– the inside story of QPR’s multi-award winner of the 1960s & 70s
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 |
