Colours and Club Crest
Bradford City is the only professional football club in England to wear claret and amber. The club colours were inherited from Manningham FC, when the club converted to football upon Bradford City's foundation in 1903. However, whereas Manningham played in hoops, the new football club adopted claret and amber stripes. Manningham RFC adopted the colours in 1884 before the move to Valley Parade in 1886. Having originally worn black shirts with white shorts, the club’s first game in claret and amber was against Hull on 20 September 1884, at Carlisle Road.
The reason Manningham chose claret and amber is not documented but it was the same colours of the West Yorkshire Regiment, which was based at Belle Vue Barracks on nearby Manningham Lane. Both Manningham, from 1886, and Bradford City, from 1903–08, used the barracks as changing and club rooms.
Bradford City has worn claret and amber, with either white or black, since it was founded. Since the fire in 1985, the club has used black on the kit as a memory to the 56 supporters who died. The club's away shirt has traditionally been white and to a lesser extent also blue, but there has been a profusion of other colours and designs particularly in more recent years. The away kit for the 2008–2009 season was all white. For the new 2009/10 season, the away kit will be all black with a thin claret and amber stripe down the centre-left.
City scarves have also sold in large numbers in recent years to fans of Harry Potter, because the colours are the same as Harry’s house scarf at Hogwarts School.
A number of other clubs across the world wear claret and amber. They include Scottish club Motherwell, who originally wore blue and white until they wore claret and amber for the first time on 23 August 1913, against Celtic. It is erroneously believed that Motherwell chose the claret and amber colours because they were the racing colours of Lord Hamilton; it is more likely that Motherwell were influenced by Bradford City's English FA cup win in 1911.
The club’s crest combines a series of logos from over the years. In 1974, City adopted a contemporary style crest incorporating the club’s initials, with a B-C logo. At the time, the new logo maintained the previous nickname of the Paraders. By December 1981, the club relaunched the Bantams as the official identity with a bantam on the new crest. The crest maintains the club colours and also includes the words The Bantams.
Read more about this topic: Bradford City A.F.C.
Famous quotes containing the words colours and, colours, club and/or crest:
“I should need
Colours and words that are unknown to man,
To paint the visionary dreariness”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“When we reflect on our past sentiments and affections, our thought is a faithful mirror, and copies its objects truly; but the colours which it employs are faint and dull, in comparison of those in which our original perceptions were clothed.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“The barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
—Mme. Ellen Louise Demorest 1824–1898, U.S. women’s magazine editor and woman’s club movement pioneer. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 203 (January 1870)
“What shall he have that killed the deer?
His leather skin and horns to wear.
Then sing him home.
Take thou no scorn to wear the horn,
It was a crest ere thou wast born;
Thy father’s father wore it,
And thy father bore it.
The horn, the horn, the lusty horn
Is not a thing to laugh to scorn.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)