Viva Brighton Issue #38 April 2016

inside left: brighton at home, 1953
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This oil painting of Brighton & Hove Albion’s Goldstone Ground, entitled Saturday Afternoon, 1953, is
by Fred Yates, and it won second prize in the painting category of the Football Association’s ‘Football
and the Fine Arts’ competition, held in 1953, which subsequently toured the country. That was no mean
feat, as the winner was Lowry’s Going to the Match, which fetched a price of £2 million at auction in 1999.
The competition, in association with the newly founded Arts Council (under John Meynard Keynes), was
given a great deal of publicity at the time, and there were a total of 1710 entries from the public.
Yates, himself from Manchester, was often likened to Lowry, which he shrugged off with good grace, suggesting
he was a ‘happy Lowry’. He took up painting after serving in WW2, and spent much of the 50s
teaching art in Brighton. This is a stylised version of the Goldstone Ground, taken from the viewpoint of
Goldstone Lane, behind the ‘Chicken Run’ (East Terrace). The West Stand, sponsored by Co-operative,
also appears in the James Gray collection; Gray called it ‘miserable’ and revealed it was nicknamed ‘The
Rabbit Hutch’ by the fans.
The painting has some lovely touches and is worth close scrutiny. Check out the folding chairs in the
foreground, the hot dog stand adjacent to the Rabbit Hutch, and the splendid Goldstone House in the
top right of the picture. There are a couple of anomalies: Yates has turned the ground round, for the sake
of composition (it should be the East stand in front of Goldstone House). And count the players and
you’ll see that the Albion only have ten on the pitch. Perhaps one has been sent off or – this being long
before substitutes were allowed – injured?
The Goldstone Ground was, of course, scandalously demolished in 1997, and the Albion lost their
spiritual home, banished to Gillingham and Withdean until the Amex was completed in 2011. The image
is part of the Brighton and Hove Museum collection, and we use it courtesy of the Estate of Fred Yates.
Yates continued painting until his death, aged 85, in 2008.
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