The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Pars’heritage to be preserved thanks to launch of new trust
MEMORIES AND memorabilia f ro m Dunfermline Athletic’s long and historic past are to be put to better use after a new dedicated trust was set up by the club.
The Dunfermline Athletic Heritage Trust will look after trophies, pennants and hundreds of other items from across t he Pars’ 129- year existence to ensure that Scottish football enthusiasts can savour these pieces of local history as part of their matchday experience.
As well as looking after the tangible items, the trust will bring together and publish to a wider audience, statistical and photographic information about the Pars, and especially the personal anecdotes of past players, fans and club officials, collected through interviews.
The trust will also liaise with Dunfermline Library and Museum, particularly on cultural and historical projects such as the recent World War One Day at East End Park.
Club chairman Bob Garmory admitted he felt there had been a need to better streamline the Pars’ story and channel the club’s history in a more effective way.
“There’s an awful lot that the club had, and has been generated over the long history of the club, that many fans didn’t know existed,” he told Courier Sport.
“We were missing out on a great deal of what you would call the ongoing history of the club, players who had played for us in the ’50s, ’60s, cup winning sides. We had no proper record of their thoughts ab o u t the fo o t b a l l club.
We’ve got Roy Barry, who was the cup-winning captain in 1968, who’s a very sprightly 70-year-old, but we needed to get a proper record of how Roy Barry felt when he captained the club when we won the cup, how he feels now.
“And that has to be available, not just to the board — it has to be available on podcast, it has to be available on the web, so that people can go in and access that.
“So if you are sitting on a plane going to Johannesburg, you can sit and watch whatever’s on the telly or you can say to yourself: ‘I could be listening to Roy Barry all the way there with a glass of red wine’.
Garmory added that this could mean that the memorabilia on show could be tailored to suit each individual game to enhance the matchday experience for home and visiting fans.
At a signing ceremony to l aunch the trust, director Ian Hunter added: “We would also welcome the involvement any interested supporters who feel they might have something to contribute, whether it is their time, their expertise or some old Pars memorabilia that has been lying in the attic.”
The 12 trustees of the new organisation are all Pars fans and have been tasked with taking the project forward.