Our team of experts offers tips and inspiration EDITED BY CLAIRE VAUGHAN
What is this footballing event?
Q I have a family photo of a boys’ football team winning a league – I’d love to know what the event was. It presumably took place in Glasgow where my father-in-law, Christian Julius Etrop Sundstrem, who appears in the picture, lived. It shows the team with a trophy and shield. Christian, born in Bridgeton in 1920, is the boy to the front right of the team.
I don’t know what school he went to, but his family were Catholic. There was a Sacred Heart Primary nearby in Bridgeton, and I believe that there was a Catholic secondary school there too.
Joyce Sundstrem
A If this was a school team, a list of past winners of the Glasgow schools league can be found on the website of the Glasgow Schools’ Football Association at https://www.gsfa. net/Previous%20Division%20 Champions.html.html, but the first thing to identify is which school Christian went to.
Christian’s birth record on ScotlandsPeople (scotlands people.gov.uk) notes that he was born at 8 Pentland Place, Bridgeton; his father was Charles Sundstrem. The site’s valuation rolls from 1930 and 1935 note that Charles is still resident there.
Glasgow Post Office directories from the 1930s are freely available on the Internet Archive. The 1932–1933 volume is at archive.org/details/postofficeann193233glas/page/n5/mode/2up. A schools list on page 220 of the appendix shows 19 schools in Bridgeton, including Our Lady and St Francis’ Secondary on Charlotte Street, and Sacred Heart Advanced Central on Pirn Street. The latter was a fairly short walk from Pentland Place, as seen on an Ordnance Survey map (1934-1935) on the National Library of Scotland’s website: maps.nls.uk/view/82891803.
Catholic schools were brought into the state-education system in 1918, and Glasgow City Archives (glasgowlife.org.uk/libraries/city-archives/archive-collections) has records for all Bridgeton schools from this period. These include admission registers, for which you need to know the child’s name and address to perform a search. The headmaster’s logbooks may well note a sporting victory.
Also, the city’s Catholic Observer newspaper may have reported the team’s success. The British Newspaper Archive (britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk) does not yet cover the relevant period, but there are microfilms at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow (glasgowlife.org.uk/libraries/venues/the-mitchell-library).
Chris Paton
