The current Chesterfield FC dates from April 1919, and was formed as the Chesterfield Municipal FC. It is the fourth club to carry the town's name and it is possible to trace a line of "ancestry" from one to the other through various common players and administrators.
Although there is a widely-held belief that the first Chesterfield club was formed in 1866, no contemporary documentary evidence has been found to substantiate a claim for formation earlier than October 19th., 1867. This evidence is an advertisement that appeared in two local newspapers on that date, saying that the local cricket club intended opening a football club, and advertising for players. Here is that advertisement:
The club did not play a match against another side until February 1868. A report of the game in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph (20/2/1868) reads thus:
"Yesterday, teams from the Chesterfield and Garrick (Sheffield) football clubs contested for superiority in the Recreation Ground, Chesterfield, and after some spirited play the Garrick gentlemen were returned the victors. Considering that the Chesterfield club has only been in existence a few months, they played with remarkable skill and pluck."
The part in bold is fairly unambiguous. The Derbyshire Times report of the match offers one or two clues to the formation question, calling the club a "new" club and saying that the match was a novelty for Chesterfield, although it does go one to say that the game was the first the town had seen for some time - suggesting that there had been others, albeit not in the recent past. Here is the report:
So, where does "1866" come from? The first reference I have seen to an 1866 formation came in the 1905 Book of Football, in an article which was written by George Oram, a club director, and which contained various factual errors. My suspicion is that Oram over-egged the pudding in order to make Chesterfield "older" than its near neighbours, Sheffield Wednesday, and establish some sort of bragging rights in that respect. In the finest UK journalistic traditions of "Copy it and see if anyone notices," this article formed the basis of every subsequent article about the club, right up to programme articles in the 1990s. The "Book of Football" article is dealt with here. Could Oram have got it wrong? He was writing forty years after the event, and we can't say if any contemporary evidence - minute books, and the like - survived to help him. Twenty years after the Anglo-Scottish win over Rangers I was stopped outside the Rec' by a fan who insisted that I'd got that game's goalscorers wrong in "The Definitive Chesterfield FC." I hadn't, but it shows that memories are an unreliable basis for the assertion of fact.
This first club folded in 1881, largely through lack of interest in anyone taking charge of its small debt, although there may be something in the idea that the cricketers had become jealous of the greater popularity of football and told the footballers to vacate the Rec. The attraction of the more successful Spital club, who operated on a field near Horns Bridge, drew Chesterfield players away, and the leftovers, upon the Chesterfield club's passing, joined other local clubs.
The second Chesterfield FC appeared in 1884: there is a story that another local club, the Spital club, simply changed its name to Chesterfield FC and moved up to occupy the Rec but, since the Spital club continued playing after 1884 this must be discounted, although it is fair to say that players from Spital (and another local side, Chesterfield Livingston,) formed the first playing staff of the new club. This club became known as the Chesterfield Town FC sometime around the late 1880s, but a proper, legal name-change waited until the club became a limited company in 1899. This is the Chesterfield Town club that competed in the Football League between 1899 and 1909.
The Chesterfield Town FC (1899) Ltd was put into voluntary liquidation in 1915, and another Chesterfield Town FC was formed immediately, to play under the peculiar conditions of domestic wartime football. Run as a one-man band by its founder and chairman, a Mr CW Everest, this club became extinct after an FA enquiry banned all its players, management and its Chairman in 1917, in the wake of an illegal payments scandal.
This left a vaccum that the Chesterfield Borough Council filled by the formation of the Chesterfield Municipal FC on April 24th, 1919. The game's authorities would not contemplate a municipal framework for football, though, and the club was forced to become independent of the council, which it did in December 1920, and changed its name to Chesterfield FC. That Chesterfield FC is the one that we watch today.
So, we have four Chesterfield Football Clubs:
Chesterfield FC: 1867 to 1881.
Chesterfield FC (later, Chesterfield Town FC): 1884 to 1915.
Chesterfield Town FC: 1915-1917
Chesterfield Municipal FC (later, Chesterfield FC): 1919 to date
Strictly speaking, the 1919 club went into administration in 2001 and was replaced by another company. In keeping with recent form, though (Middlesbrough, Bristol City and many more), this was not regarded as a change of club, as such. Why not consider all the clubs as one, then? In a sense you could, and it is fun to look upon the whole thing a a big "family tree" of local football, but you'd have to ignore whole seasons that passed without a Chesterfield FC, and clear breaks in administrative continuance to do so.
S Basson, 2006.
