was a little different.

There lay the Reverend Ben Swift Chambers, whose belief in the popular Victorian doctrine of “muscular Christianity” led him to form a cricket club in 1877 at St Domingo’s Methodist Chapel in the Everton district, where he was minister.

This was fine, but it left the cold months empty. So that winter, at Chambers’s suggestion, the young men started a football team, playing on nearby Stanley Park and quickly attracting players from other churches.

This meant that they needed another general name and, in 1884, they built a new stadium at Anfield and were billed as Everton FC for the first time. The following season, they turned professional, winning the Football league Championship in 1891.