– the inside story of QPR’s multi-award winner of the 1960s & 70s
"I’m delighted to
hear from you, particularly
when you are talking about my favourite subject - the QPR programme” – and so began a fascinating series of
conversations with Paddington-born Ron Phillips, the former Secretary of Queens
Park Rangers FC, and editor of the club’s matchday programme. For it was Ron
who was responsible in transforming what had previously resembled a team sheet
for a school’s football tournament into a multi-award winning matchday publication.
And what’s more, the chequerboard cover design, with its everchanging palette
of dayglo colours made QPR’s programme the most recognisable in British
football for ten straight years.
In fact, the task of editing the club
programme was not what Ron had in mind at all when he was appointed as QPR’s
new club secretary in the Autumn of 1966. He’d just left the 10th
Royal Hussars cavalry regiment after fifteen years of service on the Monday, spotted
the job in a 2” square advert in the Daily Telegraph the following day, and on
Friday morning Ron was interviewed and began work the very same day - even
though he had made it clear that he’d never attended a football match. What
followed was an extraordinary 23 years for Ron at the club whose on-field
exploits included winning the very first League Cup Final to be played at Wembley
(and as a Third Division team), a meteoric rise to the top flight, European
football, and that 1975-76 season when QPR were pipped by just one point by
Liverpool as Division 1 champions. But on the whole, my communications with Ron
by email and phone focussed on his most beloved project – the official
programme of Queens Park Rangers.
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| QPR v Oxford Utd 1966/67. Ron Phillips on the cover in his first season as QPRs club secretary |
I
wanted to track Ron down as I’d just co-written ‘1 Shilling – The Football
Programme Design Revolution of 1965-85’, a book where graphic designer Matt
Caldwell and myself interviewed the designers about their work on some of our
favourite football programmes of that period. It was the time just before
high-res photography and Apple Macs took over from a super-creative period of hand-crafted
illustrations, layouts and exciting cover design. We are both massive fans of
QPR’s chequerboard cover, and needed to know exactly who had dreamt it up. Well,
Ron Phillips wasn’t an illustrator. He had held a Regular Commission in the
British Army, a large part of which was spent as Major and Paymaster to the
10th Royal Hussars. But one of his tasks was to run the quarterly regimental
journal issued free to everyone in the barracks. In Ron’s words “Yes,
it was ruddy boring but I couldn't play around with it too much as the Queen
was on the subscription list. However, I brightened it up with a cover which you
would have recognised as the forerunner to that belonging to a certain football
club”. An image was forming in Ron’s mind for this next generation QPR
programme, first though, he had to convince the Chairman that the current
League Cup holders and Third Division Champions should be represented by a
football programme that is rather more ambitious than a folded sheet of A4
paper. Jim Gregory was tough and streetwise, a self-made man who had started
his working life selling fish from a barrow in nearby Shepherd’s Bush Market, and
who would go on to make his fortune from selling cars and car dealerships. But Gregory
famously “refused to spend a penny on anything which didn't produce an
immediate profit” So, what happened next?
“The
Chairman forbade me to alter the programme in any way and, if I did and it lost
money, the loss would come out of my salary. I set to work immediately to transform
it. I gave the design to our printers, T.W. Pegg & Sons based in Ellerslie
Road, Fulham. I asked for a chequerboard cover, alternating black and white
squares, with little stick figures of footballers centred in some of the white
squares. You have seen what they produced. I could never have done
that in a lifetime”.
Ron’s
draft of ‘black and white squares’ was brilliantly conjured up by Pegg’s. It
was the Swinging 60’s after all, a point in time when the high streets of
London were awash in bright colours. For every game they would print the
non-white squares in a different colour. So, I wonder, would each colour
represent the kit of your opponents? “Ye Gods, no! My job was to make
the visiting team as uncomfortable as possible. So always the 'wrong'
colour!” The chequerboard cover was inhabited by smaller than postage stamp-sized
stick figures of football players in action: kicking, dribbling, heading,
diving and catching. Beautifully rendered by an artist at Pegg’s. Sadly, Ron
cannot recall who he was, and his work was never specifically credited. This is another not unfamiliar story of so
many people involved in the creation of matchday publications of the past –
again that’s something we wanted to redress in our book.
However,
one aspect of the front cover would start a controversy that continues to rage over
half a century on. Ron asked for each of the letters making up QUEEN'S PARK
RANGERS to be placed into the squares in the central upper section of the
design. Pegg’s produced a mock-up which worked perfectly but with one
exception. The apostrophe between the N and the S of QUEEN’S whether it was inserted
between the letters, or put into its own square, just didn’t look right
aesthetically. So, Ron made the decision which in his words “launched a
thousand letters of incomprehension”. He told Pegg’s to drop the apostrophe
completely. “They did so, pale and horrified, but the cover design was
now perfect”.
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| QPR v Burnley 31st Oct 1967. QPRs very first chequerboard cover |
Ron
Phillips chose a League Cup 4th Round match versus Burnley on 31st
October 1967 to launch the chequerboard programme, bearing the club’s new name
– Queens Park Rangers. The plan was that as it was a midweek match it would
slip under the chairman’s radar. The price was now 9d, a 3d rise on QPR’s rudimentary
sixpenny football programme that had returned for the start of the 1967/68
season. By December 1967, the programme now cost 1/-, reflecting the increased
page count. After half a dozen issues, Pegg’s initial Queens Park Rangers
lettering was changed from white letters with a drawn outline where each letter
took up an entire square, to a smaller font printed in black with the coloured
squares now removed from under all the letters. Ironically this new layout would
have been visually kinder to an apostrophe, but it had already been expunged - as
it has been to this very day…
Up
to this point, Ron Phillips was the Club Secretary – dealing with all the
day-to-day finances doesn’t come close to describing what his post entailed - and
programme editor was certainly not in the job remit. But he wanted to give the
fans a publication that reflected their team’s success on the pitch, and which
could make the kind of profit that would convince the Chairman to support his vision.
Phillips took control of the programme, honing its pages to reflect his mission
to communicate personally with the fans, and giving them a space to share their
voices with the club. During the 1967/8 season, Ron began the ‘Ranger to
Ranger’ letters column which he says was “dear to my heart”. The page
was decorated with a delightful illustration by Alfred Hackett of a fan in his
hooped top connected by a long telephone cord to the programme editor. The
column’s ethos was “If there’s anything you want to get off your chest, now is
the chance”, and the supporters certainly took the opportunity to put pen to
paper…
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| QPR v Hull City 1967/68. The redesigned QPR lettering. |
Phillips
himself wrote the new editorial for each match. It was first dubbed ‘Bush News’
which soon became ‘Bush Telegraph’, and besides his pithy accounts of previous
matches or wider footballing issues, it was a showcase for Ron’s literary
passions. He would quote Thomas Paine “These are the times that try men’s
souls” when responding to the press criticising the club – or offer up some Kipling:
“If you can lose and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word
about your loss” for a first editorial of the season having been relegated the
previous season. And then there was ‘Post Mortem’, the page that listed the
facts on recent games. The opponents, the ground, the attendance, the line-ups,
the score, and what the press said. It was a good title according to Phillips,
but an elderly Director felt the name was too close to the bone so he
reluctantly had to change ‘Post Mortem’ to ‘It’s a Record’. Another addition to
the new programme was the woman’s page ‘Let a Lady Speak’, where wives of the
club’s directors or players offer their tips from everything from slimming and
cleaning grass stains out of white shorts, to the tale about how a woman who
accompanied her husband to matches stopped him getting into trouble, and
recommended more wives do the same. Ron also reminded me that one of his
favourite contributions was a QPR crossword in which most of the clues were
linked to Rangers. Q. Opposing skipper's instructions to his team before
the game (4-7) A. Mark Lazarus
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the 'Ranger to Ranger' column
|
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| the short-lived POSTMORTEM title for the vital facts on recent games column |
At
the end of the 1967/68 season, Ron Phillips went to see the Chairman in his
office at Roehampton to suggest that the club should put out the redesigned
programme for the start of the new season. Jim Gregory refused to discuss it, saying
it would lose the club money. But 1968/69 was QPR’s very first season in the top
flight. Ron Phillips issued his 1/- programme complete with a cast of contributors
that included John Brough’s superb photography (with some images even printed in
colour), Derek Buxton’s statistics, Tony Pullein’s articles and cartoons by the
great Bill Tidy.
“I
was immediately fired but I ignored this (after all, it was the fifth time I
had been dismissed and, to put this in context, Jim Gregory fired 18 Managers while
I was with him) and I soldiered on until the end of the season. I then
forwarded a Profit and Loss Account to the Chairman. I made no comment
on what had been a horrific season financially. The only bright spot
was that programme sales had brought in a profit of £1,100 which was equivalent
to nearly 25% of that season's gate takings. And, more pleasing to me than the
increased takings was the fact that we won the award for Best Programme In The
Football League!”
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| QPR v Middlesbrough 1969/70 with programme award winner rosette |
Hence
the following season, 1969/70, the programme covers proudly wore a rosette that
celebrated the Football League Review’s ‘Best Programme in the League’ award (there
were more awards to come in subsequent years). Ironically, Phillips had been frustrated
by the waste caused by discarded copies of the FLR that had slipped out of the
Rangers programmes. It didn’t help that the publication was “merely a
propaganda instrument of the Football League” according to Phillips. At the
end of the previous season he had conducted a poll of QPR fans about keeping
the FLR in their 1/- programme, and in accordance with the fans wishes, from August
1969, supporters who didn’t want to read the FLR queued up at programme sellers
wearing a blue uniform. Anyone wanting a copy of the FLR would have to pay 1s
3d for a programme that included the magazine, and these could only be bought from
programme sellers on each side of the ground who were dressed in white. It was
a set-up that continued for several more years. Of special note at this point,
it is important to stress that photographs of programme sellers from the 1960s
and 1970s are almost impossible to find. Coincidentally though, while
researching our book we discovered that a photo does exist. It was taken
outside Loftus Road in September 1976 at a First Division match versus Aston
Villa, and shows a programme seller at work, wearing an official cap and what
looks like a milkman’s uniform with a leather pouch slung across his shoulder
for his takings. It feels appropriate that such a rare image depicts an example
of Ron Phillips’s pride and joy, and in its final season before the
chequerboard cover gave way to a new era of programme design dominated by colour
photography.
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| QPR v Leeds 24th April 1976. Rangers qualified for Europe and Ron Phillips asked Peggs the printers to create a special cover featuring the flags of European nations |
By
the way, another of Ron’s favourite ever programme covers was based on an idea
he gave Pegg’s the printers when QPR had already mathematically qualified for
Europe. Instead of the classic chequerboard, Ron asked Pegg’s to print the
flags of the European nations on the cover for the match versus Leeds United on
24th April 1976. In addition, the printers added three special
edition rosettes, as not only had Rangers qualified for Europe for the first
time, but in 1975/76 the QPR programme was again voted ‘Best in the Football
League’. Rangers beat Leeds 2-0 that day but still missed out on the First
Division trophy to Liverpool who had also won their final match of the season.
Second place meant that it would be UEFA Cup football rather than the European
Cup in the following season.
As
I mentioned at the beginning of the article, it’s the QPR programme that is
centre stage, especially the chequerboard era. Ron Phillips was Secretary of
QPR between 1966 and 1989, a dramatic period of highs and lows for the club where
fans also witnessed many exceptional players. His personal favourite was Stan
Bowles, and having read Ron’s memoirs of his time at QPR, he was kept well on
his toes by Stan’s extra-curricular activities. Ron left football for good to
move on to fulfil a dream – to run his own theatre. He started Barons Court
Theatre in London W14, and was its artistic director until he retired at the
age of 88 in 2021. To this day Ron Phillips still receives fan mail about his
stint on the QPR programme. Though he did recently get a letter from a Rangers fan
in New Zealand who is still irate about that expunged apostrophe…
Alan
Dein, 8th January, 2023
For more details about Alan & Matt’s book 1 Shilling - Football Programme Design Revolution of 1965-85, please check: Instagram: @1_shilling
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| QPR v Aston Villa 11th Sept 1976 as seen in that super-rare photograph of a 1970s programme seller |
Sadly, Ron Phillips passed away in April 2023. Please take a look at this tribute to his remarkable career at Queens Park Rangers: https://www.qpr.co.uk/news/club-news/ron-phillips-tribute-210423/
