IN these modern times of frenetic social media interaction, can you imagine the total uproar if a professional football club changed their name without telling anyone about it?
The sudden modification of a team’s title might well confuse football odds in
online betting stakes.
Yet this is exactly what happened 57 years ago at my beloved QPR. A crucial apostrophe mysteriously went missing and no one seemed too bothered!
Going right back, the club was initially established in 1886. It was an amalgamation of two boys’ teams - Christ Church Rangers FC and St Jude’s Institute FC.
The name for this merged outfit reflected on the fact that members were based in an area of North-West London called Queen’s Park.
Up until the 1960’s, our home matchday programmes always proudly referred to “Queen’s Park Rangers”. However something strange happened in the 1967/68 season.
Rangers started that campaign with a small-sized programme which included the traditional apostrophe in the club’s name.
Then on Tuesday 31st October 1967 against Burnley in the League Cup, we launched a new programme design portraying prominent squares and stick men footballers on the slightly larger cover.
The front page that night dropped the apostrophe and hailed “Queens Park Rangers” for the first time. There was no explanation whatsoever. But inexplicably, it was still “Queen’s Park Rangers” above the team line-ups on the back cover.
This trend continued for several months – Queens on the front cover, Queen’s on the back!
There was a further development on 9th March 1968. The programme for a home match versus Hull City stated “Queens Park Rangers” on both the front and back cover. The apostrophe had gone forever and has never returned!
Reflecting on the apostrophe saga many years later, QPR’s former secretary – the late Ron Phillips – told me: “Yes I did that! I’ve heard of arguments about why it was done and whether it was for grammatical reasons. But I dropped the apostrophe in 1967 simply to make the club’s name look better.
“If you have “QUEENS PARK RANGERS” on a big sign up on the wall and you put an apostrophe in there, then it spoils the look of it. That’s the only reason why I did it.
“It tied in with when I designed our new programme cover. I liked having little men on white squares of the chequerboard alongside those letters of Queen’s Park Rangers.
“However, our printers phoned me to ask how the apostrophe should fit in. I felt the letters of the alphabet looked great but an apostrophe by itself on a square would look silly. Furthermore if the printers attempted to place the letter N and the apostrophe on the same square together, it would appear rather untidy and cramped.
“So I just told the printers: ‘Drop the apostrophe completely. No one will even notice...’
“The new programme cover was published and all our supporters appreciated it. In fact, we received the national accolade for top Football League programme two years in succession.
“Quite soon I noticed our printers had dropped the apostrophe from the club’s name elsewhere in the programme pages. This looked alright to me.
“Therefore I decided to leave the apostrophe out completely. Otherwise we would have been displaying two different versions of QPR's title in the same programme.
“Anyway, we were in the very good company of Regents Park, Barons Court and
Lloyds Bank etc, who had all originally possessed apostrophes.”
The club’s official historian Gordon Macey said before he died: “Our name should always be spelt with an apostrophe as the first word is a possessive noun describing something owned by a Queen.
“Queen’s Park as an area was named after the Tudor Queens, who were the original land owners. It was a simple farm until the 19th century when the Queen’s Park housing estate was built between 1875 and 1881.”
Nowadays, there is still an apostrophe in use locally at Queen’s Park Underground Station on the Bakerloo Line. And the parkland in that area continues to be called Queen’s Park.
But the football club are universally known as Queens Park Rangers.
*Credit for the photos in this article belongs to Tony Incenzo*
