A CREDITON charity that preserves historical material has digitised a reel of cine film showing an old football match at Lords Meadow.

A souvenir programme held up to the camera 28 seconds in shows the match was between Crediton United and “Bristol City Select XI”.

The date listed below reads Sunday, August 1, with kick-off at 4pm.

And a bit more digging in the Crediton Courier archives reveals the exact year the match took place was 1976.

The game was held to celebrate the opening of Crediton United’s new ground at Lords Meadow and was arranged by former player and committee member Trevor Scott.

Mr Scott was friends with the captain of Bristol City, Trevor Tainton, which was in the First Division (now the Premier League).

Mr Tainton had been granted a “benefit” season with the club, and Bristol City agreed to send down a full first-team squad as part of the benefit year in exchange for a donation of £500 towards Mr Tainton’s benefit.

The match reportedly attracted a large crowd, and Bristol City won 5-1.

The reel of cine film belongs to Gill Pearn and was digitised by the Folklore Library and Archive, which is based at Crediton Library.

Founding curator Mark Norman is currently digitising several more reels of old cine film.

He is asking more people to loan the Folklore Library and Archive their old material to help it build “a picture of our past”.

“We think there must be loads of interesting old footage and other documents and records of Crediton in people's attics, sheds and other places,” he said.

“We would love to borrow any of these to digitise for the archives. We can let people have copies of the files too, of course.”

Formats the charity can digitise are VHS, VHS-C, SVHS, SVHS-C, 8mm cine film, 35mm slides (positive and negative) and any printed photos or documents.

If you would like to loan any media to the Folklore Library and Archive, you can email [email protected] to get in touch.